Small Lots, Big Impacts Design Competition, cityLAB – UCLA, 2025
This panel discussion will explore how the right to housing—in Los Angeles and globally—isn’t just a political, legal and economic issue, but also an architectural one. What does the right to housing mean in practice? And how can designers contribute? Moderators Dana Cuff (cityLAB UCLA) and Karen Kubey (University of Toronto) will be joined by architect Julie Eizenberg and Professor of Urban Planning Ananya Roy to discuss these urgent questions and examine promising housing models, laying the groundwork for ways forward.
Janet Echelman (American). “Enfold,” Hill House Montecito, CA, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joe Fletcher.
Step into a world in which interconnectedness and innovation abound with "Janet Echelman: Radical Softness," on view Nov. 16, 2025-April 26, 2026, at Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design. Janet Echelman's solo exhibition at Sarasota Art Museum traces more than four decades of her path-breaking career, offering an intimate look at Echelman's artistic evolution through drawings, paintings, textiles and the artist's renowned monumental, netted sculptures and sculptural dance performances. The exhibition also marks the debut of a series of cyanotypes created from 3D models and photographs made during her design process, translating her monumental forms into a new photographic medium that uses the environment — sunlight — as both method and subject.
Keller Easterling is a designer, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is currently working on a book about land activism in the US after the Civil Rights Movement. Other books include, Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934-1960.
The Case Study House program was founded in 1945 with the goal of adapting wartime era technologies and materials into future forward, mass produced, middle class homes for a peacetime economy.
Hsinming Fung, AIA has been Principal and Co-Founder of Hodgetts + Fung since 1984, a studio with expertise in the design of unique places for learning, cultural events, and civic functions. H+F’s approach is multifaceted, embracing visitor experience, technology, and iconic presence in a disciplined process, resulting in a bold, uncompromising architecture. The firm’s award-winning projects include the design of the renovated Hollywood Bowl, Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center, CalArts’ Wild Beast Pavilion, Jesuit High School Chapel, and Nashville’s new Ascend Amphitheater. Current projects include the renovation of Culver City’s historic Robert Frost Auditorium and a West Hollywood mixed-use development. H+F was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the AIA CC Firm of the Year Award.
Mark Lee is a principal and founding partner of the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 50 major awards. A book on the work of the firm, entitled HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. Monographs include: 2G N. 67, El Croquis N. 198, and A+U N. 614.
Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT's School of Architecture + Planning. Jarzombek works on a wide range of topics – both historical and theoretical. He is one of the country’s leading advocates for global history and has published several books and articles on that topic, including the ground-breaking textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with co-author Vikramāditya Prakash and with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. He is the sole author of Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective (Wiley Press, 2013), which is a sensitive synthesis of first society architecture through time and includes custom-made drawings, maps and photographs. The book builds on the latest research in archeological and anthropological knowledge while at the same time challenging some of their received perspectives. Jarzombek also published a book that interrogates the digital/global imaginaries that shape our lives: Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Life adapted to our material environment. Until the moment we discovered tools, technology and architecture. Then we acquired the power to adapt our material environment to life. You can look at the evolution of human history as a tale shaped by the materials we have known how to harvest and process. As evidenced in how we name the epochs of human history – the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age – our capacity to manipulate matter is perhaps the greatest force driving the development of our culture. By reclaiming the term materialism from the realm of empty consumerism, we aim to bring it back to the practice of formulating our future through form and matter. We will go on an odyssey through the material world through the works of BIG starting with solid rock and ending with the flow of electrons.
Marlon Blackwell, FAIA together with his partner in life and work, Ati Blackwell, AIA, ASID lead the internationally recognized practice Marlon Blackwell Architects. Their work has received recognition with significant publication and more than 200 design awards including the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and the 2025 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. Working between the universal language of architecture and the particulars of place, they have cultivated a studio recognized for its formal clarity, contextual depth, and architectural integrity.
David Godshall is principal at TERREMOTO, an award-winning California-based landscape architecture studio he started in 2012 with his late business partner Alain Peauroi. TERREMOTO has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
