February 20, 2007
Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture, and Founding Director, Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University, 2-23-07
Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture, and Founding Director, Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She is the author of Domesticity at War (ACTAR and MIT Press, 2006), Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Akal, 2006) and Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994) and the editor of Architectureproduction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), Sexuality and Space (PAP, 1992), and Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy (PAP, 2004).
Beatriz is the organizer of the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. The show will travel to several cities in North America, Europe, and Asia, starting with the CCA in Montreal on April 12th, Documenta 12 (Kassel, Germany), and the Architectural Association in London. Recently she received a Graham Foundation grant for her next research project X-Ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor.
Posted by David Lemberg at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2007
ULI Los Angeles Urban Marketplace 2007, 3-21-07
Urban Marketplace 2007 is a unique conference on investment opportunities and development strategies for Southern California's emerging lower income and distressed neighborhoods. The ULI LA Urban Marketplace has become a national model over the past six years, attracting over 3400 real estate and related professionals, as well as community and government leaders to its case studies, roundtable discussions, and exhibits. Attendees learn best practices and solidify relations with key professionals and leaders at the forefront of revitalizing the inner city.
This year's event will explore strategies and best practices for investing and developing in Los Angeles' emerging neighborhoods. The discussion — entitled Where is L.A. Headed? Solving the Real Estate Puzzle — focuses on redevelopment and economic investment in four regions within the city: Hollywood, Downtown L.A., East L.A., and Inglewood.
Posted by David Lemberg at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007
Brooke Hodge, Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 1-26-07
Brooke Hodge’s most recent project is Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, a major thematic exhibition that examines the intersections and overlaps between fashion and architecture. Skin + Bones is on view at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, until March 5, 2007. In addition, Ms. Hodge was one of four curators of the National Design Triennial, which is currently on view at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York.
Organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and curated by Brooke Hodge, the museum’s Curator of Architecture and Design, Skin + Bones is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the extensive and telling similarities between contemporary architecture and fashion. Skin + Bones explores the parallels between the “skin”—or exterior surface—and the “bones”—or structural framework—of both clothing and buildings of the past 25 years. Forty-five of today’s most brilliant and creative fashion designers and architects are represented by a wide range of more than 300 objects: from stunning one-of-a-kind haute couture gowns to intricate architectural models and special full-scale installations. This exhibition is the first opportunity for viewers in the United States to see many of the works.
Posted by David Lemberg at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2007
Steven J. Vasilion, Principal, Vasilion Architects, 1-12-07
Steve Vasilion is a life-long Chicago area resident. He attended the University of Illinois, Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Architecture in 1978 and graduating with Honors and High Distinction in Design. Vasilion has been a member of the American Institute of Architects since 1986.
He practiced in several Chicago-area architectural firms before founding Vasilion Architects in 1990. Located in Batavia, IL, Vasilion Architects specializes in the design of medical facilities and custom residences.
Vasilion strongly believes in community service. He serves on the City of Batavia’s Historic Preservation Commission and is in his second term as Chairman. His stated goal is “to create standards and procedures which will balance the rights of individual property owners while striving to preserve local heritage”.
Vasilion also mentors high school students interested in a career in architecture. Each year he works with six students (two each from three local high schools) from September through April. He creates a hypothetical project, using a real site and owner to interact with the students. Through their research, instruction, design and presentations, they receive an inside look at an architectural practice. As a result the students are able to make a better informed decision as to whether or not they wish to pursue architecture as a profession.
Posted by David Lemberg at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2006
Kimberli Meyer, Director, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 11-10-06
Kimberli Meyer earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and practiced architecture in Chicago before moving to Southern California. She received her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1995, and has since lived in Los Angeles pursuing art and architecture projects.
Ms. Meyer has been Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles at the Schindler House since 2002. There she has co-curated the current exhibition The Gen(h)ome Project along with Open Source Architecture. She has also co-curated the exhibition Symmetry (2006) with Nizan Shaked and Showdown! at the Schindler House (2004) with Fritz Haegj. She has directed guest curator François Perrin for the exhibition and publication Yves Klein: Air Architecture (2004) and has organized Schindler’s Paradise: Architectural Resistance (2003), an architectural ideas competition, exhibition, and publication.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is a contemporary, experimental, multidisciplinary center for art and architecture that operates from architect Rudolph M. Schindler’s own House and Studio (1922) in West Hollywood. It was established in 1994 as an alliance between the MAK Museum in Vienna and Friends of the Schindler House in West Hollywood.
Designed and built by Rudolph Schindler in 1921–1922 as live/work space for two families, the Schindler House redefined notions of residential space and architecture. It is the mission of the MAK Center to continue the conversation initiated by Schindler by creating and supporting programming that explores the dynamic intersections of art, architecture, and culture.
The MAK Center acts as a “think tank” for current issues in art and architecture by encouraging exploration and experimentation of artistic practices. It produces a year-round schedule of exhibitions, lectures, concerts, film screenings, performances, publications and new work commissions. It also hosts an international residency program for visiting artists and architects, who live and work in the Mackey Apartments (R. M. Schindler, 1939).
Posted by David Lemberg at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
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 12:49 PM | Comments (0)