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October 20, 2006
David Erdman, Partner, servo; Design Faculty, University of California Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design, 10-20-06
David Erdman is one of four founding members of the research design collaborative servo, comprised of partners practicing and teaching in four different cities — Marcelyn Gow, Zurich; Ulrika Karlsson, Stockholm; Chris Perry, New York City. Launching the practice through a group exhibition collecting its four founding members, servo has used the space of the gallery as a primary site for design research and architectural investigation. The practice was initiated with a series of group and solo exhibitions where servo designed full scale architectural prototypes that act on the space and viewers of the gallery.
Their work explores how architectural elements like ceilings, benches, walls or structure can infuse the basic elements of each project or installation, using the architecture as a device for distribution and action where the design works on the gallery-goer and responds in real time to the event space of the gallery. Participating in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, San Francisco MOMA, MOMA and both the Venice, Korean and Beijing Biennale, servo has exhibited widely and has been collected by the French Architecture Collection, SFMOMA and most recently the MAK Center in Vienna.
servo currently has two studios — one in Los Angeles directed by Mr. Erdman and one in Stockholm by directed by Ulrika Karlsson. In the past two years servo has begun to design exhibitions where the logic and material experimentation in earlier works has escalated in scale and scope. The Genealogy of Speed, an exhibition for Nike containing 30 of its most technologically innovative sneakers and Dark Places, a group exhibition containing 76 artists including Matthew Barney, Cathie Opie, Raymond Pettibon and Wim Wenders, were completed in 2004 and 2006, in Venice and Santa Monica respectively. servo’s design for each of these develops strategies where the storage, organization and mixture of a dense amount of information is pushed through an architectural infrastructure that responds to the container of the exhibition and the people experiencing it.
servo has lectured and published widely receiving the Young Architects Award from the Urban League, Architecture Vanguard from Architectural Record and an American Institute of Graphic Arts award as part of the team for Nike Genealogy of Speed. Currently there are several permanent built projects on the cutting floor of servo including a recently completed house in upstate New York.
Mr. Erdman and each founding member of servo blends the work of the practice with academic research. Each partner is a design instructor at a leading university in their respective cities. Mr. Erdman has been a full-time faculty member at UCLA’s Department of Architecture since 1999, teaching design studios in both the Core and Advanced Topics Curriculum as well as conducting Technology Seminars which focus on the development of new modeling, representational and production techniques in Architectural Design. Mr. Erdman has coordinated the participation of his student’s work in exhibitions internationally including the Florence Festival for Architecture in Video, the Gray, Green and Brown competition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the 2x8 exhibition at the A plus D museum in Los Angeles.
Recently, Mr. Erdman was awarded the Charles Moore Travelling Fellowship where (with 14 students) he studied minimal surface geometries in several mosques in Istanbul, Turkey as part of a one-quarter design studio which was recently exhibited at UCLA. Mr. Erdman has taught at the KTH Stockholm, RPI and the Southern California Institute of Architecture and is the Joseph Esherick Visiting Chair at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design this Fall, in addition to his continuing appointment at UCLA in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design.
Mr. Erdman received his B.S. in Architecture from Ohio State University and his M.Arch. from Columbia University.
Posted by David Lemberg at October 20, 2006 12:49 PM Return to ARTSCAPE home page