Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Two pioneering works of radical television from the mind of the iconoclastic architecture critic Reyner Banham.

The writings and thinking of Reyner Banham, born 100 years ago this year, came to define and create architectural culture. His hugely innovative and engaging analyses of architecture, the city, culture and its artefacts continue to mark generations.

Banham’s trademark formal and intellectual wit, invention and creative critique found a perfect home on TV. In tonight’s first episode he drives the streets of his beloved LA, aided by an Alexa-like technological tour guide. In the second, he departs from there for Las Vegas, finding his own personal jackpot in the desert landscapes on route.

The ScreenTalk is chaired by Professor Richard J Williams, author of Reyner Banham Revisited, with guests writer and journalist Owen Hatherley, architectural historian Adrian Forty and LA-based critic, editor and curator Mimi Zeiger.

Peter Reyner Banham is one of the most relevant architectural and design critics of the 20th century. Join us to celebrate his 100th birthday on March 4 with a symposium, organised as a collaboration between the AA and The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, which will bring together multi-generational duets of scholars and practitioners engaging on themes key to the life and intellectual legacy of the English critic.

The symposium will precede two AA Visiting Schools held from June-July 2022 – “Farewell Reveries” (online) and “A Blighty Safari” (a road trip throughout the UK) – that will reflect on Banham’s passion for travel and field exploration.

Original image by Tim Street-Porter

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The League’s FF – Distance Edition, an online version of the long-running First Friday series, will continue on Thursday evenings. This season’s events feature design practices that are redefining the contemporary public landscape by responding to social and environmental concerns and exploring the intersections of architecture, technology, and ecology.

FF – Distance Edition brings participants on site, offering virtual access to practices’ workspaces and current projects. Following each presentation, join in an open conversation with the designers.

Founded in Boston by Chris Reed in 2001, Stoss Landscape Urbanism is a landscape architecture and urban design firm committed to “the power of open space to bind communities to one another and to the environment,” according to its website. At Stoss, landscape is a catalyst for positive change, enhancing both human wellbeing and ecological diversity. The firm’s work focuses on creating active and environmentally sustainable urban realms, socially vibrant public spaces, and diverse, vital neighborhoods in which people can live, work, and play.

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In fall 2020, the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab sponsored a six-episode series titled Whither Criticism? to question the state of architecture criticism today, and to ask how the field needs to adapt to address the major crises of our time.

Hosts David Rifkind (Architecture) and Dan Evans (Journalism + Media) welcomed some of the leading architecture critics of our time for a frank and illuminating discussion. Speakers included Lee Bey, Christopher Hawthorne, Inga Saffron, Kate Wagner, Alistair Gordon, and Mimi Zeiger.

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The 2020 Exhibit Columbus Symposium: New Middles gathered national and international thought leaders in architecture, art, design, and landscape architecture together with Columbus stakeholders to explore the question, What Is The Future of The Middle City?

The Symposium examined this question through the lens of four topics:

Futures and Technologies: Dan Hill, Vinnova, Stockholm, Sweden; Radha Mistry, Autodesk, San Francisco CA; Moderated by Marcus Fairs, Editor-in-Chief, Dezeen

Resiliency and Climate Adaptation: Iñaki Alday, Tulane University / aldayjover architecture and landscape, New Orleans; Kate Orff, SCAPE, New York, NY; Moderated by Iker Gil
2020–21 Curator, Exhibit Columbus

Arts and Community: Paola Aguirre, Borderless Studio, Chicago IL; Matthew Fluharty, Art of the Rural & M12 Studio, Winona MN; De Nichols, Civic Creatives, St. Louis MO; Moderated by Anne Surak, Director, Exhibit Columbus

Indigenous Futures and Radical Thinking: Chris Cornelius (Oneida), studio:indigenous, Milwaukee WI; Wes Jackson, The Land Institute, Salina KS; Joar Nango (Sámi), FFB, Alta, Finland; Ash Smith, Carson Center of Emerging Media Arts, Lincoln NE; Moderated by Mimi Zeiger, 2020–21 Curator, Exhibit Columbus

Each topic was explored weekly through Thematic Conversations, hosted in partnership with Dezeen, featuring international thought leaders. They were followed by Columbus Conversations featuring community stakeholders in conversation with 2021 Miller Prize recipients highlighting forward-thinking initiatives happening in our community of Columbus, Indiana.

