POSTOPOLIS! -- TUESDAY MARCH 31, 2009 – SATURDAY APRIL 4, 2009 

A live 5-day blogathon of back-to-back discussions, interviews, panel talks, slideshows, films and parties with scheduled and unscheduled guests, themed around landscape and the built environment.

Hosted by ArchDaily / Plataforma Arquitectura , BLDGBLOG , City of Sound , Subtopia,
mudd up!,  We Make Money Not Art

Location: Rooftop Terrace at The Standard, Downtown LA
 

On the occasion of Los Angeles Art Weekend, Storefront for Art and Architecture and ForYourArt presented Postopolis! LA, a live five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, and design held in Los Angeles from 31 March to 4 April 2009. Six bloggers, from five different cities around the world, hosted a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and presentations, fusing the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face-to-face interaction.

Over the course of five days, the six host bloggers invited 40+ participants from a range of fields including architecture, urban planning, geology, defense, publishing, game design, artistic practice, oceanography, music, politics and many others to give brief presentations, each followed by a public discussion.

Postopolis! LA followed in the footsteps of the first groundbreaking edition of Postopolis! held in New York in May 2007, hosted by BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat and Subtopia and attended by several thousand people over a period of five days. Postopolis! LA took place during the 2nd annual Los Angeles Art Weekend, highlighting the city’s vast array of creative talent.

SCHEDULE
The following lineup of speakers for Postopolis! LA was curated by the authors of the six host blogs.

TUESDAY 31
05:00 : Fritz Haeg Artist and Writer
05:40 : Patrick Keller Architect and Principal, Fabric
06:20 : Yo-Ichiro Hakomori Architect and Principal, wHY Architecture
07:00 : BREAK
07:20 : Dwayne Oyler Architect and Principal, Oyler Wu Collaborative
08:00 : Michael Dear Professor of Geography, USC
08:40 : Jeffrey Inaba Architect and Principal, Inaba Projects
09:20 : BREAK

The evening concluded with brief back-to-back presentations by the organizers and host blogs:
09:40 : Joseph Grima Storefront for Art and Architecture / Bettina Korek ForYourArt
10:00 : Geoff Manaugh BLDGBLOG / David Basulto Plataforma Arquitectura / Bryan Finoki Subtopia
10:20 : Jace Clayton mudd up! / Dan Hill City of Sound / Regine Debatty we make money not art
10:40 : OPEN QUESTIONS

WEDNESDAY 1
05:00 : Mary-Ann Ray Architect, Writer, and Principal, Studio Works Architects
05:40 : David Gissen Theorist and Historian, CCA
06:20 : Whitney Sander Architect and Principal, Sander Architects
07:00 : BREAK
07:20 : Sarah Johnston & Mark Lee Architects and Principals, Johnston MarkLee
08:00 : Robert Miles Kemp Designer and Principal, Variate Labs
08:40 : Freya Bardell & Brian Howe Principals, Greenmeme
09:20 : BREAK
09:40 : Ted Kane Architect and Writer
10:00 : Stephanie Smith Founder, Ecoshack

THURSDAY 2
05:00 : Austin Kelly Principal, XTEN Architecture
05:40 : Orhan Ayyüce Architect, Blogger , and Senior Editor, Archinect
06:20 : Ava Bromberg Just Space(s)
07:00 : BREAK
07:20 : Ben Cerveny Strategic and Conceptual Advisor, Stamen Design
08:00 : Steve Roden Musician and Artist
08:40 : Gary Dauphin Writer and Critic
09:20 : BREAK
09:40 : Benjamin Ball &Gaston Nogues Architects and Founding Partners, Ball-Nogues Studio
10:00 : Mike the Poet Poet and Writer

FRIDAY 3
05:00 : Michael Downing LAPD
05:40 : Bryan Boyer Organizer, Helsinki Design Lab 2010
06:20 : Ari Kletzky Founder, Islands of LA
07:00 : BREAK
07:20 : Eric Rodenbeck Founder, Stamen Design
08:00 : Matthew Coolidge Director, Center for Land Use Interpretation
08:40 : Christopher Hawthorne Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times
09:20 : BREAK
09:40 : David Burns, Austin Young & Matias Viegener Founders, fallen fruit
10:00 : Ken Ehrlich Artist and Writer

