Manifesto Series: At Extremes Tuesday, March 21st, 2017 7 – 9 pm [RSVP] #atextremes #manifestoseries @storefrontnyc With Jordan Carver, Mitchell Joachim, Janette Kim, Lola Sheppard, Andy Vann, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss The condition of extremes suggests a tipping point: a moment in which a system shifts from one state to another (often unpredictable) state. Ulrick Beck, in Risk Society, argues that “being at risk is the way of being and ruling in the world of modernity…global risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” Until recently, the developed world has largely been successful in displacing the economic, environmental, and political impact of its development to other nations and peoples, or in directing externalities of development toward other groups and stakeholders within their own nations, rendering the risk invisible in its original context. However, with the financial crisis of 2008 and the increasingly tangible impacts of climate change, complete displacement of risk is no longer possible. When one group or region seemingly achieves stability, another will likely lose it. A key factor in understanding extreme systems is the ability to interpret their relationship to risk. The further we move away from a state of equilibrium, the more volatile the extremes, the more exposed we are to danger and loss, and the more risk we take on. Manifesto Series: At Extremes discusses how architecture, infrastructure, and technology negotiate limits and operate in conditions of imbalance. Do the risk/reward models prevalent on the trading floors of global financial markets and in speculative real estate projects hold up in disciplines related to design? How can the entangled relationship between risk and extreme conditions be leveraged in a new and productive model; one that emphasizes speculation as a way to test scenarios, outcomes, and tools? What is the role of design in such contexts? To document? To redress? To mitigate? To capitalize on new opportunities? Does the progressive destabilization of political, social, and environmental conditions render design more relevant, or less so? Participants will draw upon Bracket Vol 3. At Extremes, edited by Lola Sheppard and Maya Przybylski, to present a manifesto for or against the positive correlation of risk and extreme circumstances as a productive tool for models in architecture.

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