9:30 AM, Tuesday, May 21

230 College Street, Room 103



Voluntary prisoners no more!



Voluntary Collectivism is an emergent economic logic of free association and community building. This lecture presentation studies the potential of this logic for infrastructural and urban design, where collective organizations are more of a realist pursuit than a fleeting fantasy.



Michael Piper is an architect and urbanist who investigates planning policy, public services and architectural design that employ realist methods for engendering collaborative relationships between otherwise isolated urban actors. He is a co-founder of dub studios, an architecture and urban design practice with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Piper is a Visiting Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Toronto and is also a critic at Columbia University’s Urban Design program. He has recently taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Syracuse University, and he was the 2010-11 Lefevre Fellow at the Ohio State University. He received a Masters in Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a BS in Architecture from Georgia Tech. Before and during his university education he did construction for four years, an experience that drives his interest to negotiate lofty ideas with the pragmatics of implementation.