John Enright is Co-founder and Principal of the Los Angeles-based Griffin Enright Architects, with partner Margaret Griffin. His firm’s work has been extensively published nationally and internationally, and has received dozens of awards for design excellence including, local, state and national AIA Awards and The American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.

Griffin Enright Architects recently completed the award winning St. Thomas the Apostle Education Campus in Los Angeles, Calif., as well as a wide range of projects from installations to residential and institutional projects. They are currently at work on a mixed-use project in Venice, Calif. and a series of projects in China. Enright is Undergraduate Program Chair at SCI-Arc and has taught design studios and technology seminars at SCI-Arc, Syracuse University, The University of Houston, and USC. His academic research focuses on design and building technology including Building Information Modeling and new digital paradigms as applied to fabrication and construction.

www.griffinenrightarchitects.com

SCI-Arc is pleased to announce the exhibition Go Figure by Los Angeles-based architect Ramiro Diaz Granados (B.Arch '96) of Amorphis, on view in the SCI-Arc Gallery from January 13 through February 26, 2012.

Seeking to shift the role of the figure from a metaphorical device to a subliminal one, Go Figure promotes simultaneity in the evolution of the delineated figure by distributing cartoon and visceral features across a three-dimensional, spline based form.

Visit the Go Figure exhibition page >>

Juan Herreros is a PhD Architect, Chair Professor and Director of the Thesis Program at the Madrid School of Architecture, Spain as well as a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. He has previously taught at EPFL, Lausanne, Architectural Association, London, Princeton, and ITT in Chicago. In 1984, he founded together with Iñaki Abalos the office Abalos & Herreros, in 1992 the Multimedia International League, and in 2006 his current office, Herreros Arquitectos, through which he pursues his professional, teaching and pedagogical activity.

"The architectural profession has undergone unprecedented changes in recent years. The profile of the typical architect, neatly located at the apex of the design and construction pyramid, has faded in the working processes. The ancient metaphor of the orchestra conductor is slipping through our fingers to be replaced by an architect who is obliged to listen and to engage in dialogue, to effectively explain and communicate the fundamentals of their proposals. In a world in recession, the paradigms also change while the concepts of prestige, need, quality, luxury and interest do the same. The new type of architect has to read, interpret, describe, and activate a reality which day-by-day becomes increasingly imperfect while at the same time becoming full of poetic potential which needs to be exploited in order to become the motor for transforming the world."

www.herrerosarquitectos.com

Dwayne Oyler & Jenny Wu
Oyler Wu Collaborative
Friday, February 17, 1pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu established the architecture and design firm of Oyler Wu Collaborative in Los Angeles in 2004. The office has been published globally and is recognized for its experimentation in design and innovative strategies. Jenny Wu received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Dwayne Oyler received a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Recent projects include reALIze, a traveling art installation based on the face of Muhammad Ali, and the 2011 SCI-Arc graduation pavilion. Oyler Wu is currently at work on a 16-story residential tower in Taipei, Taiwan, a 10-story media office in Los Angeles, and architectural installations in Taipei and Los Angeles. The office has recently exhibited at the Beijing Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the London Festival of Architecture.

Both partners currently teach design studio at SCI-Arc. Their book, Pendulum Plane, was published in 2009 by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and most recently, a book entitled, reALIze, was published in 2011. In 2010, they received the first annual "Arch Is" award given by the AIA Los Angeles for emerging talents in architectural design. They have been invited to lecture at the University of Southern California, Texas Tech, Tamkang University and Arizona University.

www.oylerwu.com

Peter Trummer is Professor and Head of the Institute for Urban Design & Spatial Planning at the University of Innsbruck. He was Head of the Associative Design Program at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2004 to 2010. Trummer practiced architecture with UN Studio before establishing his own firm in 2001. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis on "population thinking in architecture." He lectures, teaches and is invited as a critic at the Berlage Institute, Architectural Association, University for Applied Arts in Vienna, IAAC, SCI-Arc, University of Pennsylvania and Rice University. Recently he has published Essays in AD, Arch+, Hunch, Volume and Manifold.

"Ludwig Hilbereimer has argued that a single building is no longer an 'object,' but only the place in which the assemblage of single cells assumes physical form. The intent of this lecture is to argue that from the viewpoint of urban flow of capital, the disciplinary problem being to understand any urban figure as an aggregation of inhabited cells. The lecture will demonstrate this thesis on several design projects developed within the last six years."

