Not so long ago, restless, still-young architects—many of them with roots in process-driven procedures—began to direct attention toward things like mood, atmosphere, and sensation. Soon, whiskers erupted, dimples puckered, and cracks opened across smooth, fin-de-siècle surfaces. The cathode-ray glow that signaled advanced work began to dim, and high-gloss sheen faded into the shadows. For some, hardline abstraction gave way to hazy allusion, for others, to overt legibility. As another faction distilled unlikely cocktails from aberrant materials, yet another began to conjure insistent objects resistant to conventional modes of perception. Now, with the new century well into its teens, the most interesting practices have all but abandoned the superficial for the speculative, the indexical for the ambiguous, and the overtly spectacular for allusive glimpses at the edge of perception.

SCI-Arc is pleased to announce RIGHT NOW, a 2-day public forum taking place September 25-26, 2015 on the SCI-Arc campus in downtown Los Angeles. Hosted by new SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso and emceed by faculty members  Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe, the symposium will take stock of some of the most promising directions in contemporary architecture, using the conversation, as opposed to the conference paper, as its primary catalyst.

Organizers will set the stage for five provocateurs to instigate unscripted conversations among a broad cross-section of today’s most exciting practitioners, using their recent work as lenses through which to examine specific topics in contemporary architecture.

RIGHT NOW speakers include Benjamin Bratton, Thomas Daniell, Neil Denari, Mark Foster Gage, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ferda Kolatan, Jimenez Lai, Jennifer Leung, Lucy McRae, Jason Payne, Rhett Russo, Theo Spyropoulos, Liam Young and Michael Young.  SCI-Arc design faculty members joining the conversation include Joe Day, John Enright, Marcelyn Gow, Dora Epstein Jones, Elena Manferdini, Anna Neimark, Florencia Pita, Casey Rehm, David Ruy, Marcelo Spina, Peter Testa, Peter Trummer, and Andrew Zago.

Aiming to tease out new ideas as opposed to harden nascent positions, RIGHT NOW is less interested in taking inventory of the latest projects than in using new work to amplify the volume of contemporary discourse and to swerve ongoing conversations in new directions.

Join us at SCI-Arc for a glimpse of the RIGHT NOW.