See below for an archive of videos from recent past guest lectures at Syracuse Architecture. We invite you to visit here regularly as we continually update this space.
Visit our YouTube channel for additional past lectures. To learn more about upcoming lectures please visit our calendar.
Erika Naginski Robert P. Hubbard Chair in Architectural History, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Breaching the Proscenium
This lecture considers the architecture of the theatre, highlighting some of the episodes, from Ledoux to Wagner, marking its emancipation from the world of the court to its presence in the city of which it became a flagship monument. At play throughout is the manipulation of the proscenium along with the illusionistic, dramaturgical, and ideological conditions it instigates.
Today, we are all cyborgs. As we navigate our cities adorned with wearable devices, the boundary between human and machine is rapidly dissolving. This talk explores how wearables, though seemingly ephemeral in form, manifest real and tangible impacts on our urban experience—introducing a new architectural typology that extends beyond buildings to the very limits of our bodies and the software we use. Phones, health trackers, and headphones cradle us in digital frameworks that reshape how we perceive and inhabit space. In this emerging paradigm, we build the wearable, and we wear the building.
Ahearn Workshop: Extending the Body
February 15-17
Chrisoula Kapelonis will be holding an in-person workshop, open only to current students, on February 15-17, where she will guide students in transforming everyday materials into extensions of the body. Drawing from her expertise in innovative prosthetic wearables, Kapelonis will share her process of translating the human form into spatial architecture. Students will design and construct custom wearable pieces, exploring their interaction with the body and space.
The workshop will also introduce techniques for digitally capturing these works through imagery and drawing. Open to students across disciplines, we encourage participation from both the School of Architecture and VPA departments to foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
The Ahearn Workshops are made possible by a gift from Patrick Ahearn ’73, G’73, member of the School of Architecture Advisory Board and Syracuse University Trustee.
Andrew Kudless Bill D. Kendall Professor of Architecture, University of Houston; Principal, Matsys
Public Lecture - Architecture in the Age of Automation
Andrew Kudless will present his professional work and academic research related to the increasing automation of the design and fabrication of architecture. The talk will begin with the role of architectural drawing in relation to computational design and generative AI—the topic of Kudless’ workshop at Syracuse—and will then transition to materiality, performance, and fabrication topics, focusing on the Confluence Park Pavilion’s design and construction.
Graduate Workshop Review - The Exquisite City: Collective Form in the Age of Generative AI
February 10, 5:30 p.m., Slocum Atrium
This workshop explores the combination of two powerful design technologies, parametric modeling and generative AI, to develop and visualize speculative urban forms. Each student will construct a set of rules that parametrically produce urban plans. These rules will first be tested through quick sketches and visualized through the collective encoding of existing urban patterns found within generative AI models. The opportunities and challenges of these models, including cultural, historical, and technological biases will be discussed as students learn to critically engage generative AI in the design process.
Students will then select specific patterns and develop generative logics that can be encoded within a parametric environment. The contrast between the bottom-up emergence of generative AI with the top-down constraints of parametric modeling is a central focus of the workshop. While both allow for exploration, they operate in different design modalities. Generative AI is more like a freehand sketch, quick and loose, able to suggest directions without overly determining the destination. On the other hand, parametric modeling is more like building a machine able to precisely produce an unlimited number of variable but narrowly defined results. By learning to iterate between these technologies, the designer expands their imagination and capabilities.
The workshop is part of the Graduate Program’s Design Research Workshop Series: “Crafting with Machines: Imagery, Coding, and Material as Generative Instruments,” which is a set of inventive and speculative workshops that highlight the increasingly pervasive combination of traditional craftsmanship with modern technology, where machines are not just tools but active participants in the creative process. The aim of the workshops is to see how learning and crafting, in tandem with machines, can enhance the design processes and enable more complex and innovative solutions to architectural problems using imagery, coding, and materials as potential generative instruments for design. By using advanced technologies, architects can explore unconventional design solutions that might not be immediately achievable through traditional methods. Crafting with machines creates a framework for innovative forms, structural components, and representational strategies that integrate emerging technologies, such as AI, robotics, CNC milling, 3D printing, and much more, into the design process to create aesthetically rich and innovative architectural design solutions.
Ling Fan Founder & CEO, Tezign; Director & Professor, Tongji University
Design+AI: Research and Entrepreneurship
The integration of artificial intelligence into design disciplines offers transformative potential, reshaping how we conceptualize, create, and communicate. In this lecture, Dr. Ling Fan, a scholar and entrepreneur at the intersection of Design and AI, presents his research on the theoretical framework of the computability of design and his entrepreneurial endeavors to build design AI solutions for business.
Today, the Biomaterial Turn foregrounds changing ecological and material ethics that necessitate alternative approaches to working with grown matter. By reconsidering our relationship to craft, construction practices, and fabrication technologies, architects and builders can leverage the embodied intelligence and grown form of natural materials – a shift in approach from specifying to strategizing.
Maturing digital tools allow for a reimagining of traditional constraints on material economies and labor. In their practice, After Architecture, and research lab, Before Building, Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann deploy both analog tools and emerging technologies to collaborate with natural materials. They seek to make computational construction techniques low cost and accessible, using consumer grade technologies and inventing their own low-cost ground-up systems. Their work proposes an expanded approach in which architects conceptualize and execute not just single projects, but the systems, methods, and technologies that enable their production - a shift in the respective agencies of architect, builder, and factory.
This lecture will share the nine-year journey of architecture studio, LANZA Arienzo Abascal. Co-founder, Isabel Abascal will present a selection of built projects in Mexico, Spain and the United States. More broadly, this talk will delve into their research on the importance of the maternal archetype in architecture.
XS: Extra Small Works, will examine the role of scale in the work of salazarsequeromedina. With geographically dispersed projects in Peru, Spain, South Korea, and the United States, the practice of architecture requires renewed attention to the scale of material assemblies, tectonic craft, economy of means and a responsive relationship to its users. How can architecture assume an infrastructural role in communities without relying on infrastructural scale?
Laura Salazar and Pablo Sequero will trace the methodologies of their practice, which has been recognized in multiple international publications, exhibitions, and awards since their collaboration began in 2020.
Working Backwards will describe Katherine Hogan Architects’ hybrid approach to practice. The firm started with small design-build commercial and residential projects but has grown its portfolio to include projects for public schools, universities, state parks, and nonprofits. Often the product of modest but impactful interventions, the designs reflect the principals unyielding explorations into assembly, tectonic craft, and resourcefulness. The firm has crafted a diverse body of work, and has received AIA awards at the local, state, and national level for innovative design solutions to complex problems and for using ordinary materials in inventive ways.
Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA Managing Principal, Brooks + Scarpa Adjunct Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California
The Power of Beauty: Why It Matters
Why do we remember buildings, locations and experiences? Even a place visited in our childhood can conjure emotions that make an impact on us through the memories they create. Brooks and Scarpa will explain the creative process that aspires to make a lasting impression out of even a brief encounter.
Beauty is deeply intertwined with human values, social structures, and individual well-being. Its relevance can be seen in the way societies and cultures celebrate, pursue, and define beauty. It impacts almost every aspect of life from art and architecture to daily routines and social norms.
Beauty is the promise of happiness.” Happiness is one of our fundamental human needs and Beauty fulfills that promise. Buildings that we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol the values we think worthwhile. Whether through material innovation, form, colors or service to society, qualities such as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence are part of what we believe are beautiful. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of what is good are intertwined and inseparable.
Brooks and Scarpa’s work is deeply rooted in conditions of the everyday, and works with our perception and preconceptions to allow us to see things in new ways. They do this, not by escaping the restrictions of practice, but by looking, questioning and reworking the very process of design and building, rethinking the way things normally get done – with material, form, construction, even financing –– and to subsequently redefine it to cull out it’s latent potentials – making the “ordinary extraordinary.”
Yuyang Liu Founder and principal, Atelier Liu Yuyang
Extraordinary of the Ordinary
Architecture as a discipline is deeply rooted in the land and its people, two fundamentally intrinsic values that give architecture its true meaning. In this lecture, Yuyang Liu will discuss the relationship between culture, tradition, history, architecture and design in the post-pandemic era. He will trace five thematic emphases—House and City, Fragments Rearranged, Constructed Topography, Arched Space, and Linear City—from his studio’s practice.
“In the middle of winter, I at last discovered there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”, The Summer (1953)
Behind the Marble Room doors is an open storybook. Here a lake, a cicada, and a family of dandelions await. They will tell you three stories about the winters and summers of Syracuse:
Lake’s Story
They colonized me and possessed me as property. Yet I love you all: crayfish and catfish and ospreys and starlight and clouds and willow trees and humans and buttonbushes alike. Come sit with me and listen to my stories: the sound of cells splitting, wind breathing life, mercury buried, toxic chemicals dumped, and new lives birthing inside my body.
Cicada’s Story
In the many dark years that I lived in the embrace of this dark, moist ground, I had a lot of time to ponder. What is the soil made of? As I burrowed toward the light across strata, I saw blood, sweat, and wreckage of demolished homes. Who do these belong to and where are they from? How did they get entrenched and buried in my soil? I need to find out before summer comes.
Dandelions’ Story
We are constantly ripped up from our land and apart from our kin. We drift; we are carried by wind, birds, human hands. We root; we give and nourish and make kins everywhere we go. We have no home, but everywhere is home. We tell a story of dislocation and the bonds of kinship.
Cabinet of footnotes
The three stories inside the Marble Room draw from many historical events and ongoing resistances, but they only capture a fraction of the immense efforts and struggles shaping Syracuse today. To get a deeper dive, after you visit the exhibition, please make a stop at the “cabinet of footnotes.” There, you will find all the articles, oral histories, ongoing struggles, and other documents that gave form to these three stories made from so many more.
I am immensely grateful for this year of research and teaching at Syracuse Architecture, made possible by the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship. I would like to thank my mentors and colleagues at Syracuse University, especially Michael Speaks, Eliana Abu-Hamdi, and Kyle Miller for their generous support throughout this year. I am thankful for every story and life that inspired my exhibition. I want to offer special thanks to Aryan Ambani ’25, Karen Villacis ’25, and James Barbier ’25, the exhibition production team; Michael Giannattasio and John Bryant, the fabrication shop; Andy Molloy, Daryl Olin, and Christopher Cavino, the technology support. It was also a truly humbling experience to teach and learn from the students of Syracuse Architecture. They have given me courage and innumerable ideas that led to this exhibition. Thank you.
Christina Chi Zhang Syracuse Architecture Harry der Boghosian Fellow 2023–24
Graduates are to meet in the lower level of Hendricks Chapel at 9:15am. Kristen DeWolf and Lauren Mintier will hand out your name cards and explain the procession. Bring as little as possible with you—items cannot be locked up during the ceremony.
Degree candidates are required to wear a cap and gown.
Hendricks Chapel is wheelchair accessible.
Tickets are not necessary to attend this event.
The School of Architecture has contracted with a professional photographer from Genesee Photo Systems to take pictures of each graduate as he/she/they receive/s a certificate of recognition. Images will be posted online on the Genesee Photo Systems website during the following week and be available for purchase.
The ceremony will be streamed LIVE from Hendricks Chapel, beginning at 10 a.m., for the benefit of family and friends unable to attend the ceremony and will be available through a link on the Commencement website.
The ceremony will also be videotaped and available for future viewing on our YouTube channel.
Bringing together a notable panel of designers, practitioners, educators and theorists, this AI roundtable discussion aims to delve into the nuanced influence of AI on architecture, steering the conversation beyond typical debates. Structured to explore the intellectualizing, aestheticizing, and practical applications of AI in design, this discussion seeks to shed new light on its historical context, aesthetic possibilities, and practicality in the field. This dynamic exchange is set to challenge and expand the understanding of AI’s evolving role in architectural innovation.
Participants
Kory Bieg Principal, OTA+; Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin
Diffusions in Architecture: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators in Architectural Design
In this lecture, Matias del Campo unfolds the captivating realm of AI-generated images, as articulated in his book, “Diffusions in Architecture”. The book serves as a compelling chronicle and speculative inquiry into the transformative impact of AI image generators on the architectural imagination, featuring contributions from six theorists and twenty architects.
Leveraging Ludwig Wittgenstein’s axiom, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, the lecture delves into the contemporary surge of natural language text-to-image applications like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E 2, revolutionizing the architectural landscape. This novel design tool has yielded a prolific output of extraordinary images and instigated theoretical explorations, hinting at the inception of a posthuman design methodology. The confluence of these factors marks a seismic shift in architecture, redefining the dynamic between human and machine in the creative process. The lecture navigates the transformative impact of large language models, exemplified by ChatGPT, which have rendered promptism and prompt engineering obsolete. It has made it feasible for even the most inexperienced user to come up with functional code and complex image prompts. All of this resulted in the proliferation of astonishing images, engendering a new epoch of design that blends human creativity with algorithmic intelligence. In doing so, diffusion models have emerged as a possible new design tool. Enabling architects to mine the multilayered, deep historical repositories of architectural knowledge for chimeras, capriccios, and mutants and encouraging architects to discover a new voice for the architecture of the 21st century.
Workshop
October 14-17
Drs. Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger will be holding an in-person 650 design research workshop, “Architecture, Artificial Intelligence & Synthetic Imagination” from October 14-17.
Adi Kumar Loeb Fellow, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD)
Design Cities for People, and Not for Profit
Over the four decades most cities and urban areas across the globe have become increasingly segregated. Studies in the U.S. indicated that 80% of urban areas are more segregated now than in 1990’s highlighting that this segregation is clearly embedded in poorer neighborhoods and communities of color1. These spatial manifestations of poverty and inequality have informed heated, and often polarized debates, on affordable and adequate housing, migration, access to well-located land, increasing homelessness, deteriorating public transit and infrastructure. Large private developments driven by profit, rather than by needs of people, have dramatically increased spatial segregation. Market based economics have also been effective in reducing “housing as a human right” to an economic asset for generational wealth, exclusion and speculative practice.
In this talk, Kumar will explore how architects, planners and built environment professionals are critical to reframing and shaping these polarized debates. Kumar will explore tools to shape urban development using participatory methods of planning, building broad consensus and breaking normative rules of design. Drawing on personal experiences in post disaster reconstruction in India, post conflict reconstruction of refugee camps, developing models for slum upgrading, advocating for affordable housing, the lecture will focus on empirical practices of coproduction, activism, negotiation and resistance to realize just cities.
Kory Bieg Principal, OTA+; Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin
Elements of (an AI) Architecture
The surge of accessible artificial intelligence (AI) is profoundly reshaping every aspect of our lives, and architecture is no exception. In times like these, it’s useful to look back to our fundamentals. As Rem Koolhaas said in his introduction to the 2014 Venice Biennale, a study of the fundamentals is a study of histories, and “tries to reconstruct how architecture finds itself in its current situation and speculates on its future.” In this lecture, Bieg will discuss the parallel histories of AI and Computational Design, show projects that use novel AI design tools and methodologies, and discuss the disciplinary impact of generative AI.
Workshop
February 24-26
Kory Bieg will be holding an in-person 650 design research workshop, “Elements of an AI Architecture” from February 24-26.
Jess Myers Urbanist and assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University
Adventures in Audiosocial Space
In this lecture, Myers will propose sound studies as a critical framework for urban and architectural analysis. Myers challenges architecture’s exclusive relationship with visual communication and proposes instead a practice of “listening.” Myers will make the case for architects’ ears, for how they can be attuned to the soundscapes of the built environment and how a practice of “listening” might impact the dynamics of power in shared and personal space.
Ahearn Workshop
February 17-19
Jess Myers will be holding an in-person workshop from February 17-19. RSVP through Handshake if you’d like to attend.
The weekend workshop will focus on “the interview” as a strategy for urban research and podcasting. On Saturday, participants will record, analyze, and edit interviews with one another to interrogate each participant’s relationship with the city of Syracuse. On Sunday, participants will be introduced to sound editing and learn how to weave excerpts of their interviews together with other “found” sound samples. On Monday, participants will share a 10 to 12 mins edited version of their audio work with guests.
The Ahearn Workshops are made possible by a gift from Patrick Ahearn ’73, G’73, member of the School of Architecture Advisory Board and Syracuse University Trustee.
Indoor Urbanism calls for a shift in environmental thinking, emphasizing the exchange between architecture and the city, both from the inside-out and outside-in perspectives. This concept merges the scales of urbanism and interiors, pushing the boundaries of architecture. Rachely will present MODU’s recent book, “Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism,” along with relevant projects.
In this lecture, T+E+A+M will explore the interplay of digital and physical media through a collection of recent work. From temporary pavilions wrapped in renderings to new buildings built inside old buildings, T+E+A+M shows how speculative architecture influences building practice.
We are interested in a space that makes us curious, but that does not explain itself fully, a space that doesn’t prescribe what or who it serves and doesn’t reveal why it is the way it is. This type of space is what we call a space for something. We think that this type of space is the most useful over the long term, the most elastic and also the most intriguing.
