LECTURE: Sarah Whiting

L A N D S C A P E . A R C H I T E C T U R E
L E C T U R E . S E R I E S -- F A L L 2 0 0 7


" What Ever Happened to the Big City Plan? "

Sarah Whiting, M.Arch., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Princeton University School of Architecture

Wednesday, September 12
Cook-Douglass Lecture Halls Room 110
4:00 - 5:15


Three simultaneous exhibitions on Robert Moses last spring,
combined with proposals for big schemes, such as the
Brooklyn Atlantic Yards project, suggest that the big urban
vision may not have been killed off by Jane Jacobs and
others after all. This talk examines why it is that the
American city is so polarizing, why it has such a difficult
relationship to democracy, and yet how it is that we can
still do what Daniel Burnham exhorted almost a century ago:
"make no little plans."

As a teacher, a writer, and a designer, Sarah Whiting's
work focuses on the questions and consequences of modernism.
As an Assistant Professor at the Princeton University School
of Architecture, she teaches undergraduate lecture courses
on modern urbanism, graduate seminars in contemporary theory,
and coordinates the Master of Architecture (M.Arch.) thesis
program. Previously she taught at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology,
the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida.
As an author, she has been widely published in many journals
and anthologies, including Eleven Authors in Search of a
Building: The Aronoff Center for Design and Art; An
Architecture for All Senses: The Work of Eileen Gray;
Between War and Peace: Society, Culture and Architecture
after World War II; and Mies in America. She is currently
completing a manuscript on the superblock. And as a
practicing architect, Ms. Whiting is a design principal
in the firm WW in Princeton. Its current projects the
San Jose State University Museum in California and a
sports/arts complex for a small private high school
in Louisville, Kentucky.