New Yorkers, clear your schedules for this weekend because there’s only one place you need to be for the next three days: the Lower East Side, for the third biennial IDEAS CITY Festival. For three days, starting tomorrow, the Bowery will be transformed, literally and figuratively, into the epicenter of arts and culture, offering something for everyone. Whether you’re an upstanding urbanist or you just live here, the multifaceted, multidisciplinary event is not to be missed — especially considering that we have a very special ticket giveaway! Read on for details …
Spearheaded by the New Museum since the inaugural festival in 2011, IDEAS CITY features an ever-expanding roster of local and civic organizations concentrated in Lower Manhattan as it attracts participants from the world over. This year’s theme is the Invisible City — as Joseph Grima, Director of IDEAS CITY, puts it: “The intangible, seething energy that the legendary Bowery neighborhood is steeped in will once again become visible as we peel back the surface of the streets to take a closer look at the lives that surround us every day, in our own neighborhood and beyond.”
AIRBNB Pavilion, Stay With Me (2015). Digital image. Courtesy the artists.
The festivities kick off with a one-day conference at Cooper Union, featuring panel discussions on topics ranging from policy to utopia, featuring speakers such as Lawrence Lessig and Bjarke Ingels. (The event is ticketed, but for a lucky few of you, we have a handful of conference Day Passes, a $50 value, to give away — details below.)
Friday morning will see the keynote address by Julián Castro, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, followed by workshops and panel discussions at the New Museum and its neighboring incubator, New Inc., as well as a number of screenings, performances, etc., after hours.
The ETH Pavilion will be constructed out of New York City’s waste materials. Courtesy ETH.
As in the previous two editions, IDEAS CITY culminates on Saturday with a street fair — a fixture of summer throughout the five boroughs — clustered around the New Museum to Sara D. Roosevelt Park and First Street Garden. For one day, over 100 cultural and community groups will take over the blocks between Bowery, Houston, and Forsyth to create a temporary city of ideas, “redefining public space through participatory programming and unexpected structures for gathering, several of which will be constructed from normally invisible commercial materials.” This will include popup structures by Foamspace, the winner of this year’s Street Architecture competition.
Foamspace
Of course, there are far too many events and activities to list here, so we encourage you to check out the full listing on the IDEAS CITY website to plan your next few days. Our recommendation, of course, is Friday night’s Pitching the City event, for which we’ve once again partnered the Municipal Arts Society for a live pitch event featuring five proposals for civic projects — RSVP here.
Pitching the City
SPECIAL CONFERENCE DAY-PASS GIVEAWAY
Haven’t bought your ticket for tomorrow’s conference yet? You’re in luck — we have five day passes to give away. Just send an email to editorial[at]architizer.com with the subject line “IDEAS CITY 2015” and answer the question, “Who won the first Street Architecture competition, in 2011?”
See you on the Bowery!
About Ideas City
IDEAS CITY is a collaborative, civic program founded by the New Museum in 2011 on the premise that art and culture are essential to the vitality of cities. IDEAS CITY builds on the New Museum’s mission of “New Art, New Ideas” by expanding the Museum beyond its walls into the civic realm. Addressing the key challenges and opportunities facing cities around the world today, the Festival creates networks, seeds concrete projects, and harnesses cultural capital for economic development.
IDEAS CITY provides an important platform for thinkers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including the arts, design, architecture, urban planning, technology, science, business, sociology, and education, as well as civic and governmental institutions, to exchange ideas, locate problems, propose solutions, and engage the public’s participation.
All events will be livestreamed on the IDEAS CITY website: ideas-city.org