Tectonics of the Latent Space - Designing with Artificial Intelligence
In this lecture, Dr. Sandra Manninger provides some thoughts on the ontology of Artificial intelligence and its relationship to architectural production. Oscillating between aspects of wicked problems (aesthetics, agency, authorship, inspiration, creativity) and tamed problems (analysis, feature recognition, prediction), this lecture paints a picture as of how architecture might operate in a future design environment.
Ian Wang Founding partner and branding designer, URSIDE Design and URSIDE Hotel Shanghai
The Possibilities of Metamorphosis
In this lecture, Wang will delve into his design philosophy, emphasizing the significance of interdisciplinary approaches and the integration of diverse design elements. He will explore the boundless potential inherent in the concept of metamorphosis, a central theme in his work, and will showcase a wide array of projects that exemplify his innovative approach to design. From unconventional hotel entrepreneurship to architectural and urban branding, store design, fashion branding, exhibitions, curation, lecture branding and photography, Wang’s work reflects his commitment to pushing the boundaries of conventional design norms and seeking to transform the world of design through creativity and exploration.
Evelyn Lee Global Head of Workplace Strategy and Innovation, Slack Technologies
The Practice of Architecture - Designing New Practices and Practicing New Design
Evelyn Lee will talk about her unique career path from architecture to tech, the lessons she learned along the way, and why she still stays engaged within the professional community. She believes that architects are more valuable than ever, but for the profession to thrive we must redesign and expand the definition of practice.
Ahearn Workshop: Podcasting for Growth - Leveraging the Power of Storytelling to Grow an Architecture Practice
September 30-October 2
Evelyn Lee held an in-person workshop from September 30-October 2.
The Ahearn Workshops are made possible by a gift from Patrick Ahearn ’73, G’73, member of the School of Architecture Advisory Board and Syracuse University Trustee.
Da-Un Yoo Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Ewha Womans University
The Clients: Who Do Architects Work For?
In this lecture, Professor Yoo will introduce various ways that architecture can contribute to the ‘public’ through not only individual architectural projects, but also expansion into architecture-related institutions, policies and research fields.
Patrick Ahearn Founding principal, Patrick Ahearn Architect LLC
History Reinterpreted: The Myles Standish Hotel
Ahearn’s most recent publication, “History Reinterpreted: The Myles Standish Hotel” (ORO Editions, 2023), showcases the reimagination of the north wing of the 1871 Myles Standish Hotel in Duxbury, Massachusetts, detailing the process of its dramatic transformation into a grand dame seaside estate.
Following the lecture, Patrick Ahearn will be available to sign copies of his book “History Reinterpreted: The Myles Standish Hotel.” The book will be available for purchase at the signing.
What is a potted plant in the age of botanical reproduction? Often mass-produced in today’s blooming plant industry, houseplants are as much living organisms as they are technoscientific artifacts. Many novel tropical and subtropical cultivars in the U.S. are created by plant breeders, who augment biological traits to optimize propagation, shipping, ease of maintenance, and marketable aesthetics. Some invented fronds are considered to be intellectual properties under the law, while their inventors are granted plant patents with exclusive rights for reproduction and sales. These patent plants redefine the relationship between architecture and vegetal life. If transplants from European colonies once necessitated the development of architecture as contained environment, patented foliages from laboratories today absorb the logics of spatial and infrastructural systems. Such botanical facsimiles are designed for production lines, shipping boxes, and climatized rooms, challenging what we understand as “natural.”
The Patent Plants exhibition presents a care and signaling system for 18 houseplant varieties and explores the spatial and environmental conditions for their patentability. This system includes not only infrastructure for basic vegetal needs, but also a community of plant parents. Each patent plant on display here is under the care of a member from the School of Architecture. Visitors are encouraged to look at them through hand lenses and to draw them. As the anthropologist John Hartigan asserts in the essay “How to Interview a Plant,” drawing facilitates careful looking, which is the first step toward taking plants seriously.
Exhibition Assistants
Kyle Lenihan, Parker Vanderven, Tru Truong
Fall 2022, “Constructing Nature” Seminar
Vanessa Chica, Alexis Diaz, Spencer Ghobadian, Ian Goodale, William Herndon, Samuel Langer, Kyle Lenihan, Miao Luo, Emerald Man, Lia Margolis, Mariana Munoz, Quinn Pelichoff, Lauren Reichelt, Wendy Kexin Wang, Xiaoxuan Xu, Zhexu Yang, Shiji Zhang, Junye Zhong
Spring 2023: “Displaying Nature” Seminar
Roaa Alshehri, Brendan Carroll, Jack Chen, Andrea De Haro, Wenting Feng, Crystal Giard, Andrea Hoe, Houming Lu, Miao Luo, Jenna Merry, Catherin Kovalcik, Meejan Patel, Erin Splaine, Winnie Ngai Lan Tam, Neha Tummalapalli, Parker Vanderven, Xiaoxuan Xu
Spring 2023: “Manuals for Human-Plant+X Interactions” Visiting Critic Studio
Kelly Chan, Joshua Fellows, Emily Herr, Gretchen Hundertmark, Anup Adhikrao, Emily Lane, Daniela Llaguno Garcia, Terry Luo, Erin O’Daniel, Dingkun Qian, Tru Thruong, Violet Wong, Congshuo Zhang
Special thanks to Michael Speaks, Kyle Miller, Michael Giannattasio, John Bryant, Andy Molloy, Daryl Olin, Beth Pierson, Kristin Shapiro, Julie Sharkey, Ken Meier, Samantha Vasseur, and LariAnn Garner.
Plants are the new pets. The fronds in our pots, corms in our homes, and trees on our streets are perhaps best understood as what the scholar Donna Haraway calls “companion species.” As co-inhabitants of our world, pet plants inspire new aesthetics and function as instruments of value. They require constant care and are bred for optimized growth. They are legacies of empires and technoscientific commodities. How do humans ascribe value to different flora? What does it mean to care for plants without capitalizing on their utility? What forms of vegetal performance can be visualized? Who speaks for plants? How can pet plants reframe our relationship with the concept of “nature,” climate change, and other more-than-human subjects?
Staged through six multimedia human-plant performances organized as a “Pet Plants Symposium,” this event brings together a group of artists and practitioners in the fields of art, architecture, landscape architecture, and performance. We aim to explore the valuation and domestication of plants and speculate on new forms of engagement with all manner of vegetal beings.
This symposium is organized by Lily Chishan Wong, the school’s seventh Boghosian Fellow. Throughout the academic year, she has been teaching an architecture studio and two professional electives focusing on her research project, “Producing Nature” that examines the production of tropical and semi-tropical ornamental plants and its spatial, socio-political and environmental dimensions.
Lily Wong and Tim Simonds will moderate the discussion.
Performances
Noon – 5 p.m., Slocum Hall Marble Room
12:00 – 12:15
Introduction
12:15 – 12:45
Cooking Sections
1:00 – 1:30
Michael Wang
1:30 – 2:00
Aidan Ackerman
2:00 – 3:00
Break
3:00 – 3:30
Tim Simonds
3:45 – 4:15
Lily Chishan Wong
4:30 – 5:00
Nocturnal Medicine
Panel Discussion / Reception
5:30 – 6:30 p.m., Slocum Hall Atrium
Performers
Aidan Ackerman Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Planning and Designing to a Brand Ethos: Building a Career in Retail Experience
In this lecture, Eggert-Peluso will take you through his approach on designing for two iconic American brands in the store design environment.
Ahearn Workshop: Store/Shop/Web Experience Design
March 25, 26, 27
Jeffrey Eggert-Peluso will be holding an in-person workshop from March 25-27. RSVP through Handshake if you’d like to attend.
The Ahearn Workshops are made possible by a gift from Patrick Ahearn ’73, G’73, member of the School of Architecture Advisory Board and Syracuse University Trustee.
Noushin Ehsan Award-winning Iranian-born American Architect
An Architect’s Journey: Excerpts from “Noushin, A Memoir: The Making of a Woman Architect”
In her talk, Noushin will read a few excerpts from her book, Noushin, A Memoir: The Making of a Woman Architect, which discusses her personal journey as a young child in Iran whose foremost ambition was to become an architect and the sometimes-difficult paths she navigated as she achieved each of her goals. Noushin will focus on the qualities it takes to establish and lead a successful international practice of architecture/planning and will share her philosophy that all architects must possess a desire to use their knowledge and talent to serve humanity. Her doctrine, called Spirit of Space, denotes that an architect must understand the value and impact of subliminal feelings of joy in spaces and the impact of creating designs that “sing.” To achieve this goal, Noushin believes the architect must employ a holistic approach to craft designs that are timeless, promote positive emotions, and work towards contributing to a healthy society.
Ringo Studio creates immersive, brand-forward environments. The customer becomes the protagonist, willed forward in time and space by material curiosity, nuanced form, and spatial cues. The visitor’s journey is the brand.
Ahearn Workshop: Store/Shop/Web Experience Design
March 4, 5, 6
Madelynn Ringo will be holding an in-person workshop from March 4-6. RSVP through Handshake if you’d like to attend.
The Ahearn Workshops are made possible by a gift from Patrick Ahearn ’73, G’73, member of the School of Architecture Advisory Board and Syracuse University Trustee.
Akanda’s lecture will follow her career, beginning at Syracuse Architecture, then to New Delhi, continuing through her work for a series architecture firms specializing in high-end residential, commercial and hospitality design, and finally to her current work as Aesop Head of Store Design and Development for the Americas.
Lindsey Wikstrom Founding Principal, Mattaforma; Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP
In the new book, Designing the Forest, and Other Mass Timber Futures, Wikstrom traces wood’s passage from forest to cross laminated walls through to the material’s discarded final return to earth’s soil, considering the enmeshed histories, economies, and philosophies; and ultimately outlining a path towards biodiverse mass timber cities. Designers today should feel empowered to more creatively imagine carbon not as a footprint but as a choreographed flow between forest, factory, site, and beyond.
Li Han and Hu Yan Co-founders of Drawing Architecture Studio (DAS)
Extra Ordinary Views
Everyday urban space has become an important topic of discussion over the last several years. After weathering a storm of avant-garde ideas and technology, architecture has begun to return to more down-to-earth concerns. This lecture explores the ways Drawing Architecture Studio has made the “everyday” and vernacular architecture an important part of their practice, research and teaching.
Ahearn Workshop: Store/Shop/Web Experience Design
February 25, 26, 27
Drawing Architecture Studio will be holding an in-person workshop from February 25-27. RSVP through Handshake if you’d like to attend.
The Ahearn Workshops are made possible by a gift from Patrick Ahearn ’73, G’73, member of the School of Architecture Advisory Board and Syracuse University Trustee.
We often forget why we design or what we design, while we design byinertia. Let’s lower the speed of proposal making, and question what the design is. This lecture talks about the re-valuing moment of architecture by empathizing and defining the real value of the existing. Physical intervention is minimized, social intervention is amplified, participation is expanded, and the city becomes socially sustainable.
Throughout the academic year, Leen Katrib, the school’s sixth Boghosian Fellow, has been teaching an architecture studio and two professional electives focusing on her research to deconstruct the myths surrounding Mies van der Rohe’s proposal for IIT’s post-WWII modernist campus expansion. In collecting and reconstructing materials that are often discounted from official histories on Mies’s legacy in the US, Katrib seeks to contribute to a counter-historiography that highlights Miesian modernism’s entanglement in social, racial, and bureaucratic realities that not only shaped discursive and pedagogical agendas in architecture, but arguably commenced a pattern of post-WWII university campus expansions into vulnerable neighborhoods that continue to this day to influence and shape the American university and landscape.
Organized as a live, roundtable discussion, the symposium convenes a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and practices whose work deconstructs “official” historical narratives and reconstructs counter-histories by engaging a constellational practice of grouping, arranging, or positioning seemingly disparate collections of discounted detritus to retell one possible permutation of history among infinite potential assemblages and meanings.
Michael Speaks, dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture, along with Katrib, will moderate the discussion.
Participants
Azra Akšamija Artist, architectural historian, Associate Professor, MIT Department of Architecture; Director of MIT Future Heritage Lab
Gastón Gordillo Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Sylvia Lavin Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Co-Director of the Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University; historian and curator
Jorge Otero-Pailos Artist, preservationist, and Professor and Director of Historic Preservation, Columbia University GSAPP
Anna Tsing Professor, Anthropology Department; University of California, Santa Cruz
This symposium at Syracuse University and related programming with Toolshed and Basilica Hudson in Hudson, New York will explore the condition of feral ecologies and how we think, act, and live in relation to such spaces, from perspectives of participatory art and design. The event will investigate how to connect theory and practice in order to dwell more ecologically in our communities and on the planet. The keynote speakers will be Anna L. Tsing, a professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Wael Al Awar, principal of waiwai design in Abu Dhabi.
In the evening following this midday session, there will be a panel discussion consisting of Syracuse University professors Nina Sharifi, Arnisson Andre Ortega, Sam Van Aken, Yutaka Sho, Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris. These professors will share their work and respond to and discuss the earlier talks along with a live audience.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Media Arts in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, The Canary Lab, Toolshed, Basilica Hudson, Gabe and Katie Nugent, and the Collaboration for Unprecedented Success and Excellence (CUSE) grant program.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Kristina Hill Program Director of IURD and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design, College of Environmental Design; University of California, Berkeley
Meyerson Chair of Urbanism and Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Executive Director of the McHarg Center; Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
ALL INTERACTIVE investigates the role of interaction and immersion in designing spaces. We will dive into the exciting world of game engine, photogrammetry, artificial intelligence, simulation, networking, virtual and mixed realities to understand how they can be built as research tools. We will navigate through various projects of our studio Folly Feast Lab from the past three, and from my teaching at University of California, Los Angeles.
Iman Fayyad Designer and Lecturer in Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Drawing Form
The art historian Ernst Gombrich reminds us that the two-dimensional image is ambiguous. It represents infinite possibilities of three-dimensional configurations. Techniques of projective transformation—from orthography and stereography, to surface development and oblique distortions—challenge the capacity of the flat plane to map spatial relationships. “Drawing Form” will present ways of working with the flat plane as a motivator for form production and venue for spatial imagination. We will draw from examples in cartography, mathematics, art, and linguistics, to explore how projection—a process that necessitates the selective obfuscation of information—addresses cognitive and visual perception, subjective experience and bodily movement, material behavior, and the tectonic expression of architecture.
Cultivated Imaginaries: Superblock and the Idea of the City
CULTIVATED IMAGINARIES is the culminating exhibition of Harry der Boghosian Fellow Liang Wang’s year-long research project devoted to the study of the superblock. The results of Wang’s studio and other courses taught over this last year are catalogued and published in two large volumes, which are part of the exhibition. Volume One features forty-one superblock projects redrawn from initial research produced in the seminars. Volume Two collects student design projects produced in seminars and in the Visiting Critic studio. But those materials tell only part of the story. Wang and his students also set out to discover why “superblock,” as a term, concept and reality has been so central to discussions of the contemporary city despite the fact that even today there is no agreed upon definition for the term or its use. What they discovered is that “superblock” is not so much a term, concept or reality, but is instead the name for an ambition, shared by the architect and the urbanist alike, to “see all”: to represent, name and thus comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible complexity of the contemporary city.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large model of multiple scales—urban, architecture, interior—that comes in and out of focus depending on how and from what vantage point it is viewed. Indeed, depending on the vantage point, the scales appear not only to be multiple, but indeterminate. To be more precise, the model encourages our eye to move seamlessly between scales and accede to the ambition of “seeing all” named by “superblock” but more often accomplished in the views provided by Song Dynasty landscape paintings. The large model is painted white and filled with copper-colored interior furnishings visible through the frame of what, upon entering the Marble Room through the center doors, appears to be a large white building. As we approach the white frame, the interior spaces of the building do not conform precisely to the expected scale. When viewed more closely, the scale of these three levels with furnishings becomes larger as our eye moves vertically up the model towards the top level. Also, as we move in closer to the model, towers arise beyond the copper furnishings from what appears to be the center of the building. Walking around the model blurs and montages the framed views into the building creating a more fluid, “cinematic” view that allows us to see through and past the interior furnishings where we can make out, though not see in full, an urban block in what, by convention, would be called the building’s atrium.
On initial approach, views of the urban scale are thus framed by and through the white building, and then as we move closer, by the multiple-scaled interiors, and then more fully—though not entirely—by way of a more kinetic view enabled by walking around the model. Access to a full view of the urban scale is foreclosed, however, by the height of the model itself. Something approximating this full view, though, is enabled through the eye of a camera placed above the model, which provides a continuous video feed projected onto one of the room’s marble walls, also accessible via Bluetooth on a mobile phone. And yet even this unconventional, mediated plan view, which allows us to see the urban, architecture and interior scales all at once, does not enable us to “see all.” The conclusion drawn by Wang and his students seems to be that this full view can only ever be “imagined” and made possible through a rigorous and inventive curation, cultivation and narration of multiple points of view such as the one offered here in this exhibition. As such, the exhibition is perhaps better viewed like a novel in which the spaces themselves are characters in a story whose narrative is driven by the ambition to “see all.” But we are also left to understand that even the fictive, “imagined” view provided by this exhibition is but a single, cultivated imaginary, only one among many possible views or stories. And in this, Wang and his students have truly understood the call to “see all” invoked by the superblock, acknowledging, as all who attempt an answer must, both the impossibility of success and the necessity of the effort.
