The Architectural League of New York is a leading non-profit forum in the United States for the presentation and discussion of new work and ideas in contemporary architecture and urbanism. This online forum documents and expands on the League’s 2007-8 lecture series, “Reimagining Risk.” The Reimagining Risk online forum will critically explore the people and themes presented as part of the Risk series.

Statement
We live in times permeated by the sense that we are at risk—from terrorist attack, from environmental disaster, from infrastructure failure; but simultaneously that taking risks is the way to reap big rewards in economic exchange, technological innovation, and artistic production. The Architectural League’s 2007-8 series Reimagining Risk will examine both of these dimensions of risk, and how the idea of risk, in its manifold meanings and interpretations, is affecting the design of cities and buildings. The series will look at how our understandings of risk seem to impel a closing down—creating the surveilled city, the hardened building and border—but could also encourage resistance and an opening up to bold new approaches to political, social, and environmental challenges. The yearlong series is divided into three segments: “Landscapes of Risk,” “Design Practice in the Second Modernity,” and “Towards New Paradigms.”