4

Organized by Czech collective Arch for People, ModulARCH is a new festival of modular architecture to be held in Brno, Czech Republic this April. The festival will explore all aspects of modular architecture from the ecological to the economic, and discuss the role of the typology within the contemporary city. Learn more about the three day conference after the break.

The three day program of ModulARCH will unfold on the grounds of Brno's Moravian gallery, and comprise three distinct blocks. In succession, the festival will address modular architecture's relationship with the public space, the modular EXPO 2015 pavilion in Milan, and the social necessity of modular architecture, alongside its role in public buildings. Two evening lectures will be given by Chilean architect Sebastian Irarrazaval, whose practice and research has dealt closely with modular architecture and construction.

From April 18 until August 24, 2015, the Hombroich Foundation will showcase the work of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Spanning from his early career in 1980 to the present, the exhibition will explore de Moura’s influential style through models, plans, sketches and photographs. Celebrating such dynamic works as the reconstruction of the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria do Bouro in Amares and the the football stadium Estádio Municipal de Braga, highlighted projects will tell the lifelong story of de Moura’s designs.

On April 17, Harvard GSD will host this year's annual interdisciplinary Doctoral Conference, "Data Across Scales: Reshaping Design." The conference invites design reachers and practitioners to examine the role and potential of data in design. Particularly apt for the technology-centric times of present, "Data Across Scales" focuses on the proliferation of information technologies within personal and professional contexts.

"We produce, share, collect, archive, use and misuse, consciously or unconsciously an immense amount of data," reads a statement on the conference's website, "This burst of data production and collection has already had a profound impact on the way we organize ourselves as a community."

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) will hold its 68th Annual International Conference in Chicago, Illinois, from April 15–19, 2015, with the theme "Chicago at the Global Crossroads." SAH will celebrate its 75th anniversary during the conference, which includes lectures by Jeanne Gang and Blair Kamin, as well as roundtables and 36 paper sessions covering topics in architecture, art and architectural history, preservation, landscape architecture, and the built environment. SAH is committed to engaging both conference attendees and local participants with public programming that includes over 30 architectural tours, a plenary talk, and a half-day seminar addressing Chicago’s waterways and neighborhoods. Register at sah.org/2015.

Apertures reflect a current architectural discourse of digital ecologies, emphasizing the relationship between the natural world and advances in digital technology, which leads to a new type of interactive, organic buildings. The installation focuses on a symbiotic relationship between nature, building morphologies, and material expression.

Rooted in Baumgartner+Uriu’s work and ongoing research, Apertures challenges the notion of an architectural opening as a static object. Moreover, it aims to redefine the DNA of a window both in terms of its appearance and materiality, as well as its nature as an object in continuous flux, responding to its environment through movement or sound. The pavilion and its apertures are designed to physically engage the visitor with the architectural work through sensors and sound feedback loops creating an immersive spatial environment in which the visitor can experience their own biorhythms.

Only 5 more days on the exhibition 2D:3D, an installation by Barkow Leibinger at the BDA Berlin Gallery. Covering the wall surfaces of the small gallery space with “tapete” or wallpaper the façade of the storefront gallery frames what Leon Battista Alberti described as a fenestra aperta. In this configuration the space of the gallery is a projection/ extension of the streetscape in the bourgeois residential historical Mommsenstrasse neighborhood.

Playing with the concept directive 2D 3D, the wall paper on one side of the gallery is a two dimensional pattern: an organic looping structure which repeats and mirrors itself that is both ornamental and geometrically structural in its architectural implication. On axis with the street front façade at the back of the gallery is a wallpaper “portrait” of this system in black and white but now projected as a one-point perspective optically extending the perspective of the gallery itself.

As part of the CA Group’s lecture series, “Architour,” one of the Executive Board of SeARCH, Bjarne Mastenbroek will give a lecture at 15:30 on April 25th at Tongji Architectual Design (Group) Co., Ltd.(TJAD) auditorium in Shanghai. For 2013 through 2015, “Architour” has as its theme “New Force of Architecture – Leading Young Architects”: each year, the CA Group will select nine young, global leaders in architecture (four from Asia and five from the West) to lecture on topics that cross typologies and disciplines, from architectural design, urban planning to interior design. Sou Fujimoto, Christian Kerez, Thomas Heatherwick and Ensamble Studio were part of the series’ speakers.