…
This exhibition is the result of a truly collective and collaborative process. Special thanks to Michael Speaks, CULTIVATED IMAGINARIES curator and dean of Syracuse Architecture; Julia Czerniak, professor and associate dean of Syracuse Architecture; Emily Hu ’22 (B.Arch) and Lu Zhang (Payette), exhibition production team; Wendy Li ’23 (B.Arch) and Roy Zhang ’23 (B.Arch), exhibition research team; John Bryant, Michael Giannattasio and Robbie Weaver, Syracuse Architecture Fabrication Shop; Andy Molloy and Thuc Phung, Syracuse Architecture IT Services; and all the students enrolled in the fall 2020, spring 2021 and summer 2021 Boghosian Fellowship seminars and studios.
Liang Wang Syracuse Architecture Harry der Boghosian Fellow 2020–21
Signifyin(g) Spatial Narrative in Composite (DJ Sample, Layer, Repeat)
Williams will explore the ar(t)chitecturally re-mixed media techniques of perspectival composite collage through African Diasporic creative theory as a framework for “making”. Techniques related to rhythmic, sonic, and visual practices such as the DJ process of sample, layer, and repeat; the textile process of rhythmic quilting and griot modal storytelling will be introduced to develop new hybrid interpretations of visual representation. Syncopated mappings and their multi-voiced fractals will inform Spatial Narratives of composited hand-crafted works occupying the spaces between rhythm and revision. Investigations will challenge relevant materials as well as strategies of (re)presentation of history and culture; gender, sexuality; race and place, spirit and space. Future space(s) are invoked, employing techniques in continuity towards innovations in Spatial Narrative and Visualization.
Perry Kulper Architect and Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan
Surface Capacity
‘Surface Capacity’ will unpack the construction of a spatial and pedagogical practice through the lens of architectural representation, by sampling various kinds of produced surfaces—analog, digital and composites. Comprised of influences, hunches, flat out shots in the dark and outcomes, ‘Surface Capacity’ will build a relational calculus that points to developing spatial, representational, cultural and disciplinary participation. Key partners-in-crime for the work will be tickled in the talk, including curiosity cabinets, Robert Venturi’s book, ‘Complexity and Contradiction’, Wallace Stevens’ seminal poem ’Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, Jorge Luis Borges’ fictional taxonomy, ‘Celestial Emporium of Celestial Knowledge’, Baroque architecture, Matthew Barney’s ‘Drawing Restraints’, surrealist techniques, and interests in contingency and indeterminacy. Language prompts, analogous thinking, the ‘naming problem’, tailored visualizations, and inventive programmatic thinking will populate the margins. ‘Surface Capacity’ will get under the metaphorical hood of an approximate practice, constructed by an amateur, that leverages various forms of visualization towards spatial speculations that aspire to enlarge what might be possible in the cultural imaginary.
Founded in January 2018, the brilliance of SCANVISION’s work is based on many years of experience with point clouds at the Chair of Landscape Architecture Christophe Girot at ETH Zurich coupled with strong skills in conceptual, spatial and cinematic thinking. The boundaries of surveying and representation are constantly being explored and new ways of conveying spatial information are being developed. The scope of possibilities is constantly being expanded through new surveying methods, workflows and the development of sensor-based interfaces.
The work includes the surveying, documentation and visualisation of art objects, complex urban situations, large-scale landscapes, underground infrastructures and many more. With the help of surveying methods, such as 3D laser scanners, spaces are captured efficiently and in high detail. The resulting digital models are made accessible through a wide variety of representations.
The media-effective reproduction techniques range from high-resolution films to VR and AR applications to interactive programs and convey a spatial experience to the viewer. It shows the relationship of places, infrastructures, objects and spaces in a new way.
Looking Back, Looking Forward: Architecture Abroad reflects on four decades of leadership and pedagogy in Italy as well as speculates on future trajectories for the program.
Please join Dean Michael Speaks and the School of Architecture community for a remembrance for Connie Caldwell, former director of Career Services in the School of Architecture.
Stephanie Lin will present the work of her practice, Present Forms, through a focus on surface conditions as expressions of larger organizations, translations, and processes at work. Explorations of materiality and medium formulated through drawings, moving images, objects, and building, elucidate relationships between the physical and the perceptual that lie beyond the spatial surface. Lin’s lecture will also discuss the extension of these conversations through academic collaborations and collective practice with Office III.
Co-sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor Urban Humanities working group, the Department of African American Studies, and the Department of Art and Music Histories.
Adedoyin Teriba Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary architecture & urbanism, Vassar College
Architecture, Daemons and Regionalism in Southwest Nigeria (1970s to the Present)
The history of architectural education in Nigeria in a “professional sense” is relatively young - if one narrows the definition of “architectural education” to the sort of training that leads to a bachelor’s degree in architecture. The School of Architecture within the Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria started in the 1960s. A commitment to create a regional architecture became its focus from the outset. This desire continues to the present-day throughout the country; in 2020, the School of Architecture at the University of Lagos inaugurated a conference that focused on the role of ornament in creating contemporary Southwest Nigerian architecture. Outside the academy, Susanne Wenger, a long-time Austrian resident of Nigeria created her vision of regional architecture in the Southwestern part of the country. Hers was a product of her status as a priestess of two deities known in the region, tapping into the “non-professional” architectural traditions and religious practices that had existed for centuries.
This lecture will contrast the academic approach to regional architectural design in the country with how her knowledge of daemons and rituals informed her design. Ultimately I hope to explore how knowledge that can be culled from local rituals and religious corpuses – perhaps not valued as highly because of the secular nature of contemporary architectural practice - can enrich a quest for a regional architecture.
Ibiye’s lecture explores modes of resistance inspired by Christina Sharpe’s writing in The Wake, On Blackness and Being. We will be discussing how technology manifests in the environment by analysing scanning software, the importance of resolution, and incompleteness of the scan in contrasting spaces.
During the 1930s-70s, architect Thomas W. Boyde Jr. ’28 (B.Arch.) designed hundreds of buildings in the Rochester area that were instrumental in shaping the mid-century city and suburbs at a time when he, the first African American architect in Rochester, would not have been welcome as a resident of many suburban neighborhoods where he worked.
Boyde’s body of work has yet to be fully appreciated, as debates over the extent of his involvement in a handful of prominent projects have overshadowed his real contributions to the built environment. This presentation explores Boyde’s life and his prolific career, challenges in documenting the work of African American architects practicing in the mid-twentieth century, and ways to bring new appreciation to the work of this supremely talented architect who left a remarkable legacy in the greater Rochester area.
A Presentation By:
Christopher Brandt, Architect and Project Manager, Bero Architecture, PLLC
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Heather Merrill Professor of Africana Studies, Hamilton College
Being Italian: The Peculiar Journey of Blackness
Professor Merrill will explore the problematic presence of people of African descent in Italy, in the context of rapid social transformation, anti-immigrant and anti-black hostility, and a hesitancy to include them as full members of European societies. There are ongoing contestations over spatial rights and meanings. People of the African diaspora, have struggled for place and belonging in Italy since at least the early 1990s, and there has been a constant movement to relegate them to peripheral status, or to erase their presence as full, complex human beings. She will examine several local spaces generated by African origin Italians and local Italian collaborators that represent creative inter-cultural movement, intersecting histories and subjectivities. Her discussion will also touch on issues of representational sites of the popular media that nourish the popular imagination, and conflicts over the emergence of a rich, diverse Italy that embraces a more expansive world of interconnections and interrelationships.
An overview by Anthony McCall of his “solid light” installations, beginning at the beginning with the seminal work “Line Describing a Cone” (1973), then tracing the development of the “solid light” idea over time through to his current works-in-progress.
Slocum Hall Marble Room and Online April 27–June 11, 2021
Exhibition Interrupted explores the dual nature of the screen as an architectural device. Whether as material space divider or video monitor, screens delineate and regulate the relationship between inside and outside, historic and contemporary, sacred and profane, private and public. Consistent with the hybrid, online-in-person reality that has emerged as a result of the global pandemic, and consistent with this dual reading of the screen, Exhibition Interrupted has been designed as a physical and an online installation that can be experienced in numerous hybrid formats in the Marble Room and on social media.
Three curving wooden screens have been inserted into entry doorways of the Marble Room delineating what is inside and outside the physical exhibition and literally enacting the show’s title, Exhibition Interrupted. While these screens regulate physical movement into and out of the Marble Room gallery space, they also invite us to look through the perforations, through the screens, into the gallery space where we view projections onto the marble wall surface and a display of digitally milled and printed design objects placed throughout the gallery space. Exhibition Interrupted can also be experienced through the screen of a computer or phone where, on select social media platforms, we are able to view a series of films featuring recent projects designed by Anne Munly as well as a discussion about those projects and the challenges and opportunities of designing and exhibiting in the new hybrid online-in-person reality that has become the screens through which and on which we now live our lives.
This lecture will introduce you our studio, illustrating our latest projects, and at the same time, talk about our vocation and approach to architecture design. Engaging with the knowledge of the structure of a place through the analysis of large and small scale, the architectural object, to understand the anthropic landscape and the ways that contribute to its formation and determination.
The architecture is the result of a complex process, not unique, never equal to itself nor linear, based on the continuous critical work on the available design options. AMAA shares its research on the working method: a specific way of working that makes every single occasion a moment of wider research, aimed at a continuous experimentation with a rich use of study models. An approach that focuses on the search for a continuity of thought, more than formal.
During the lecture some AMAA will present some of their latest projects, expressions of the architectural research of the studio and occasions of comparison on the theme of the reuse of the existing architectural heritage and on the continuous tension between old and new, between tradition and contemporaneity.
Space is limited. To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Charting Renewal
An online panel presentation and public discussion about housing, redevelopment, social justice and the replacement of I-81.
The replacement of the I-81 viaduct in Syracuse provides new housing and economic opportunities for the neighborhoods adjacent to the highway. This symposium, “Charting Renewal,” will focus on urban design and issues of social and economic justice. This conversation will consider critical questions as the city confronts what comes next: What makes a good community? What is the relationship between public space and private development? How does good design contribute to the success of neighborhoods and the people who live there? What can we learn from successful housing models elsewhere?
This is the first of three planned events addressing housing issues in Syracuse, and will create a dialogue among and between residents, local leaders, and national experts on the history and impact of other urban revitalization projects.
City Scripts is a partnership between the School of Architecture and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The partners hope their collaboration will help to ensure that inclusive policy and design are at the forefront of challenges facing cities in the United States and around the world. The goal of the City Scripts symposia is to create an ongoing, interdisciplinary and applied dialogue that reaches beyond the university and influences both policy and design.
The “Charting Renewal” forum is supported by The Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Program, the Syracuse University Collaboration for Unprecedented Success and Excellence (CUSE) grant program, the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, the School of Architecture, and Syracuse University. It is organized by School of Architecture Associate Professors Elizabeth Kamell and Lawrence Davis, undergraduate chair; and Maxwell School Professors Carol Faulkner, associate dean, and Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.
In this lecture, Max Kuo will explore the aesthetics of a post-internet paradigm where digital networks have woven together all aspects of social and material life on this planet. As a result of this interconnectivity, everyday routines from democratic governance to pop-cultural fandom have been rewired in the most unexpected ways. While architects have historically speculated upon the techno-utopias of future technologies, Max will present a new spatio-temporal framework for discerning the aesthetic projects of our post-internet modernity. The superstitions and enemies of our past have collapsed into the unpredictable behaviors of the familiar. Through a series of projects designed by his studio ALLTHATISSOLID, Max will outline the qualities of our new architectural frenemies.
Towards New Beginnings: Reflections on Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one (5th Istanbul Design Biennial)
Nowadays we tend to think of empathy as a way to understand, simulate or grasp other people’s feelings. But when the term empathy came into circulation about 100 years ago it described how one’s feelings transferred into objects and the natural world. In the face of urgent climate and economic crises, a general state of social deprivation and an exhausted global industrial model, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial revisits empathy to think critically about how we relate to others, be them human or other bodies – biologic, bacterial, geologic. With the aim to open up a space of responsibility and nourish a culture of attachment towards the more-than-human, this biennial explores the idea of designs for multiple bodies, dimensions and perspectives.
Vernacular buildings have been the primary inspirations and subjects in the practice of Drawing Architecture Studio. In their architectural drawings and designs, DAS has continued to create strong visual narratives to represent their observations and reflections on the development of vernacular buildings in the present urban context in China. The lecture will be focused on a series of projects DAS completed in recent years that tell the stories and discuss the relationship among vernacular buildings, urban environment, and their inhabitants.
In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo—TEK, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and spanning 18 countries from Peru to the Philippines, Tanzania to Iran, this book explores millennia-old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
In a session moderated by Dean Speaks, Rosa Sheng from SmithGroup will discuss the area of “Equity in Architecture” and address such topics as:
How has she seen the industry adjust to global pressures and challenges over the last year?
What does she expect over the next several months with regard to career opportunities within her organization as well as peer firms?
Rosa Sheng is a Designer, and Thought Leader known for innovating the field of Architecture. If asked “What type of Architecture do you do?” the answer is “The kind that hasn’t been done before.” She has led a variety of internationally acclaimed projects from the development of the glass structures for Apple’s original high-profile retail stores to Pixar Animation Studios, and notable institutions of higher learning. A 1994 graduate of Syracuse University’s B.Arch. program and a 20+ year career alum of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Rosa joined SmithGroup in 2017 as Principal and Director of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Zeina Koreitem Founding partner, MILLIØNS Design Faculty, Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles
John May Founding partner, MILLIØNS Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
“A Loose Collection of Objects, Images and Texts”
MILLIØNS conceives of architecture as a speculative medium for exploring the central categories of contemporary life: technology, politics, energy, media, and information. Their approach insists on an expansive parallel project of technical, historical and cultural analysis, which surrounds and informs their work.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
In a session moderated by Dean Speaks, Rich Granoff from Granoff Architects and Garland deGraffenried from SHVO will discuss the area of “Real Estate Development” and address such topics as:
What changes have they seen to projects within the development space over the past few months?
What other changes are expected and what does that mean for the industry?
What will job and internship prospects look like for 2021?
Guests
Rich Granoff graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1984. He is the Founder and Managing Principal of Granoff Architects in Greenwich, CT. Rich started his career with David Rockwell in New York City, working on many large restaurant and residential design projects. Subsequently, Rich worked with interior designer Gerald Luss, managing commercial design projects and Marigold Real Estate managing the development of luxury homes. His work has been featured on programs such as Good Morning America, High Net Worth, and MTV Cribs. Rich is an engaged contributor to the Syracuse Architecture Advisory Board.
Garland deGraffenried is a 2009 graduate of the B.Arch program at Syracuse University. He began his development career in 2010 with Alloy where he led the design, planning, and project management of several luxury residential buildings in Brooklyn. Prior to joining SHVO, he was at DDG leading design-driven residential developments in NYC and Miami. In addition to holding the position of Managing Director at SHVO, he is also board president of a nonprofit organization that supports students in need within the design industry.
Something Fantastic Founders; Elena Schütz, Julian Schubert and Leonard Streich
“Covers, Covers, Covers”
This lecture will investigate covers–works originally created by different artists–in art, architecture, fashion, music, film and Something Fantastic’s projects.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
In a session moderated by Dean Speaks, Lea Ciavarra from Lubrano Ciavarra Architects and John Burse from Mackey Mitchell Architects will discuss the area of “Designing for the Academic Setting” and address such topics as:
What changes they have seen to projects within the academic space over the past few months.
What other changes are expected and what does that mean for the field.
What is the recruitment timeline for internships and full-time positions within 2021.
Guests
Lea Ciavarra graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a minor in Art & Art History from Colgate University in 1991. She received her Master of Architecture in 1995 from Syracuse University. Lea has served on the School of Architecture’s Advisory Board since 2001 and was named the first female Chairperson in 2018. Co-founder of Lubrano Ciavarra Architects, Lea has been instrumental in leading such projects as the Harlem Day Charter School in Manhattan and the construction of a 50,000 sf K-8 charter school for Grand Concourse Academy in the Bronx.
John Burse is a 1994 graduate of the B.Arch program at Syracuse University. John’s expertise as a design leader and Principal at Mackey Mitchell Architects in St. Louis, Missouri, includes such campus projects as student centers (including our own Schine Student Center), residence halls, performing arts, and campus master planning. His student center designs have been recognized by the Association of College Unions International’s Facility Design Award of Excellence. John is also a key contributor to the Syracuse Architecture Advisory Board.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
In a session moderated by Dean Speaks, Mark Boekenheide from Las Vegas Sands Corporation and Jeffrey Shumaker from BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group will discuss the area of “Complex Project Design” and address such topics as:
How their business changed as a result of the pandemic and global unrest.
What additional changes are expected as we go forward.
What these changes mean for the internship and job search.
