Archinect Sessions One-to-one

Writer, critical theorist and architecture academic Sylvia Lavin has been a fixture in the southern California art and architecture scene for the better part of the last 30 years. Currently serving as Director of the Critical Studies programs at UCLA's Architecture and Urban Design department, she also recently launched a summer curatorial program at SCI-Arc, called MEAT: Making Exhibitions in Architecture Today, and is widely published on issues of architecture and art practice. Lavin spoke with me about growing up in an academic family, splitting her childhood between New York and Rome, and her perception of the art/architectural scene in southern California. Shownotes: LA-based architect Frank Israel's obituary UCLA urban planning professor Edward Soja's obituary Pipilotti Rist's "Pour Your Body Out" (2008) installation at MoMA

As Deputy Director for Urban Design and Mobility in Glendale, CA, a teacher of urban design at Woodbury University, and one of the Mayor's appointees on the City of Pasadena's Design Commission, Alan Loomis has thoroughly installed himself in the shifting scene of southern Californian urbanism. After moving from Michigan to get his MArch at SCI-Arc in the late 1990s, Loomis has seen enough of Los Angeles' urbanism to be convinced that whatever post-sprawl paradigm gets adopted here will become the guidebook for many more cities in the US, particularly those ever-expanding desert cities in the southwest. Loomis joined Amelia Taylor-Hochberg in Archinect's studio to talk about urban design in the public and private realms, pedagogical approaches to urban design vs. urban planning, and his earlier days in LA as an Archinect editor.

This week's guest is Garrett Jacobs, executive director of the phoenix rising from Architecture for Humanity's ashes, known as the Chapter Network. When Architecture for Humanity went bankrupt last year and shut down its formal, executive functions, many affiliated chapters continued business as usual, that is, operating independently with volunteer coalitions. To rally those troops and continue AFH's mission of humanitarian and sustainable development, the Chapter Network was formed, and Jacobs, formerly an outreach coordinator for AFH, became its organizing leader. As an architectural designer trained literally in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, and with past experience organizing for Code for America, Jacobs has big plans for the newfangled Network. We spoke about how to continue Architecture for Humanity’s legacy without making its same mistakes, and how to create a sustainable organization on a shoestring.

In line with this month's "Furniture" theme, Amelia Taylor-Hochberg speaks with Galen Cranz, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley specializing in body-conscious design. Cranz is trained in the "Alexander Technique" – a method for "correcting" the body's poor habits of movement, that can limit self-awareness in a space. Before coming to Cal to teach architecture, Cranz received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, influencing her pedagogy of architecture and furniture to primarily be about how humans occupy designs, and how social hierarchies emerge from those conventions.

Based in London, Elsie Owusu OBE runs her own firm (Elsie Owusu Architects), is a national council member at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and is vice chair at the London School of Architecture. But it’s likely that many Archinectors hadn’t heard of Owusu until December of last year, when we reported on claims of institutional racism and sexism she had made against RIBA, alleging that they had rigged an election she was up for in favor of another candidate, who wasn’t an elected RIBA council member. In my correspondence with Owusu to arrange our interview, she analogized the issue this way (paraphrased here): an African-American or minority ethnic female actor (her) being nominated for an Oscar, only to have a white actor who hasn't even made a film "parachuted in" and given an award for Best Supporting Actor. I wanted to speak with Owusu about her work alongside issues of diversity and exclusion in practice generally, and also at the institutional level of RIBA. We discuss the allegations, but O

Scott Merrill, winner of this year’s Driehaus Prize for his work under his firm Merrill, Pastor & Colgan, studied economics before getting an MArch at Yale, and found inspiration early in his career from Vermont's vernacular architectures. He began practicing solo in Florida in 1990, and works at a range of scales, in a form true to what the Driehaus celebrates: traditional, classical architecture. The award, started in 2003 by the architecture school at Notre Dame, celebrates (and gives $200,000 to) an architect whose work “embodies the highest ideals of traditional and classical architecture in contemporary society, and creates a positive cultural, environmental, and artistic impact.” Scott spoke with me about what the prize means to him, and his view of architecture as primarily about serving our human nature, not fulfilling a formal agenda.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times, joins me for our first One-to-One interview of 2016. I wanted to talk with Kimmelman specifically about a piece he had published just at the end of last year, called “Dear Architects: Sound Matters”. The piece considers how an architectural space’s unique audio atmosphere helps create its overall personality, invariably affecting us as we experience it. Alongside Kimmelman’s writing in the piece are looped videos of different spaces – the New York Times’ office, a restaurant, the High Line, Penn Station, a penthouse – meant to be viewed while wearing headphones, to get to know that space’s sonic portrait, of sorts. Too often, says Kimmelman, architects don’t think of sound as a material like they would concrete, glass or wood, when it can have a profound effect on the design’s overall impact. In our interview, Kimmelman shares how the piece came to be, and how it fits into the Times’ overall push into more multimedia journalism. We also discuss ho

