Archinect - News

California's concrete skateparks come alive in a new photography book

2019-09-12T20:30:00-04:00

Released this month, California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks, takes the birthplace of skateboard culture and celebrates the dynamic landscapes created by Cali's expressive skateparks. Amir Zaki, creator of the book, is an artist and photographer who grew up skateboarding and has spent years photographing the built and natural landscape of California.

Tony Hawk, the legendary skateboarder, has contributed an essay to the new book. In it, he expresses how Zaki's photography captured his first memories of visiting a skatepark as a kid. Los Angeles-based architect Peter Zellner also contributed an essay in which he explores the origins of modern vertical skateboarding in the mid-1970s and the resulting skateparks that came out of that movement.

Ultimately, this book provides a beautiful collection of photography, architecture, and concrete landscapes, sure to capture the interested reader.

Free School of Architecture update: open for applications in January 2017

2016-12-27T21:07:00-05:00

Earlier this year, architect Peter Zellner announced his plans of a new educational institution dubbed the Free School of Architecture. The news was hotly debated on Archinect when it first broke in September and has since grown to become one of the most popular academia-themed posts of the year.

The FSA appears to be taking shape in the mean time and started posting first announcements on its school profile on Archinect, including detailed information about the application process for the 2017 — and the school's commencement — academic year.

More updates here as they emerge.

Peter Zellner to launch the Free School of Architecture, a tuition-free, experimental architecture school

2016-09-29T20:37:00-04:00

Architect Peter Zellner of ZELLNERandCompany (formerly known as Zellner Naecker Architects) is launching a new, tuition-free post-graduate school of architecture dubbed, appropriately, the Free School of Architecture (FSA). Slated to launch in 2017, the FSA hopes to become a laboratory for new thinking about architecture and how it's taught.

While a major part of the motivation for starting the school is to explore where “architecture education might go” without massive financial burdens for students and academic pressures for professors, the FSA also aims to “absolve both students and teachers of conforming to established models of thinking,” Zellner tells Archinect.

“One might think of FSA as providing an extracurricular or alternative education, less a traditional education,” Zellner states. “The end goal is to promote new ways of thinking architecture, not to rubber-stamp more academic and/or professional worker bees.”

The FSA is not yet accredited — Zellner expresses wariness abou...

Next Up Mini-Session #6: a panel discussion with Dry Futures jurors

2015-11-04T15:32:00-05:00

Tomorrow (!!!) we'll premiere season two of Archinect Sessions, and in anticipation of the launch, we've been posting Mini-Sessions – interviews recorded during our first-ever live-podcasting series, "Next Up", held at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles' Chinatown and at the opening weekend of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. You can listen to past Mini-Sessions here. We'll also be launching a brand new podcast soon.

For our last Mini-Session recorded at Jai & Jai, we spoke with a panel of jurors from Archinect's Dry Futures competition, featuring: Charles Anderson of werk, Hadley Arnold of the Arid Lands Institute, Ian Quate and Colleen Tuite of GRNASFCK (who joined us via Skype), and Peter Zellner of Zellner Naecker Architects LLP. The winners had been announced just a few days prior.

Listen to the "Next Up" interview with select Dry Futures jurors:

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Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Peter Zellner

2015-08-27T08:46:00-04:00

Peter Zellner comes to Archinect's Dry Futures jury with a diverse architectural background, having worked for large, infrastructurally-minded firms like AECOM, while previously designing smaller-scale art spaces under his own firm, ZELLNERPLUS. In September of 2015, Peter will launch ZNc Architects with partner Paul Naecker. ZNc is a nimble, LEED accredited and NCARB certified architecture firm located in the LA Arts District.

We recently interviewed Peter at length on an episode of Archinect Sessions (listen here). Based in Los Angeles, Peter has seen the drought progress and intensify firsthand.

Peter's mindset on the drought combines experience living in the dry climates of Australia and southern California, to reflect on prior reactions (urban and not) to drought conditions. While conservation and sourcing are important, using every drop more efficiently by adopting large-scale recycling techniques will make the biggest impact on drought defense. Certain Californian municipalitie...

From Z to A: Peter Zellner joins us in the studio

2015-07-16T18:27:00-04:00

This week on the podcast: Gehry's design for the Eisenhower memorial is finally approved, Zaha Hadid's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo gets cut-and-pasted into some very Japanese situations, and Peter Zellner, Principal and Design Lead of AECOM's Los Angeles architecture division, and founder of Zellnerplus, sits down for a chat.

Listen to episode thirty-eight of Archinect Sessions, "From Z to A: Peter Zellner joins us in the studio":

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Download: this episode

Shownotes:

Paul's trip to the races: Southern California Timing Association

Take a tour along the Ballona Creek bike path, from Culver City to the Pacific Ocean

At the Congressional hearing over the Eisenh...