Guests
Mark Boekenheide received his Architecture degree from Syracuse University in 1982. Throughout his career, Mark has been responsible for the development of large hotel and mixed-use projects all over the world, including Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Mark is currently the Senior Vice President, Global Real Estate Development for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation.
Jeffrey Shumaker is a 1994 graduate of the B.Arch program at Syracuse University, and a 2001 graduate of M.I.T. where he received a Master of Science in Architecture Studies. Finding great success managing high profile, cross-functional projects in both the public and private sector, Jeffrey is the Director of Urban Planning at BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group in New York City.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
In a session moderated by Dean Speaks, Tya Winn from Community Design Collaborative will discuss the area of “Community Development and Housing” and address such topics as:
How her business changed as a result of the pandemic and global unrest.
What additional changes are expected as we go forward.
What these changes mean for the internship and job search.
Tya Winn
A 2009 B.Arch graduate of Syracuse University, completed her M.Arch degree and Certificate of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania. A longtime supporter of inner city communities and the rebuilding/rebranding of their identities, she is currently the Executive Director at the Community Design Collaborative in Philadelphia.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Historically, zoning and building codes have contributed to the concentration of low-income people of color into public housing developments that are physically and financially segregated from the public life of their surrounding neighborhoods. That the legacies of racism continue to structure and inform the built environment of American cities is a gaping wound that can only be healed through urban alchemy—the reparation or reconstruction of the intentional, codified ways in which the urban landscape has been used to promote the subjugation of people based on their race.
Ifeoma Ebo and Nathan Williams will share student work from an experimental design studio centered on design justice and bring together housing experts from New York City and Syracuse to discuss housing and the Black community.
Panelists
Baye Adofo-Wilson Real Estate Developer, Lawyer & Urban Planner; CEO, BAW Development LLC
Rasmia Kirmani-Frye Independent Consultant, Public Housing Transformation
Justin Moore Adjunct Associate Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Founder of Urban Patch
Lanessa L. Owens-Chaplin, Esq. Project Counsel, New York Civil Liberties Union - Central New York Chapter
Stephanie Pasquale Director of Neighborhood Advancement, Allyn Family Foundation
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Blackness, as both a conceptual orientation as well as a way of thinking through living, is embedded within the built environment while also incontrovertibly linked to histories of systems through which oppression and segregation were designed. The effects of systemic, structural racism for centuries established the means by which anti-Black sentiment was not only enforced through architecture and the landscape but also widely adopted at all scales of development, including education, medicine, museums, infrastructure, industry and housing throughout the United States.
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, co-curated with Mabel O. Wilson, set to open in February 2021 at The Museum of Modern Art, will be the first exhibition for which Black and African Diasporic architects, artists and designers will be the sole focus of a show that will observe, question and speak to the celebration of Black Life rather than excavating such histories of disenfranchisement, violence and despair. Discussing the ten commissioned projects of The Black Reconstruction Collective, join Associate Curator Sean Anderson for a conversation about the exhibition and its ambitions with a response from Assistant Professor Sekou Cooke, one of the exhibition’s participants.
Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. He has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the U.A.E. His second book, In-Visible Colonies: Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea (2015) was nominated for an AIFC Book Prize in Non-Fiction. Earlier this year, he curated the exhibition On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention at the Dhaka Art Summit. At MoMA, he has organized the exhibitions Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016-17), Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-89 (2017-18) as well as collaborative collection displays including Surrounds (2019), Inner and Outer Space (2019-20) and Building Citizens (Present). Sean manages the Young Architects Program (YAP) and the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, with the next exhibition opening in February 2021 and its associated Field Guide organized with Mabel O. Wilson, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
In a session moderated by Dean Speaks, Margaret Griffin from Griffin Enright Architects and Sara Lopergolo from Selldorf Architects will discuss topics such as:
How their business changed as a result of the pandemic and global unrest.
What additional changes are expected as we go forward?
What do these changes mean for the internship and job search?
Guests
Margaret Griffin, BArch graduate of Syracuse University, MArch graduate from the University of Virginia. She is the Co-Founder and Principal at Griffin Enright Architects in Los Angeles.
Sara Lopergolo, BArch graduate of Syracuse University and Partner at Selldorf Architects in New York.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Nathan Williams Founder, Nathan Williams Design and Research
Conjuring Four Moments of the Sun: Collaged Black Atlantic Spirit Signified in Object, Image and Space
D. Kenneth Sargent Visiting Critic lecture
This talk collages investigations of African Transatlantic Diasporic creative theory, process and practice, both documenting and developing ar(t)chitectural language in the design of image and object, space and place.
Much of Williams’ recent work has been expressed through mixed media collage where he samples and layers conceptual elements of Black Atlantic arts; whether in rhythmically embodied movement, visual, musical, lyrical, or spiritual production as the conjuring of creative continuum.
The talk will include both moving and still images.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Architectural designer Benjamin Vanmuysen came to Syracuse Architecture in fall 2019 as the School’s fourth Harry der Boghosian Fellow. During the 2019–20 school year, Vanmuysen taught an architecture studio and two professional electives, as well as organized an exhibition on the work produced during his time at Syracuse. His research focuses on two opposite design extremes: underdesign and overdesign. While both limits have negative connotations and are active terms within our architectural jargon, they have never been further investigated, nor defined.
In an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the concerning design extremes and its processes, multiple elements of the exhibition space – floor, wall, ceiling, door and duct – have been designed with varying degrees of labor and design investment and consideration, resulting in an under-and-overdesigned Marble Room.
Dean Michael Speaks and Benjamin Vanmuysen will unveil and discuss the installation, which was designed by Vanmuysen and his students in the spring 2020. This event will be set up as a conversation in which the associations of under-and-overdesign will be addressed and specifically how the diametrical extremes have manifested themselves over the multiple elements in the Marble Room.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Sam Jacob Principal, Sam Jacob Studio for architecture and design Professor of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago
That Lightbulb Moment: Architecture As Information
Marshal McLuhan told us that a light bulb is information, but that we don’t recognise it as such because it is information in its purest state. If that’s the case for a very small part of architecture, then perhaps it’s also true for the whole. But what might that mean?
The talk will think through this idea using a series of projects as jumping off points – from early FAT works that imagined architecture as a form of communication to more recent projects exploring the material transmission of information though architecture.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Sean Ahlquist Associate Professor of Architecture, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
ARCHITECTURE GETS IT WRONG: But that’s okay if it’s ready for the authorship of an otherness
We’re at a moment in time where a history of architecture shaped by a narrow set of viewpoints is being more heavily scrutinized for its ramifications in exacerbating social inequities. Personally, I see the prejudice of architectures that compete against my daughter and her worldview constructed through autism spectrum disorder. That architecture fails, at times, its okay but only if it has the capacity to be reshaped. If it can be indeterminately reshaped by otherly actions and social motivations to form a common ground that not just welcomes but is of my daughter’s “neuro-atypicality”. Diversity implies unknowing-ness. This talk will discuss whether architecture can transcend its own authorship and dismiss its desire to narrate from a set of inevitably constrained viewpoints, and unfurl the means that are necessary for architecture to be party to crafting a social and material language of diversity.
To gain access to the event weblink, register below.
Hosted by ARC 307
Juliette Spertus Co-founder, ClosedLoops Project Manager in Sustainability Programs, New York City Housing Authority
Dirty Work: Waste, Cities and Considerations for Urban Design
In 1969, Roosevelt Island’s designers imagined a neighborhood so pleasant that it could keep the middle class from fleeing New York City’s urban crisis. Amenities included automated garbage collection via pneumatic tube. Over the last decade cities around the world have acknowledged the need to reduce their impact on the environment by reducing waste and investing in the circular economy. The Zero Waste Design Guidelines proposed tools to help architects adapt buildings and neighborhoods to enable a zero waste future. In 2020, quality of life and public health in dense urban environments is in question as never before. Drawing on these case studies and my experience working on the implementation of the NYCHA 2.0 Solid Waste Management Plan, I will consider how learning to design for waste can help keep urban communities alive.
To develop your own practice requires repetitively making and doing. Beginning and being have their own complications: perhaps you have little money (or no access to money); perhaps you struggle to define your objectives; perhaps you know what you want to do, but do not know the best way or method to execute the idea. The creation of material and immaterial objects is different from their formal design; practice implicates strategy, communication, conceptual development and lateral thinking.
The symposium will be centered on the “diversification of the scope of architecture” where Kemp-Rotan and Winn will discuss the opportunities they’ve had to engage in design work outside of the professional realm of being an architect, what it means to be design thinkers in our global society, and how their skills have been utilized in an array of design professions.
Emily Hunt Turner ’07 (BArch) is a civil rights attorney with a background in architecture, law, and public policy. She is the Founder and CEO of All Square, which was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 2019 Greatest Places in the World. All Square is a social enterprise centered on a craft grilled cheese restaurant and professional institute that invests in formerly incarcerated individuals. Prior to All Square, Emily spent five years as an attorney for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), tackling housing discrimination and segregation. She was selected as a 2015 HUD Emerging Leader, where she spearheaded federal prisoner reentry reform in Washington DC. She graduated from Syracuse University’s School of Architecture with outstanding thesis honors and went on to receive a Masters of Public Policy and her Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School, New Orleans.
We are increasingly interested in designing around architecture’s strange timespans, where the apparent speeds of design and construction (think fast! design efficiently!) produce works of perceived longevity and permanence. New ethics around reuse, maintenance, and economies of means encourage us to look at material life cycles as well as industrial and disciplinary by-products to extend their possibilities. This talk scans several of our recently completed and ongoing projects to find new logics and orientations around “reuse” through public work, through temporal considerations, and through practice at large.
Despite Charles Percier’s staunch support of the Republican cause—as a preeminent designer during the French Revolution, Percier served on the committee mandated to replace the royal insignia in 1793—his approach remained remarkably similar to that of royal architects. His teacher Antoine-François Peyre and his mentor Pierre-Adrien Pâris, both of whom were trained and employed by the monarchy, provided a model and shaped the young Percier’s outlook.
Spanning a wide range of scales from diminutive ornamental designs to large urban planning schemes, his work combined Pâris’s dexterity as an ornament designer with Peyre’s skills in architectural composition. Percier’s production, like theirs, fulfilled the multifarious demands placed on architects by a court culture that the Revolution failed to obliterate.
Zigeng Wang Principal, Pills Lecturer, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
Curiosity and Method - Pills’ Recent Preoccupations
Pills practices extensively in multiple discourses through exhibitions, publications and built projects, covering topics such as capital and spatial politics, environmental control and philosophy of technologies, globalization and infrastructure, contemporary media culture and production-consumption relationship.
Based on speculative design and the narrative approach, this lecture will center around Pills’ recent works; from where it will attempt to discuss the changes and contradictions of contemporary architectural agendas, and the possibilities of architectural interventions today.
Co-sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Angel David Nieves Professor, Department of History, San Diego State University
Transmedia Historical and Architectural Reconstructions: Forensic Traces of Apartheid-Era Human Rights Violations in Soweto’s Built Environment, 1976-1989
Over the past two decades, scholars and community leaders have experimented with the use of new digital technologies to tell the complex histories of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony using online platforms and multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Architectural reconstructions of sites where apartheid-era crimes occurred can now be used to document more complex histories of the liberation movement. As a field, digital humanities (DH) can also help analyze new forms of documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing histories for the foreign tourist market.
Deborah Hauptmann Professor and Chair, Department of Architecture, Iowa State University
The Double Progression of Body and Brain: On what (no longer) escapes the domain of architects
In the early 1980s Michel Foucault was pressed by Paul Rabinow in the interview subsequently held under the title Space, Knowledge, and Power (1984) to take a position as to whether architecture as a practice could claim to exert the power of space. Concluding that “the three great variables-territory, communication, and speed … escape the domain of architects.” Today, with the double progression of body and brain, or the analysis of bio-politics expanded to noo-politics, this conclusion will be respectfully challenged and reframed.
The lecture is a survey of Spinagu‘s recent work and thinking around old and new media in architectural production. The dual pressures of digital tooling (which allow for the endless finessing of forms) and digital imaging (which allows for the endless circulation of images) have pushed other forms of technological and visual explorations to the periphery. The studio is interested in interrogating architectural modes of production in order to understand how architectural tools and procedures produce and effect perception itself. The survey of work spans multiple scales and covers a broad range of interest and agendas, from scholarly investigations into the history of architectural representations and exhibitions, to the interrogation of digital procedures and the representational space of software. Through their work, Gu and Spina engages a long history of ideas and craft in architecture.
This year’s symposium, “Stretchy Cities” features presentations by leading experts and discussion among local office-holders and the audience concerning regional urban government and a “stretched” urban landscape. The symposium will examine the intersections of public policy, economics and urban space.
Experts, local officials and the audience will consider the most pressing governance issues involved in an increasingly complex and varied urban landscape, the government’s impact on the built environment, and whether to preserve the classic urban core and local authority or accommodate a new regional urban reality.
“Stretchy Cities” continues the public deliberation on governance and planning in Syracuse, but also offers a constructive reference point for other North American metropolitan areas as they engage in similar discussions on their future political and spatial composition.
The symposium is the fifth in the interdisciplinary City Scripts series, which examines the intersections of public policy, economics, and spatial practice.
Speakers
David Owen Critic, author of Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, and staff writer, The New Yorker.
Roger Keil Professor of Environmental Studies and research chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies at York University; author of Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from Outside In
Respondents
Khalid Bey Syracuse Common Council, councilor at-large and president pro tempore; author, The African American Dilemma
Edward M. Michalenko, Ph.D. Supervisor, Town of DeWitt, New York; President, Onondaga Environmental Institute
Moderator
Mary Anne Ocampo Principal, Sasaki Associates, Boston, Ma.; Lecturer of Urban Design in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The City Scripts symposia series and accompanying website are made possible by a unique partnership between the School of Architecture and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The partners believe their collaboration will insure that policy and design are at the forefront when confronting the challenges facing cities in the United States and around the world. The goal of the symposia is to create an ongoing, interdisciplinary and applied dialogue that reaches beyond the university and, ultimately, influences both policy and design. The website extends the life and impact of the symposia, creating a dynamic resource open to a global audience.
The “Stretchy Cities” symposium is curated by Syracuse Architecture associate professors Elizabeth Kamell and Lawrence Davis, undergraduate chair; Carol Faulkner, Maxwell School professor of history and associate dean; and Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute within the Maxwell School.
Degree candidates are required to wear a cap and gown.
Hendricks Chapel is wheelchair accessible.
Tickets are not necessary to attend this event.
Syracuse Architecture has contracted with a professional photographer from Genesee Photo Systems to take pictures of each grad as he/she receives a certificate of recognition. Images will be posted online on the Genesee Photo Systems website within the following week and available for purchase.
Family and friends who will not be able to attend the Convocation ceremony on campus may watch the event online. Live streaming will begin the moment the event starts (9am) and is available through a link on the Commencement website.
The ceremony will also be videotaped and available for future viewing on our YouTube channel.
Convocation Printed Programs Survey
To be sure we correctly recognize you in both the School of Architecture printed luncheon and Convocation ceremony programs, please complete the Convocation Printed Programs online survey by Friday, March 29.
Architect and educator James Leng came to Syracuse Architecture in fall 2018 as the School’s third Harry der Boghosian Fellow. This semester, Leng will teach a visiting critic studio and produce a culminating exhibition as part of his work and research that builds upon his extensive travel to industrial and former industrial building sites around the world.
Zhu Pei Principal, Studio Zhu-Pei Dean, Central Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, Beijing
Zhu Pei, one of China’s leading architects, is principal at Studio Zhu-Pei and Dean at the Central Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Beijing, China. He is also a Visiting Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He received his Master of Architecture from both Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley. And in 2005, he founded Studio Zhu-Pei in Beijing.
Zhu Pei has won the Architectural Review Awards, the AIA Honor Award, the Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record, the China Award from Architectural Record, the WA Award, and the Special Merit Award from UIA and UNESCO.
In 2006 and 2007, Zhu Pei was commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation to design the Guggenheim Art Pavilion in Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Museum in Beijing.
His works have been exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennial, the Sao Paulo Art Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Dresden State Art Museum, AEDES, Kassel and MAXXI Museum.
He was selected as an architecture jury member for the Mies van der Rohe Award and Hong Kong Design Week in 2011.
Zhu Pei has given numerous lectures at Harvard University, Columbia University, Yale University, UC Berkeley, Rice University, Rhode Island School of Design, University of South California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Auckland, Tsinghua University, Tongji University, Tianjing University, etc.
Emily Abruzzo is a founding principal of Abruzzo Bodziak Architects. She earned a B.A. from Columbia College, Columbia University, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, where she also received a Certificate in Media and Modernity and was named a Fellow at The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. In addition to her practice, Abruzzo has taught design, materials, and theory courses at numerous institutions and is currently a Critic at the Yale School of Architecture.
Gerald Bodziak is a founding principal of Abruzzo Bodziak Architects. He earned a B.S. from the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, a MArch from Princeton University. In addition to his practice, Bodziak has been a lecturer and guest critic at numerous institutions, teaching design, drawing, and construction technology courses at, among others, Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and The Rhode Island School of Design.
