Daily Archives: January 16, 2023

Monday, January 23 – Friday, March 31 – Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure

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The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce that the 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Grand Paris Express, a large-scale transit project currently being built in and around the Paris metropolitan area. Through carefully articulated design interventions, the Grand Paris Express illustrates the potential for the planning and execution of mobility infrastructure to transform a city and its region. Société du Grand Paris, a national agency responsible for designing, creating, and implementing the Grand Paris Express, will receive the $50,000 USD prize and recognition for the continued stewardship behind the project.

With 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of additional tracks, as well as extensions of existing metro lines, the Grand Paris Express is currently the largest urban design project in Europe. Its four new lines will circle around the capital and provide connections with Paris’s three airports, developing neighborhoods, business districts, and research clusters. It will service more than 100 municipalities, 165,000 companies, and the daily transport of 2,000,000 commuters. Construction work began mid-June 2016 and is due to last until 2030.

Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure, an exhibition coinciding with the prize, will be on display at the Druker Design Gallery from January 23 – March 31. Curated by Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design, the exhibition showcases models, renderings, documentary photographs, and video footage of this vast and ambitious urban design project. A public lecture and reception for the exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, March 2 at 6:30 pm at Piper Auditorium. For more information, visit https://urbandesignprize.gsd.harvard.edu/grand-paris-express/

Friday, January 20, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm Eastern – Opening Reception for “Volumes”with Karlene Jean Kantner

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Berkshire Botanical Garden’s first art exhibition of 2023 features the work of Karlene Jean Kantner. The show, “Volumes,” will include nearly two dozen of her works. It runs in the Leonhardt Galleries from January 20 through February 26.

The opening reception on Friday, January 20, will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Kantner will give an artist talk in the gallery on Saturday, February 11, at 3 p.m.

Raised in Montana, a denizen of the outdoors, Kantner began her artistic undertakings as a child making fresh batches of hand-pressed, sunbaked “mud cookies” that looked good enough to eat. After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Montana and teaching art to children for several years, she came East with her partner, Chris Powell, a West Stockbridge native.

Once settled in the Berkshires, among her first acts was digging out a pit fire oven — that is to say, an open-air fire pit about a foot-and-a-half deep by four-feet wide in which she bakes much of her artwork, turning clay to ceramic. Her pit-firing is limited to Massachusetts’ open-air brush-burning season (from January 15 and May 1). The rest of the season, Kantner uses an electric kiln. 

But she prefers the pit fire process, in which she places her clay creations directly onto burning coals before she slowly builds the fire again until it’s raging. The process requires care, patience and the thoughtful tolerance that everything could go horribly wrong. Indeed, not all pieces survive the firing process. 

To learn more, visit www.berkshirebotanical.org