SPRING 2010 LECTURES
Wednesday, February 10, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Intro by Hsinming Fung
According to Michel Rojkind Halpert, principal of Mexico City-based Rojkind Architectos, to risk contamination of the mind from the ideas of others is a means to bigger thinking. In this lecture, he speaks to the challenges of building during this time of economic crisis, stressing the strategy necessary to get things accomplished in different environments.
Among projects presented:
Project: R432 TowerAuthor: Rojkind Arquitectos (Michel Rojkind)
Status: Design stage
Completion date: 2012
Location: Reforma, Mexico
Project: Tori Tori RestaurantAuthor: Rojkind Arquitectos (Michel Rojkind) & Esrawe Studio (Hector Estrawe)
Status: Under construction
Completion date: 2010
Location: Polanco, Mexico
Project: Nestle Application GroupAuthor: Rojkind Arquitectos (Michel Rojkind)
Status: Built
Completion date: 2009
Location: Queretaro, Mexico
Michel Rojkind was born in Mexico City where he studied architecture and urban planning at the Universidad Iberoamericana. After working on his own for several years, he teamed up with Isaac Broid and Miquel Adria to establish Adria+Broid+Rojkind (1998-2002).
Rojkind is a member of the SCI-Arc Future Initiatives Network - a global peer-based academic research council dedicated to supporting the Future Initiatives program's academic mission.
With the idea of exploring new challenges that address contemporary society, to design compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality, and to connect at a deeper level with the intricacies of each project, he established an independent firm, Rojkind Arquitectos (2002), recognized by Architectural Record in 2005 as one of the ten best "Design Vanguard" firms. In December, Halpert was listed among "Faces to Watch in 2010" by the Los Angeles Times. He is a regular contributor to many architecture and design publications, and has been short-listed for several large-scale projects in Dubai, China, Kuwait, Canada, Singapore and Spain.
Wednesday, February 17, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Intro by Eric Owen Moss
Michael Sorkin is Principal of Michael Sorkin Studio, New York, and Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at CCNY.
The Michael Sorkin Studio is devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city and in green architecture.
Previous to his current post at CCNY, Sorkin was the Professor and Director of the Institute for Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Sorkin was the architectural critic of the Village Voice and is currently contributing editor for Architectural Record. His forthcoming books are Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Eutopia, All Over the Map, and Project New Orleans. He is also president of The Institute for Urban Design.
Wednesday, February 24, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Monica Ponce de LeonPrincipal, Office dA, Boston/New York/Ann Arbor
Dean, Taubman College, University of Michigan
Office dA is best known in Los Angeles for its leading green design of the ARCO sustainable gas station at the south east corner of Olympic and Robertson Boulevards.
Ponce de Leon is currently the Dean of Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and was previously Professor and Director of the digital lab at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her firm has received 12 progressive architecture awards, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards, among many others.
Photo credit: Eric Staundenmaier Photography
Wednesday, March 3, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Born on the 23rd of July 1933 between water and wine/Water: inaccessable / mysterious / gravitational
Wine: open / reflective / weightless
Water / locus / mother (Lienz / East-Tyrol)
Wine / anti-locus / father (Girlan / South – Tyrol)
Most significant memory during childhood:
The entire sky covered by a metallic sheet of warplanes
(Later confirmed by Marinetti)
Later: merciless conqueror of the uppermost tree-line /
Even later: rock- obsesses wanderer of vertical space /
First sub- conscious lesson in Architecture:
Cracks / edges / chimeneys / overhangs / battling fear /
Presentiment of love for a tree-less desert landscape /
Dream of an infinite horizon
Everything else could be re-read in official curriculum vitae
ON ARCHITECTUREA drawing for me is a "model" that oscillates between the idea and the physical or built reality of architecture. It is not a step towards this reality and in this respect it is autonomous. However, for me there must be the anticipation of the physical reality and its commemoration of the idea. In this sense, an architectural drawing can never be rendered. On the contrary, it has to be constructed so that it reveals the idea of the syntactic form through the medium of lines. In much the same way it has to anticipate the sensuality of the material through the layering of colour.
