Rending of the Field House, designed by Bureau Spectacular, to house Archinect's podcast conversations

Recently, Archinect teamed up with Bureau Spectacular for the Arroyo Seco Weekend festival. Jimenez Lai and Joanna Grant designed a pavilion for the event, while Archinect's Paul Petrunia and Nicholas Korody held a series of interviews within it. Conversations focused on temporary architecture, installations, festival design and planning, and the festival's host city of Pasadena, CA, the results of which can be listened to below.

We'd like to thank the Goldenvoice team, and in particular Raffi Lehrher, for recognizing the importance of architecture and urban issues, their interest in engaging the community, and inviting us to take part in this inaugural event. 

Mimi Zeiger

The first interviewee of the series is Los Angeles-based critic, editor and curator, Mimi Zeiger. Our conversation spans a number of topics including the rapid evolution of architectural journalism over the past 20 years and its relationship with architecture, temporary structures, and, of course, tiny houses.

“There’s a growing demand for reflection on where we are in architecture culture in relationship to the larger world,” Zeiger states. “We can’t ignore that, and it might require finding certain kinds of voices and ways for that.”

David Freeland

Here, we talk with David Freeland, who is a faculty member at SCI-Arc and one of the partners of FreelandBuck, an architectural design practice specializing in commercial interiors and speculative installations. They currently have a temporary ceiling up in the Smithonsian's Renwick Gallery. 

Continuing the discussion on temporary architecture, we asked David about the significance of pavilions in architectural practice, FreelandBuck’s installation projects and their interests as a studio.

"Pavilions are a reduced version of a building problem which is a great opportunity. In terms of the timeline of the development of the office, early on, it was a ground by which we were able to test out different ideas and sort out the direction of the office," said Freeland.

When discussing the studio’s main characteristics he noted, “I think that drawing has been a kind of autonomous interest of the practice since the beginning. We’ve always made drawings even exclusive of buildings. But we’re also very suspect of that autonomy because we’re an office that builds. So I think that the installations have always engaged drawing and we have always thought about installation as drawing at full scale. We think about drawing in terms of its structural possibilities, in terms of its tectonic possibilities, its representational possibilities—the ones that are not just about the simple transition let’s say from drawing at a scale of a drawing board and then building at the scale of the building but maybe building at the scale of a drawing.”

Alan Loomis

For this episode, Paul spoke to urban designer, planner and educator, Alan Loomis about the evolving architectural identity of Pasadena, the current state of urban planning as a profession, and his experience of working in different parts of LA county.

“Planning is always about managing growth in some fashion. And nobody likes change,” Loomis said. When characterizing the city he has lived and worked for for many years, he noted, “Pasadena is not defined by style. But, if you walk around Old Town, what you discover is this amazing network of publicly accessible alleys and hidden courtyards that feel almost European or maybe East Coast, or kind of like New Orleans. So, I think, Pasadena architecture is really about this figure-ground, in which there is a real open network for pedestrians at the sidewalk and the ground level to penetrate through and connect different buildings.”

Ali Jeevanjee & Poonam Sharma (LOC Architects)

We spoke with LOC Architects and discussed their practice, the numerous temporary installations the firm has worked on for Burning Man and Coachella among others.

“The thing you do when you create a camp or do a project for a festival is, really, an experience, and in that sense, architecture is just a means by which to create that experience,” said Jeevanjee when describing his early installation projects. Sharma noted, “Festivals have various functions. Obviously, the driver is music, but then there’s also human desire for spectacle and the ability to interact with things and to not be just a passive consumer of music or merchandise. The art installation provides an opportunity for people to have an interactive experience that differentiates one festival from another.” 

Jimenez Lai

For our fifth interview, Paul Petrunia and Nicholas Korody sat down with Jimenez Lai who, in partnership with Joanna Grand, leads Bureau Spectacular. We got to talk about the firm’s evolving ambitions, issues of sustainability/temporality, and, of course, the white and breezy Field House in which all of our Arroyo Seco Weekend conversations took place.

Commenting on the dominant typology of the studio’s projects in context of the economic recession, Jimenez said, “you run the risk of sounding ironic or sarcastic when you’re always doing work that’s not realizable or, god forbid, has a cultural critique.”

Alex Dahm

Alex Dahm is a Production Manager over at Goldenvoice, the company behind Coachella that put on LA's newest musical event, the Arroyo Seco Weekend. He has a background in architecture having graduated from SCI-Arc with an M.Arch I back in 2013, and today designs the venues and site plans for Goldenvoice's concerts and festivals.

While talking about what his architectural degree offers to the festival scene, he remarked, “I would recommend any architecture student, if you have a chance to work any other job besides architecture, I would say, first and foremost, work construction and secondly, work production because you are going to learn on your feet and you are going to deal with problems that you would probably never have the chance to solve or experience in school.”

Benjamin Ball

Benjamin Ball, the principal of Ball-Nogues Studio, describes the process of working at the intersection of architecture, art and product design and discusses various fabrication and production processes that the firm has previously employed. 

On the firm's approach to technological development of installation projects, he had this to say: “We don’t want the material experimentation, the process experimentation to be limited, let’s say, to an academic frame where those issues are isolated and dissected, often times to the exclusion of other meanings.” 

Sarah Lorenzen & Peter Tolkin

Peter Tolkin is an architect with a degree from Cal Arts and a background in the visual arts, and Sarah Lorenzen is from Mexico City, also with a Fine Arts background. The two have known each for many years—both spent some time working at Cal Poly—and have recently decided to join forces after working together on a competition entry. 

The two discuss their new venture together, their “Dunnage Balls” project for the festival, and how temporary works can offer architects a venue to explore and experiment singular ideas without the larger constraints that come with built works. “Those kinds of collaborations are really about expanding the dialogue about what is going on in the arts and sort of relating it to the conversations that happen in architecture in terms of representation, in terms of the meaning of what is that we do, the symbolic aspects of art and design. That’s really interesting because it injects new ideas into the work that maybe wouldn’t come from just being isolated in the architecture ghetto that we are in," said Lorenzen.