Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

June 22, 2016

Fuzzy Urbanism

TAGS

Architecture, Daveed Kapoor, Elizabeth Timme, Events, Matthew Severson, Nat Gale, Urbanism

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Join us in discussing alternative models of urbanism and how public realm investments can support culture and build community. The recently completed ‘Hollywood Pop!’ will serve as as a starting point for our discussion. A yearlong park installation funded by the Sunset & Vine Business Improvement District, the project was designed and built by LA-Más to explore divergent approaches to providing public amenities in the private realm.

Our diverse panel represents a wide range of voices – urban advocates, bureaucrats, designers, critics, and Hollywood business stakeholders. Our discussion will focus on the potential of public-private partnerships and small scale investments that can not only blur traditional urban boundaries, but also provide a model for investment and impact at the neighborhood scale.

This discussion features Nat Gale (Los Angeles Department of Transportation), Elizabeth Timme (LA-Más), Daveed Kapoor (utopiad.org), Mimi Zeiger (critic), Matthew Severson (Hollywood Property Owners Alliance), with facilitation by Helen Leung (LA-Más).

June 16, 2016

The Rupture

Variety Show

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Architecture, Events, Jonathan Lee, Kimberly Drew, Oscar Nuñez, Riley Hooker, Steven Thrasher, Tammy Kim, Urbanism

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What is disruption, anyway? The term has been cast as a tech market tactic, a cultural trope, and a belief system of near-theological proportions. In an evening of performances and provocations, we considered many definitions of this watchword. Presenters offered perspectives of radical change ranging from activism and technology to equity and design:

Participants: It’s Showtime NYC subway dancers; Kimberly Drew, @museummammy and associate online community producer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Riley Hooker, editor, Façadomy; E. Tammy Kim, editorial staffer, The New Yorker, Jonathan Lee, design manager/lead, Google Design; Oscar Nuñez, program coordinator, Center for Urban Pedagogy; members of Picture the Homeless; Steven Thrasher, U.S. writer-at-large, The Guardian; and critic, editor, and curator Mimi Zeiger

April 28, 2016

HACLab Pittsburgh Salon

Where to Next?

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Architecture, Events, Urbanism

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Salon Participant

HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern

The city of Pittsburgh encountered modern architecture through an ambitious program of urban revitalization in the 1950s and ’60s. HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern untangles Pittsburgh’s complicated relationship with modern architecture and urban planning.

In this experimental presentation at Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center, architects-in-residence over,under highlight successive histories of pioneering architectural successes, disrupted neighborhoods, and the utopian aspirations and ideals of public officials and business leaders. These intertwined narratives shape the exhibition’s presentation, which includes abundant archival materials from the period, an active architecture studio, and a salon-style discussion space, all unearthing layers of history and a range of perspectives.

Through these stories, HACLab Pittsburgh demonstrates the city’s national influence in the development of the modern American city, and focus on several neighborhoods and sites, including Gateway Center, the Lower Hill, Allegheny Center, and Oakland. Read More …

April 26, 2016

AIA East Tennessee Chapter Meeting Lecture

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Events

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In an era of star architects and rapidly consumed online media, what is the contemporary role of architectural criticism and the design critic? How does a critic negotiate the sometimes obscure territory of discipline-specific issues or vocabularies and bring larger awareness of design to the public and, conversely, how do contemporary social issues impact the profession?

November 9, 2015

Shelter Closing Panel and Podcast

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Amelia Taylor-Hochberg, Architecture, Bob Dornberger, Elizabeth Timme, Events, Jennifer Marmon, Jimenez Lai, Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects

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To celebrate the closing of the exhibition “Shelter” at the Architecture + Design Museum, on curators Sam Lubell and Danielle Rago hosted two panel discussions with the featured architects, focusing on the sites that serve as the exhibition’s organizing principles: the Metro subway extension in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the stretch of the LA River running through the city proper. Both sites embody much of what is affecting Los Angeles’ changing urbanism – ongoing drought, invigorated public transportation, gentrification, and increasing density.

Mimi Zeiger, West Coast Editor of The Architect’s Newspaper moderated the panel on the River, with Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular), Elizabeth Timme (LA-Más), and Lorcan O’Herlihy (Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects), and Amelia Taylor-Hochberg moderated the panel on Metro, with Jennifer Marmon (PAR), Bob Dornberger (wHY), and Priscilla Fraser (senior architect at LACMA).

Archinect Sessions, featuring a live recording of the closing panel discussion.

November 6, 2015

The Arsenal of Exclusion: Los Angeles Edition

Sixteenth National Conference on Planning History

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Dan D'Oca, Daniel D’Oca, Events, Laura Pulido, Theresa Hwang, Therese Kelly, Urbanism

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The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion (Actar, 2015) is a forthcoming encyclopedia of tools—or what we call “weapons”—used by architects, planners, policy-makers, developers, real estate brokers, ac/vists, and other urban actors in the United States use to restrict or increase access to urban space. The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion inventories these weapons, examines how they have been used, and speculates about how they might be deployed (or re/red) to make more open ci/es in which more people feel welcome in more spaces, be they “exclusive” communi/es with good schools, good jobs, and stable property values, or the everyday public spaces—the parks, sidewalks, and street corners— within those communi/es.

