SCI-Arc is pleased to announce its Spring 2014 schedule of public lectures, discussions and exhibitions. The downtown LA architecture school’s highly anticipated series of public events provides audiences with access to award-winning architects, urban historians, artists, designers, curators, writers, scholars, and other cultural figures. Upcoming programs span from innovative theory to contemporary architecture, technical practice, writing, and urban planning. Admission to SCI-Arc-hosted public events and exhibitions is always free and open to the public.

LECTURES
All events begin at 7pm unless otherwise noted. Lectures takes place in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall and are broadcast live on www.sciarc.edu/live. Gallery discussions and opening receptions are held in the SCI-Arc Gallery. For additional information including lecture updates and gallery hours, please visit www.sciarc.edu.

January 15, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Jen Stark: Art, Science & the Cosmos
Artist, Los Angeles
Stark’s sculptures seemingly reconstruct elements of time, nature and the cosmos on an exponential scale. Her artwork is instantly recognizable for its breathtaking color spectrums rendered in mind-bending forms cut from paper, wood and other organic materials. During her presentation, she will explain her art process and her works relationship to math, science & the universe. She will reveal universal designs in nature that have the same shapes regardless of their size: from the shape of a huge galaxy, to fractals and tiny microorganisms under a microscope. Stark also draws inspiration for her works from the rhythmic visual qualities of mandalas and other such sacred objects, as well as the imagery of topographic maps, geometric repetitions and 3-dimensional prisms. www.jenstark.com

January 22, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Alberto Kalach: Alberto Kalach Workshop
Principal, Taller de Arquitectura X (TAX), Mexico City
Cited as one of the most versatile and prolific architectural voices in Mexico City today, Alberto Kalach co-founded the firm Taller de Arquitectura X (TAX) in 1981. Kalach’s concern for the emerging problems of his vast native city has inspired projects at a range of scales, from his minimal $5,000 houses to housing developments and urban master plans. Kalach’s most ambitious speculative plan, México Ciudad Futura, is the largest project ever conceived for Mexico City. www.kalach.com

January 31, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Lars Müller: 2014: Avant-Garde is Analog
Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich
Lars Müller is a graphic designer and publisher based in Switzerland. He established his design-studio in 1982 and started publishing books on typography, design, art, photography, and architecture. Lars Müller Publishers have published over 600 titles to date, many winning awards for their content and design. Müller has taught at various universities in Switzerland and Europe and is currently a guest lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. www.lars-mueller-publishers.com

February 5, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
Barry Bergdoll: Out of Site/In Plain View: On the Origins and Modernity of the Architecture Exhibition
Meyer Schapiro Professors of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, New York
Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Architectural History at Columbia University and a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, where from 2007-2013 he served as The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design.  At MoMA, he has organized, curated, and consulted on several major exhibitions of 19th and 20th-century architecture, including  last year’s “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes” with Jean-Louis Cohen and “Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light” with Corinne Bélier and Marc LeCoeur.  He served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2006-2008, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in winter 2011, and in 2013 delivered the 62nd A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

February 12, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Antoni Vives: Barcelona 5.0: The Polis is Back
Deputy Mayor, Barcelona, Spain
Antoni Vives currently serves as Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, where his vision for the next generation “smart city” is redefining the city’s approach to urbanism, infrastructures, environment and urban services. An influential thinker and city planner, he plays a significant role in Barcelona’s long-term efforts of repositioning itself within the global economy. In his role, Vives oversees Urban Habitat, an area that includes urbanism, town planning, housing, infrastructures, environment and urban services and ICT. He is also Vice President of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area and Counselor for the City District of Les Corts, and serves as Senior Advisor for the Prince of Asturias Professorship of Spanish Studies of the London School of Economics.