ABA has received numerous recognitions including the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, AIA New Practices New York, Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard, and Curbed’s Groundbreakers Award. A proponent of civic engagement, the office is included in New York City Department of Design and Construction’s Design Excellence Program.
The office’s projects have been featured in international publications such as Architectural Record, Wired, Fast Company, Wallpaper, FRAME, Domus, Baumeister, and Cultured, and the firm’s work has been exhibited by institutions such as Exit Art, Japan Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Boston Society of Architects, and as part of The New Museum Festival of Ideas, with the Audi Urban Future Initiative.
Lawrence Scarpa Managing Principal, Brooks + Scarpa Adjunct Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California
Why do we remember buildings, locations and experiences? Even a place visited in our childhood can conjure emotions that make an impact on us through the memories they create. Lawrence Scarpa will explain the creative process that aspires to make a lasting impression out of even a brief encounter. Scarpa’s work is deeply rooted in conditions of the everyday, and works with our perception and preconceptions to allow us to see things in new ways. He does this, not by escaping the restrictions of practice, but by looking, questioning and reworking the very process of design and building, rethinking the way things normally get done––with material, form, construction, even financing––and to subsequently redefine it to cull out it’s latent potentials – making the “ordinary extraordinary.” The seminar will look at building materials innovation and applications, and how it relates to the architectural design process and sustainable design strategies.
Lawrence Scarpa has garnered international acclaim for the creative use of conventional materials in unique and unexpected ways. His firm, Brooks + Scarpa is the recipient of multiple international awards including the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Award in Architecture and the AIA National Firm Award. He is also the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Interior Design Magazine and the AIA California Council. Mr. Scarpa has taught at the university level for more than two decades and is currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California.
Katherine Hogan Principal, Tonic Design Adjunct Professor of Practice, Department of Architecture, NC State University College of Design
Vincent Petrarca Principal, Tonic Design Professor of Practice, Department of Architecture, NC State University College of Design
Katherine Hogan ’05, AIA, LEED AP and Vincent Petrarca, Associate AIA are founders and principals of Tonic Design, a design studio, and Tonic Construction, a North Carolina-based construction company. The two companies are separate but interacting entities. Together as a design-build firm, Tonic creates sensitive, modern, construction-led design solutions for all building types, including award-winning modern homes/new home construction, commercial, and cultural design and construction.
With the flexibility to take on the role of designer or general contractor (a builder for other designers), or both (designer/builder), Tonic’s knowledge of construction and design is a valuable editing device for the work they produce, and it increases the scope of their influence on the final product. As a methodology, Tonic embraces the influence of construction on design (construction-led design) and design on construction as the fundamental premise that defines their work.
David Freeland has been principal at FreelandBuck in Los Angeles since 2010. He is also a faculty member at Southern California Institute of Architecture and has taught design studios at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Southern California. From 2006-2012 Freeland taught at Woodbury University where he was instrumental in developing the FabLab and teaching fabrication and computation. With over 15 years of experience practicing architecture, he has worked on award winning residential, commercial, urban, and institutional projects with FreelandBuck, as well as Michael Maltzan Architecture, Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design, RES4, and AGPS. Freeland holds a BArch from the University of Virginia and an MArch from the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. His research and practice focuses on the spatial potential of patterned systems.
Brennan Buck has been principal at FreelandBuck in New York City since 2010. He is also a critic at the Yale School of Architecture. Prior to teaching at Yale, Buck worked for Neil M. Denari Architects, Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles, and Walker Macy in Portland, Oregon. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, the University of Kentucky, and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. From 2004-2008, he was assistant professor in Studio Greg Lynn at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Buck received a B.S. from Cornell University and an MArch from the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. His writing on technology and representation within the discipline of architecture has been published in numerous academic and professional journals.
Ellie Abrons is a licensed architect, principal of T+E+A+M, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she was the A. Alfred Taubman Fellow in 2009 – 2010. Ellie received her Master of Architecture from the University of California Los Angeles, where she graduated with distinction and received the AIA Certificate of Merit, and her BA in art history and gender studies from New York University. Ellie recently held Visiting Assistant Professor appointments at UCLA and Princeton University and has received residency fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and The MacDowell Colony. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Storefront for Art and Architecture, a+d Museum, Yale University, Harvard University, and the Architectural Association. T+E+A+M was part of the 2016 U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale, winners of the 2017 Adrian Smith Prize for the Ragdale Ring and the AN Best of Design Award for Temporary Installation for their project Living Picture, and were participants in the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. From 2010 to 2015, Ellie led the design practice EADO.
Michael Meredith is principal and co-founder of MOS, an internationally recognized architecture practice based in New York. Meredith received a Master of Architecture with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2000) and a Bachelor in Architecture from Syracuse University (1994). His writing has appeared in Artforum, LOG, Perspecta, Praxis, Domus, and Harvard Design Magazine. Meredith previously taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the University of Michigan, where he was awarded the Muschenheim Fellowship, and the University of Toronto.
Kyle Miller is an assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture and co-founder of Possible Mediums. His design research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and has been included in the AIA Emerging Professionals Exhibition and shown at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, Harvard GSD, and Yale School of Architecture. Miller’s writing has been published in Monu, Pidgin, Project, Offramp, PLAT, Room One Thousand, Fresh Punches, and the Journal for Architectural Education. He previously taught at the University of Kentucky College of Design and the University of California - Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and worked professionally in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and most recently for Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos with UNStudio in Amsterdam. Miller is a graduate of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the University of California – Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design, where he earned his professional degree and was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate.
Jennifer Bonner is Director of MALL, assistant professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and director of the Master in Architecture II Program. Born in Alabama, Jennifer founded MALL—a creative practice for art and architecture—in 2009. MALL stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability, an acronym with built-in flexibility. By engaging with “ordinary architecture,” such as gable roofs and everyday materials, Bonner playfully reimagines architecture in her field. Her work has received an AR Award for Emerging Architecture (Architectural Review), an Emerging Voices Award (AIA/Young Architects Forum) and has been published in Architect Magazine, a+t, DAMn, PLAT, Offramp, and MAS Context. She is the founder of A Guide to the Dirty South, editor of Platform: Still Life, and guest editor of ART PAPERS: Special Architecture + Design Issue.
Brandon Clifford is the director and co-founder of Matter Design. He is also an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work at Matter Design is focused on advancing architectural research through spectacle and mysticism. He is best known for captivating new ideas by critically evaluating ancient ways of thinking and experimenting with their value today. This work ranges from an award-winning play structure for kids to megalithic sculptures that come to life to perform tasks. Brandon is dedicated to re-imagining the role of the architect. His speculative work continues to provoke new directions for design in the digital era.
Kyle Miller is an assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture and co-founder of Possible Mediums. His design research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and has been included in the AIA Emerging Professionals Exhibition and shown at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, Harvard GSD, and Yale School of Architecture. Miller’s writing has been published in Monu, Pidgin, Project, Offramp, PLAT, Room One Thousand, Fresh Punches, and the Journal for Architectural Education. He previously taught at the University of Kentucky College of Design and the University of California - Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and worked professionally in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and most recently for Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos with UNStudio in Amsterdam. Miller is a graduate of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the University of California – Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design, where he earned his professional degree and was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate.
Edges, gaps, voids, and interstices; polluted and forgotten manufacturing zones; abandoned districts lining waterfronts and rail lines: decaying former industrial sites pose enormous challenges. But crumbling industrial artifacts offer unprecedented opportunity for innovative design and re-invention of cities in the 21st century.
A forgotten product of the post-industrial environment and rapid technological change, abandoned industrial structures are increasingly explored as history worth preserving and sites worth reinventing. Scattered across our city’s edges, ruined manufacturing sites now offer our greatest opportunities for innovative public spaces, equitable housing, resiliency against climate change, and radical contemporary design.
This lecture will investigate innovative projects by Manhattan based STUDIO V Architecture that are reinventing these sites and transforming our cities. It will explore Maker Park, a contemporary park in abandoned oil tanks on the Brooklyn Waterfront; Empire Stores, a Civil War-era coffee warehouse transformed into a museum, startups, and rooftop public park; and for the first time show their new designs for Silo City, the transformation of the iconic and ruined Grain Elevators in Buffalo into a cultural and arts center. These projects portray how the ruins of our industrial past can be preserved to benefit communities and transform our cities.
Jay Valgora’s Manhattan based practice, STUDIO V Architecture, is dedicated to the reinvention of the contemporary city. The Studio addresses multiple themes in its designs including creating a new architecture of transformative edges and sustainable communities, radical adaptive reuse, and experiments in innovative structures and fabrication.
STUDIO V has designed an extraordinary range of work advancing these issues. The Studio’s work encompasses reimagining New York City’s waterfront in all five boroughs including Astoria, Inwood, Flushing, DUMBO, Gravesend, Sunset Park, and Staten Island. Innovative designs for the Empire Stores and Bronx Post Office combine historic and contemporary architecture. The exploration of radical structures and fabrication includes Yonkers Raceway, MOBI pavilion, and Morimoto Asia.
Mr. Valgora has thirty years of experience in multiple disciplines including architecture, urban design, and industrial design. Mr. Valgora earned a Master of Architecture from Harvard, a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and was a Fulbright Fellow to the United Kingdom where he began his studies of reinventing former industrial waterfronts.
Mr. Valgora’s work has received numerous awards including national, state, and local AIA awards, International Design Award, Architizer A+ Awards, Architectural Record Award, among many others. His work is featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Record, Dwell, Wall St. Journal, New York Magazine, Crain’s New York, and Architect’s Newspaper. He is currently completing a book on the contemporary transformation of cities titled Last Utopia.
Jiat-Hwee Chang (PhD, UC Berkeley) is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, where he is also the leader of the history, theory and criticism cluster. Jiat-Hwee is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which is awarded an International Planning History Society (IPHS) Book Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He is also co-editor (with William S. W. Lim) of Non West Modernist Past (2011) and (with Imran Tajudeen) of Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power (2018). Currently Jiat-Hwee is a Canadian Centre for Architecture/Mellon Foundation Researcher 2017-19, researching the transnational history of air-conditioning, built environment and thermal governance in Asia.
Marc B. Spector, AIA, leads an architectural practice that excels in two managerial aspects critical to our profession—design as the power to enable creativity and design as a business. Marc accomplishes his remarkably skillful balancing of architecture with entrepreneurship in such a natural, talented and gifted way as to make astute business practice an essential part of design. Through consistent daily practice, Marc inspires us to be entrepreneurs of ideas and partners in innovation.
As a Principal/Owner of the Spector Group, a firm founded by his late father, Michael Harris Spector, FAIA, a 1962 graduate of the Syracuse University School of Architecture, Marc has grown his firm into an international practice where his ever‐sharpening expertise and non‐traditional approach to envisioning the experience of architecture has resulted in AIA award‐winning work. More importantly, Marc has consistently sharpened a process that convinces clients of the value of design excellence and collaboration. Joining the firm in 1989, Marc earned his Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture.
WeShouldDoItAll (WSDIA) is a contemporary design studio that translates clients’ needs into dynamic, visual systems that can be presented at multiple scales. These solutions take the form of branding, spatial, environmental, interactive, or print projects. WSDIA has been nationally and internationally recognized through various awards and publications, including the prestigious Art Directors Club Young Guns 5 award. WSDIA has won awards from the Event Design Awards, Type Directors, Creative Review Magazine, and AIGA National.
Jonathan Jackson is principal of WSDIA and brings over 14 years of architectural, spatial, graphic, and interactive design experience for global brands to the team. He graduated from Kent State University with a degree in Architecture. Prior to founding WSDIA in 2004, he worked for architects, Studio Archea in Italy, Archi-Tectonics, and Lindy Roy in New York. He served 2 years on the board of directors of AIGA/NY and he has served as a visiting critic at Columbia University GSAPP, Pratt University, Rhode Island School of Design, and has lectured at the Ecole Superieure en Visual Merchandising Design in Switzerland, UsByNight Design Festival in Antwerp, Belgium, Harvard GSD, The Art Directors Club, University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, and AIGA/NY.
Sara Lopergolo is a Partner at Selldorf Architects, a 70-person architectural design practice founded by Annabelle Selldorf in New York City in 1988. The firm creates public and private spaces that manifest a clear and modern sensibility to enduring impact. Ms. Lopergolo is a licensed architect with nearly three decades of experience and has been with the firm for almost 25 years. She has worked on many of the firm’s major projects including large-scale new construction and cultural facilities. Ms. Lopergolo is currently Partner-in-Charge for the 75,000 sf expansion and renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the expansion and enhancement of the Frick Collection. She has significant experience with ground-up construction having served as Partner-in-Charge on large-scale projects such as the Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn and 200 Eleventh Avenue, a 19-story residential condominium. Ms. Lopergolo has completed galleries for David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth and Barbara Gladstone among others. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University, and has studied and worked in England, Italy, and Japan.
Rachely Rotem, LEED AP BD+C leads MODU Architecture (Brooklyn, NY) with years of experience designing a wide range of project types and scales. She has won the Founders Rome Prize (2016) and numerous other competitions, including those organized by Design Museum Holon (2014), Beijing Architecture Biennial (2013) and the Athens Olympic Games (2004). Design awards include the AIA New Practices New York award (2016) and the Core77 award (2011). Before starting her first solo practice in 2009, she worked for established architecture practices in both Tel Aviv and New York.
Rachely holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Technion (Cum Laude) in Haifa and a Master in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, where she was awarded both the Lowenfish Prize and the William Kinne Fellows Prize. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute and has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. Rachely Rotem is a LEED Accredited Professional in Building Design and Construction.
W.H. Vivian Lee is principal and founder of LAMAS. Her work focuses on the role of craft in architecture as related to labor, professional practice, vernacular traditions, and ornament. She has extensive experience in the design and construction of public space including the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan. In addition to her role at LAMAS, Vivian is also Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto and previously at University of Michigan. Prior to founding LAMAS, Vivian practiced as a project manager at SHoP Architects and LTL Architects in New York City. Lee received her masters of architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She holds a B.A. in studio arts from Wesleyan University.
James Macgillivray is a principal and founder of LAMAS. He has published widely on film, architecture and projection. He is from Toronto and received his Masters in Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and his B.A. in architecture from Princeton University. Prior to founding LAMAS he worked as a designer at Steven Holl Architects and as a project manager at Peter Gluck and Partners Architects. Alongside his work at LAMAS, James is also Lecturer at the University of Toronto.
Friday, May 11, 2018 12:00 pm-2:00 pm School of Architecture Class of 2018 Luncheon
Slocum Hall first-floor atrium Class of 2018, faculty, and staff RSVP by May 4: dwitterg@syr.edu No charge
Saturday, May 12, 2018 9:00 am School of Architecture Graduation Honors Convocation 2018
Hendricks Chapel, Syracuse University Rosa Sheng FAIA, B.Arch. ’94, Convocation speaker Reide “Remi” McClain & Samuel Dye, Class marshals
10:30 am Reception + exhibitions
Slocum Hall
Shelf Life - 2018 Thesis Exhibition
Beta-Real: The Material of Loss - Boghosian Fellow Exhibition 2018
Convocation details
Degree candidates are required to wear a cap and gown.
Hendricks Chapel is wheelchair accessible.
Tickets are not necessary to attend this event.
Syracuse Architecture has contracted with a professional photographer from Genesee Photo Systems to take pictures of each grad as he/she receives a certificate of recognition. Images will be posted online on the Genesee Photo Systems website within the following week and available for purchase.
The ceremony will be streamed LIVE from Hendricks Chapel, beginning at 9am, for the benefit of family and friends unable to attend the ceremony.
The ceremony will also be videotaped and available for future viewing on our YouTube channel.
A culminating exhibition of Linda Zhang’s fellowship research, “Beta-Real: The Materiality of Loss” will open with a special gallery talk in the Slocum Hall Marble Room at 6 p.m. by K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and interim chair for the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. An exhibition opening reception will follow Hays’ talk.
Beta-Real: The Materiality of Loss
The work in this exhibition was made using slip casting—a technique commonly employed in the mass production of ceramics—to develop an iterative “thinking by making” protocol that offers, in its processes, and in the material results produced, an alternative to conventional architectural preservation and reconstruction. Specifically, the work exhibited here produces architectural memories, identities and histories by focusing on three seemingly banal site-types: roadways, commemorative monuments, and the sites of performative rituals.
More about Linda Zhang’s fellowship year at Syracuse Architecture
Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000 and led by architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. Balancing education, research and practice, the office explores innovative approaches to architectural and urban spaces, and the technologies that build them.
Among the studio’s most relevant completed works are Hemeroscopium House and Reader’s House in Madrid (Spain), Music Studies Center and SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), The Truffle in Costa da Morte (Spain), Telcel Theater in Mexico City and, more recently, Cyclopean House in Brookline (USA) and Structures of Landscape for Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana (USA).
