Liferaft Earth 1969 a film by Robert Frank will be shown Thursday, April 1^st in Higgins Hall Auditorium, a symposium panel, including Alessandra Ponte, Edward Dimendberg, Caroline Maniaque, and William Menking, will discuss the film.

Liferaft Earth begins with a newspaper report from Hayward, California: “Sandwiched between a restaurant and supermarket, 100 anti-population protesters spent their second starving day in a plastic enclosure…. The so-called Hunger Show, a week-long starve-in aimed at dramatizing man’s future in an overpopulated, underfed world….” This film accompanies the people on this “life raft” from 11 to 18 October 1969, and was made by Robert Frank for Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the international ecological movement and publisher of the bestselling Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85).

Alessandra Ponte is currently the Director of the Undergraduate Program in History and Theory of Architecture at Pratt’s School of Architecture, New York. She has also taught at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, at Princeton’s School of Architecture, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and at Cornell’s Department of Architecture.
She has published a book on Richard Payne Knight and the XVIIIth Century Picturesque: Le paysage des origines. Le voyage en Sicile (1777) de Richard Payne Knight (Paris, 2000). She edited (in collaboration with Antoine Picon) a volume on the interconnections between architecture and the sciences: Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2003), and she is currently preparing a collection of essays on the American desert.

Edward Dimendberg currently is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine, and a University of California President’s Research Fellow in the Humanities. He has received grants and fellowships from the German Fulbright Commission, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Social Science Research Council, and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. From 2005 to 2008 he served as the first Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and he remains a frequent lecturer at schools of architecture, museums, cinema studies programs, and film festivals. His book Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity is a key contribution to scholarship on cinema and the city in the 1940s and 1950s. Together with Anton Kaes and Martin Jay, he co-edited The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. As Sponsoring Editor in the Humanities at the University of California Press from 1990 to 1998, Dimendberg acquired and published manuscripts in philosophy, twentieth-century Art, film studies, and European intellectual history. He is a General Editor of the Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism book series and of the Flashpoints electronic book series.

Caroline Maniaque is both an architect and a historian, having earned her PhD from l’université de Paris VIII. She is an associate professor at l’école nationale supérieure d’architecture et de paysage in Lille, where she teaches architectural history and culture. Additionally, she teaches regularly at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York. Between 1994 and 1997, Caroline was the associate curator at the Centre Pompidou for the exhibition L’Art de l’ingénieur taking charge of the portion of the exhibit devoted to light structures showing the works of Graham Bell, R. Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Snelson, Georges David Emmerich, Frei Otto, Robert Le Ricolais, and Emilio Perez Pinero. Her research and publications have, on one hand, focused on scholarly architectural culture of the 1950s and, on the other hand, on alternative North American culture of the 1960s and its impact on Europe. In particular, she has published Hard et Soft America : Perspectives françaises, dans Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale et urbaine (2002). She contributed to the catalogues for Ant Farm exhibitions both through the University of California Press in 2004 and at the FRAC Centre in October 2007. During her stay at the CCA, she is putting the finishing touches on a work about European architects and North American counterculture. She has presented her work in progress at the Docomomo international colloquium in New York in 2004, at the Americanization of Post War Architecture colloquium at the University of Toronto in 2005, as well as at the colloquium on the Whole Earth Catalog organized by UC Davis in 2006.

William Menking is the founder and editor of The Architect’s Newspaper. Published in both New York and California the papers highlight the latest design projects and commissions, unfolding politics and debate, current events and cultural developments on architecture, urban design and planning. He has organized, curated and created catalogues for exhibitions on architecture and urbanism for venues in the U.S., England and Europe, including Forever Modern: Fifty Years of Record Houses and Shrinking Cities at The Pratt Manhattan gallery and Van Alen Institute. He is the commissioner and curator of the United States pavilion at the 2008 Venice biennale. The title of the exhibition Into the Open: Positioning Practice proposes that social, cultural and spatial boundaries be understood as a new kind of center that can and should act as a definer of architectural problems. He is professor the Pratt Institute in New York City.

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