For those of you that missed it but wanted to see it, for those that saw it and need to see it again, and for those of you that are easily distracted, here is my Pecha Kucha Night Chicago presentation. My sincere thanks to Matt Dumich of Young Architects Forum, Peter Exley and his gang of volunteers responsible for bringing PKN to Chicago 6 or 8 times a year, and everyone who came out to offer their support. A special thanks to Thorsten Bosch for tolerating my pestering and sending me the video.
The next PKN is December 1st, see you there.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Volunteer opportunity: Ask an Architect this Saturday
Chicago Bungalow needs volunteers on short notice. To make the cut, you must be licensed, be in good standing with the AIA, have experience in single family and especially vintage homes and experience with implementation of green technologies would be nice. Interested? Contact Chris Turley.
More information.
More information.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
IIT College of Architecture Symposium: What Next?
This Saturday, October 17th, with a keynote speech on Friday night, IIT will be hosting a symposium promising to address the impact of the following influences on the profession: rapid global urbanization, looming environmental change, algorithmic form generation, digital modeling and economic upheaval. The organizers have lined up an impressive roster of architects and educators to present the latest developments in these areas.
Here's a taste of the schedule:
Here's a taste of the schedule:
Friday, 16 October 6 pm
Wishnick Hall, IIT, 3255 S. Dearborn Street
Keynote Address
Robert Somol
Director and Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture
Saturday, 17 October 9 am — 6:30 pm
McCormick Tribune Campus Center, IIT, 3201 S. State Street
What Next for Interface?
Joel Sanders
Associate Professor, Yale University
Principal, Joel Sanders Architect, New York
What Next for Probability?
Luke Ogrydziak + Zoë Prillinger
Friedman Assistant Professors, University of California at Berkley
Principals, Ogrydziak/Prillinger Architects, San Francisco
What Next for the Avant-Garde?
Michael Meredith
Associate Professor, Harvard University
Principal, MOS, Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT
What Next for Resources?
Sandy Isenstadt
Associate Professor, University of Delaware
Member, Institute for Advanced Studies
What Next for the Past?
Andrew Herscher
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
What Next for Futurology?
Felicity Scott
Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Plus a roundtable discussion with:The event is free and open to the public but seating is limited. If you're interested in hearing about where the profession may be headed from leading practitioners and educators, RSVP.
Joseph Rosa
Chair of Architecture and Design, Art Institute of Chicago
Monday, October 12, 2009
Upcoming Lectures
Check out the much-neglected sidebar for some outstanding lectures over the next two weeks including some heavy-hitting theorists at UIC (I've noticed a recurring theme here). Don't forget Sergio Palleroni, not a theorist-a practicist? Well, he's certainly an activist. He'll be here Oct 20th. Tune in tomorrow for information about a symposium at IIT this weekend. I hope your Friday evening and Saturday is clear.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Post AIA Conference Post
I wanted to write a brief reflection about my experience at the conference including some of the highlights as I think it would be relevant to the architecture community at large.
The three themes of the conference, Building Information Model (BIM), Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), and sustainability certainly resonated throughout the seminars. So much so that, in many cases, the content of several seminars overlapped.
What I really wanted to convey to you was the impact of the opening and closing keynote speakers. The first speaker, Larry Prusak, talked about knowledge for an hour and a half. And while that may seem like a boring speech to sit through, he delivered it with such wit and enthusiasm that we were all on the edges of our seats. I easily could have listened to another 2 hours.
He talked about knowledge as the new commodity but, paradoxically, we are unable to exchange it as a commodity. And, unlike the old standby commodities, land, labor and capital, we don't run out of knowledge when we use it. In fact, it tends to increase when we share it. Some memorable quotes:
He referred to many present-day and historical references, describing companies like Intel that scour the globe for personnel and a company in Norway that has 30 "idea makers" whose job it is to find new ideas by talking to researches, academics and scientists throughout the world and bring back those ideas to the company.
What does this mean for architects? In the last 100 we have become more of a private club rejecting outside ideas or even closing ourselves off completely as a result, in my opinion, of our huge, bloated egos. I’ve often heard architects complain about structural engineers or contractors. In my experience, the more successful projects have been those where there is more of a collaborative effort and the architect welcomes the advice from contractors and engineers rather than stifling them at the risk of being proven wrong.