Their work is extensively published in both printed and digital media, exhibited world-wide -Orleans Frac Centre Biennial 2017, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017, Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 and 2010, GA International Exhibitions 2016-2010 in Tokyo, MOMA NY 2015, MAK Vienna 2015, M.I.T. 2015, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture 2013 in Shenzhen, etc.- and awarded with international prizes –2017 Architizer A+Award, 2016 NCSEA Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards, Iakov Chernikhov Prize 2012, Rice Design Alliance Prize 2009 to emerging architects, Architectural Record Design Vanguard Prize 2005, among others.
Beside their professional career, both principals keep a very active research and academic agenda: they have been invited professors and lecturers at numerous universities and architecture forums, were curators of Spainlab -Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012- and founded that same year the POPlab (Prototypes of Prefabrication Research Laboratory) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), that they continue to direct.
The Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Syracuse University Libraries will co-host the dedication of the newly renovated and renamed King + King Architecture Library. The event will take place on the third floor of Slocum Hall on Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 3 p.m. Speakers include Syracuse University Chancellor and President Kent Syverud, School of Architecture Dean Michael A. Speaks, Dean of Libraries and University Librarian David Seaman, and special guest Russell A. King, B.Arch ’52.
A diverse group of seven thinkers and makers will explore the philosophical turn away from singular, knowable, stable, and metaphysical absolutes, towards a multitude of experiential, ambivalent, shared realities. Such ambivalent and unstable states have come increasingly to characterize our shared reality—from sites of contested memory and amnesia, to economic and identity politics in a globalized age of displacement, to scientific and technological revolutions.
The Beta-Real names a search for alternative frameworks of understanding that might allow us to confront the contradictions of our contemporary reality. How we deal with these contradictions has social, cultural, and political implications—not only for architecture, humanities, science, society, and culture at large, but also for everyday life.
Participants will discuss how architecture might address and negotiate these states of contradiction. Participants will present their own designs and research and discuss in round table format how they each confront and navigate the Beta-Real.
Ani Liu, Artist and speculative technologist, New York, NY
Biko Mandela Gray, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Syracuse University
Natalie Koerner, Ph.D. candidate, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark
Bryan E. Norwood, Ph.D. candidate in the history and theory of architecture, Harvard University; Visiting Assistant Professor, Mississippi State University School of Architecture
Irene Chin, Curatorial Coordinator, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada
William Stewart, Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University Department of German
The symposium is the second in a series, made possible by a unique partnership between two internationally prominent colleges at Syracuse University, the School of Architecture and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.The partners believe their collaboration will insure that policy and design are at the forefront when confronting the challenges facing cities in the United States and around the world.
The event will be held in Slocum Auditorium, in Slocum Hall, home of the School of Architecture.
The goal of the symposium is to create an ongoing, interdisciplinary and applied dialogue that reaches beyond the university and, ultimately, influences both policy and design.
Future Infrastructures: The Over and Under of I-81 will focus on the choices for renovating or re-routing the I-81 elevated highway in Syracuse, New York from both urban design and public policy perspectives. This challenge facing the city engages a range of interdisciplinary issues and is emblematic of similar infrastructural questions confronting cities across world.
Curated by: Syracuse Architecture associate professors Elizabeth Kamell and Lawrence Davis, undergraduate chair; Carol Faulkner, Maxwell School professor of history and associate dean; Grant Reeher, Director, Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Maxwell School
Panelists
Joseph Kane, Economist Metropolitan Policy Program Brookings Institution
Alex Krieger, Urban designer Professor of Practice, Harvard University
Jonnell Robinson, Social geographer Assistant Professor, Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University
Alejandro Zaera-Polo graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid with Honors in 1988 and obtained an M.Arch 2 degree from Harvard GSD with Distinction in 1991. He worked at OMA in Rotterdam prior to establishing first FOA in 1993, an international award winning practice that built projects such as the Yokohama International Cruise Terminal in Japan and participated in projects such as the Ground Zero competition in New York, and the London Olympics masterplan. He is a principal at AZPML.
In parallel to his professional activities, Alejandro Zaera-Polo has developed a substantial role within academia. He was the dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University and was the dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. He was a visiting professor at Princeton University and the inaugural Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture. Alejandro is currently Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture in Princeton University.
He has published extensively in El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Volume, Log and many other international magazines. The work of Alejandro Zaera-Polo has been widely published and exhibited. It represented Britain at the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002; he has received the Enric Miralles Prize for Architecture, seven RIBA Awards, the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale Award, and the Charles Jencks Award for Architecture.
Jayna Zweiman is a multidisciplinary artist and designer. Her independent practice combines architecture, art, craft and new media to focus on experiences that overlap physical, virtual and conceptual spaces.
Perhaps best known as the co-creator/co-founder of The Pussyhat Project, an international network and movement of women’s rights supporters, Zweiman has become a leading advocate of using design innovation to enact social change. The Pussyhat Project became a worldwide phenomenon at the 2017 Women’s Marches with one of the largest crowd-sourced art advocacy projects ever. She is also the creator and founder of Welcome Blanket, a reconceptualization of the 2000-mile length of the proposed border wall as 2000-mile length of yarn to make individual welcome blankets for new immigrants coming to the United States.
Zweiman’s work has been exhibited and published internationally. In 2017, her work has been nominated for the Beazley Design of the Year by the Design Museum in London, acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum, and awarded the first ever Brand of the Year by the School of Visual Arts. Zweiman was awarded in 2017 as one of “The 25 People Who Defined Visual Culture” by Artsy.
Zweiman received her AB from Brown University in visual arts and economics and her Masters in Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
In her talk, Zweiman questions how can we use design and architecture to craft the world we wish to see? We will investigate the overlap between individual stories and collective conversations, between craft and politics, and between physical and virtual communities in both Pussyhat Project and Welcome Blanket. Join Zweiman to discuss how these design interventions create social change by reimagining our spaces and systems.
Co-sponsors for this event
The Humanities Center
School of Art
Maxwell School
School of Architecture
Event to take place in Slocum Hall first-floor atrium
Kenneth Frampton was born in 1930 and trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. He has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic, and is now Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York. He has taught at a number of leading institutions in the field, including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne and the Accademia di Architettura in Medrisio. Frampton is the author of numerous essays on modern and contemporary architecture, and has served on many international juries for architectural awards and building commissions. In addition to Modern Architecture: A Critical History, his publications include Studies in Tectonic Culture, Labour, Work and Architecture, and A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form.
Karim Moussawer, assoc. AIA is El Seif Global Travel Studio Professor at Syracuse Architecture this semester.
Moussawer graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture- SCI-Arc with a post-graduate master’s degree in architecture; he was the recipient of the Graduate Director’s Award.
He worked in Los Angeles for several years before relocating to Beirut, Lebanon where he founded PARALX, an architecture and design practice that’s currently engaged in projects of different types and scales in the Middle East region.
The practice’s portfolio shows an evident interest in the built form, challenging typologies while exploring the effects of social, cultural, political and environmental issues on architecture.
PARALX [parallel practice]—which signifies collaborative work—has won several international design awards within just few years of its establishment, including merit and citation awards from the AIA. Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Karim Moussawer earned his architectural degree from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut.
Karim Moussawer’s lecture will highlight the work of PARALX, and how social, cultural and political issues can affect the design process.
Since 2014, when he retired as Smith Professor of Humanities in the departments of Classics and Art History at Case Western Reserve University, Charles Burroughs has been Adjunct Professor of Art History at Geneseo. Previously he taught at SUNY Binghamton, UC Berkeley Architecture School, Northwestern, and the Rome Program of Trinity College. He has degrees from Oxford (BA) and London (PhD), and was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His scholarly interests encompass Italian architecture and urbanism of the 14th to 17th centuries, Renaissance painting and art writing (he has published on Alberti, Michelangelo, and Botticelli, on whom he is writing a book), and plantation landscapes in the Americas, including the Hudson Valley. Since settling in Rochester he has been working on a revisionist account of Frederick Law Olmsted’s plans for the park system, and on the impact of Jane Jacobs’ ideas about city life on the design, by an associate of hers, of an academic facility in upstate New York, a building that marked an early departure from modernist orthodoxy.
Lecture overview
Anyone who has strolled through a historic Italian city recalls streets framed by impressive house facades, forming a surprisingly uniform backdrop to the choreography of the streets while registering, more or less subtly, the status of individual occupants. The architectural facade has a history. As part of a building, the facade arises in late medieval Italy and eventually meets a fatal challenge in the reaction against 20th century modernism (its more recent resurrection is not my topic). The facade is also a cultural phenomenon, coinciding with the era of portraiture, the Renaissance emphasis on the human face, not so much as a window into the soul as a crucial site of dissimulation and insincerity. For Renaissance architects the facade was a surface requiring a harmonious and unified design, incorporating an element, the entrance, that potentially disturbs the integrity of the whole. Especially baroque facades concentrate the typical rhetorical dimension at the portal, as key interface of interior and exterior, the source of (claimed) power and the arena of its projection. This talk will review examples in Italy and France of the tension in many facades of between the expression of passage and the implementation of ideal principles of design, and will discuss inventive responses to the challenge of the facade.
Professor Randall Korman has been part of the Syracuse Architecture faculty since 1977. His research interests have focused principally on the phenomenon of the architectural façade, a topic that he has written about and lectured on widely.
Randall Korman is a native of New York City where he received his undergraduate professional degree in architecture from the Cooper Union. From 1972 to 1974 he worked as a graduate intern at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York City. He received a graduate degree in advanced architectural design from Harvard University. His professional experiences include employment in the architectural offices of Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves.
Beyond his role at Syracuse University, Korman has also served as a visiting faculty member at the University of Texas and Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan. In the spring of 2009 he was invited to be the Batza Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colgate University. At Syracuse he has taught at all levels of the undergraduate and graduate programs and has been extensively involved in international educational programming.
Between 1980 and 1982 he established and developed the Syracuse Florence Architecture Program. Since then he has served as the chair of both the undergraduate and graduate architecture programs at Syracuse, and in 1989 returned to Florence as the resident director of the Syracuse University Florence Center. In 2007 he established the Syracuse University London Architecture Program. Between 2005 and 2012 he served as the associate dean and between 2012 and 2013 he served as the interim dean.
Façades
A special lecture series organized by retiring Syracuse Architecture professor, and former associate dean, Randall Korman. The series is complemented by a special visiting critic studio on façades, taught by Professor Korman. (Sponsored by Granoff Architects, Greenwich, CT)
Daniel Vasini graduated with a master in architecture from Southern Californian Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and was granted a Fulbright Scholar in 2004 by the Institute of International education IIE. He practices as creative director for West 8, working in close collaboration with founding partner Adriaan Geuze.
He is focused on conceiving designs and creating landscapes that are unique to its location and establish identity as second nature. He has led internationally recognized projects with a multidisciplinary approach; shifting scales from strategic master plans to transformative park designs followed by iconic public spaces, which accommodate 21st Century infrastructure needs and the challenges of urbanization.
Prior to joining West8, Daniel worked with Phil Enquist at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, urban design and planning studio in Chicago and London. In 2012, Daniel received a Medal Prize for the Malecon of Puerto Vallarta in the category of Best Urban Design Project by the Federation of Mexican Architects (FCARM).
Luming Wang and Zhenfei Wang each earned a bachelor degree of architecture from Tianjin University, and an advanced master of degree of architecture from Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Their earlier work was at UNStudio, Amsterdam. They founded design and research studio HHDFUN in 2008 in Beijing.
HHDFUN is interested in the integration of knowledge from various fields outside of architecture and applying it to architecture design, working collaboratively with artists, fashion designers, mathematicians, engineers, and others. They enjoy producing “unexpected” designs that go beyond the conventional. The firm explores new design possibilities by means of cross-over cooperation.
Luming and Zhenfei have won numeric awards including: winner, 2015 and 2017 Iconic Award (Germany); special mention, 2016 German Design Award; Grand Architectural Creation Award (China); and third prize, New Chinese Architecture (Architecture Studio office & AREA magazine). Their work was exhibited at the 2010 Venice Biennale.
Liam Young is an Australian born architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. Building his design fictions from the realities of present, Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time Magazine, and Dazed and Confused and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University and now runs an M.A. in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc. Young manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.
Margaret Griffin FAIA is an alum of Syracuse Architecture, receiving her B.Arch in 1986. She was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1989, and received an M.Arch from the University of Virginia in 1991.
Griffin is co-founder and principal of the Los Angeles based, Griffin Enright Architects, a collaborative practice recognized for its noteworthy and forward thinking designs since 2000. Their work combines innovation and experimentation to explore cultural complexities relative to the built environment. Griffin Enright Architect’s work has been extensively published, exhibited locally, nationally and internationally, and has received over fifty awards for design excellence including local, state and national AIA awards and the American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum. In addition to guiding a progressive practice, Margaret has taught graduate and undergraduate architectural design for more than twenty-three years at universities including USC, UCLA, Syracuse University, UT Austin, and SCI-Arc, where she is currently on the design faculty. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia. Margaret was also granted a fellowship from the American Academy of Rome to investigate the relationship between urban from and landforms, a subject she continues to examine in her practice through the integration of landscape and urban design into her practice. Ms. Griffin also expands her practice through community engagement, both as a member of Santa Monica’s Architectural Review Board and previously as a director on the Los Angeles AIA Board of Directors.
This unique lecture will focus on the theme of urbanism and theatre. Randy Weiner will talk about immersive theater, his history, and what he is working on now. It is held in conjunction with visiting critic Bing Bu’s “Double Scripted Urban Play” fall 2017 studio.
About Randy Weiner
Weiner is a producer, venue owner, and playwright. He has been hailed as “the leading impresario of nontraditional theater in New York” by the New York Times, and “a mad genius of nightlife” by The Wall Street Journal. He is the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards (“Sleep No More” and “Queen of the Night”).
With partners Simon Hammerstein and Richard Kimmel, Weiner created the theater nightclub, The Box (first in New York, then in London), for which he continues to serve as a Managing Partner.
With Hammerstein, Weiner created The Box’s sister nightclub, The Act, in Dubai. Also with Hammerstein, their dinner spectacular, “Queen of the Night,” opened in 2014 at The Diamond Horseshoe in The Paramount Hotel in Times Square, New York City. “Queen of the Night” has been licensed for further productions in Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Las Vegas.
With partners Jonathan Hochwald and Arthur Karpati, Weiner produced Punchdrunk’ “Sleep No More” in New York City at the formerly abandoned McKittrick Hotel. Weiner and his partners have gone on to restore The McKittrick Hotel to include a jazz club, Manderley Bar; a restaurant, The Heath; and a roof garden, Gallow Green.
With his wife, Tony Award Winning Director Diane Paulus, Weiner created “The Donkey Show,” a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that has been produced in New York, London, Madrid, Geneva, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Seoul, and throughout the United States.
Weiner is the creator of OBERON, the theater nightclub that is the second stage at A.R.T. at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Weiner has worked as a designer for Cirque du Soleil on multiple occasions, and most recently served as the dramaturg for their touring tent show “Amaluna.” Weiner has also collaborated with MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover and United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to create the opera “Death and the Powers,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Weiner has been a member of the Advisory Committee on the Arts at Harvard University and has lectured on theater at Harvard, Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, and Yale University. Weiner’s work as an entrepreneur in the arts is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.
Architect Daan Roggeveen is partner at MORE Architecture, a multidisciplinary firm that he founded with Robert Chen. Based in Shanghai and Amsterdam, MORE strives to create contemporary notions of collectivity in the projects they work on globally.
MORE recently finished mixed-use building Jiaxing Island (with AIM), contemporary art gallery BANK in Shanghai and the headquarters for MINTH Group.
Current projects include a canal house in Amsterdam, a boutique hotel in the mountains of Anji (both under construction) and an urban plan in Accra, Ghana (with OKRA, MLA+, FABRIC and MIXST). MORE was recently included in the AD100, the list of 100 most influential design firms in China.
With journalist Michiel Hulshof, Roggeveen initiated the Go West Project, a think-tank focusing on emerging megacities. In 2011, they published the acclaimed book How the City Moved to Mr Sun – China’s New Megacities.
Currently, Roggeveen and Hulshof are researching Chinese influence on African urbanization. Their study has been shown at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Louisiana Museum for Modern Art, Copenhagen; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Shenzhen Biennale.
Roggeveen studied architecture at Delft University of Technology. He was curator at the University of Hong Kong / Shanghai Study Centre and taught studio at the Chinese Academy of Art, Hangzhou. A frequent guest lecturer at international universities, his expertise are regularly sought for debates and analyses around urban development in China.
Hsinming Fung received her M. Arch from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her B.A. from California State University, Dominguez Hills. Over the years, Fung has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Rome Prize Fellowship in Design (1991), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award (1994), and the Chrysler Design Award (1996). Fung also received the AIA/LA Gold Medal (2006), and the AIA/CA Firm Award (2008).
Throughout her career, Fung has maintained a commitment to architectural education as demonstrated by appointments and teaching positions. Currently, Fung is the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_Arc) Director of International Programs & Institutional Relationships. Past positions at SCI_Arc include Director of Academic Affairs (2010-1015) and Director of Graduate Programs (2002-2010). Fung’s teaching positions include Eero Saarinen Visiting Professorship of Architectural Design at Yale University (1995 and 2000); Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ohio State University (1996); and Visiting Critic at University of Pennsylvania (1990).
