JULY 15, 2004 8 pm [MP3]

JENNA DIDIER [MATERIALS & APPLICATIONS]

:Organization in its Infancy:
The purpose of Materials & Applications is to explore current ideas in architectural design theory on an experiential level. The research center's founder will discuss the drive and the development of this space and its plans for the future.

ROB LEY [URBANA]

:A Fair and Balanced Look at Making:
A presentation hyping the potential of material and architectural transformations. The lecture will include slides and video taken during the construction of Serial Departure, the current installation at Materials & Applications.

July 22, 2004 8 pm [MP3]

Hernan Diaz Alonso [XEFIROTARCH]

:Red, Beautiful, Horrific, Cartoons:
If the logic with an excessive systematicity; then the horrific would find a way of eloping by inserting an emphasis in the figures at play, the figures within its external immediate spatial boundaries, instead of it's interior confines.

Paul Preissner [SOM, LLP + QUA'VIRARCH]

:Who I'm In Love With :
A smallish lecture about the ultimate condition of architecture (Beauty) and why we are In Love with her.

Marcelo Spina [PATTERNS]

:FoRM / Fluency of Rhythmic Materialities:
FoRM will focus on the potential of systems that populate, constitute and intersect a series of recent projects, exhaustively rehearsing the imminence of the intensive materiality within these systems and the rhythmic sensitive outcomes they produce (while influencing one another), akin to the complexity of contemporary life.

Thursday, July 29 at 8 PM [MP3]

IDCA Satellite Symposium Los Angeles [IDCA

IDCA:54 ambient: interface brings into focus the design complexities of connection, contact and interaction. ambient: interface explores how computation changes design’s imagination of these complexities and their translation into the making of the material world. We propose for consideration an image of the world as an interface, and of all design as interface design.

  • Benjamin H. Bratton, SCI_Arc and UCLA, IDCA:54
  • David Erdman, SERVO
  • Adam Eeuwens, co-author, False Flat: Why Dutch Design is So Good.
  • Helene Furjan, UCLA and SCI_Arc
  • Peter Lunenfeld, Art Center College of Design
  • Richard Metzger, Disinfo.com, Los Angeles
  • Daniel Sauter, UCLA
  • Marcelo Spina, Patterns, SCI_Arc
  • + presentation of Natalie Jeremijenko’s OOZ workshop at SCI_Arc

August 5, 2004 8 pm [MP3]

Elena Manferdini [ATELIER MANFERDINI]

Both clothing and architecture revolve around the scale of the human figure to find their dimensions and they negotiate the relationship between private and public arenas. Atelier Manferdini considers clothing not only as a metaphor for shelter and social space, but also as a case study for architectural cladding systems: tailors for centuries have been solving the problem of constructing complex curved geometry with simple flat material. Fashion becomes a case study to learn innovative techniques for architectural components and a tool to introduce creativity, effect and taste in the mass culture of building standards.

August 12, 2004 8 pm [MP3]

Jason Payne& Heather Roberge [GNUFORM]
David Erdman of [SERVO]

: Form Through Refinement :
An illustrated conversation between David Erdman of SERVO and Jason Payne and Heather Roberge of GNUFORM on the role of refinement in the development of form. In contrast to definitions of novelty involving the sudden appearance of new form in a primitive state, these designers innovate form through nuanced transformation toward higher states of order.

August 19, 2004 8 pm

Peter Zellner [ZELLNER, DESIGN RESEARCH PLANNING]

:Minor Practice:
Peter Zellner is an architect, writer and curator, and a Studio Faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He is the author of Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture and along with Jeffrey Inaba, co-founder of ValDes, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching suburban conditions. His architectural projects have been published and exhibited internationally - most recently as a part of Experimental Architectures 1950-2000, in OrlEans, France.

George Yu [GEORGE YU ARCHITECTS]

:Universal and Specific:
A small office that has taken on big jobs for big clients, collaboration has been one of the hallmarks of the firm. Specializing in the integration of architecture, technology, lifestyle and workspace issues, we have collaborated on several projects with firms. Our office has become very successful in creating innovative solutions for problems that are normally considered beyond the purview of architecture. In the IBM, Jusco and Sensorium projects, we’ve made architecture a significant part of larger organizational and technological transformations occurring within these companies.

August 26, 2004 8 pm [MP3]

Greg Kochanowski [STUFF (architecture +)]

: VISCO-CITY (The Entropic State of Contemporary Public Space):
Architects have a problem with stuff. Stuff is clutter. Stuff dirties up the clarity of architecture, removing the autonomous vision of the designer by giving way to unplanned occupation and conditions of decoration and excess. Contemporary strategies of fluidity give way to an entropic thickening of the environment through an influx of natural, artificial, and informational stuff. Characterized by mobility and change, this viscous urbanism interiorizes architecture and, in turn, engenders new types of sociability through the establishment of emergent territories and synthetic disciplinary tactics which operate between the realms of fashion and the built environment - engaging the material presence of life and lifestyle while generating new forms of organizational, occupational, and diagrammatic stuff. This lecture will discuss these ideas through a series of recent projects.

Joshua Stein

: Zoom In/Zoom Out:
There is often a confusion of scale between the acts of modeling, prototyping, versioning, and the proposing of an architectural project. Can this confusion be productively exploited? Techniques which are quickly being integrated into architectural design demand another round of exploration into which truths are tied to a particular scale and which can move fluidly across scales.