The closing keynote speech by Dr. Daniel S. Friedman, Dean of the College of Built Environments at Washington University was equally compelling and an appropriate way to end the conference. He talked about the profession changing, or rather, not changing while the world around it does. He suggested it was leaving us exposed to the potential of deregulation and referenced the deregulation of architects in the U.K. With all the talk about BIM throughout the seminar, we have to realize that we are no longer representing buildings with lines but we are now building models with objects, in effect simulating construction. This has the potential of bridging a huge gap between professionals and lay-people or students of architecture that previously existed, potentially lessening the value of the architect.
He proposed changes in the way architecture students are educated as well as the need of seasoned practitioners to teach and criticized the current system of tenure, saying some of these professors have never practiced and will never retire reducing the chances for change to occur at the university level.
He likened his new profession of architecture to that of the scientific or medical community in which university education, and especially research are extremely important to their respective fields. I've often regretted the fact that we in the architecture community are so competitive that there is a lack of collaboration that I feel is sorely missing. Perhaps if we had some kind of governing body or publication, like the Journal of Medicine, architects would be more inclined to share their ideas as there would be a method of providing and tracking acknowledgment.
On academia, he had 10 principals that he has been proposing throughout universities and to the NAAB:
1 treat the entire curriculum like studio - all studio all the time
2 use research to drive design (design as skill, design as an epistemology)
- type drove 19th
- program drove 20th
- research drives 21st
3 teach more building science (NAAB criteria should be ~ 50/50 in technical knowledge)
4 mandate teamwork
5 replace the jury system with studio rounds (like medical rounds / grand rounds for final reviews)
6 dissect abandoned buildings (access to building pathology…)
7 use case method to teach professional practice and ethics (courage to face uncertainty)
8 interdigitate research and internship
9 require internship for accreditation
10 quality interns for licensure at graduation
One of my favorites is the Studio in the Round, as doctors have, in lieu of the current system of critiques and jurors. He criticizes the current system saying we teach our students how to fail rather than how to succeed.
I spoke to him afterward and suggested that he could tackle architectural education reform from two ends rather than from just the universities. If the AIA has been able to incorporate mandatory green Learning Units, why not mandatory research or teaching units?
If you ever have a chance to hear either of these two gentlemen speak, I highly recommend it. I also recommend following Dr. Freidman’s work. Change is inevitable and it remains to be seen whether we as architects will step up to the responsibly or whether we will continue to ride the wave while outside influences force us to change to accommodate them. Lets put the leader back in architect.
The three themes of the conference, Building Information Model (BIM), Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), and sustainability certainly resonated throughout the seminars. So much so that, in many cases, the content of several seminars overlapped.
What I really wanted to convey to you was the impact of the opening and closing keynote speakers. The first speaker, Larry Prusak, talked about knowledge for an hour and a half. And while that may seem like a boring speech to sit through, he delivered it with such wit and enthusiasm that we were all on the edges of our seats. I easily could have listened to another 2 hours.
He talked about knowledge as the new commodity but, paradoxically, we are unable to exchange it as a commodity. And, unlike the old standby commodities, land, labor and capital, we don't run out of knowledge when we use it. In fact, it tends to increase when we share it. Some memorable quotes:
Knowledge has the tendency to stick. It's sticky.
Cognitive Diversity.
We should be teaching children rhetoric instead of calculus.
He referred to many present-day and historical references, describing companies like Intel that scour the globe for personnel and a company in Norway that has 30 "idea makers" whose job it is to find new ideas by talking to researches, academics and scientists throughout the world and bring back those ideas to the company.
What does this mean for architects? In the last 100 we have become more of a private club rejecting outside ideas or even closing ourselves off completely as a result, in my opinion, of our huge, bloated egos. I’ve often heard architects complain about structural engineers or contractors. In my experience, the more successful projects have been those where there is more of a collaborative effort and the architect welcomes the advice from contractors and engineers rather than stifling them at the risk of being proven wrong.