Building on the success of their first Winter school in 2010, ManTownHuman's "Critical Subjects" school returns this summer. The week-long event that will serve as a platform to debate vital architectural questions as diverse as "what is 'nature'?"; "whatever happened to the avant garde?"; and "what is architecture for?" Applications are currently open - 30 of the UK's keenest architecture students will be chosen for their critical and innovative thought.

Building resilient and sustainable urban centers. That's going to be the main issue that over 30 speakers will be addressing at the Cities for Tomorrow Conference next Tuesday, April 22 at TheTimesCenter, NY. The event, hosted by NY Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, will feature Shigeru Ban's first public appearance since winning the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His presentation will be on the eve of the conference, on Monday, April 21. Although the reception is invitation-only, we will be live-tweeting the presentation.

Jeanne Gang, founder of Studio Gang, will be hosting a public lecture at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on Monday, April 28, 2014. The lecture, named 'What Mammals Want', will start at 5:15pm and seating is first-come, first-served.

Text by Isaac Wilhelm:

The architectural firm PRODUCTORA, based in Mexico City, is presenting 9 unbuilt projects that have a clear relation to geometry and mathematical composition. Large-scale models, made in collaboration with students at Woodbury University are presented together with black and white CAD drawing that clarify the main conceptual aspect of the building.

Starting this week,The Princeton University School of Architecture will hold until May 14 a retrospective exhibition on the work of Andrés Jaque and his architectural practice Office for Poitical Innovation. It includes their production since 2000, including several projects we've published in the past like the Plasencia Clergy House, Sweet Parliament Home, Escaravox and the Never Never Land House.

In the last 10 years the Office for Political Innovation has explored the question: ‘What happens to architectural practices when common notions of the urban (as something confined in cities) are replaced by others in which the urban is contained in urban enactments (ordinary interactions in which politics are produced)?’

More after the break.

The editors of PROJECT invite you to celebrate the release of Issue Three at common room, 465 Grand St., New York, NY, this Wednesday, April 9 from 7pm to 9pm. PROJECT investigates the possibilities for developing a a critical position in contemporary architecture. Publishing both visual and written work, the goal of PROJECT is to provide a platform for disseminating ideas.

Next Month, the Mackintosh School of Architecture (The Glasgow School of Art) will host its first International Symposium for Social and Humanitarian Architecture, ‘Clean Conscience Dirty Hands’, in the new Reid Building by Steven Holl Architects. The symposium focuses on the limited resources intrinsic to the provision of social and humanitarian architecture and the impact of such scarcity on the ability of organisations to ‘harness’ the learning from each built project through documentation, discussion and dissemination. As such, it seeks to provide both a locus and a forum for like-minded organisations engaged in social and humanitarian building projects, in order to capture and disseminate good practice in both a UK-based and overseas context.

International and award-winning speakers representing a multitude of organisations, including MASS Design Group, TYIN Tegnestue, Architecture for Humanity, London Metropolitan University, Peter Rich Architects and Orkidstudio will gather to discuss a range of ideas relating to one of the three topics broadly covered by the symposium:

Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Stephen Phillips and Eva Franch i Gilabert will be discussing on the “institutionalization” of “experimentation” and cultural politics and power of taking risks.

The Faculty of Architecture at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences will host a lecture series on Japanese architecture. The program will start April 8 with Junya Ishigami and will continue until June 24 with lectures by Shin Takamatsu & Takeshi Katagiri, recent Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban, Ryusuke Kojio, Sou Fujimoto, Hitoshi Abe and Hiroaki Kimura.

Critical Shifts is a one-day, student-organized symposium dedicated to exploring the ongoing transformations of critical practice in architecture. The event brings together a diverse group of practitioners in order to investigate how their work (which often combines the activities and approaches of curation, editing, writing, design, teaching, and research) can begin to trace a nuanced map of the fieldʼs current critical terrain.