Symposium on Space

The significance, meaning and interpretation of "marginal space" will be the subject of an interdisciplinary symposium tomorrow and Saturday at UB that promises a deep and curious look at good, bad and ugly spaces, how they come to be marginalized and the purposes they serve.

The Center for the Study of Space will sponsor the event, "Marginal Space: A Précis," at which participants will explore how different architects, literary scholars, sociologists and a cartoonist inform one another's understanding of this concept.

The symposium, which is free of charge and open to the public, will open tomorrow with a lecture by controversial, Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind at 5:30 p.m. in 114 Wende Hall on the South Campus.

Events on Saturday will take place in the Screening Room, 112 Center for the Arts, North Campus. The schedule:

- 2:30 p.m., "Urban Navigation" a talk by writer and cartoonist Ben Katchor, whose comic-strip character "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" trolls the extremely articulated architectural setting of a declining, post-industrial northeast American city. There he chronicles, elucidates and mythologizes the minutiae and marginal spaces.

The strip ran in the Village Voice for a year and for six years in the New York Press and his strip "The Cardboard Valise" currently appears in weekly papers in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Miami, Memphis, Chicago, Rochester and other cities. It also became a series of radio plays aired on National Public Radio. His books include "The Pleasures of Urban Decay" (1991, Penguin), "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories" (1996, Little, Brown & Co.) and "The Jew of New York" (1999, Pantheon), based on a monthly strip he writes for Metropolis magazine. He has lectured widely and received several prestigious grants and awards.

- 3:30 p.m., "The Space of Famine," talk by writer Mike Davis. Davis is the author of the critically acclaimed new book "City of Quartz," which critiques the encampment/enclosure mentality of Los Angeles, and "Ecology of Fear," which addresses LA's relationship with disastrous riots, earthquakes, fires and mudslides.

- 4:45 p.m., panel discussion featuring UB faculty whose research and writing encompass different conceptualizations of space. Participating will be Rodolphe Gashé and Henry Sussman, professors in the Department of Comparative Literatures, and Mark Gottdiener, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology, all in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Mehrdad Hadighi, associate professor, and Jean LaMarche, assistant professor, both in the School of Architecture and Planning