The closing keynote speech by Dr. Daniel S. Friedman, Dean of the College of Built Environments at Washington University was equally compelling and an appropriate way to end the conference. He talked about the profession changing, or rather, not changing while the world around it does. He suggested it was leaving us exposed to the potential of deregulation and referenced the deregulation of architects in the U.K. With all the talk about BIM throughout the seminar, we have to realize that we are no longer representing buildings with lines but we are now building models with objects, in effect simulating construction. This has the potential of bridging a huge gap between professionals and lay-people or students of architecture that previously existed, potentially lessening the value of the architect.
He proposed changes in the way architecture students are educated as well as the need of seasoned practitioners to teach and criticized the current system of tenure, saying some of these professors have never practiced and will never retire reducing the chances for change to occur at the university level.
He likened his new profession of architecture to that of the scientific or medical community in which university education, and especially research are extremely important to their respective fields. I've often regretted the fact that we in the architecture community are so competitive that there is a lack of collaboration that I feel is sorely missing. Perhaps if we had some kind of governing body or publication, like the Journal of Medicine, architects would be more inclined to share their ideas as there would be a method of providing and tracking acknowledgment.
On academia, he had 10 principals that he has been proposing throughout universities and to the NAAB:
1 treat the entire curriculum like studio - all studio all the time
2 use research to drive design (design as skill, design as an epistemology)
- type drove 19th
- program drove 20th
- research drives 21st
3 teach more building science (NAAB criteria should be ~ 50/50 in technical knowledge)
4 mandate teamwork
5 replace the jury system with studio rounds (like medical rounds / grand rounds for final reviews)
6 dissect abandoned buildings (access to building pathology…)
7 use case method to teach professional practice and ethics (courage to face uncertainty)
8 interdigitate research and internship
9 require internship for accreditation
10 quality interns for licensure at graduation
One of my favorites is the Studio in the Round, as doctors have, in lieu of the current system of critiques and jurors. He criticizes the current system saying we teach our students how to fail rather than how to succeed.
I spoke to him afterward and suggested that he could tackle architectural education reform from two ends rather than from just the universities. If the AIA has been able to incorporate mandatory green Learning Units, why not mandatory research or teaching units?
If you ever have a chance to hear either of these two gentlemen speak, I highly recommend it. I also recommend following Dr. Freidman’s work. Change is inevitable and it remains to be seen whether we as architects will step up to the responsibly or whether we will continue to ride the wave while outside influences force us to change to accommodate them. Lets put the leader back in architect.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Palleroni Lecture Countdown
On the evening of October 20th, architect and activist Sergio Palleroni will present a lecture of his work and experiences at the Graham Foundation. It should pair well with the new exhibit opening that week at the Graham called Actions. More on that later.
When planning for this started, Mr. Palleroni's name sounded only vaguely familiar until I remembered seeing him featured on an episode of Design e2. One of the services his organization, BaSiC Initiative provides is teaching very poor communities how to build housing from materials available on the land. Often times these result in now forgotten methods of construction as was the case on the Design e2 episode when he taught a Native American community in Mexico how to build houses out of adobe brick. He thus not only provides what we would neatly categorize his housing as affordable, but he teaches communities how to build them for themselves, empowering them with skills they can pass on to future generations indefinitely.
As a sort of countdown to the event, I'll be writing a series of posts on the organizations involved with planning the lecture. Over the next three weeks, look for posts in the form of summaries or interviews or both about National Public Housing Museum, City Design Center, Graham Foundation, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Converge:Exchange, ADPSR, LL Consulting, SHED Studio and Urban Habitat Chicago.
The lecture will be followed by a panelist discussion with a chance to ask questions. This is a rare opportunity and I, for one, am grateful for Mr. Palleroni donating his time like this to share his craft with us. The lecture starts at 6pm.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Blogging for the AIA
For the next 3 days I'll be blogging from AIA's Changing Times|Time for Change conference at the Wyndham Hotel. They asked if I was interested and, upon reviewing the schedule of topics, I said yes. You can find my posts here.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Volunteers Needed in September for Exhibition Evaluation Project
From the Chicago Architecture Foundation:
Gallery Observations for Chicago Model City
CAF is looking for volunteers to be part of an important project this year that will help us better understand our audience visitation for exhibitions in the atrium space. Volunteers are needed to help evaluate the effectiveness of the 2009 exhibition Chicago Model City which runs June 11-November 21, 2009. Volunteers will conduct gallery movement observations, hand out surveys to visitors, and track attendance numbers.
