Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures
Damon Rich, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
Thursday, January 17
An edited version of Damon Rich’s lecture on CUP’s new project exploring financial architecture from the Great Depression to the subprime meltdown. This project is commissioned by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. The lecture traced the evolving relationship between buildings and money over the 20th century in three episodes:1. The Great Depression and the creation of a national secondary mortgage market
2. The battle against redlining and the creation of the Community Reinvestment Act
3. The Savings & Loan crisis and the ascendancy of securitizationEach episode describes a different configuration of government, private markets, and finance and how the status quo adapted to an emerging risk in the system. The lecture will conclude with speculations on what architects can learn from studying this extra-architectural history, and what architects can contribute to popular understandings of the current crisis in real estate finance.CUP is a nonprofit practice that designs educational projects about places and how they change. CUP brings artists and designers together with community-based advocates and researchers to create public projects ranging from high school curricula and outdoor installations to websites and TV shows.Damon Rich is the founder and chair of CUP. After training as an architect at Columbia University, Damon worked for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, eventually becoming Chief of Staff for Capital Projects. Since leaving Parks in 2000, in addition to running CUP, Damon has taught design at schools including Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. He also writes regularly about architecture and politics for publications including the Village Voice, the Nation, Metropolis, and Architecture magazine. From 2007-2008, Damon served as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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