United States

Come to the Table is an installation made of reconfigurable elements that serve as a platform for dialogue. The construct is a framework to engage local architects, artists and thinkers in questioning What is the State of the Art of Architecture Today? Confirmed Panelists include Penelope Dean (Associate Professor, UIC), Vedran Mimica (Associate Dean, IIT)
and Ben Nicholson (Professor, SAIC).

In collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Cal Poly LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design, Caroline Bos, co-founder and Principal Urban Planner of UNStudio (www.unstudio.com), will speak about recent architectural, infrastructural and masterplan projects carried out by UNStudio. She will also introduce UNStudio’s Urban Unit and the approach to knowledge sharing recently adopted by the practice to enable the development, application and dissemination of practice related research.

Stanley Tigerman will discuss his 2015 New Titanic along with the opening of a special exhibit that includes a selection of past and recent work featuring the 1978 “Titanic” photomontage.

Monuments are deliberate gestures—objects or structures created to commemorate an event, person or era. Their meaning is usually imposed, and they often serve as focal points for aspirational civic and political attributes like valor and sacrifice, or to underscore a foundational political narrative. But their meaning can transform, changing over time as the relevance of their symbolism ebbs and flows due to social and political shifts. Like monuments, architecture and photography are also inflected with a grace of intention, and both have the ability to commemorate or represent a nation, event, time or place. The act of photographing monuments and buildings transforms them, sometimes revealing some of the original qualities and more closely evoking the response that they were originally intended to have. And photographs have an inherent memorial quality. This group exhibition examines the work of international artists, some of whose work addresses actual monuments, some whom look at architecture and its relationship to memory and how its importance and symbolism can shift over time, and others approach the idea of the future monument.

Sergei Tchoban, managing partner of the architectural firm nps tchoban voss with offices in Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg, SPEECH in Moscow and founder of the Tchoban Foundation – Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin and Andrew Zago, partner and founder of the firm Zago Architecture in Los Angeles will talk about the architectural hand- and computer generated drawings in architectural practice today. The importance of a drawing as an official language of an architect, as well as collecting and displaying it.

The panel will be moderated by Wim de Wit, Adjunct Curator of Architecture and Design at the Cantor.

Jacob A. Riis and Vilhelm Hammershøi were Danes of the same generation who took up the challenge of understanding modernity in radically different ways. Riis left Denmark for America to become the nation's leading advocate for the urban poor. He was a media-savvy journalist who used words and pictures to make a compelling case for reform. Hammershøi, by contrast, was a Copenhagen-based aesthete whose mysterious paintings of bourgeois domestic interiors suggested the psychological experience of modern life. Join two art historians and experts on Riis and Hammershøi, Bonnie Yochelson and Thor Mednick, for an exploration of their work. After their presentations, Ambassador Anne Dorte Riggelson will lead a conversation about Riis and Hammershoi's contrasting lives and perspectives.

Let your inner designer out and explore the playful side of architecture at this hands-on program for adults. Join other kids at heart and build amazing structures with BSA Space’s LEGO® collection, while enjoying beer, wine, snacks, and conversation. This month’s session is inspired by Canstruction’s 2015 theme: get inspired by Boston!