Oren Safdie's Latest Architecture Play COLOR BLIND Gets First Public Reading

Oren Safdie, a nationally celebrated playwright of contemporary architecture culture, will present a read-through of his new play entitled "Color Blind." This play satirizes the racial politics of a fictional jury assembled to select a winning design for the Smithsonian's recently built National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington DC.

COLOR BLIND will be presented on April 2nd, 2019 by the Department of Theatre & Dance at University at Buffalo, SUNY as the opening night to a symposium on "The Whiteness of American Architecture," organized by the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. This symposium is an outgrowth of the Race + Modern Architecture Project by Charles Davis II, an interdisciplinary workshop on the racial discourses of western architectural history from the Enlightenment to the present.

Oren Safdie is a Canadian-American-Israeli playwright, screenwriter, and the son of modernist architect Moshe Safdie. He attended Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning before changing careers in his last year of architecture school to write plays. He has produced a series of tomes on architecture culture, including his debut work "Private Jokes, Public Places," the critical off-Broadway hit praised in venues such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Other architectural themed plays include "The Bilbao Effect," which premiered at New York's Center for Architecture in May 2010, and "False Solution," which premiered in 2013. He has been a contributor to a long list of journals, including Metropolis, Dwell, and The New Republic. Safdie is also the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the John Golden Fund and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles.

The University at Buffalo SUNY symposium will outline a critical history of the white cultural nationalisms that have proliferated under the rubric of "American Architecture" during the long nineteenth century. This theme will be explored chronologically from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and regionally from representative avant-garde movements on the East Coast to the regionalist architectural styles of the Midwest and West Coast. Such movements included the neoclassical revivals of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, the Chicago School of Architecture and the Prairie Style, the East Bay Style on the West Coast, the Arts & Crafts movement across the continent, and various interwar movements that claimed to find unique historical origins for an autochthonous American style of building.

COLOR BLIND will take place at 6:00pm on Tuesday, April 2nd in 56 Parker Hall on the university's South Campus at the University at Buffalo SUNY and be presented by the Department of Theatre & Dance. http://ap.buffalo.edu/events/2019/oren-safdie.html

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