Fung has also served as the President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and was appointed by President Clinton as Council Member of the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2016, Fung was elevated to Fellow by the American Institute of Architecture and served as president of the AIA Los Angeles chapter (2011-2012).
Fung presently serves on the Board of Directors for Places Journal.
The question strikes at the heart of challenging and polarizing issues Angelenos struggle with as their city faces the effects of rapid growth and rapid urban transformation. Perhaps no issue defines the challenges faced by Los Angles, and indeed cities across North America, more than housing: Should there be more or less public housing? More or less market rate development? What should be the mix of public and private housing? And should new housing, whether public or market rate, be more or less dense?
The Syracuse Architecture undergraduate program presents the third installment of “Density: Through Thick and Thin,” a 3-part series of discussions on re-surging issues about urban density in the 21st century.
As we face pressures of global population explosion, measurable and alarming ecological stress and related urbanization, the symposia offer an arena to discuss the current and near future status of the fundamental quality of built environments. Join us as we focus on discourse occurring in LA and a larger discussion about the various modes of urban density and their relation to environmental, economic, social, cultural and political quality.
Thursday, March 30, 5:30pm-7:30pm Slocum Auditorium
Greg Goldin Architectural critic and writer
Sam Lubell Architectural critic and writer
Stuart Rosenthal Urban economist, professor, Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of Economics
Lemir Teron Environmental justice and policy; Assistant Professor, SUNY-ESF,
Jamie Winder Urban geographer; O’Hanley Faculty Scholar, Professor, Maxwell School
Francisco Sanin, Moderator Professor, Syracuse Architecture
Sponsored by the Syracuse Architecture undergraduate program, Associate Professor Lawrence Davis, Chair; Curated by Associate Professor Elizabeth Kamell and Assistant Professor Tarek Rakha
Participant bios
Greg Goldin
Greg Goldin was the architecture critic at Los Angeles Magazine from 1999 to 2011. In 2011, he was awarded a Getty Institute Research Grant, which led to his exhibition Windshield Perspective at the A + D Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles (2013), a study of vernacular Los Angeles architecture. In summer 2013, he co-curated and co-authored Never Built Los Angeles. In 2014, he was a contributing curator to the Getty Museum’s No Further West, an exhibition about the making of Los Angeles’s Union Station. His latest book, co-authored with Sam Lubell, is “Never Built New York.” His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Record, Architect’s Newspaper, and Zocalo, among many others.
Sam Lubell
Sam Lubell is a staff writer at Wired and a contributing editor at The Architect’s Newspaper. He has written seven books about architecture for Monacelli Press, Rizzoli, Metropolis Books, and Phaidon. He also writes for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Architect, Architectural Record, Architectural Review, Wallpaper*, Contract, and other publications. He co-curated the A+D Architecture and Design Museum exhibitions Never Built Los Angeles and Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles. His upcoming exhibition with Greg Goldin, Never Built New York will open at the Queens Museum this September.
Stuart Rosenthal
Stuart Rosenthal is the Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of Economics and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy Research. Before joining Syracuse University in 1999, Professor Rosenthal held positions in the economics department at Virginia Tech University, the faculty of commerce and business administration at the University of British Columbia, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. His research is in the area of urban economics, real estate finance and housing, and state and local public economics. This includes work on a wide range of housing and mortgage issues, the determinants of urban renewal and decay, the influence of agglomeration on productivity, and entrepreneurship.
Lemir Teron
Lemir Teron is on the environmental studies faculty at the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry. He currently works on municipal scale renewable energy projects; His research examines sustainability policy, urban development and environmental justice. Teron received his PhD from the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy & Environmental Policy and completed a postdoc at the NOAA affiliated Environmental Cooperative Science Center where his work explored the human dimensions of challenges related to legacy pollution, climate change and coastal communities.
Jamie Winders
Jamie Winders is O’Hanley Faculty Scholar, Professor, and Chair of the Geography Department in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Trained as an urban geographer, she studies the relationships between immigration and racial politics, especially in the context of American cities. Beyond her work on immigration, Winders has published on topics including new and social media, social reproduction, postcolonial theory, gender, and class dynamics.
Video archive of previous Density symposia discussions
Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer who advocates internationally for more walkable cities. As Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007, he presided over the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and created the Governors’ Institute on Community Design. Prior to his federal appointment, Mr. Speck spent ten years as Director of Town Planning at DPZ & Co., the principal firm behind the New Urbanism movement. Since 2007, he has led Speck & Associates, a boutique planning firm that specializes in making American downtowns thrive.
With Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Mr. Speck is the co-author of The Smart-Growth Manual and the “modern classic” Suburban Nation, which the Wall Street Journal calls “the urbanist’s bible.” His latest book, Walkable City–which the Christian Science Monitor calls “timely and important, a delightful, insightful, irreverent work” –was the best selling city-planning book of 2013-15.
“If we design on a landscape scale and move away from the norms and criteria with which the architectural discipline defines buildings, we can conceive and imagine transformations of matter and materials based on a dimension of the land that relates to the supreme presence of the natural environment. The landscape — both as built and natural context — gives designers new models for knowing and interpreting. Yet, like all pre-existing fabric, it has its own identity and particular structure. Through human action it is a bearer of its tradition and specific history represented by a defined environmental form and structure.”
From this perspective, the three Studio Archea projects that Laura Andreini will present — the Antinori Winery in Tuscany, the Liling Ceramic Art City and the design for Yanqing Grape Expo, both in China — are more than architecture as they become chances to think about landscape and different ways of acting on it through projects that relate with a sense of continuity to their surroundings that express universally recognized values.
In 1999, Yan Meng co-founded URBANUS Architecture & Design Inc. with partners Liu Xiaodu and Wang Hui. URBANUS developed branches in Shenzhen and Beijing and has become one of the most influential architectural practices in China. URBANUS built works have become new landmarks of urban life; Many projects have received prestigious architecture awards, been exhibited and published worldwide.
Meng is an architect licensed in New York State. He received his bachelor and master of architecture degrees from Tsinghua University, and master of architecture degree from Miami University. He has been a design critic at many universities and taught at the School of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. He has been an invited juror for numerous international design competitions and given lectures at many influential academic institutions in New York, Venice, Moscow, Rotterdam, Brussels and Singapore. Yan Meng was appointed chief curator of the Shenzhen Pavilion in 2010 Shanghai Expo, and is appointed to be one of the three curators for 2017 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Urbanism\ Architecture Bi-City Biennale (Shenzhen).
Please join us for the inaugural Syracuse Architecture Boghosian symposium, “Ishness & Counter-Absolutes,” organized by Assistant Professor Maya Alam, 2016-17 Boghosian Fellow.
The Boghosian symposium enables the Fellow to produce and present work that is meant to engage the larger Syracuse Architecture community in a discussion about issues relevant to contemporary architecture.
Says Alam, “Our time is asking for definite answers, and thus, somewhat paradoxically, certainty becomes more of an improbability than ever. Similarly to art (and other aspects of humanity), architecture has not been a stranger to persistent questions for absolutes. Questions of authorship, source, imitation or creation, blending-in or standing-out are prevailing.
However, the world we live in cannot be understood as a singular entity - the in-between happens to be our current reality. Uncertainty is understood to be an obstacle in architectural practice today, and the fallacy that it can be avoided through rigorous planning and design remains persistent.
We experience a new paradigm shift where public and private blend into one another; with the ever-growing, multi-layered digital presence of our real-time, social networking reality, we are, more than ever, confronted with a multiplicity of media platforms that challenge both our perception of our environment, as well as our multivalent presence in it. Therefore, maybe, uncertainty can become a chance for new conversations instead of reasons for capitulation.”
This symposium invites architects to examine their work through the lens of “ishness, in-between & other uncertainties.” A series of short presentations by the participants will lead to a round table discussion that will further shape a conversation around the potential of “ishness” in architectural practice.
Format
Three panel discussions, each with a 15-minute intro by Maya Alam, followed by a round table discussion moderated by Dean Michael Speaks.
Symposium participants
Kristy Balliet Balliet Studio / BairBalliet / Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture & Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc)
Erin Besler Besler & Sons / UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
Sarah Blankenbaker University of Illinois at Chicago College of Architecture and the Arts
Mira Henry Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)
Molly Hunker SPORTS / Syracuse University School of Architecture
Nicole McIntosh Architecture Office / Syracuse University School of Architecture
Carrie Norman Norman Kelley / Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
Rosalyne Shieh Schaum/Shieh Architects / Yale School of Architecture
Julien De Smedt is the founder and director of JDS Architects based in Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Shanghai. A designer and architect whose work is internationally spread, Julien’s commitment to the exploration of new architectural models and programs has helped re-energize the contemporary architecture discussion. Seminal projects include the VM Housing Complex, the Mountain Dwellings, Lille’s ABC, the Iceberg, Kalvebod Waves and the Holmenkollen Ski Jump. Born in Brussels to French art enthusiast Jacques Léobold and Belgian artist Claude De Smedt, Julien attended schools in Brussels, Paris, and Los Angeles before receiving his diploma from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.
Prior to founding JDS Architects, De Smedt worked with Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, and co-founded the architecture firm PLOT with Bjarke Ingels in Copenhagen. In 2013, with William Ravn, he co-founded the agenda-driven design label Makers With Agendas, addressing matters of society to create meaningful products.
Among other awards and recognition, De Smedt received the Henning Larsen Prize in 2003 and the Eckersberg medal in 2005, the Maaskant Award in 2009 and the Prix Dejean in 2014 from the French Academy of Architecture. In 2004 the Stavanger Concert Hall received the Golden Lion as the World’s Best Concert Hall at the Venice Biennale, the Maritime youth House won the AR+D award in London and was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe award. The Mountain received the World Architecture Festival Award and a MIPIM Award in 2009, while the Iceberg received the Architizer Award for housing in 2013, the MIPIM Award that same year and the Best Building Award in 2015 from Archdaily.
Julien De Smedt has been a guest lecturer in numerous venues worldwide and a professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas and the University of Kentucky and currently teaches at MIT (Cambridge, USA) and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His work is published and exhibited internationally.
Julián Manriquez Botello, AIA, was born in Zacatecas, México and received his bachelor and master of architecture degrees from Cornell University and SCI-Arc [Southern California Institute of Architecture] respectively, and was named director scholar in the latter institution.
He is the director and founder of in.formation studio, a multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar practice working between urbanism, architecture, art and object. Its multi-disciplinary projects include masterplanning, architecture, interiors, installations, furniture, and product design.
Manriquez Botello embraces all scales as an opportunity to engage design research and investigate the relationships between territory/object, object/interior, inhabitation/event, and body/product.In.fo studio’s work has been internationally awarded and published.
Manriquez Botello’s work is part of the XBIAU [Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo] in São Paulo, Brasiland has been given various design awards in the CEMEX International Awards in Mexico City.
Manriquez Botello has received numerous design awards from the American Institute of Architects [AIA] for various projects including a coffee cup made of chocolate. His practice has commissioned work in México, República Dominicana, British Virgin Islands, United States and Puerto Rico.
Current projects include the new observation booth and lounge for the equestrian club of San Juan, an animal hospital, and a public/private street-space project
Prior to forming in.formation studio, Manriquez Botello was a senior designer at Toro Ferrer Arquitectos, and was director of projects for the San Juan Knowledge Corridor, University of Puerto Rico’s Botanical Gardens and its Río Piedras campus, all of which were in collaboration with James Corner Field Operations.
Manriquez Botello was the presidential visiting professor at Universidad Católica de Ponce and a visiting professor at Politécnica Universidad de Puerto Rico. He has been guest critic at Cornell University, PRATT, Escuela Internacional de Diseño, among others. He is an active member of the AIA [American Institute of Architects] Puerto Rico and has served as its president, vice-president and board member. He has been a member of the Colegio de Arquitectos y Arquitectos Paisajistas de Puerto Rico and has served as an education advisor to the Board.
Panos Dragonas is an architect, curator and professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Patras, Greece. Together, with Varvara Christopoulou, he established dragonas christopoulou architects, an awarded design practice in Athens.
From 2001 to 2013, Dragonas was consultant editor of the annual review Architecture in Greece. In 2012 he was joint commissioner and curator of Made in Athens, the Greek entry in the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. He has curated, alone or in collaboration, the exhibitions Adhocracy [Athens], Rethink Athens, 14F/21G, Young Architects from France and Greece, and the 2nd Biennale of Young Greek Architects. He has also co-curated the Rethink Athens - Urban Challenges cycle of events at the Onassis Cultural Centre (2013-’15).
His current research and design activities focus on the transformations of the Greek cities during the economic crisis, the investigation of post-consumerist housing typologies, and the connections between cinema, architecture and the modern city. Panos Dragonas is a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University for the fall 2016 semester.
Image credits
1 - Polykatoikia (apartment building) at Pagkrati. Architects: Panos Dragonas & Varvara Christopoulou. 1999-2002. Photo by Charalambos Louizidis.
2 - Urban Hut in Athens. Architects: Panos Dragonas & Varvara Christopoulou. 2014.
3 - Made in Athens, Greek participation at the 13th Venice Biennale. Curated by Panos Dragonas & Anna Skiada. 2012. Photo by Charalambos Louizidis & Aikaterini Glinou.
4 - Adhocracy [Athens]. From Making Things to Making the Commons. Curated by dpr-barcelona & Pelin Tan. Co-curated by Panos Dragonas. 2015. Photo by Charalambos Louizidis.
The undergraduate program presents “Density: Through Thick and Thin,” a 3-part series of discussions on resurging issues about urban density in the 21st century.
As we face pressures of global population explosion, measurable and alarming ecological stress and related urbanization, as well as projected food and clean water shortages, the symposia offer an arena to discuss the current and near future status of the fundamental quality of built environments.
North America Friday, September 30, 3pm - 5pm Slocum Auditorium
Michael Dennis Professor, MIT; Principal, Michael Dennis & Associates
Roger Sherman Senior Architect, Gensler, Los Angeles; Adjunct Professor, UCLA AUD; Visiting critic, Syracuse Architecture
Discussion will involve architects, economists, and environmentalists and be a collaboration with other units on campus.
Sponsored by the Syracuse Architecture undergraduate program, Associate Professor Lawrence Davis, Chair; Curated by Associate Professor Elizabeth Kamell and Assistant Professor Tarek Rakha
Na Wei is the founder and director of WEI architects, aka ELEVATION WORKSHOP. She has taught at China Central Academy of Fine Arts since 2010. Na Wei graduated from the School of Architecture at Yale University with a master of architecture degree and Tsinghua University School of Architecture with a bachelor of architecture degree.
ELEVATION WORKSHOP is an international multi-disciplinary architecture and design firm. Originally founded in New York by Na Wei and Christopher Mahoney, ELEVATION WORKSHOP established its office in Beijing; WEI architects in 2009.
As one of the most innovative and leading architecture firms in China, WEI architects has worked on projects of various scales. Positioned at the crossroads of art and architecture, WEI’s projects were featured in over fifty publications in over ten countries around the globe, including Time Architecture (China), Domus, Archdaily (U.S.), Dezeen (UK), FRAME (the Netherlands), Gestalten (Germany), and Rikuyosha (Japan). Several WEI’s projects have been nominated for international design awards. WEI received a competition award in 2009, the “People’s Choice” as well as the “Most Stunning Design of 2010” awards for the Rizhao Urban Planning Museum, Shandong Province. The “SongMax” store and showroom design was presented at the AIANY Interior Design Lecture series in 2014. One of its recent projects, WHY Hotel, was awarded “the 2015 Best New Hotel”, “Hotel of the Year” and other international and domestic awards. WEI has been profiled and covered by many international media, including CBS News, China Economic Observer News, China Construction News, etc.
WEI architects intends to derive its design concept from emotions in order to create an atmosphere-driven synergy that highlights the interaction between people and the built environment. WEI adopts the conceptual approach of creating a “Suffused Space” to outline a spatial parameter that encourages users to appreciate their own intuitive perceptions and maximizes their bodily experience.
During the 2015 Beijing International Design Week, Na Wei, in collaboration with China Building Center and Beyond Architecture, curated the section of Design for Children and created the designer union of Children design. Meanwhile, Na, a key committee member of YaleWoman China, has been organizing and participating in many social activities for entrepreneurial women in China.
Prior to forming WEI architects / ELEVATION WORKSHOP, Na Wei used to work for Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners LLP in New York and was responsible for the design of several major projects. She also worked for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam as a project manager.
The undergraduate program presents “Density: Through Thick and Thin,” a 3-part series of discussions on resurging issues about urban density in the 21st century.
As we face pressures of global population explosion, measurable and alarming ecological stress and related urbanization, as well as projected food and clean water shortages, the symposia offer an arena to discuss the current and near future status of the fundamental quality of built environments.
North America Friday, September 30, 3pm - 5pm Slocum Auditorium
Michael Dennis Professor, MIT; Principal, Michael Dennis & Associates
Roger Sherman Senior Architect, Gensler, Los Angeles; Adjunct Professor, UCLA AUD; Visiting critic, Syracuse Architecture
Discussion will involve architects, economists, and environmentalists and be a collaboration with other units on campus.
