An Ambitious Architecture Series Begins at the Parrish

“Inter-Sections: The Architect in Conversation,” a new series exploring architecture in multiple contexts, will launch tomorrow at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with “The Art of Architecture,” featuring Preston Scott Cohen in conversation with Terrie Sultan, the museum’s director. 

The 6 p.m. discussion will consider design and building issues in a global context but with a focus on the East End. Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan will discuss the ramifications and considerations that come into play when building specifically for art, such as cultural context and tensions, audiences and collections, the new roles of museums, and unconventional approaches to presenting art.

Mr. Cohen will sign his new book, “Lightfall: Genealogy of a Museum: Paul and Herta Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art,” after the talk. The chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Architecture and the university’s Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture, he won a competition to design the Amir Building. 

“I’m very interested in cross-disciplinary programs and projects,” said Corinne Erni, the Parrish’s curator of special projects, who developed Inter-Sections. “I feel that architects tend to talk to each other, but not so much with practitioners from other disciplines or the actual people who will be living with their structures.” 

Having architects speak with people from other disciplines, particularly artists, takes them out of the structured thought processes to which they may be accustomed, Ms. Erni said. “When you put people of different disciplines together and try to focus on a specific issue, you can get really amazing results.” 

Ms. Erni, who joined the Parrish in September, has deep experience in such cross-disciplinary efforts. At the New Museum in Manhattan, she produced the biennial Ideas City program, which she said included site-specific and collaborative art projects around the museum’s Lower East Side neighborhood, as well as a conference and street fair. “I was looking at issues of how art can play a role in the urban space from very different vantage points: bottom-up, top-down,” she said. “Bringing in new ideas from artists, looking at the city from very different angles, and exploring ideas and collaborations on how art can influence the cityscape. I took a lot of that with me when I came here.” 

Several Inter-Sections programs will be held each year, and they are expected to include discussions, panels, symposia, workshops, think tanks, and projects that foster dialog between architects and professionals in art, landscape design, technology, science, new media, academia, government, and public policy. 

The series will continue on April 30 at 2 p.m. with a screening of “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City,” a documentary chronicling the activist Jane Jacobs’s struggle in the 1960s to save historic New York City neighborhoods from Robert Moses’s redevelopment plans. That event will take place in collaboration with the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival. 

On June 9, the series will resume, this time in conjunction with “Landscape Pleasures,” the Parrish’s annual garden symposium. Architects and landscape designers will address topics including how landscape design can weave together human activity, natural forces, and the built environment.

“I think it’s very interesting to look at how architects and landscape designers can work together to integrate buildings and their surroundings,” Ms. Erni said. “Not landscape design as a value-added or just a backdrop to buildings, but thinking more holistically, how these two practitioners can work together to create something more cohesive.” 

A symposium on water and climate change, in conjunction with the exhibition “Platform: Clifford Ross Light | Waves,” is set for Sept. 22. Artists, architects, designers, policymakers, farmers, fishermen, technologists, and scientists will explore water as an artistic inspiration as well as a resource threatened by climate change. 

Admission to “The Architect in Conversation” is $12, free for members, children, and students.