What is the role of curation in today’s architecture & design disciplinary framework? The guest curator program aims to produce a conversation through making & curating that begins to analyze traditional modes and models of curating architecture & design.

The Guest Curator Program was motivated by the A+D’s desire to provide an opportunity for emerging voices to collaborate, create, and experiment alongside the museum’s chief curator on contemporary modes of curation, media, and untapped mediums. The Program is an evolving body of professionals and academics from different backgrounds gathered in the effort to initiate conversations on how to expand upon and rupture traditional modes of curating architecture and design.

With this particular rotation, the museum is thrilled to focus on new media and modes of expression and how they may intersect with classic curatorial techniques, and emerging themes in design, architecture, and consumption. The 2019 guest curators are Alessio Grancini, Claudia Wainer, and Runze Zhang. You can read more about each of the guest curators backgrounds, projects and tendencies below. 

Alessio Grancini

Alessio Grancini is an architectural designer originally from Italy and currently based in the city of Los Angeles. His practice operates between architecture and extended reality media. He shares with his thesis collaborator Runze Zhang achievements as the Gehry Prize 2019 for the best Master Graduate thesis at SCI-Arc and the best app for AEC at the USC Creating reality Hackathon ‘18. Alessio joined the advanced technology team at Morphosis Architects in October ‘18.

Alessio received a bachelor of architecture from Milan Polytechnic in 2015 and successively graduated from SCI-Arc in 2018. Alessio’s fondness for technology applied to design comes from the scientific background as a high-school student and the innate enthusiasm for cinematic arts as animation, VFX, and sound.The extended collaboration with his thesis partner Runze keeps producing speculative prototypes for urban Augmented Reality platforms. The thesis project is mean to be scaled up during the next year.  Alessio’s disciplinary approach for Augmented Reality is influenced by the discipline of architecture and is meant to generate solid model for interacting with new realities.

Claudia Wainer

Claudia Wainer is a Los-Angeles-based designer and educator. Her work investigates the intersection of technology, consumer culture, and gender. She currently teaches undergraduate design studios at Cal Poly Pomona. She completed her postgraduate degree from SCI-Arc’s Design Theory and Pedagogy program in 2018, where she also previously graduated from SCI-Arc’s Master of Architecture program in 2017. 

Runze Zhang

Runze Zhang is a Creative Technologist at Kilograph and a freelance XR developer. He was born and raised in Shanghai. Runze holds both a Bachelor of Architecture from Tongji University and a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCIArc). Games of Deletion (GoD), in collaboration with Alessio Grancini, is an award-winning Gehry Prize 2018 Thesis project. GoD pushes the disciplinary potentials within architecture; it builds on the contemporary discourse of how architecture utilizes the digital property and how urban physical canvas’, such as murals, reanimates the way people engage the city through refreshing and entertaining MR experience in blank space. Alessio and he actively explore aspects of AR within architectural design at SCIArc. Games of Deletion is widely exhibited throughout California, including recent exposures at the Augmented Reality Expo 2018, Mapbox Locate 2018, A+D Museum, IDEAS UCLA, etc. Runze, the core Unity/Unreal developer and prototyper of AR/VR team at Kilograph, is the forerunner of Digital Experience Design (DXD) and creates gamifying interaction in space. His is one of the recipients of the Grand Prize for AEC section at Creating Reality 2018 AR/VR Hackathon held by USC&MIT.