More specifically, architecture can only be understood as a polarity between geometric and physiological space or as a collision between the ideal and matter, and while the ideal represents the notion of infinity or, let us say, the eternal, matter can be regarded as the symbolic representation of the body - its presence and its absence. To put it in other words, while man's conceptual powers aspire to the infinite, his body is essentially fragile, temporal, a corpus which will be laid waste, like material itself, by the unremitting action of time. If there remains any hope for recreating the iconic in the modern world, then surely this will only come from reinterpretation of the archetypal existence of man; that is to say, new icons cannot possibly be established on the basis of motifs drawn or transposed from the lost historical epochs. New icons will either come from recognition of our intrisic ontological limits or they will not arise at all.
Friday, March 5, 2010
5pm, in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Work in Progress: A Post-midterm Discussion
Eric Owen Moss, Hsinming Fung and Chris Genik with distinguished faculty Michael Rotondi, Jeffrey Kipnis, Hernan Diaz Alonso
Wednesday, March 10, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
IDEA Office (IO) works on design at all scales, ranging from graphic design to installations and industrial design, to architecture and urban planning. The firm (formerly COA, 1986-2009) was launched in 2009 in Los Angeles by architects Eric A. Kahn and Russell N. Thomsen, who are also senior design faculty at SCI-Arc.
Recent works include a permanent installation at Walt Disney Concert Hall and a new building at West Los Angeles College. The work of IO has been published in numerous journals and books, and a monograph of the work of COA was published in 1998 as part of the Contemporary World Architects series. The work is also part of the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wednesday, March 17, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Using the newest tools and the oldest of techniques, Commonwealth is a furniture, art, and design studio based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Commonwealth was founded in 2005 by Zoe Coombes and David Boira, and their practice is grounded in new technologies as they relate to material experiment.
Their works have been showcased in galleries in Europe, America and the Middle East, and the studio has been commissioned by such clients as Issey Miyake, Warp Records, the Maxalot Gallery, and film director Timothy Saccenti.
Wednesday, March 24, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Michael Kubo traces the influence of architectural publishing as an operative device, through an examination of books produced by architects and critics in the past century. In this history, publishing reveals itself as an alternative form of practice, parallel to and frequently more agile than other forms of production more typically understood as architectural.
Kubo is a writer and editor currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at MIT. His research focuses on topics such as history of publishing as a strategic form of architectural practice and the Cold War architecture of the RAND Corporation. He is the co-author of The Function of Ornament; other recent editorial projects include Kazys Varnelis's The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and Sanford Kwinter's Far From Equilibrium.
Wednesday, March 31, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Eric Avila received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1997, he has taught Chicano Studies and History at U.C.L.A. and was promoted to associate professor in 2004. He is the author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, published by the University of California Press in 2004. He recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, where he began research for a second book project, entitled The Folklore of the Freeway: A Cultural History of Highway Construction.
By the 1920s, Downtown Los Angeles had become the "Great Gatsby of American cities," a magnet for Southern California's political, commercial, and cultural capital. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, tempered this exuberance. By the 1940s, at the outset of the postwar suburban boom, Downtown L.A. had become the paragon of the Noir city: dark, dangerous, and distant from the periphery of suburban wealth. Avila revisits the predicament of Downtown L.A. during the post-World War II period, emphasizing the role of the culture - high and low - in the effort to recover its lost vitality and how the tension between the center and the periphery exemplifies the postwar urban history in the U.S.
Wednesday, April 7, 7pm
W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Known for exploring the ways in which architectural mass can produce distinct sensations, davidclovers brings together the practices of David Erdman and Clover Lee. Their work moves between design platforms and scales of operation, between urban design, interiors and product design. In 2009, davidclovers relocated from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, immersing the studio into an actively maturing Southeast Asian design culture.
David Erdman has been a thesis advisor at SCI-Arc and a member of the design faculty at UCLA. In 2010, Erdmann will be a Visiting Professor at Hong Kong University and Rice University. In this lecture, Erdman illustrates how the current projects of davidclovers both redefine and relate to the terms mass production and mass media.
Juan Azulay and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss discuss 