PNCA+FIVE Idea Studio: Susan S Szenasy
Green with Envy:
How Innovative is PDX in the Quest for a Sustainable City?

This coming Friday (May 23) PCS is proud to host the latest and greatest from the PNCA+FIVE Idea Studio series–a wildly engaging platform for creativity, cultural connectivity and ideas whose time have come:
Green with Envy:
How Innovative is PDX in the Quest for a Sustainable City? featuring Susan S. Szenasy, Editor-in-Chief of Metropolis magazine, since 1986.

Szenasy is an articulate, razor-sharp writer who has brought considerable attention and critical weight to issues around sustainability, historic preservation, and advocacy for collaborative design, planning, and stewardship of public space. (She’s in Portland as a distinguished guest of PNCA, where she will receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the 2008 commencement address.)

Friday’s conversation (co-hosted with Tom Manley) promises a riveting back-and-forth on sustainable communities and Portland’s capacity for confluence and the successful merging of art, commerce, higher education and urban planning. This is one great opportunity to dig into the je-ne-Say-What that is defining Portland as an epicenter of Big Ideas and Possibility.

Last week I heard Tom Manley, president of Pacific College of Northwest Art, speak about a collaborative notion he called “Creative Grid.” The CG is a “map or a way of picturing the overlay of the creative organizations in the city and state and how they’re positioned to support the development of art and culture.”

To develop and activate this kind of way-finding, Manley referenced Daniel Pink’s widely telegraphed shift from an “information age” to a “conceptual age” (a paradigm guided by creativity, empathy, and emotion)–with the ultimate expansion to, what his art-school-prez homeboy Roger Mandle termed, an Age of Conciliance. So what is Conciliance? The great Belgian playwright-director-artist Jan Fabre nails it thusly: “By means of the idea of conciliance we are trying to find a language that connects different disciplines.” An idea whose time has surely come.

If you’re like me and you believe that art and culture solidify connections between social, economic and environmental sustainability—conciliance is one of those necessary bonds for the architecture of community, and a seminal piece of the puzzle that Portland is fast assembling. Deeper participation and collaboration in the civic and cultural life of the city is going to be the thing that sets Portland apart—and mark a true renaissance—in the “greening” of social end of the sustainability spectrum.

Ziba Design’s Sohrab Vossoughi eloquently points out that the DNA of Portland is one of the singular strengths that is making this cultural transformation viable: a double helix powered by Authenticity; Collaboration; a Humanist sense of scale; and a thoughtful Craft mentality. We see this vibrant combination everyday. . .an incredible leveraging of analog values of things like radio and public conversation, open markets, arts attendance, and citizen involvement that counter the “shuffle” mode of digital distraction, isolation, and overload.

My man Mihály Csikszentmihályi very astutely reminds us that it was strong community collaboration that brokered revolution and renaissance way back when in the 15th century: “It was [the] tremendous involvement of the entire community in the creative process that made the Renaissance possible. And it was not a random event, but a calculated, conscious policy on the part of those who had wealth and power.”

Hopefully Szenasy et al will hope as see that Portland with its ready-for-prime-time-renaissance, vitamin-rich DNA is booted, suited and able for such a transformation.

Joining Szenasy and Manley is a heavy-hitting roster of developers, architects, writers and urban visionaries, including: Greg Baldwin, partner, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects; Mark Edlen, managing principal, Gerding/Edlen Development; Randy Gragg, Editor-in-Chief, Portland Spaces; and Scott Lewis, founder and principal, Brightworks. The second part of the program will open the discussion to the audience.

PNCA+FIVE Idea Studio: Susan S Szenasy
Green with Envy: How Innovative is PDX in the Quest for a Sustainable City?
 
Friday, May 23 | 10:30 am
Gerding Theater at the Armory
128 NW 11th Avenue
Free and open to the public