Urban Design Lab abroad

January 2011 was a month of intense traveling for the Urban Design Lab (UDL) with Director Richard Plunz and Assistant Director Michael Conard  giving a series of high profile presentations on their work in China. In Beijing, they offered an exemplar of their activity to a venture capital group undertaking large urban projects and a second presentation followed to the Gulin County government officials in Szechuan Province. Plunz and Conard also presented UDL work in Kharkiv, Ukraine, at the “The Place of Identity and the Identity of Place” conference. Richard Plunz is Director of the post-professional Urban Design Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), which conducted advanced studio workshops in both Gulin and Kharkiv during 2011’s spring semester.