Events at SCI-Arc are always free and open to the public  

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SCI-Arc is pleased to continue its commitment to maintaining a robust platform for interdisciplinary thinkers with its fall 2019 series of public events. The SCI-Arc public lectures coming this fall introduce speakers from a broad cross-section of cultural practices, including Ghanian architectural technologist and programmer Iddris Sandu, SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program Chair Tom Wiscombe, Coolhaus founder Natasha Case, and Princeton School of Architecture faculty V. Mitch McEwen.  

The public lecture series is complemented by several exhibitions, including Claude Parent: Visionary Architect, which will be accompanied by the launch of a book on the celebrated French architect, as well as a panel discussion between Jennifer Dunlop, Thom Mayne, Deborah Richmond, Michele Saee, and Hernan Diaz Alonso.  

SCI-Arc’s annual Selected Thesis exhibition, highlighting the most compelling student thesis projects of the year, will open to the public on September 20 and run through September 29, 2019.  

Admission to SCI-Arc-hosted public events and exhibitions is always free and open to the public.

Media Inquiries: Stephanie Atlan, news@sciarc.edu, 213-356-5395

09/20        Selected Thesis 2019 Exhibition Opening

09/25        Walead Beshty Lecture

10/02        Iddris Sandu Lecture

10/09        Timothy Morton Lecture

10/16        V. Mitch McEwen Lecture

10/18        Fabian Marcaccio: Paintants Lab

10/23        Tom Wiscombe Lecture

10/24        Worlds of Homelessness Panel

10/25        Claude Parent: Visionary Architect Exhibition Opening

11/06        Jennifer Bonner Lecture

11/13        Natasha Case Lecture

11/15        Discrete Book Launch & Panel

11/20        The Future of Automation Symposium

11/22        Angelica Lorenzi Faculty Talk

12/04        Refik Anadol Lecture

Visit https://sciarc.edu/events/ for more information about upcoming lectures. All events begin at 7pm unless otherwise noted. Lectures take place in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall and are broadcast on SCI-Arc’s Facebook page. Gallery opening receptions are held in the SCI-Arc Gallery and Kappe Library Gallery spaces.    

LECTURES  

September 25, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Walead Beshty: Lecture  

Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, UK) is an artist and writer working in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; the Barbican Centre, London; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden / Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City. Beshty’s work is represented in permanent museum collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Beshty has organized exhibitions at such institutions as Luma Arles, France; the Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. Monographs on his work include Walead Beshty: Natural Histories (JRP|Ringier, 2011; second expanded edition, 2014) and Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001–2010 (Damiani Editore, 2010). Beshty edited the anthology Ethics, in Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series (MIT Press, 2015), and Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, (JRP|Ringier, 2018). His collected writings 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings (2003–2015) was published by JRP|Ringier, 2016.  

October 7, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Iddris Sandu: Lecture

Iddris Sandu is a Ghana-born, Los Angeles-bred, 22-year-old technologist, entrepreneur, and self-identified ‘cultural architect.’ At age 13, Sandu did coding work on several projects for Google, one of which was Google Plus; by age 19 he’d consulted or written algorithms for Uber, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter. In 2016, Sandu was honored by president Obama and in 2017, he conceived the world’s first smart retail experience, The Marathon Store, with the late rapper Nipsey Hussle. He’s collaborated with Kanye West and currently serves as Design and Tech Consultant for Yeezy. Sandu gave a TED Talk, entitled GenZ: Plan A, in 2018, has lectured at Stanford University, and earlier this year delivered the commencement address at NYU. His current and upcoming projects include unveiling a high-tech parking meter that will be released in 2020 as well as building a state-of-the-art school in West Africa.  

October 9, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

V. Mitch McEwen: Lecture  

V. Mitch McEwen joined the Princeton School of Architecture as Assistant Professor in fall 2017 from the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning. She is founding director of Black Box, a research group at Princeton’s Embodied Computation Lab, and co-founder of A(n) Office, an architecture collaborative of studios in Detroit and New York. McEwen's design work has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. Her work has been commissioned by the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Istanbul Design Biennial. Projects in Detroit include a combined residence and flower incubator for an engineer at 3M, a strategy for 100 houses selected by the City of Detroit to densify the neighborhood of Fitzgerald, and an award-winning repurposing of a balloon-frame house titled House Opera.  Her work in urban design and architecture began at Bernard Tschumi Architects and the New York City Department of City Planning, as well as founding the Brooklyn-based SUPERFRONT. McEwen earned her M.Arch at Columbia and BA at Harvard.     