SATURDAY 4
04:20 : Benjamin Bratton Architect and Theorist
05:00 : Christian Moeller Artist
05:40 : Sean Dockray / Dan Goods / Daniel Rehn / Jay Yan
06:20 : Media Panel ( Matt Chaban (Architects Newspaper) , Curbed LA , Alissa Walker , Greg J. Smith , Christina Ulke )
07:00 : Photography Panel ( Catherine Ledner , Misha Gravenor , Dave Lauridsen , Tom Fowlks , Gregg Segal )
07:20 : BREAK
08:00 : Paul PetruniaFounder, Archinect School Bloggers Panel
08:40 : Magazine Panel Sam Grawe DWELL , Zach Frechette GOOD , & t.b.d
09:20 : CLOSING PARTY

About the six blogs hosting Postopolis! LA:

ArchDaily (English) & Plataforma Arquitectura (Spanish)
Author: David Basulto (Santiago, Chile)
Plataforma Arquitectura and ArchDaily focus on connecting architects and designers from around the world to debate about design in general and the current state of practice. Plataforma Arquitectura started in early 2006, and ArchDaily launched in March 2008. While both blogs share similar goals, they follow different approaches. The authors of ArchDaily have been traveling to the US constantly to interview architects who have an important role in education, public policy, or practice itself. On the other hand, Plataforma Arquitectura has become a powerful voice that has given more visibility to the Latin American architects as it reunites them and gathers their problems/rants/concerns acting as a whole. The editors of PA and AD have collaborated with the last 2 Biennales, helping spread the fame of Chilean – and Latin American – architecture around the world. Plataforma Arquitectura is the most-read Spanish language architecture blog in the world.

BLDGBLOG
Author: Geoff Manaugh (San Francisco)
Geoff Manaugh is senior editor of Dwell magazine and the author of BLDGBLOG, a 2006 Yahoo! Top 25 Pick of the Year and a Time Magazine Style & Design 100 blog for 2007. Since its launch in 2004, BLDGBLOG has been read by more than 5 million people. Manaugh has been called “the world's greatest living practitioner of ‘architecture fiction’” by Bruce Sterling, and one of the 50 “most influential architects, designers, and thinkers” in the field today by Icon magazine. Geoff Manaugh was a participant in the first edition of Postopolis! in NYC, 2007.

City of Sound
Author: Dan Hill (Sydney, Australia)
City of Sound is a blog about cities, architecture, design, media, and culture—often colliding in the same post on the imagined connections between travel writing and design, or football and architecture. Dan Hill was a participant in the first edition of Postopolis! in New York City, 2007.

Subtopia
Author: Bryan Finoki (San Francisco)
Subtopia (http://subtopia.blogspot.com) began as a site where research on the broad topic of “military urbanism” could be gathered. As time went on, Subtopia evolved into a larger, ongoing chronicle of how different Orwellian trends in urbanism engage the geopolitical process of constructing and living in cities all over the world today. In the world of architecture blogging, Subtopia is one of the most fascinating and unique destinations. Bryan Finoki was a participant in the first edition of Postopolis! in New York City, 2007.

Mudd Up!
Author: Jace Clayton (New York)
Jace Clayton is a writer & musician based in Brooklyn. His essays have appeared in such places as The Washington Post, Frieze, The Fader, Wire, Bidoun, The National, n+1, Abitare, and on his blog, Mudd Up! As a musician, he’s performed in over 25 countries, released records on Soul Jazz & Tigerbeat6, DJ’ed in a band with Norah Jones, done two John Peel Sessions, and was turntable soloist with the 80-member Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. Jace Clayton hosts a weekly radio show on NYC-area FM station WFMU, 91.1 fm, featuring lots of international exclusives and live guests.

We Make Money Not Art
Author: Regine Debatty (Paris, France)
The blog we-make-money-not-art.com (WMMNA) is a series of reports on art exhibitions, architecture events, conferences on digital culture, and design festivals taking place all over the world. The blog also features interviews with creative people, book reviews and visits to art and design schools. WMMNA won a Webby Award in both 2006 and 2007 for best personal/cultural blog and a Media Guardian Innovation Award in 2008 as Best Independent Blog. In addition to writing about the intersection between art, design, and technology, Régine Debatty also curates art shows, organizes discussion panels, and lectures internationally about the ways that artists, hackers, and interaction designers continue to(mis)use technology.