Ricardo de Ostos is co-founder of London-based NaJa & DeOstos, an architectural studio exploring symbiotic relations between emerging cultural patterns and architectural narratives. With a strong research-based design focus attitude, Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos seek to generate an adventurous—and sometimes excitingly dangerous—but beneficial built environment through critical and challenging speculation. Jackowski and de Ostos are Unit Masters at the Architectural Association and at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Together they are authors of The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad (Springer, 2007) and Pamphlet Architecture 29: Ambiguous Spaces (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

"Between dream and nightmare Ectoplasmatic Manifestations presents architectures that respond to extreme infrastructures unveiling a catalogue of spatial tales of horror and hope. The lecture will discuss architecture as a body for manifestation of narratives of the phantasmagorical public, horrifically entertaining and toxically green, while at the same time interrogating the role of the architect in relation to contentious environments and contemporary pervasive technology."

www.naja-deostos.com

Peter Eisenman is an internationally recognized architect and educator whose award-winning large-scale housing and urban design projects, innovative facilities for educational institutions, and series of inventive private houses attest to a career of excellence in design.

Prior to establishing a full-time architectural practice in 1980, Mr. Eisenman worked as an independent architect, educator, and theorist. In 1967, he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), an international think tank for architecture in New York, and served as its director until 1982.

Eisenman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among other awards, in 2001 he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the Smithsonian Institution’s 2001 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale. Popular Science magazine named Eisenman one of the top five innovators of 2006 for the University of Phoenix Stadium for the Arizona Cardinals. In May 2010 Eisenman was honored with the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, awarded in Jerusaleum.

Currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at the Yale School of Architecture, Eisenman’s academic career also includes teaching at Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, and Ohio State universities. Previously he was the Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union, in New York City. He is also an author, whose most recent books include: Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990-2004 (Yale University Press, 2007) and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950-2000 (Rizzoli, 2008), which examines in depth buildings by ten different architects.

Eisenman holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University, a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Columbia University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University (U.K). He holds honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago, the Pratt Institute in New York, and Syracuse University. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Architecture by the Università La Sapienza in Rome.

www.eisenmanarchitects.com

Wednesday, March 7, 7pm
W. M. Keck Lecture Hall

Philippe Rahm is Principal of Paris-based Phillippe Rahm Architectes. In 2008, he was one of twenty architects invited by Aaron Betsky to the Venice Architecture Biennale, and in 2009 Editions Archibooks published his book, "Architecture Météorologique." He was appointed director of the Symposium on Architecture and Climate: Towards an Atmospheric Architecture held at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Rahm is currently working on a number of projects, including office buildings in France and Italy.

"Climate change is forcing us to rethink architecture radically, to shift our focus away from a purely visual and functional approach towards one that is more sensitive, more attentive to the invisible, climate-related aspects of space. Slipping from the solid to the void, from the visible to the invisible, from metric composition to thermal composition, architecture as meteorology opens up additional, more sensual, more variable dimensions in which limits fade away and solids evaporate. The task is no longer to build images and functions but to open up climates and interpretations."

www.philipperahm.com

Andrew Atwood
Atwood-A
Friday, March 9, 1pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Andrew Atwood is full-time faculty at SCI-Arc. In 2009, he founded Atwood-A, a design office interested in the ambiguous roles of architectures various mediums. He graduated from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2007. Before founding Atwood-A in 2009, he worked in the offices of MOS in New Haven, CT and Belzberg Architects in Santa Monica, CA.

www.atwood-a.com

Thom Mayne is founder and design director of Los Angeles-based Morphosis. He founded his firm in 1972 as an interdisciplinary and collective practice involved in experimental design and research. He is a founding faculty member of SCI-Arc and Distinguished Professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010, appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009, and honored with the American Institute of Architects/Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2000.

With Morphosis, Mayne has been the recipient of the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize, 26 Progressive Architecture Awards and over 100 American Institute of Architecture Awards. Morphosis works have been published extensively and the firm has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and 25 monographs.

www.morphosis.com

*The 2012 Raimund Abraham Lecture has been generously supported by gifts from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and John Cordic/RJC Builders.

Anthony Vidler, a historian and critic of architecture, is Dean and Professor of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. Trained in architecture at Cambridge University in England, with a PhD in history and theory from TU Delft, he was a member of the faculty of the Princeton University School of Architecture from 1965 to 1993, serving as the Chair of the Ph.D. Committee, and Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies.