October 23, 7pm in W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Tom Wiscombe: Lecture  

Tom Wiscombe is founder and principal of Tom Wiscombe Architecture, an internationally recognized design practice. His work is known for powerful massing, alluring graphic qualities, and tectonic inventiveness. Wiscombe is currently working on the Dark Chalet, a Utah residence for the CEO of the largest independent solar developer in the US, The West Hollywood Sunset Spectacular, a twenty-first century billboard and public plaza developed in partnership with MOCA, and Blockchains City, located on 67,000 acres of Land in Nevada. This project envisions a new world built on blockchain technology, allowing for new forms of collaboration, sustainability, and democracy. His book, OBJECTS MODELS WORLDS is forthcoming in fall 2019. Wiscombe is Chair of the Bachelor of Architecture Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where he has taught for over 12 years.    

November 6, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Jennifer Bonner: Lecture  

Jennifer Bonner (b. Alabama) is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Architecture II Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Bonner has received the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Emerging Voices Award (AIA/ Young Architects Forum), and Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award. Her creative work has been published in architectural trade journals including Architect, Metropolis, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, and Wallpaper, as well as a+t, DAMN, PLAT, Offramp, and MAS Context. She is founder and author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta, editor of Platform: Still Life,  and a guest editor for ART PAPERS’s special issue on architecture and design of Los Angeles. In 2009, Bonner founded and is the Director of MALL (Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability), a creative practice for art and architecture. MALL's recent work includes a single family residence constructed out of cross-laminated timber, a mid-rise tower that resembles a sandwich, an urban development for a small lot located in Atlanta, Georgia, and a temporary installation for Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway. MALL’s work can be described as pictorially graphic and out of place, playfully challenging the production of architecture through representation, materiality and color.   

November 13, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Natasha Case: Lecture  

Natasha Case founded Coolhaus in 2009 with Freya Estreller after working in architecture at Walt Disney Imagineering. They launched their architecturally-inspired, unique ice cream sandwich company from their barely drive-able postal van at the Coachella Music Festival to an audience of 100,000. They built a loyal following over the festival weekend and returned to LA to an abundance of viral press, rapidly-building social media following, and an eager foodie audience. Since then, Case has been named a Forbes 30 Under 30 for Food & Beverage; Zagat 30 Under 30, LinkedIn 10 Under 35 for Food & Leisure, and was recently named UCLA LGBTQ+ 2019 Alum of the Year. She has been featured in many national publications and media outlets like Cosmo, Dwell, Bon Appetit, Bustle, Vice, NPR, and Food52, and TV shows including Food Network’s Chopped, Barefoot Contessa, Unique Sweets, Good Morning America, King of Cones, Andy Cohen Live, Top Chef Jr., and co-hosts her own podcast, Start to Sale through Eater/Vox Media. Case has collaborated on brand partnerships with Bustle, Lexus, MeUndies, and K-Swiss, among others. Coolhaus has become a pioneer in dessert innovation with its architecturally-inspired creations, and is the leading women-owned ice cream business at the grocery level, growing significantly to include not only four trucks and two storefronts in Los Angeles, two trucks in New York City, and four trucks in Dallas, Texas. Coolhaus artisan-crafted ice cream sandwiches, pints, and bars are now available in 7,500+ gourmet grocery stores (in every state) ranging from Whole Foods global and Wegman's to Kroger, Safeway Albertson’s, and Publix, and distributed internationally in Asia and the Middle East. In 2019 Coolhaus successfully launched its first dairy-free line with sandwiches and pints at Whole Foods and other specialty/natural stores.      

November 15, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Discrete: Reappraising the Digital in Architecture, Book Launch & Panel Discussion  

Discussion with M. Casey Rehm, Tom Wiscombe, Jose Sanchez, Gilles Retsin, and moderated by Marrikka Trotter    

 

If being comes in “chunks,” as Graham Harman has said, what are architectural chunks made of? Two generations of architects have deployed this concept in radically different ways. Tom Wiscombe argues for architectural “supercomponents:” specific, unique entities that are produced in the process of creating fully choreographed, obsessively detailed, alternative realities. Gilles Retsin claims that new, digitally optimized regimes of fabrication can more fully align with production processes to create radical economies. M. Casey Rehm’s neuro-net algorithms produce stylized and futuristic aggregates that straddle the boundary between the readily buildable and the otherwise unimaginable. Jose Sanchez promotes game-based collaborative design based on standardized building chunks as a way to remake the relationship between communities and the production of housing. Embedded in each of these positions is a different philosophical position about what constitutes the core of the discipline, and how architecture should relate to the status quo.  

