Open for debate: teaching Thunderdome style

BERKELEY

In post-apocalyptic films featuring the fight-to-the-finish Thunderdome, an audience chants the arenas guiding principle, Two men enter, one man leaves. In many ways, the ongoing Thunderdome Debates initiated last fall at the University of California, Berkeleys College of Environmental Design (CED) borrow from the movies, but theres no steel cage. And if anyone is left behind, its only figuratively.

The Thunderdome Debates stake out their own special purposes and rules. Theres no blood, just verbal sparring by two leading minds in landscape architecture and environmental planning one man and one woman who face off in Wurster Hall in front of an audience comprised mostly of well-mannered students looking for more than the typical and too-often-sleepy expert presentations.

My take-over-the-world goal is to re-position Berkeley at the center of debates in this field, since theres broad interest in the big topics well discuss, quipped Kristina Hill, an associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning and Thunderdome Debates mastermind.

Kristina Hill

Moderator Kristina Hill to Julie Bargmann:

What pisses you off about starting with form instead of process?

Bargmann: Thats actually why I left sculpture. I was making objects, and gravitated more and more towards making installations it is just that kind of, you know, object-making. Objectification. Thats the thing that burns my ass

Kristina Hill to Walter Hood:

Are there aspects of all this process stuff that piss you off?

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Open for debate: teaching Thunderdome style