These dialogues have served as foundational research for all New Middles participants—as a kind of Exhibition Design Brief and Community Design Brief — identifying topics, themes, and writings for community partners while growing exhibition participants’ understanding of Columbus’ culture and context as they conceptualize their commissioned installations for the Fall 2021 Exhibition.

Presented as part of the Ada Louise Huxtable and the Formation of the Architecture Critic Workshop held at the Getty Research Institute, organized by Maristella Casciato and Gary Fox. Participants included: Barry Bergdoll, Maristella Casciato, Pippo Ciorra, Meredith Clausen, Gary Fox, Ann Harrison, Anne Helmreich, Thomas Hines, Mary McLeod, Barbara Penner, Emily Pugh, Peg Rawes, Suzanne Stephens, Wim de Wit, and Mimi Zeiger.

Questions of criticism in relationship to time have been on my mind lately. So, I wanted to start with a quote from Huxtable taken from her 1969 review of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction published in the New York Times under the title “The Case for Chaos”:

Today’s theory is tomorrow’s practice. With the speedup characteristic of our age, it has a way of becoming today’s practice. Any thinking feeling citizen involved with his environment in this latter part of the twentieth century (that’s right—latter—with all the “projections” to the one awesome remote year 2000 no more than comfortable middle age for the present generation) must know the wave of future or succumb to the undertow of the past.

—Ada Louise Huxtable, New York Times, January 26, 1969

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2018 Design Trust Seed Grant

“Criticism Now: Developing Architecture and Design Criticism in the Pearl River Delta” is a weeklong English writing workshop that aims to develop new critical voices in architecture and design in Hong Kong, a place that needs more communication channels to represent its growing creativity in architecture, design, and urbanism.

The Hong Kong workshop is one in a series of critical writing workshops led by Zeiger, organised by DESIGN TRUST. She has taught workshops internationally, including at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Harvard University in Cambridge, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and the Aformal Academy in Shenzhen. Outcomes from this workshops include pamphlets, broadsheets, billboards, websites, debates, and performances. In a Hong Kong context, Criticism Now will add long-form essays and interviews to the body of work produced.

Additionally, Criticism Now brings together writers and editors for an in-depth discussion with the participants on present and future of design criticism in the Greater Bay Area.

The workshop has a creative format where participants work in a diversity of HK spaces, from an academic library setting, a co-working space, the newest “co-living” HK community area, in- between public spaces, to a bookstore context, to explore the act of critical writing using the city of Hong Kong and the local design community as both subjects and instigators.

Published participant essays:

Melody Yiu, Does the Xiqu Centre Live Up to Its Promise?, Zolima City Mag
Viola Gaskell, Why Hong Kong’s Buildings Are Clad in Bathroom Tiles, Zolima City Mag
Diego Caro Serrano, The Strange Intimacy of High Density, Zolima City Mag
Natasza Minasiewicz, New Modesty: In Conversation with Studio MLKK, Design Anthology

Co-curators of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Ann Lui and Mimi Zeiger, will give insight into the curatorial practices and research leading into Dimensions of Citizenship. Interrogating the spatial conditions of design and citizenship, their exhibition will present works by architects, designers, artists, and thinkers who are responding to today’s shifting modes of citizenship, and putting forth visions of future ways of belonging. Future Firm co-founder and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Ann Lui, and architecture critic Mimi Zeiger, are curating the exhibition along with University of Chicago architectural history professor Niall Atkinson, and associate curator Iker Gil, founder of MAS Context.

March 27, 2018 – 6:00pm
Art & Architecture Building
Taubman College, University of Michigan

A&A Auditorium (room 2104)