Join us at USC School of Architecture for a lecture by Mimi Zeiger.
Trained as an architect, critic Mimi Zeiger tracts 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, criticism, and architectural experimentation.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | 2pm
Gin Wong Conference Center
Harris Hall 101
Architecture and Design Film Festival Panel:
Hands-on, Ground-up: Community and Design/Build
Hippie havens, handbuilt provocations, and tech experiments with Yestermorrow, Jersey Devil, and Materials & Applications.
Mediabisto’s coverage of the panel by Brigitte Brown.
Mextropoli, the First International Festival on Architecture and the City, organized by Arquine and directed by Andrea Griborio, takes place in Mexico City March 22-26, 2014.
Panel Discussion: Habla ciudad: la crítica
Iker Gil (Chicago), Andrés Jaque (Madrid), Ethel Baraona Pohl (Barcelona), Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles)
Habla ciudad: la crítica
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Time: 5 pm – 6:30 pm
Location: Plaza de la Santa Veracruz
Syracuse Architecture
Lecture
Slocum Auditorium
Syracuse University
The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design presents:
Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime
A Book Talk and Signing
December 5, 7 p.m. Read More …
Across our diverse fields we are tackling the question of how to better engage the bottom-up-open-source-distributed-tactical-informal-crowd phenomena surrounding us, whether in the service sector, the city, or the networked community. Read More …
Advisory Board Member and Respondent
In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners and designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to avoid major social and economical catastrophes, working together to ensure these expanding megacities will remain habitable.
To engage this international debate, Uneven Growth brings together six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners to examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. Following on the same model of the MoMA exhibitions Rising Currents and Foreclosed, each team will develop proposals for a specific city in a series of workshops that occur over the course of a 14-month initiative.
Uneven Growth seeks to challenge current assumptions about the relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down urban development, and to address potential changes in the roles architects and urban designers might assume vis-à-vis the increasing inequality of current urban development. The resulting proposals, which will be presented at MoMA in November 2014, will consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, spatial justice, environmental conditions, and other major issues in near-future urban contexts.
Urban Case Study Teams:
New York: Situ Studio, New York, and Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), Rotterdam
Rio de Janeiro: RUA Arquitetos, Rio de Janeiro, and MAS Urban Design ETH, Zurich
Mumbai: URBZ, Mumbai, and Pop Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge
Lagos: NLÉ Architects, Lagos, and Inteligencias Colectivas, Madrid
Hong Kong: MAP Office, Hong Kong, and Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University, New York
Istanbul: Superpool, Istanbul, and Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris
Today the feedback, spin, and other acts of interpretation that were once the preserve of historians and other experts are often virtual, instantaneous, and open to input from a broad audience. What does this mean? Mimi Zeiger, critic and journalist based in Los Angeles, will consider expanded models of architectural criticism and discursive platforms. Alexandra Lange, New York-based critic and 2014 Loeb Fellow, will explain why architects should use Twitter and Instagram to show their influences—what they read, the design pilgrimages they make, the colleagues they admire—not just to promote themselves. Florencia Rodriguez, editor of Plot (Buenos Aires) and 2014 Loeb Fellow, will explore the question of criticism’s social or disciplinary responsibility; should it be “useful”? A discussion will follow, with GSD student writers and bloggers.
Moderated by Shantel Blakely of Harvard GSD Public Programs.
Reread Remix is a cross-platform criticism workshop that explores the act of critical writing as it translates from the page to the screen to performance. The workshop questions the role of the critic in a digital age, cautiously embraces the potential of the social web, and posits a collective criticism as a productive mode for expanding discourse.
Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to read and respond in a public manner to the following texts:
Ada Louise Huxtable, Plastic Flowers are Almost All Right (1971)
Reyner Banham, Bricologues a Lanterne (1976); see also: Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism (1972; 2013)
Working in groups, students made critical commentary, using the 140 character limit of Twitter, on the texts or on the discussion going on in the workshop. All tweets were tagged #rereading. Students then chose 3-5 of their tweets to perform in rapid succession. The goal of the reading was to continue the translation between platforms and to apply the immediacy of performance to critical practice.
Big City Forum returns for a second annual residency at Armory Center for the Arts with a new series, entitled Transforming the Social, which features six panel conversations that recognize and celebrate the ability to create transformative moments within the scope of the built environment and social space. Armory is pleased to have been hosting Big City Forum in residence since 2012, which saw the launch of Mapping LA, a series of four events exploring current creative practices that inform the landscape and geography of Los Angeles. Through its residency at Armory, Big City Forum is deepening its ongoing investigation of social and civic space within the built environment of the Los Angeles region. The residency builds upon a shared interest between the Armory and Big City Forum in advancing public discourse on the notion of social and civic engagement.
This panel discussion brings together four practitioners from the fields of art and architecture to discuss the complexity of social engagement. Speakers will investigate the agency of art and design when shaping spaces for a public. What I Talk About When I Talk About Community asks for more refined understanding of community, in order to reveal the politics, pitfalls, and pleasures of these practices.
Featuring:
Victor Jones, principal of Los Angeles-based Fievre Jones, cultural activist, and writer, whose research lies at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and community building within cities. Recent design projects include the Platform for Watts House Project (2011) and a skate park for New Orleans’ City Park (2009). His design work has been supported by numerous grants, including the Graham Foundation, Artplaces, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
ennifer Su and Laura Noguera, co-owners of Thank You for Coming, a communal restaurant/residency program that “aims to give people with varying experiences and backgrounds an opportunity to explore and execute ideas around sharing food. Residents are invited to utilize our restaurant space as a platform for public engagement and creative experimentation.
James Michael Tate received his Masters of Architecture from Yale University and Bachelors of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University. He has previously worked for MOS, Peter Eisenman, and Samuel Mockbee. Tate co-taught a studio with Michael Maltzan at Rice University this past spring; the experience motivated him to move to Los Angeles. Tate designs, makes, writes, and participates in a variety of architectural affairs. His current affinities include narratives, oppositional dialectic blends, seeking refuge in unsettled territories between art and architecture, the latent potentialities of history in contemporary experiments, and the Korean taco food-truck.
Moderator:
Mimi Zeiger, editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse. As writer and critic she covers art, architecture, urbanism, and design for the New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World; Tiny Houses; and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature.