Everything real was once a dream. The buildings and cities we design today will be built in the future. Through his cutting-edge design practice, Marshall Brown has been creating architectural visions for the future for over two decades. From the scale of the house to the city, Brown presents audiences with challenging visions that will expand their imagination of what architecture and cities can be.
How can we use driverless technology to turn our 20th-century transportation infrastructure into 21st-century human infrastructure? Given the record investment levels in driverless technology in recent years across both the automotive and tech industries, there can be little doubt about the oncoming mobility revolution. Less certain, however, is what physical shape this revolution will take and how we will live differently.
Marshall Brown has worked with transportation engineers, landscape architects, urban designers, sociologists, design researchers, and planning lawyers to develop conceptual tools, technical experiments, stakeholder engagements, policy assessments, and visionary proposals that provide the first outlines of the Driverless City. As municipalities around the world try to grasp the practical opportunities and policy impacts of these new machines, Marshall Brown is presenting social scenarios, technical solutions, and infrastructural prototypes.
Our urban fabric must evolve for the twenty-first century. Despite national and regional growth in the United States, many inner-city populations remain constant or have declined over the past several decades. Degrowth has become an increasingly common and controversial topic among planners and developers. To make matters more complex, these increases and losses are highly varied across metropolitan areas. Thus, we must respond to dramatically uneven development—especially in neighborhoods losing population. Rather than continuing to accept infill and higher-density development as the only solutions for revitalization, we need strategies that do not rely on increases in population density. Smooth Growth® is an innovative approach to urban design which recognizes that urban environments can evolve structurally and formally to accommodate social and demographic changes over time. Smooth Growth urban design fluidly weaves public and private landscapes to create a twenty-first-century garden city. Marshall Brown treats cities as emergent systems and physical manifestations of collective intelligence. His prototypical plan is for a neighborhood in Chicago – Washington Park. Smooth Growth planning does not rely on increasing population density and reminds us that in urbanism, one should never confuse quantity with quality. Smooth Growth planning aligns with socialized democracy in America by establishing a landscape of collective independence.
Marshall Brown utilizes the power of collage as a medium that changes the terms of authorship and challenges outdated definitions of originality. In his most recent work, Brown dissects images by contemporary architectural photographers and artists who take architecture as their subject, using the historically disruptive properties of collage and montage to create new forms, spaces, and narratives. Brown's collage works were recently featured in a solo exhibition and catalog from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Brown cuts out photographs of buildings and reassembles them into levitating structures that hover between reality and fiction. He calls them chimeras, after the lion-goat-snake creature of Greek mythology. Like the monster, whose parts were taken from existing animals, the parts of these collages are taken from actual buildings but, when combined, form something new. They are physical proof that borrowing, and recombination can yield strikingly original results and achieve what contemporary art often does so well: suggest that the world could be different than what it is without specifying what that might concretely be.
Marshall Brown is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics such as Making Space for the Future, Driverless Cities, Smooth Growth Urbanism and The Architecture of Collage. The estimated speaking fee range to book Marshall Brown for your event is $20,000 - $30,000. Marshall Brown generally travels from Philadelphia, PA, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Carlo Ratti, Adrian Owen, Jack Halberstam, Nik Bhatia and Olaf Groth. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Marshall Brown for an upcoming live or virtual event.
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