Sponsored by the Syracuse Architecture undergraduate program, Associate Professor Lawrence Davis, Chair; Curated by Associate Professor Elizabeth Kamell and Assistant Professor Tarek Rakha
Roger Sherman, AIA is senior project director of urban strategy at Gensler Los Angeles. Previously, he was founder of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design in Culver City, California. From 2006 to 2015, Sherman was co-director, with Dana Cuff, of cityLAB, an urban design think tank at UCLA, where he is an adjunct professor. A graduate with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Roger Sherman has taught and lectured widely, including at New York’s MoMA and TEDx.
Roger Sherman’s work has been featured in Newsweek and Fast Company and on CNN and the History Channel. It has also been exhibited at many prominent international venues, including the 2009, 2010 and 2016 Rotterdam and Venice (IT) Biennales (for the design of the new town of Providencia, in the Ecuadorian Amazon; Playa Rosa, a public/private community-based development in South LA; and Thinking Outside the Big Box, an urban infill cum community investment strategy for Target); and at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Flex-Deck-Spec House, 2007). Award-winning larger-scale urban planning work includes RePark, an end-use plan for FreshKills Landfill (Staten Island, NY); UP THE BLOC, the re-purposing of a downtown LA parking structure; and Chia Mesa, the re-purposing of a Scottsdale, AZ strip mall. Since joining Gensler, Sherman has been at work on a new infrastructure and urban development plan for: northern Haiti; a digitally-driven signage and public space installation for the Sunset Strip (West Hollywood); and HYPO-PARK, a high density model of public recreation space for underserved communities in LA.
Sherman is author of several books, including LA Under the Influence: the Hidden Logic of Urban Property, RE American Dream, and most recently, Fast Forward Urbanism, with Dana Cuff. Roger Sherman serves on the board of Zocalo Public Square, and is a past board member of: AIA/LA; Livable Places, a non-profit affordable housing developer; and the Westside Urban Forum.
Annabelle Selldorf is a 1987 graduate of the Syracuse Architecture Florence M.Arch 2 program. Born and raised in Germany, she received a bachelor of architecture degree from Pratt Institute prior to her master’s study at Syracuse. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and serves on the board of the Architectural League of New York and the Chinati Foundation. In 2014, Selldorf was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ prestigious Award in Architecture. She recently received a 2016 Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architecture New York City chapter.
Annabelle Selldorf founded architectural design practice Selldorf Architects in 1988. Now a 65-person firm, Selldorf Architects has worked on public and private projects that range from museums and libraries to a recycling facility, and at scales encompassing large new construction, historic renovations, and exhibition design. Clients include cultural institutions and universities such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Neue Galerie New York, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Brown University. In addition, the firm has created numerous galleries for David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Gladstone Gallery among others, and designed exhibitions for Frieze Masters and the 2013 Venice Art Biennale. A monograph of the firm’s work, “Selldorf Architects: Portfolio and Projects,” published by Phaidon, will be released this spring.
“At a time when architecture seems to be obsessed with grand gestures … the work of Annabelle Selldorf speaks to the transformative power of sculpting space in subtle and dignified ways.” (Carolina A. Miranda, L.A. Times, March 13, 2016)
In her Syracuse lecture Annabelle Selldorf will present recent work by her firm, Selldorf Architects, including the Sims Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn and Luma Arles, a new center for contemporary art in the South of France.
Michael Peng is a senior architect at Gensler, the world largest design firm. Among his many building credits, Peng worked on all aspects and oversaw the facade design of China’s tallest building, the Shanghai Tower. Peng has authored numerous essays on parametric design and has lectured on this topic at many universities and international seminars.
Michael Peng is dedicated to the crossover research of art and design field, and has achieved accomplishment within the areas of education and practice. His research on the super high-rise and advanced media platform has been published in key Chinese and international publications.
Georgina Huljich received a master of architecture from UCLA and a diploma from National University of Rosario, Argentina. She is co principal of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, an architectural design practice based in Los Angeles. P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S gained international recognition for its subtle approach to architecture; one that seamlessly integrates advanced technology within an extensive consideration of form, novel tectonics and innovative materials. With a decidedly global influence and working across multiple scales, programs and cultures, the office completed projects in the US, South America and Asia. Its work was exhibited and published worldwide most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Venice Biennale in Italy, the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco MOMA, Vienna MAK Museum, where their work is also part of the permanent collections.
P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S received numerous prizes and awards including two AIA LA Honor Awards, an AIANational Design Review Honorific Mention; first prizes in the competitions for the SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion, a Temporary Pavilion for MOCA, the Vertical Garden at the Schindler House and the New SCI_Arc Café; Emerging Voices Series of the Architectural league of New York, and was the recipient of the Arch is Award by the AIA LA Chapter. In 2013, Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich were the recipients of the prestigious USA Grigor Fellowship. PATTERNS first comprehensive book- monograph entitled Embedded was released in 2011.
Georgina Huljich received a master of architecture from UCLA and a diploma from National University of Rosario, Argentina. She is co principal of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, an architectural design practice based in Los Angeles.
Other awards include the ACSA Faculty Award and the American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum both for Jujuy Redux, a special mention in the Architizer Awards for the League of Shadows Pavilion, and a grant from the prestigious Graham Foundation to publish the forthcoming book “Mute Icons: The Pressing Dichotomy of Contemporary Architecture”.
Huljich has previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum and the architectural firm Dean/Wolf Architects in New York and as project designer at Morphosis in Los Angeles. She has lectured extensively in the U.S. and internationally, and has held teaching positions including the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship at Yale, Maybeck Fellowship at UC Berkeley, Visiting Professorships at Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Robin Visser (B.S. Engineering, University of Michigan; Ph.D. Chinese, Columbia University) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in Chinese literature, urban studies, and environmental studies. Her first book, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke UP, 2010), analyzes Chinese urban planning, architecture, fiction, cinema, art and cultural studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. She has published numerous articles and translations on Chinese and Taiwanese urban cultural studies, literature, and cinema, and has forthcoming essays on Chinese eco-city planning and global creative city policies. She is Chief Co-editor of the Chinese-language Journal of East Asian Humanities《東亞人文》, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and is a Standing Review Board Member of the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong SAR. Her current research is for a book manuscript on Sinophone environmental literature, tentatively titled Bordering Chinese Eco-Literatures.
In her lecture, Visser will analyze three case studies of Chinese “eco-city” development within the context of national “urbanization planning” policies in order to elucidate prevalent rural land conversion mechanisms within China’s rapidly evolving urbanization strategies. Urban-rural integration policies aim to develop vast regions as metropolitan networks, industrialize agriculture, and relocate thousands of farmers into new or redeveloped cities.She explores how the rhetoric of sustainability rationalizes land transfers in order to evaluate whether eco-city projects function primarily within a virtual speculative economy rather than significantly contributing to the social or ecological good.
National Veterans Resource Complex Competition Finalist
David Adjaye OBE is recognized as a leading architect of his generation. Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents and his influences range from contemporary art, music and science to African art forms and the civic life of cities. In 1994 he set up his first office, where his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability established him as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and vision.
He reformed his studio as Adjaye Associates in 2000 and immediately won several prestigious commissions. In Oslo he designed the Nobel Peace Centre in the shell of a disused railway station (completed in 2005). In London his design for the Whitechapel Idea Store pioneered a new approach to the provision of information services (2005). Later projects in London included the Stephen Lawrence Centre, with teaching and community spaces (2007), Rivington Place, an exhibition venue and resource centre (2007), and the Bernie Grant Centre for the performing arts (2007). He is currently working on two major redevelopment projects in the city: 70-73 Piccadilly, a £600 million scheme in the prestigious Piccadilly area, and the Hackney Fashion Hub, a masterplan to renew a significant central area in the Borough of Hackney. Adjaye Associates’ largest completed project to date is the £160 million Moscow School of Management Skolkovo (2010).
In the United States Adjaye was the designer of a new home for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver (2007), two public libraries in Washington DC (2012), as well as of several innovative residential projects. In 2009 a team led by Adjaye was selected to design the new $360 million Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington DC. The practice has also completed a social housing scheme in New York’s Sugar Hill (2014) and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard’s Hutchins Center (2014). Adjaye is currently working on the new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Ruby City building for the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio, and a condominium development for Four Seasons in Washington DC.
Adjaye Associates now has offices in London, New York, and Accra, with projects throughout the world. These include the Aishti Foundation shopping and cultural complex in Beirut (2015), the Alara concept store in Lagos (2014), and a new headquarters building for the International Finance Corporation in Dakar (ongoing).
Adjaye frequently collaborates with contemporary artists on art and installation projects. Examples include The upper room, with thirteen paintings by Chris Ofili (2002), Within reach, a second installation with Ofili in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003), and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art for the 21st Century Pavilion that was designed to show a projection work by Olafur Eliasson, Your black horizon, at the 2005 Venice Biennale. The upper room is now in the permanent collection of Tate Britain. Adjaye recently collaborated with Okwui Enwezor on the design of the 56th Venice Art Biennale (2015).
Adjaye has taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had previously studied, and at the Architectural Association School in London, and has held distinguished professorships at the universities of Pennsylvania, Yale and Princeton. He is currently the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard. He was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2007, received the Design Miami/ Year of the Artist title in 2011 and the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award in 2013.
The material from Adjaye’s ten-year study of the capital cities of Africa was shown in Urban Africa, an exhibition at the Design Museum, London (2010) and published as African Metropolitan Architecture (New York, 2011, and as Adjaye Africa Architecture, London, 2011). He was the artistic director of GEO- graphics: A map of art practices in Africa, past and present, a major exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2010). An exhibition of his architectural work, David Adjaye: Output, was held at Gallery MA, Tokyo (2010). In 2015 a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work to date was held at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Adjaye Associates has recently been named as one of 7 finalists for the design of the future Obama Presidential Library in Chicago.
Accessibility entrance
Please enter at the ground-floor level entrance on College Place and take the elevator to Floor 2.
Byron Merritt is Vice President and Global Creative Director for Nike Digital. In this role he oversees the design, development and creation of Nike’s digital experiences. Central to that is the Nike+ ecosystem of mobile applications.
Previously, Byron Merritt was Sr. Creative Director and leader of Nike’s North America Brand design. In this role he drove how the Nike brand came to life across all consumer touch points–retail, digital, events and brand experiences.
The team he led focused on driving innovation around how the products Nike makes, the services created around those products, the places where consumers interact with those products and services (both physical and digital), and the communication, messaging and storytelling all come together in a seamless experience for consumers. His work fuses marketing, design and innovation.
At Nike, Merritt drove creative around the launch of the Nike+ Fuelband and was a part of the team creating the product experience. Additionally, Byron Merritt has lead the development of many Nike firsts. He was creative director for Nike’s first video game Nike+ Kinect Training, designed for the Xbox Kinect platform as well as new to Nike customization experiences.
Prior to Nike, Byron worked at what’s been considered to be the world’s most innovative design company, IDEO in San Francisco, CA. Byron Merritt earned a masters in architecture at SCIArc and currently lives in Portland, OR with his wife and son.
National Veterans Resource Complex Competition Finalist
Since 1996, SHoP has modeled a new way forward with their unconventional approach to design. At the heart of the firm’s method is a willingness to question accepted patterns of practice, coupled with the courage to expand, where necessary, beyond the architect’s traditional roles. Founding partner William Sharples has been at the center of this collaborative practice for twenty years, leading educational projects and technology initiatives across the studio.
Sharples has served as lead partner on many of SHoP’s most prominent projects, including the Botswana Innovation Hub, Google Headquarters Offices, the New Academic Building at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the award-winning Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn.
Beyond the studio, Sharples is a powerful advocate for the role of contemporary technologies as tools to promote humanist values through design. He recently completed the development of a laboratory space and integrated curriculum for a robotics program at the Benchmark School in Media, Pennsylvania.
William Sharples’ dedication to moving the profession forward continues in his commitment to lecturing and teaching, where he brings SHoP’s message—about the unity of technological invention, artistic inspiration, and public responsibility—to students across the country.
SHoP has recently been named as one of 7 finalists for the design of the future Obama Presidential Library in Chicago.
Susan Dieterlen holds joint appointments as a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, and as a Faculty Research Fellow at the Syracuse Center of Excellence. Her research investigates human behavior and environments, with a focus on urban neighborhoods during economic transformations. She is the author of several publications, including those within Environment and Behavior and the Journal of Urbanism, as well as a book-length scholarly monograph. She also blogs at City Wild on www.susandieterlen.com.
Her work identifies opportunities during economic change to create more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous places for people. Such transformations can provide increased equality and understanding across demographic divisions, as communities pull together toward common goals. The publication of her book, Immigrant Pastoral: Midwestern Landscapes and Mexican-American Neighborhoods (Routledge, 2015) caps a decade of work focusing on immigration’s transformation of small postindustrial cities and rural meatpacking towns.
A related line of work explores social and behavioral impacts of increasing urban nature and neglect. This includes studies of crime and social capital in areas of tree canopy and understory vegetation, especially unmaintained spontaneous vegetation. This work incorporates an approach of trade-offs between costs and benefits, including the increasing need to mitigate climate change impacts in cash-strapped municipalities. Dr. Dieterlen is currently conducting studies in this area and lecturing on it nationally.
Additional work includes projects with the Syracuse Center of Excellence involving the transformation to a post-carbon age through the incorporation of clean and distributed energy generation and use. Current studies include the use of community microgrids to promote economic revitalization of disadvantaged neighborhoods in postindustrial cities. Her work also engages the dismantling/vacating of fossil-fuel infrastructure and its profound impacts on the physical environment and public acceptance.
Prior to joining Syracuse University, Dr. Dieterlen taught as a faculty member in the SUNY-ESF Landscape Architecture program. She has taught a wide range of design studios as well as courses on environment and behavior research, applied research methods, and postindustrial cities. Her teaching emphasizes critical thinking and connecting interdisciplinary research to built design work, and involves a unique combination of scholarly rigor and real-world business expertise.
In addition to an undergraduate professional degree in landscape architecture from Purdue University, Dr. Dieterlen holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and a doctorate in Landscape Architecture from the University of Michigan. She is also a registered landscape architect with several years of full-time professional practice experience, including the founding of Prologue, a small design practice.
Tong Ming is founding principal of TM Studio in Shanghai, China, and Professor at the College of Architecture & Urban Planning, Tongji University.
TM Studio is a university-based design and research studio practicing architecture, urban design and studies. Its works combine academic researches with professional practices, touching upon the multiple dialectics between tradition and modernity, locality and its transiency.
Since its outset, the studio insists on making architecture in the context of urbanism. TM Studio believes that every single architectural performance should embrace certain social values, because each city represents a rich medley of heterogeneous individuals, or a living system bearing numerous thoughts and motives.
If the entire social history and collective life were treated as a continuous process of construction, the city itself, with all the places in it, turns out to be a container under unceasing adjustment. The city fabrication does not only result in concrete edifices and environment, but also on deeper levels delicate rearrangement and refinement of the urban network, on which human beings are connected and social interactions are fabricated.
Therefore, designing architecture in an urban context leads to a methodology of fabricating, systematic researches weigh no less than physical construction. Through accurate spatial intervention, and by linking an individual architecture to a broader urban network, TM Studio tries to relate individual architectural motives to the collective will of the city. Only when this relationship is setup, the ultimate objective of architecture design might be achieved: creating better surroundings for life and demonstrating higher intentions of civilization.
Bing BU is the principal of One Design in Shanghai, China. He will lecture about work of the firm ranging from urban design to architecture, art, and curation.
Bing Bu received his bachelor’s and master’s degree of architecture from Tsinghua and Yale respectively. His works include the Hongfeng Tech Park in Nanjing, Boku Restaurant Patio in Toronto, LVG Office Complex at Shanghai, the Wulongtan Resort at Ningbo, urban design for Cixi CBD, West Town of Zhujiajiao, art installation Cloud Room traveled to Beijing, Taichung, Washington DC. His works were selected and shown in Shanghai Biennale 2002, Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale 2007, and Utopia2 at CIVA Brussels 2008, Chengdu Biennale 2011, and Guangzhou Triennale 2015.
Bing Bu also curates exhibitions including “Tumu@home” at Shanghai 2002, “Ningbo, the Metamorphosis of a Chinese City” at Aedes Berlin 2003, “Un-natural” at BCA Beijing 2009, “Spectacle” at PSA Shanghai 2013.
He also teaches design studio at schools such as Tongji, Shanghai Jiaotong, WUSTL, and USC.
His essays “A New Geography Pattern in Information Age” and “ the Fast Production of Urban Simulacra in China” were published on “Time + Architecture” in 2007 and 2011 respectively.
Second in a series of three design debates in NYC focused on the complexities of resilience as advanced and challenged by Rebuild by Design, an initiative of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and HUD. Henk Ovink, Senior Advisor to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, and Chair of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, moderates. Partly sponsored by Dutch Culture USA.
