Over at Domus, you can read an interview that I recently conducted with Pedro Gadanho, the new curator of contemporary architecture at MoMA. It's been a great privilege to get to know Pedro better since he's moved to the city (I originally met him at the Once Upon a Place conference in Lisbon in 2010) and I'm also delighted that I'm going to be interviewing Pedro live on Tuesday, May 15 in Columbia's Studio-X facility at Suite 1610, 180 Varick Street, New York at 6.30pm as the first of my Conversations on the State of the World. Please come if you can. 

On Tuesday, May 15, Columbia's Network Architecture Lab launches the first in a series of Conversations on the State of the World with a discussion between Pedro Gadanho, curator of contemporary architecture at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Netlab director Kazys Varnelis.

Coming to MoMA from Lisbon, architect, curator and writer Pedro Gadanho holds a masters in Architecture from the University of Oporto, a masters in Art and Architecture from Kent Institute of Design in the UK, and a Ph.D. in Architecture and Mass Media from the University of Oporto, where he has was also a professor of Architecture.

He is the editor-in-chief of Beyond, Short Stories of the Post-Contemporary and was the curator of international shows such as Space Invaders, for the British Council, London, and Pancho Guedes, An Alternative Modernist, for the Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel. He is the author of Arquitectura em Pœblico (Dafne, 2011), and the co-organizer of the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction: Once Upon a Place.

He maintains a blog at Shrapnel Contemporary. Extending the Netlab's Discussions on Networked Publics, Conversations on the State of the World will go beyond the parameters of contemporary discourse on architecture to seek an understanding of the critical drivers in world change and to understand what role architects and designers can play in the rapidly changing world.

The event takes place Tuesday, May 15, 2012,

6:30-8:30pm at Studio-X NYC,

180 Varick St., Suite 1610

Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.

Some images from the final projects in Terminal Condition, the Spring 2012 Netlab studio that I taught with Leigha Dennis, in which we set out to rebuild the Port Authority Bus Terminal, while plotting what the city of 2070 might be like.   

Over at the New York Times, Matt Ritchel asks why we still have to take out our laptops at security screenings even though many of them are scarcely bigger than tablets. The TSA refuses to explain, citing security concerns. After rejecting a series of possible lines of reasoning, Ritchel finds an anonymous security expert who is willing to tell him that it is nothing more than "security theater," an effort to make us feel that something is being done to protect us. 

The feebleness of this effort aside—after all, who really feels the TSA is effective at anything besides the catching the most primitive efforts, building long lines at the airport, and existing as a form of republican social welfare—it points to something that I allude to in the Situated Technologies Pamphlet I just completed with Helen Nissenbaum.

Network culture clearly has a drive toward openness and transparency. The freedom of sharing and ease of building upon information encourages that. At the same time, there are plenty of individuals and institutions with power who see that freedom as something for the Muppets of the world while they themselves hide behind the curtains. To them, our own haplessly naïve transparency is something to exploit from their citadels, be they in the government or in finance. In turn, we have to hope that those in power won't abuse it too badly, that taking out laptops at the security line as a ritual is the worst of it.     

We're still early in all this and just as the Democrats adopted civil rights as a mission in the 1950s, one day these issues may be taken up by political parties. Until then, it's not just up to power to stay vigilant, it's up to us to stay vigilant of power.