Urban Space

This event brings together visionary urban designers Emmanuel Pratt, Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, and Michael Sorkin, whose practices are shaping the future of the city in Chicago, New York, and Cape Town. The aim is to spark a conversation across the disciplines about how materiality, temporality, and social praxis might inform radically alternative urban futures.

Emmanuel Pratt, Sweet Water Foundation, Chicago, IL
Sweet Water Foundation practices Regenerative Neighborhood Development, a creative and regenerative social justice method, that creates safe and inspiring spaces and curates healthy, intergenerational communities that transform the ecology of once-blighted neighborhoods.

Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, Wolff Architects, Cape Town, South Africa
Wolff is a design studio concerned with developing an architectural practice of consequence through the mediums of design, advocacy, research and documentation. Ilze Wolff co-founded Open House Architecture in 2007, a transdisciplinary research practice that develops documentation, exhibits, and tours of industrial spaces in urban South Africa. Heinrich Wolff was the 2005 Lubetkin Award winner and elected Designer of the Future by the Wouter Mikmak Foundation.

Michael Sorkin, Michael Sorkin Studio, New York, NY
Michael Sorkin Studio is a global design practice devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city and green architecture. The studio is based in New York City and maintains satellite offices in Shanghai and Xi’an, China.

This event is sponsored under the Materializing the Future initiative of 3CT’s Object Cultures Project and is co-sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.