In this session, we will look examine a handful of weapons of exclusion opera/ng in contemporary Los Angeles, from superfluous curb cuts that prevent people from parking near the beach, to fake “parks” built to evict sex offenders from their homes (California law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of parks or schools), to communicate care facili/es ordinances that outlaw sober-living facili/es homes by outlawing mul/ple lease agreements, to gerrymandering schemes that poli/cally neutralize communi/es and their interests.

Access Wars
Daniel D’Oca, Interboro Partners, Brooklyn, NY

Community Designing Change: Active Methods of Community Engagement to Reshape a More Equitable Built Environment
Theresa Hwang, Woodbury University

Trailblazing Public Space
Therese Kelly, Therese Kelly Design / Los Angeles Urban Rangers

Aesthetics and the People
Mimi Zeiger, Architects Newspaper and Los Angles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Tourism for the 99%
Laura Pulido, University of Southern California

June 9, 2015

Between the Lines: Van Alen Book Club

Speedboat by Renata Adler

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Events

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“The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind.” ― Renata Adler, Speedboat

In June 2015 we read Renata Adler’s Speedboat, the cult favorite turned undisputed classic that reflects on what it means to be an urban American. Set in 1970s New York, Speedboat provides glimpses into the city of the past. The conversation was led by Garnette Cadogan and Mimi Zeiger.

May 16, 2015

Chatter Chat

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Agata Siemionow, Architecture, Digital Culture, Ellen Grimes, Erin Besler, Events, Grant Gibson, Iker Gil, Jonathan Mekinda, Urtzi Grau

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The Chatter Chat series are salons held in conjunction with the Architecture and Design Department’s exhibition Chatter: Architecture Talks Back that use the exhibition as a platform to discuss critical issues in the field of contemporary architecture.

This Chatter Chat invites two architects and a writer, all of whom are featured in the exhibition, to frame their projects relative to history (as a precedent and as an element to build upon), as well as discuss the productive ways in which architecture can be communicated. Each panelist presents their work through this lens as a prompt for discussion among a panel of Chicago-based architects and scholars, offering up insights for questions such as:

How do architects summon the material, formal, and sociocultural lessons from history without being beholden to them?
How do we reframe architecture through history’s most valuable architectural inheritances?
How does communication advance architectural representation and discussion?
Can architecture be communicated in a way that goes beyond the approved (but void-of-content) press release?
Can it empower, challenge, reveal, critique, reinterpret, and diagnose the discipline and our times?

Presenters
Erin Besler, University of California Los Angeles
Urtzi Grau, Fake Industries Architecture Agonism
Mimi Zeiger, critic, editor, curator, and instigator

Interlocutors
Grant Gibson, CAMES/Gibson
Ellen Grimes, School of the Art Institute
Jonathan Mekinda, UIC
Agata Siemionow, Illinois Institute of Technology

Moderator
Iker Gil, director of MAS Studio and editor in chief of MAS Context

Exhibition catalogue launch and signing follows the roundtable discussion.

March 16, 2015

Cities, Buildings, Screens: New Civic Engagement

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Architecture, Digital Culture, Events, Leslie Wolke, Michel Rojkind, Urbanism

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“Can architecture serve as a way to reconnect parts of the city or enhance human experience?” asks architect Michel Rojkind, founder of Mexico City–based Rojkind Arquitectos. Although the sharing economy recalibrated how we interface with the city through apps and services, the design of buildings and public spaces are still largely conventional. So, how to design for better civic engagement? In conversation with architect Michel Rojkind, writer Leslie Wolke, and architecture critic Mimi Zeiger will explore recent experiments at the intersection of architecture, interaction design, and urban intervention: from a department store in Mexico City wrapped in a 10-foot-deep layer of programmable hexagonal pods to mobile structures in Madrid that transform historical spaces. What do these urban interventions mean to us as technology and architecture intermingle in unfamiliar ways?

January 19, 2015

MAS CONTEXT x LOS ANGELES

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Andrew Clark, Architecture, Bruce Mau Design, David Yoon, Deborah Richmond, Events, Iker Gil, Joshua Stein, Julia Luke

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On Monday, January 19, 2015, MAS Context and five LA-based contributors will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the publication and discuss the work they contributed. The event will be hosted at Bruce Mau Design Los Angeles.

Contributors:
Julia Luke (Creative Director, Julia Luke Design)
Deborah Richmond (Architect, Deborah Richmond Architects)
Joshua G. Stein (Architect, Radical Craft)
David Yoon (Engineer, YoonCo)
Mimi Zeiger (Critic, editor, curator and instigator)

Moderated by Iker Gil (Editor-in-chief, MAS Context) and Andrew Clark (Director, BMD Los Angeles).