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The Kansas City Design Center is pleased to announce the next lecture in our 2006 series, Transformations: Leadership for the Public Realm.

On Thursday, March 9, Mark Robbins, Dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture, will explore the role of design in transforming the physical, social and cultural fabric of American cities.

As former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Mark Robbins has been a key proponent of fostering design excellence as a means to strengthen the civic culture of American cities. "It’s not about decorating a city," he says. "It’s about changing the way a city and a region function through more innovative and smarter design."

Robbins also will examine prospects for making universities a resource for urban redevelopment.

Since becoming Dean at Syracuse, Robbins has overseen the relocation of the School of Architecture into a former furniture warehouse, bringing hundreds of students and faculty downtown. "Architecture intersects with our daily life at literally every turn," he says. "The earlier students can begin to learn about interacting with people who may be neighbors or clients, the better."

During his visit to Kansas City, Robbins will address a KCDC Leadership Forum exploring different ways to promote excellence in the design of the public realm.

The lecture and forum are made possible by the generous financial support of the Francis Family Foundation, Bank Midwest and the William T. Kemper Foundation, Commerce Bank Trustee.

About Mark Robbins

Mark Robbins is an internationally renowned architect, artist, and critic whose work explores how the built environment and cultural practice intersect. His site-specific installations and photographic work bridge art and architecture, and bring into focus the relationship between mythologies about place and information about daily life that is often left out of commercial and political representations.

Robbins's work has been celebrated for its exploration of the complex social and political forces that contribute to the built environment. His work often takes the form of large, three-dimensional constructions that are designed for a specific site, and either comment on that place, or somehow invite people to think differently about their interactions with others or with the space. "I hope the work can be a trigger for people to think in other ways about their environment," he says.

His upcoming book, Households, is the "flip side" of interior design magazines: a compelling series of photographs of actual people in actual homes. A young family at a writers retreat, a gay couple in a Long Island beach house, a husband and wife in a family compound, a single parent in a city apartment: Robbins has photographed residents and environments that comment on contemporary life and relationships.

Robbins began his architecture career in New York City at the firms of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Polshek and Partners and Emilio Ambasz before starting his own practice in 1986. His projects have subsequently been exhibited in venues throughout the United States and abroad, including the Miami Art Project, the Adelaide Festival in Australia, the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan, the Queens Museum, the Clocktower Gallery of the ICA in New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

From 1992 to 2002, he was the director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), where he developed a program to strengthen the presence of innovative design in the public realm. While at the NEA, he tripled funding for the various design disciplines; expanded the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, a program dedicated to urban revitalization; and developed the New Public Works initiative, which supported more than 30 national design competitions, bringing the best of contemporary design practice to schools, museum buildings, and landscapes.

Robbins has served as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University, and was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. He also has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation, and artist fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Princeton Architectural Press published a monograph on his work, Angles of Incidence, in 1993.

Previously he was a tenured associate professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture and curator of architecture at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, where he originated projects that served as laboratories for the creation of new work, and provided educational forums about architecture, contemporary culture, and design. He also has served as a visiting critic at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He holds a Master's degree in architecture from Syracuse University, and bachelor’s degree in anthropology and film from Colgate University.