1. Liminal Spaces

When Brigham Young came upon the Utah Territory’s Great Salt Lake in 1847, he and his Mormon followers decided it might be a nice place to start a city. Since then, Salt Lake City has grown far beyond its original grid to become the largest city in Utah. It’s a common refrain, but in the process of growth and development, some of SLC’s cultural amenities have been disconnected from each other, making it hard for pedestrians to access them. Enter the SixtyNine Seventy Project, spearheaded by AIA Utah’s Young Architects Forum, which hopes to knit together the Capitol Theatre, Ballet West, the Utah Performing Arts Center, and the Utah Theater in “The Spaces Between,” an ideas competition, which closes on March 23.

To learn more, visit sixtynineseventy.com.

2. Was ist das?

Germany has grown to be one of the most economically stable and successful countries in the European Union. In addition to the Bauhaus legacy, the nation has also grown to be an architecture and building powerhouse in the areas of sustainable design and construction. With an eye toward greater energy efficiency in the U.S. in the coming decades, policy, research, and industry experts from Deutschland will gather for the German American Smart Building Symposium at the AIA Center for Architecture in Philadelphia on March 12.

Learn more at aiaphiladelphia.org.

3. Cruz Control

For a decade, Teddy Cruz has been pushing students, city officials, and architects to study the lines that divide economic classes, political enfranchisement, and geography, which he argues pose a design challenge as much as a social one. His research, through San Diego–based Estudio Teddy Cruz, has centered on the Tijuana/San Diego border—but his argument about urbanism’s role in defining community and opportunity extends well past the 13-mile fence that separates those two cities. Cruz, a Rome Prize recipient (1991) and the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City prize (2005), will speak on what he calls the “political equator” at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco on March 4.

Learn more at cca.edu.

4. Planting the SEED

There are a few different definitions of what designing in the public interest entails; its scope varies from community-focused design/build projects to broader ideas about social policy and economic incentives. For the last few years, Design Corps, founded in 1991 by Bryan Bell, AIA, has held Public Interest Design Institutes—two-day courses on the Social Economic Environmental Design (SEED) metric for community engagement—in cities across the U.S. Design Corps and the University of Minnesota College of Design will host the latest SEED event in Minneapolis on March 21-22.

Learn more at publicinterestdesign.com.

5. Modern Marvels

For historians, the so-called modern era in architecture does not map cleanly onto markers, such as the years 1850, 1900, or 1950—just about when you’d think it might have ushered forth. The curators of “What Is Modern?” at the Denver Art Museum have assembled objects that trace design’s ability to represent what they call the “modern experience” as far back as the early 19th century and into our own era. What is “modern,” then? For one, as these works of design demonstrate, it’s anything but straightforward. The show runs until March 24.

Learn more at denverartmuseum.org.