February 19, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Kevin Ratner: High-Rise Modular
President, Forest City West
Kevin L. Ratner is President of Forest City West, a subsidiary of Forest City Enterprises, Inc. Forest City is an owner, developer and manager of a diverse portfolio of premier real estate located throughout the nation, with approximately $10.9 billion in total assets. Ratner is responsible for Forest City’s commercial and residential businesses on the West Coast. In addition to the development of market rate, affordable, and high-density urban housing, Ratner and his team are currently involved with several mixed-use, developments focusing on technology and today’s innovation economy. Ratner has worked in Forest City’s Los Angeles office since 1998 and has been extensively involved in the development of more than 1,500 multi-housing units, including several high-profile redevelopment projects in Southern California. www.forestcity.net

March 5, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Wolf Prix: On Raimund Abraham: “Visions in Exile or Before We Were So Suddenly Interrupted”
Principal, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Vienna
Wolf D. Prix co-founded COOP HIMMELB(L)AU in 1968. He studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, the Architectural Association of London, and at SCI-Arc. His most well-known international projects include the Falkestrasse attic conversion in Vienna, the multifunctional UFA Cinema Center in Dresden, the BMW Welt in Münich, the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, the Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 for the Visual and Performing Arts, the Busan Cinema Center in Korea, as well as the Dalian International Conference Center in China. Projects currently under construction include the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France and the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. www.coop-himmelblau.at

March 12, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Sharon Johnston & Mark Lee: Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die
Principals, Johnston Marklee, Los Angeles
Johnston Marklee's diverse portfolio, led by principals Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, is unified by a singular conceptual approach to each project where the relationship between design and building technology are explored to create unique works of architecture. While maintaining a deep commitment to architecture history and the discipline's ongoing discourse, Johnston Marklee draws upon an extensive network of collaborators in related fields to broaden the breadth of design research, which has a particular focus on the arts. Current projects include The Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas; a campus for the UCLA Graduate Art Program in Culver City, California; DEPART Foundation's Poggio Golo winery in Montepulciano, Italy; Pavilion of Six Views, in Shanghai, China for the West Bund 2013: A Biennial of Architecture and Contemporary Art; and Chile House/META, a community arts center in Penco, Chile. www.johnstonmarklee.com

March 19, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Stan Allen: Landscapes and Buildings
Principal, SAA/Stan Allen Architect; Professor, Princeton University School of Architecture, New York

Stan Allen is an architect working in New York and George Dutton ’27 Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. From 2002 to 2012 he was Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton. He holds degrees from Brown University, The Cooper Union and Princeton. His architectural firm SAA/Stan Allen Architect has realized buildings and urban projects in the United States, South America and Asia. Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of innovative design strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practice of architecture. www.stanallenarchitect.com

March 26, 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall
Mark Z. Danielewski: Parable #8: Z is for Zoo (or Transgressing Barriers Against Creative Survival)
Novelist, Los Angeles
Mark Z. Danielewski is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel House of Leaves, National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and The Fifty Year Sword, which was performed on Halloween three years in a row at REDCAT. He is currently finishing the very beginning of The Familiar, a 27-volume novel about a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten. www.markzdaneilewski.com

EXHIBITIONS

January 17—March 2, 2014 in the SCI-Arc Gallery
Jeffrey Kipnis + Stephen Turk
Figure Ground Game
Exhibition Discussion & Opening Reception: Friday, January 17, 7pm
Jeffrey Kipnis discusses the exhibition with SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss

The Figure Ground Game, a multi-media, multi-disciplinary romp, draws upon animation, film, computer games and art to reaffirm and amplify architecture's ongoing speculative contest with instantiated power staged on the ground. Not an exhibition, but rather a curated show, the Figure Ground Game features the work of a half-dozen architects, painters, a sculptor and more, all related to one another by a desire to mine the tradition and history of figurality in the arts as it has been inflected in recent years by technology, media and the discourse of enfranchisement in order to rethink the consequences of the building-ground relationship a step or two further. Among the conjectures foregrounded in the show are new building postures, co-dependent structures, non-local contextualism, and perhaps most important of all, an assertion of a desire to see comedy achieve an equivalent status to tragedy in architecture, as it has for centuries in all of the other arts to the profound increase in their powers and the resultant existential benefit to each and all of us.

