Profile of SpeakingSpeaking
A magna cum laude graduate from Harvard College and a longtime writer, Ms. Holtz's commentary on green issues -- from building design and preservation to land use and transportation Ð have appeared regularly in The Nation, where she is architecture and planning critic, as well as in such other periodicals as Preservation, Planning, Sierra, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture. She also writes frequently for newspapers, including the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. The author of several books, including Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, Preserving New England, and Lost Boston.ÊShe isÊa frequent speaker in her own city of Boston and throughout the nation and is recently finished Last Chance Landscape: Taking the World in for Repair. Jane Holtz Kay's most influential work, Asphalt Nation, was the first book in a generation to take on America's icon - and the most comprehensive approach to the subject. The book was on The New York Times new and noteworthy list and was widely praised by critics from The Times to Business Week. Jane Jacobs, author of Life and Death of Great American Cities, observed that "Jane Holtz Kay's book has given us a profound way of seeing the automobile's ruinous impact on American life. Asphalt Nation is terrific." Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, declared that her book "belongs in all the schools and in the hands of every beleaguered citizen." As a journalist, lecturer, and teacher (at Harvard and Boston University), she has written and spoken extensively on the need to protect the landscape and cityscape. The topics she has covered fit broadly under the heading "Last Chance Landscape", the title of her newest book project. In addition to community and building design, preservation, and transportation issues, her articles have covered renewable energy, brownfields restoration, global warming activism, and other environmental subjects. She has also made frequent radio and television presentations. Her media appearances have included CNN, C-Span's "Booknotes," National Public Radio (Living on Earth, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation), and ABC News with Peter Jennings. Her presentations also include the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Kennedy Library, the National Building Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, Wellesley College and Columbia University. Kay animates her speeches with humor and enthusiasm, and incorporates slides of cartoons, advertisements and historic images that illustrate her points. She is at home with both popular and professional audiences. Tailored to meet the needs and interests of her audience, Kay's presentations include:
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An animated and practiced speaker, Jane Holtz Kay has addressed audiences from the AAA to the Sierra Club, Chambers of Commerce to governmental agencies, environmental issues to urban campaigns, along with university and activist community groups from Annapolis to Charleston, South Carolina. As an author, architecture and planning critic, and speaker, she has broad experience in describing and analyzing the built and natural environment for both expert and mainstream audiences. She has recently completed her latest book on global warming for the University of California Press, titled Last Chance Landscape: Taking the World in for Repair.
The automobile came, it saw, it conquered. This presentation examines how the car culture has impacted our lives and landscapes, from car-bound hours to sprawl to global warming emissions. It incorporates a slide show using photos of historic events, advertisements and cartoons satirizing our car-crazed culture to describe the resulting problems, the history that created them, and an alternative walkable, bikeable, and transit-oriented future where our lives, our landscapes and our communities are not designed around the automobile.
