Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

May 16, 2015

Chatter Chat

TAGS

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

TAGS

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

TAGS

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).

January 16, 2015

Photography & Architecture

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Barbara Bestor, Events, Frances Anderton, Gordon Baldwin, Grant Mudford, James Welling

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Barbara Bestor (architect and executive director of the Woodbury University Julius Shulman Institute) moderates a panel on the critical and engaged eye that photographers bring to the built environment. In LA the human experience of space has undergone constant transformation and we will discuss the urban environment and its changing representations.

Moderator: Barbara Bestor: Architect and Executive Director of the Woodbury University Julius Shulman Institute

Panelists:
Frances Anderton: Producer, Writer & Host of DnA, Design & Architecture, KCRW
James Welling: Artist & Professor of Photography, UCLA Department of Art
Mimi Zeiger: Critic, Editor & Writer
Grant Mudford: Photographer
Gordon Baldwin: Independent Curator, Writer & Editor, Former Curator
Department of Photographs, Getty Museum

November 19, 2014

Memos from the Front Line

TAGS

Architecture, Events

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Arkitekturens Grannar returns to FFAR (Ringvägen 141) for a public event with architect and critic Mimi Zeiger. In the talk she will tract the rise of publishing as practice through her own work. Memos from the Front Line rejects the binary of the print and digital divide and suggests that the commingling of the analog and algorithmic creates rich territory for cultural production, collective criticism, and architectural experimentation.

November 17-18, 2014

TEXTTEXT

OBSERVE/CRITIQUE

TAGS

Architecture, Digital Culture, Events

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TEXTTEXT is a workshop at the Sandberg Instituut Studio for Immediate Spaces that explores the act of critical writing as drawn from keen observation and experience. The workshop takes the form of three parts over the course of two days: Reading, Ramble, and Reflection. Through the use of existing texts, constraint exercises, fieldwork, research, and digital tools, TEXTTEXT offers participants a framework for the production of a critical essay and a meditation on collective criticism.

October 4-5, 2014

Intervention

Contemporary Artists and the Modern House

TAGS

Architecture, Events

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Panel discussion with artist Santiago Borja, critic Mimi Zeiger and curator/artist Anthony Carfello.

This two-day conference investigates the power of experimental art installations to remake the spatial and social realities of modernist house museums. The symposium responds to the curatorial shift in the maintenance of house museums, in which directors are supporting increasingly transformative art installations that both challenge and celebrate the modernist landmarks. These collaborations with artists point to alternative preservation strategies, which move away from the conservation of historic homes as static objects and instead affirm the importance of human occupation and transformation. The conference will host a series of conversations between house museum directors, curators, critics, artists and architects to reveal the curatorial motivations and artistic processes behind these interventions. Read More …

September 25-November 13, 2014

Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles

Worldwide Storefront

TAGS

Alexei Tylevich, Andrew Kovacs, Anthony Martin, Architecture, Charlotte Hannson, Erin Besler, Events, Exhibitions, Ian Besler, Jia Gu, Jonathan Crisman, Jose Sanchez, Katya Tylevich, Laurel Consuelo Broughton, Leonardo Bravo, Luis Callejas, Productora, River Jukes-Hudson, Sam Lubell, Sarah Lorenzen, Wonne Ickx, Worldwide Storefront

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Host curators are Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design), Leonardo Bravo and River Jukes-Hudson (Big City Forum), and Sarah Lorenzen (Neutra VDL Research House).

This fall, curators from three Los Angeles-based organizations come together as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project, to present Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles. This series of exhibitions and events is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Neutra VDL Research House.

Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles explores the multivalent meaning of “host” though spectacle, parasitic opportunism, and domestic landscapes. The Neutra VDL Research House serves as the site of these investigations and the house, embedded with spatial effects—mirrors, screens, and pools of water—heightens and confuses the relationship between the domestic interior and the exterior.  Read More …

Summer 2014

THE LOS ANGELES SEMINARY FOR EMBODIED AND CIVIC ARTS

TAGS

Art, Events, Fritz Haeg, Urbanism

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Participant
Organized by Fritz Haeg

A ‘seminary’ is a piece of ground where seeds are sown for later transplantation. It is an environment in which something is propagated, from which something originates. The Los Angeles Seminary for Embodied and Civic Arts takes back this secular and potentially radical meaning. We also take back the word ‘radical’ – going back to the roots. We take back the word ‘sensual’ – treating all of the senses as sources of pleasure but also intelligence. We take back the word ‘embodied’ – to give a body to a spirit. We take back the word ‘civic’ – the activities of people in relation to their local area.

This summer around 10 to 14 of us gather for 12 hours a day, one day a week, for 12 weeks at my home/campus – featuring a resource library, subterranean lounge, workshop garage, wild food gardens, a communal kitchen, picnic tables, lots of little nooks and two geodesic domes – turning inward for an exploration of the embodied arts, turning to each other as a community of fellow artists interested in responding to the world around us, turning outward to pay attention to the city we live in, and ultimately ‘inseminating’ Los Angeles with our civic arts. Read More …

June 14, 2014

Our Public Space

Who Owns It, Who Shapes It, and Who Benefits From It

TAGS

Architecture, Events, Iker Gil, John Preus, Patrizia di Monte, Quilian Riano, Urbanism

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Our Public Space is a two-day program of lectures and a workshop presented by a concise list of national and international architects, designers, and artists addressing the current state of public space and the built environment. This program is organized by Dilettante Studios, MAS Context, and the Hyde Park Art Center and will take place on June 14 and June 15, 2014. With Iker Gil, John Prius, Quilian Riano, Patrizia di Monte, and Mimi Zeiger. Read More …