March 14—April 20, 2014 in the SCI-Arc Library
Florencia Pita/FPmod
UMMA Table & Objects
Exhibition Discussion & Opening Reception: Friday, March 14, 7pm
Florencia Pita and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss discuss the exhibition

The SCI-Arc Library presents an installation of Florencia Pita’s work, originally commissioned by Museum Director Joseph Rosa for the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The installation explores the provocations and intersections of digital technology, material experimentation, and ornament in the work of Argentina-born, Los Angeles-based architect and designer. It traces the evolution of Pita’s design ideology through installation pieces, urban design, tableware, furniture, and architecture, as well as small adornments. Her boldly colored works draw from literary, art, and biological sources; employ cutting-edge architectural fabrication techniques; and cross borders of visual art, architecture, and design.

The works on view where displayed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art from January 19 to June 16, 2013, in an exhibition titled: Florencia Pita/ FPmod. The Umma Table and several objects here commissioned by Museum Director Joseph Rosa for Florencia Pita’s first retrospective exhibition.

April 4—May 18, 2014 in the SCI-Arc Gallery
Baumgartner + Uriu
Apertures4
Exhibition Discussion & Opening Reception: Friday, April 4, 7pm
Herwig Baumgartner and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss discuss the exhibition

Apertures4 is part of an ongoing topic in the work of Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu that challenges the notion of apertures as flat glazed openings and redefines it as three dimensional objects creating thresholds between interior and exterior. It thus confronts the idea of the static frame with edges that are always in flux and can respond to environmental forces, such as sun and wind, exploiting the latent potential of energetic exchanges between the natural and the built environment. Apertures4 re-defines the DNA of the window in terms of function, components, appearance and materiality. In particular, it attempts to refine a current discourse of digital ecologies emphasizing an architecture in between nature and technology that can evolve into an interactive building organism. By using advanced silicone composites that allow a gradient of material properties within a single object, Apertures4 is able to respond to environmental forces without mechanical parts, creating a symbiotic relationship between nature, building morphologies and material expressions.

June 20—August 3, 2014 in the SCI-Arc Gallery
Heather Flood/F-Lab
Punk’d
Exhibition Discussion & Opening Reception: Friday, June 20, 7pm
Heather Flood and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss discuss the exhibition

Heather Flood is a designer of information, graphics, and architecture. In 2007 she founded F-lab, a form laboratory that focuses on the popular application of contemporary design and fabrication techniques.
F-lab’s recent commissions include a retail expansion strategy and store prototype for a new frozen yogurt brand, the design and installation of an exhibition that showcased the work of 45 contemporary designers, and the design and fabrication of a winning scheme for the SCI-Arc Board of Directors conference table, dubbed CHUB. Prior to founding F-lab, Flood was a founding partner in the research and design firm HOLA. With HOLA, Flood completed projects for the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, the New York office of Bartle Bogle and Haggerty, Nissan/Infiniti, CKOne, Coca-Cola, Samsung, the City of Chicago, Pitti Imagine Discovery, Yogini Apparel, and Soledad Enrichment Academy.

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Public Programs

SCI-Arc exhibitions and public programs are made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.

Parking and admission are free. No reservations are required. Events are broadcast live online at www.sciarc.edu/live.

SCI-Arc Public Programs are subject to change beyond our control. For the most current information, please visit www.sciarc.edu or call 213-613-2200.

Parking and Hours
The entrance to SCI-Arc's parking lot is at 350 Merrick Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013, between Traction Avenue and 4th Street in Los Angeles. The SCI-Arc Gallery is open daily from 10am–6pm; the Library Gallery is open daily from 12pm-6pm.