Events

re:arc institute presents architectures of planetary well-being, an in-person gathering, at the London Design Museum, on Saturday, February 25, 2023.

Building on the success of the previous two virtual Spring Conferences, the themes of AIAISC'23 will be Detail & Storytelling. Presenters will focus on describing a project through the evolution of key Details, or Storytelling as part of the design process.

Since Japan and the West began exchanging ideas in the mid-19th century, Japanese design sensibilities—from elaborate kimono garments and meticulously raked gardens to lavish compositions of ukiyo-e woodblock prints—have had wide appeal across Europe and the United States. Often ornate yet minimalistic, Japanese design embodies numerous visual approaches underpinning the notion of “just right” or “just enough,” known as hodo-hodo. While no single element characterizes the entirety of Japanese design culture, many scholars attribute the spectrum of Japanese design to cultural, social and spiritual practices deeply grounded in Japan’s history that continue to be observed in Japanese design practices today. Featuring a discussion with Taku Satoh, one of Japan’s most critically acclaimed contemporary designers, alongside two internationally recognized authorities on Japanese design sensibilities, Linda Hoaglund (bilingual filmmaker and cultural producer) and Sarah Teasley (Professor of Design, RMIT University), this live webinar will explore the underlying aesthetic and cultural roots essential for understanding the essence of Japanese design.

Linvisibile is pleased to announce the opening of its first American showroom, in the exclusive Miami Design District.

The Dragon Tree of Icod de los Vinos, in Tenerife, is the oldest specimen of Dracaena Drago, which is preserved in the Atlantic archipelago, a tree 16 m high with a 20 m circumference at the base. An endemic species of the Canary Islands, with a slow growth, the dragon tree has a strong symbolism since, in the past, it was considered the protector of the islands, but, at the beginning of the 1980s, the one who needed protection was precisely the dragon tree. Visitors - about 1 million a year - flocked to visit it, and the intense activity that tourism brought around it put its life in danger. It was necessary to stop the visits and find solutions so that the drago tree did not die of success.

/// ONLINE TRAINING ///

Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has been working with various AI technologies since 2016. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs (generative adversarial networks) and their capacity for contemporary myth-making in architecture. In the same way that imaginative vocabulary and metaphoric style were primary, if literary instruments for the invention of new mythologies for the Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using AI are similarly a kind of matter metaphor-ed and made visible by the cyborg imagination. With these tools, Karel is interested in the re-enchantment of the architectural body—one that both foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions, and one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational. Her work in this realm has been exhibited at the 2021 Venice Biennale; the FRAC Institute, Orleans, France; Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis; and SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent essays in pursuit of this work include “Verto Pellis” in Offramp, issue 17; “Machines are Braver than Art” in “Rendering Fiction,” Paprika!, volume 7, issue 8; and “Machines À Rechercher,” in Log 55, summer 2022. Karel teaches currently at Washington University, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Designed directly by the internal Research & Development office, the new showroom becomes the focal point of Linvisibile’s presence in the Piedmont area.

IAAC Lecture Series – Philip F. Yuan

IAAC Lecture Series – Xavier De Kestelier

Join editor Alissa North of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design as she discusses her new book Innate Terrain: Canadian Landscape Architecture, a collection of papers written by Canadian scholars and practitioners in the field of landscape architecture. Concerned with the practice and theories of landscape architecture in Canada, the book documents the breadth of contemporary practice from across the country, with each chapter author using works of landscape architecture to theorize a distinct approach practiced by Canadians in their national context. The book’s central argument is that Canadian landscape architecture is distinct because of the unique qualities of the Canadian terrain and the particular relationship that Canadians have with the landscapes of our nation.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the planning of cities has been understood as the discipline that establishes guidelines to project architecture for human occupation, with a focus on rationality and functionalism. Nevertheless, the city is a system of many layers and folds, constructed through the interaction of natural, cultural,socioeconomic,and political forces. This choreography, with a variety of purposes and different degrees of synchronization, creates architecture that serves both as shelter and context.Architecture, therefore,does not limit itself to the production of objects but rather appears as a field of study between and through disciplines, called upon to contribute to the organization of those forces that composepublic stages, the space where collective itineraries meet and intertwine.These stages have existed historically.

This exhibition stages a meeting point for scientific predictions and futuristic fantasies that were manifested in architecture and art from the 1960s to the 1980s. Bringing together authors from Eastern Europe and the West, the exhibition will display works that emerged from the new technological reality that followed the Second World War, and which took it along unexpected paths: foreseeing the replacement of work with games and collective pleasures in computerised societies, turning away from the overarching machine logic and replacing it with myths and romantic ideas of the human being, or looking for traces of other civilizations from space, instead of conquering it. A utopia of quantification and of scientific planning, of the separation of life and work, was replaced by a striving towards harmony between the machine and nature, the mind and the body. These projects are extensions of a technologicised world, ironic and absurd situations that present a critique of rationalism and speak of the contradictions of late modern society, demonstrating at the same time both its intellectual horizons and the limits of its utopian fantasies.

Date: Tuesday, 7 February
Time: 2 pm
Stockholm Furniture Fair
Andreu World Stand
A04-20

Geo-Conversations: Nature and Technology in Architecture

AIA New York Center of Architecture open its doors to the public for a very special book launch by Alper Derinboğaz. He is founder of Salon, the internationally renowned architecture studio based in Istanbul, Berlin and recently Los Angeles known for its award-winning projects such as the Museum of Istanbul, pandemic-resistant office design Ecotone and zero-emission Villa Topos.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban is renowned for his innovative use of wood. Natural and beautiful, timber construction can also be a key tool in the fight against climate change through the creation of environmentally responsible buildings. Ban’s new book, Shigeru Ban: Timber in Architecture presents an in-depth examination of 45 of the architect’s works demonstrating the versatility of timber, from the undulating curves of the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France to the playful inversion of Japan’s Mt. Fuji World Heritage Centre. At this talk, Ban examines the awe-inspiring use of wood throughout his career, shares his long history of humanitarian work, and offers insights on working toward a more sustainable future through architecture. Moderated by Matilda McQuaid, Acting Director of Curatorial and previously Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Followed by a reception with a sale of autographed books. Program is the official U.S. book launch for Shigeru Ban: Timber in Architecture.

Bernard Tschumi is an architect based in New York and Paris. First known as a theorist, he exhibited and published The Manhattan Transcripts and wrote Architecture and Disjunction, a series of theoretical essays. Major built works include the Parc de la Villette, the Acropolis Museum, Le Fresnoy Center for the Contemporary Arts, Paul L. Cejas School of Architecture at FIU, MuséoParc Alésia, the Paris Zoo, the Binhai Science Museum, and a large educational complex for the University of Paris-Saclay opening in 2023. He was the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation of Columbia University in New York from 1988-2003. The book Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color is a comprehensive collection of his conceptual and built projects. His drawings and models are in the collections of several major museums, including MoMA in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which each presented a major retrospective of his work in 1994 and 2014.

Featuring Tura Cousins Wilson of SOCA, Jessica Kirk of the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism and Jessica Hines of Black Urbanism Toronto, this conversation about what it means to take accountability within the practice of design and focus on Black community engagement is the first in a series centred around Blackness in architecture, landscape, and design within academia. As noted in the University Commitment in the Scarborough Charter, the work of Black flourishing and thriving should “be informed, shaped and co-created by communities” in order to be effective. Other discussions in this series will include Black Flourishing through Design (February 15), a workshop for designers and educators called Blackness in Architectural Pedagogy and Practice (March 1) and a student-led online event that centres Black belonging through design.