Conceiving the Plan

In Honour of Diane Lewis (1951-2017)

The book accompanies the exhibition curated by Yael Hameiri Sainsaux within the Italian Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

How are civic spaces imbued with nuance, and in what ways does such a quality persist in the city? Can one discuss intimacy in architectural terms? Across a series of speculative projects for civic space—first exhibited as part of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, in the Italian Pavilion—Conceiving the Plan, created and curated by Yael Hameiri Sainsaux, engages these questions in dialogue with the legacy of the late architect and longtime Cooper Union Professor Diane Lewis.

For Lewis, the city was not only the result of a great number of historical, and ultimately inextricable, strata of form and memory; it was also greater than the sum of its individual architectures and a mental universe all its own. In this volume, Hameiri Sainsaux weaves historians', intellectuals', and artists' essays with projects by a range of international designers, creating a discourse on literary, ecological, social, and metahistorical questions. Together they provoke new spatial civic identities as well as critical approaches to the discipline and education of architecture.

Among the contributors, architectural historians Barry Bergdoll and Daniel Sherer contextualise the themes and approach of Lewis's pedagogy; Dan Graham reflects on the Bowery. Additional texts include contributions by Merrill Elam, Peter Hitchcock, and Anita Sieff, with projects by Pippo Ciorra, Preston Scott Cohen, Peter Lynch, Laila Seewang, Catherine Venart and Dorian Wiszniewski, among others.