December 4, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Refik Anadol: Lecture  

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist and director. Currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a lecturer and visiting researcher in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.  He is working in the fields of site-specific public art with parametric data sculpture approach and live audio/visual performance with immersive installation approach, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, a Master of Fine Arts degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree with Summa Cum Laude in Photography and Video. Anadol is Co-founder and Creative director at Antilop.   

Anadol is the recipient of a number of awards, prizes including Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Awards and Google’s Art and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. Anadol's site-specific audio/visual performances have been seen in Walt Disney Concert Hall (USA), Hammer Museum (USA), International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center (Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival SantaFe New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), Sydney City Art (Australia), Lichtrouten (Germany).  

EXHIBITIONS  

September 20 – September 29 in the SCI-Arc Gallery

Selected Thesis 2019

Friday, September 20, 7pm: Opening Reception  

A juried exhibition of exceptional thesis projects by 2018 graduates, featuring the 2019 Gehry Prize winning thesis project.  

October 18 – December 1 in the SCI-Arc Gallery

Fabian Marcaccio: Paintants Lab

Friday, October 18 at 7pm: Opening Reception  

Fabian Marcaccio (b. 1963, Rosario, Argentina) lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. Major solo exhibitions include Paintant Stories, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro (2014); Some USA Stories, Krefeld Kunstmuseen, Krefeld Germany (2012); The Structural Canvas Paintants, Lehmbruk Museum, Duisburg Germany (2012); and From Altered Paintings to Paintants, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2004). Major group exhibitions include Summer Projects, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002), Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002) and the 44th Biennial of Contemporary American painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1995). Marcaccio’s work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA, Blanton Museum of Art, Miami Museum of Art (MAM), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), among others.     

Fabian Marcaccio is one of the pioneers of digital painting. He started his practice in the 1990s with the Altered Genetics of Painting, emphasizing the alteration of pictorial content in relation to bio-genetics.  He moved to an urban scale with a new type of muralism, the Environmental paintings.  These works unify aspects film, urbanism, architecture, and painting.  Currently he is involved in a pictorial re-engineering of painting with the use of 3D printing, which he defines as hyper-structural painting or techno-brutalism. Marcaccio considers Paintants Lab to be his dynamic structural atlas; a constellation about pictorial complexity. The lab is constantly evolving and is the core of his research.  The effect and mood of the lab is in its multiplicity of pictorial concepts, modes and techniques.  It is not contingent on any single drawing, digital print, animation or 3D-printed object, but on its multiplicity. Its force is in the innumerable branches of evolution and mutation through material, technique, space, and time.     

October 25 – December 1 in the Kappe Library

Claude Parent: Visionary Architect, Exhibition, Book Launch, & Discussion

Friday, October 25 at 7pm: Opening Reception & Discussion  

SCI-Arc’s Kappe library hosts the release of the book, Claude Parent: Visionary Architect (Rizzoli New York), celebrating the work of French architect Claude Parent, alongside an accompanying exhibition. This exhibition includes a full-scale ramp installation based on the architect’s own oblique apartment interior, and presents a selection of never seen before original drawings and sketches, as well as photographs of iconic projects and publications about his work.     

Architect and theoretician Claude Parent was the first in France to make a sharp break with modernism beginning in the 1950s. Through books, manifesto-drawings, and built projects, his work has enabled new conceptualizations and understandings of space. Parent’s manifesto, the Oblique Function theory developed with Paul Virilio in 1963, dictated that buildings should use slopes, reject orthogonality, be wall-free where possible, and have a predominance of space over surface. One of the most pivotal and radical architects of the twentieth century, his work influenced leading architects such as Gehry, Hadid, Libeskind, and Nouvel, who consider him a precursor. Some of his iconic built works include the Villa Bloc in Antibes (1962), the Drusch House in Versailles (1965), the Sainte-Bernadette church in Nevers (1966), the Foundation Avicenne in Paris (1968), and the oblique superstores of Sens and Ris-Orangis (1971).    

The exhibition opens on October 25, 2019 with a book presentation and conversation between Jennifer Dunlop, Deborah Richmond, Michele Saee, and Hernan Diaz Alonso, with the presence of the authors Chloé and Laszlo Parent.  

The exhibition is made possible with the support of SCI-Arc and the French Consulate in Los Angeles, in collaboration with the Hennessey + Ingalls bookstore. Designers and curators include Laszlo Parent and Sara Benrahmoun, drawings and photographs from Claude Parent Archives, and Oblique Ramps construction by SCI-Arc.