Complaints about the state of architecture education are easy to come by, both in academia and practice. It's expensive, long, and arguably ineffective in preparing graduates for the realities of the field. So who's actually trying to fix it? Will Hunter, former deputy editor of the Architectural Review, has one idea – start a whole new school altogether. Back in October, Hunter opened the brand new London School of Architecture, starting 30+ postgraduate architecture students on a 2-year course working with local firms on local projects. As the school's founder and director, Hunter wanted to form a "cost-neutral" model of architecture education, where students work part-time – for pay equal to the cost of tuition – while also attending courses. Give students a vested interest in their city and practice, narrow the gap between education and practice considerably, and make their training financially sustaining. We spoke with Hunter in August, about the thought process behind the school and how he went about bu

Before coming to MIT to serve as dean of the School of Architecture + Planning in January 2014, Hashim Sarkis taught at Harvard's GSD as the Aga Khan professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies. He founded his own practice, Hashim Sarkis Studios, in Cambridge in 1998, and continues to lead the firm. Sarkis’s experience working in two of the most highly-regarded architectural education institutions worldwide, while also managing his own firm, puts him in a unique position to approach theoretical questions of architecture from within the two, often discordant spheres of academia and practice. Our interview revolves around the same questions we ask in our Deans List series – how architecture education and practice are changing, how to address student needs, MIT’s particular take on how to cultivate exceptional architects, and the culture of the school in a global urban context.  

Architect and educator Liam Young joins Paul Petrunia and Nicholas Korody in the Archinect studio for this week's One-to-One. Young, a kind of architect-non-architect (his definition of the role may vary), concerns his design and creative work with the anthropocentric futures of our globalized society, in architecture, energy, and technology. Standard among his many roles are co-director of the AA's Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio, and founder of the urbanism think tank, Tomorrow's Thoughts Today. Current projects include developing a new masters program at SCI-Arc in fiction and entertainment, and leading a studio at the AA. Special thanks to SCI-Arc for helping set up the interview.

This week's One-to-One guest is Jenna Didier, founder of the Materials & Applications research and exhibition space in Los Angeles. Didier started the driveway-sized venue in the front yard of her Silver Lake home in the early 2000s, looking for a space to establish community and exchange for like-minded architects, artists, designers, and makers in the city. M&A has since hosted installations by architects such as John Southern (Urban Operations), Jenny Wu and Dwayne Oyler (Oyler Wu Collaborative) and Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues (of Ball-Nogues Studio), among many others, and regularly holds events and gatherings. More recently, Didier also founded Urban Applications: an initiative of M&A that works directly in and with local communities on environmental installations. We spoke about her work with robotics and fountains, and how creative communities are formed in sprawling metropolises.

This week on the podcast, we speak with Jens Bertelsen – a Danish architect specializing in historic preservation, who since 2011 has called himself "The Queen's Architect." Bertelsen’s official title under the Danish monarch (Queen Margrethe II) translates to something like “Royal Building Inspector,” “Royal Builder” or “Royal Surveyor,” but essentially means he's responsible for making sure that all the structures belonging to the monarchy stay in shape, and ideally, in use. This includes buildings like the Danish Parliament and the royal family’s winter home, Amalienborg Castle. Bertelsen's firm, Bertelsen & Scheving, was founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, and specializes in historic preservation work. Bertelsen will hold the Royal Builder position until 2016.

Our new podcast, Archinect Sessions: One-to-One is an interview show, straight-up. Each episode features a single interview with a notable figure in contemporary architecture – it's that simple. Usually, One-to-One will be led by me or Paul Petrunia, while occasionally others will serve as guide. The conversation will be casual and spontaneous, touching on the interviewee's role in the expanding range of architectural practice, and will serve (we hope) a valuable archival role in future discourse. For our very first episode, I spoke with Neil Denari of Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA). Aside from his firm's work, Denari is a tenured professor at UCLA, and was the director of SCI-Arc from 1997 - 2001. We spoke about the shifting focus of architecture education, multitasking, Los Angeles and the recession's impact on architecture.