Georgina Huljich and Marcelo Spina: After Context: Grounds for the New

Patterns is an award-winning architectural practice led by Argentinian-American partners Georgina Huljich and Marcelo Spina. The firm brings a critical and progressive approach to projects across scales and geographies, insisting on the cultural and social relevance of architectural form, emerging technologies, and contemporary aesthetics. Based in Los Angeles, Patterns leverages the city’s global stance and idiosyncratic identity to produce projects that operate beyond functionality to become civic and cultural landmarks. Recent work includes the Victory Wellness Center in North Hollywood, an adaptive reuse project that received an AIA National Healthcare Design Award in 2025, exemplifying the firm’s ability to transform the ordinary into civic presence. Huljich is a Professor of Architecture at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, while Spina has been a Design Faculty member at SCI-Arc since 2001. Together, they are the authors of PATTERNS: Embedded (ACDCU, 2010) and Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture (Actar, 2020), among numerous essays and publications.

Following the critique of symbolic and formal excess in Mute Icons, After Context proposes an alternative basis for architectural invention. Nothing comes from nothing. Originality does not arise from erasure or empty novelty, but from the radical transformation of what is already there. For Patterns / Spina and Huljich, architecture becomes a practice of working with conditions rather than against them—turning the inherited, the ordinary, and the overlooked into engines of imagination. The lecture frames the given not as limit but as ground, demonstrating that the future of architecture lies in reworking what already exists.