In 1993, Vidler took up a position as Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA, before joining the The Cooper Union in 2001. He has curated several exhibitions, most recently, Notes from the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher at Yale University, The Tate Britain, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Vidler, whose works have been published widely, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Architecture, 2011.

"Jim Stirling was a bird-watcher; not a trainspotter, nor a blogger, nor a twitterer. He walked the landscape, travelled the architectural tradition, and watched society in all its forms and functions. Out of this he forged an architecture that was at once entirely personal and fundamentally public. Assembled in its volumes and spaces of circulation as a complex amalgam of historical allusion and brilliant innovation, Stirling's architecture was neither post-modern nor modern: it was simply contemporary. This lecture ransacks the archive to present his drawings as multiple iterations of a working method—a process of design that demonstrates the "patient search" that architecture was, and still should be."

Dora Epstein Jones
Friday, March 23, 1pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Dora Epstein Jones, Ph.D., is a theorist and teacher of architectural culture. Her work mainly focuses on the discipline of architecture, and includes interrogations on the discipline’s boundaries and operations through examinations of tectonics, practice and pedagogy, as well as (generally external) concerns such as gender, sex, mobility and criticality. She has published in Arch’it, ArcCa and ACSA, edited the Zago/dA installation book and Mechudzu: New Rhetorics for Architecture, as well as written essays for publications by J,P:A, Office dA, UCLA Architecture and anthologies on gender and sex in architecture.

Epstein Jones holds a Ph.D. in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism and an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA. She is a past research fellow of the Luce Foundation, the UC Regents, the Getty Research Institute and the AIA. She is a long-time collaborator with Jones, Partners: Architecture, and has often been a member of their exhibition and installation design team. Previously, Epstein Jones was coordinator of Cultural Studies at SCI-Arc—a department she helped organize and name. She has been a professor at SCI-Arc for the last 9 years, and is currently coordinator of General Studies.

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect based in Oakland, California, working at the urban intersection of nature and technology. He is author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural history of the Apollo 11 Extra-vehicular garment. He received his B.Arch with distinction from Yale, and his M.Arch from Princeton.

Since 2006, he has been an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley. His work has been published and reviewed in Log, Architectural Design, The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal and his design proposals for buildings, cities, and landscapes have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

"On July 20, 1969, the bodies of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were protected from a lunar vacuum by only twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario. These are particularly important lessons for our own era, where architects grapple daily with the conflict and concurrence of nature and technology; at the core of the space age, the exchange defines our own historical moment."

www.nicholas.demonchaux.com

Alex McDowell is a Production Designer at Los Angeles-based RDI. He is one of the most innovative and influential designers working in narrative media, with the impact of his ideas extending far beyond his background in cinema. McDowell advocates an immersive design process that acknowledges the key role of world-building in visual storytelling. Since moving to LA from London in 1986, McDowell has designed for a diversity of directors including Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and Steven Spielberg.

Currently, he is working on Man of Steel with director Zack Snyder. He recently completed In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol, and worked as Visual Consultant for the Aardman/ Sony animated feature Arthur Christmas. With many awards for his film design, McDowell was named a Royal Designer by the Royal Society of Arts in the UK. McDowell is adjunct professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and visiting artist at MIT’s Media Lab. He is also co-founder and creative director of 5D|The Future of Immersive Design, a global series of distributed events and 5D Institute, an education space for an expanding community of thought leaders across narrative media.

"As interplanetary scientists hypothesize about the deliberate modifying of planets to make them habitable, this discussion will suggest a radical and transformative approach to designing space, allowing us to create and collaborate virtually and intuitively, and to sculpt new visual narratives as we imagine unbounded worlds. Our experience of narrative media is changing rapidly as traditional storytelling disciplines expand and merge. A new breed of ‘maker’ is emerging who freely traverses the traditional silos of storytelling; creating worlds across media and across culture."

Peter Cook’s Six Dreams—Six Targets installation in the SCI-Arc Gallery introduces a six-zone, almost completely light-tight experiential space with projection screens and a sonic chamber, in an enclosure dependent upon a single point of entry, with no part of its internal physicality being visible from the outside. More details are forthcoming in the spring.

Visit the exhibition page >>