If you have an interest in learning more about the interests of CAF’s audiences and the effectiveness of CAF’s marketing and exhibition development please join us on this project!
We are currently looking for volunteers during the week of Friday, September 25 – Thursday, October 1. Shifts run in 2-1/2 hour increments from 9am – 6:30pm. Service hours will be earned for each shift.
To sign up, please contact Barbara Gordon at bgordon@architecture.org or 312-922-3432 ext 225.
See my previous post about the exhibit here.
Gallery Observations for Chicago Model City
CAF is looking for volunteers to be part of an important project this year that will help us better understand our audience visitation for exhibitions in the atrium space. Volunteers are needed to help evaluate the effectiveness of the 2009 exhibition Chicago Model City which runs June 11-November 21, 2009. Volunteers will conduct gallery movement observations, hand out surveys to visitors, and track attendance numbers.
If you have an interest in learning more about the interests of CAF’s audiences and the effectiveness of CAF’s marketing and exhibition development please join us on this project!
We are currently looking for volunteers during the week of Friday, September 25 – Thursday, October 1. Shifts run in 2-1/2 hour increments from 9am – 6:30pm. Service hours will be earned for each shift.
To sign up, please contact Barbara Gordon at bgordon@architecture.org or 312-922-3432 ext 225.
See my previous post about the exhibit here.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Exhibit Review: The Glue Factory
On Friday, I attended the opening of a new exhibit at I-Space, The Glue Factory. On display was documentation of peoples' fears.
Curated by Rashmi Ramaswamy and Mike Newman of Shed Studio and Helen Slade, all of whom are part of The Museum of Contemporary Phenomenon, this show is the culmination of a number of studies and surveys that began with an interactive method for community members to state their fears in a gallery exhibit called "What Do You Fear?/House of Fear". Ms. Ramaswamy was surprised to find the majority of fears surrounding issues of growing old: alone, without money, unable to take care of one's self, degradation of mental and physical capacities. "Especially since, at the time, the major news headlines were about global issues such as the Afghan and Iraq wars and the fight on terrorism. The fears were rather selfish considering the issues being broadcast in the news."
Which is what makes The Glue Factory so well-timed today; health care and domestic issues are the big stories of the day. I've said before, it's good to see architects take on social issues. We're so often focused on the built environment, the needs of the client and budgetary constraints that we never consider the social impact we may be making (or most often, the social impact we're not making).
The Glue Factory is on display on the 2nd floor of the I-Space gallery and runs through October 10th.
Curated by Rashmi Ramaswamy and Mike Newman of Shed Studio and Helen Slade, all of whom are part of The Museum of Contemporary Phenomenon, this show is the culmination of a number of studies and surveys that began with an interactive method for community members to state their fears in a gallery exhibit called "What Do You Fear?/House of Fear". Ms. Ramaswamy was surprised to find the majority of fears surrounding issues of growing old: alone, without money, unable to take care of one's self, degradation of mental and physical capacities. "Especially since, at the time, the major news headlines were about global issues such as the Afghan and Iraq wars and the fight on terrorism. The fears were rather selfish considering the issues being broadcast in the news."
Which is what makes The Glue Factory so well-timed today; health care and domestic issues are the big stories of the day. I've said before, it's good to see architects take on social issues. We're so often focused on the built environment, the needs of the client and budgetary constraints that we never consider the social impact we may be making (or most often, the social impact we're not making).
The Glue Factory is on display on the 2nd floor of the I-Space gallery and runs through October 10th.
Friday, September 11, 2009
9/11 Declared Day of Service
What will you do?
If the plethora of links on the sidebar don't float your boat, I recommend contacting your alderman. Often times they will have a list of not-for-profits on their website. At the very least, they will have someone on staff to point you in the right direction.
Can't weasel out of work today? Here are two ideas for tomorrow. As mentioned in a previous post, Rebuilding Together is conducting interviews of homeowners as well as scoping their homes to qualify them for their rebuilding day in April.
Also tomorrow, I'm coordinating a team on behalf of Architecture for Humanity Chicago Chapter to head out to Peoples Church to do some field measuring. They provide church services on Sunday, yes, but the rest of the time they provide shelter for the homeless on their other floors. Here are some photos. The ultimate goal will be to document this beautiful and historic building but they have an immediate need for ADA upgrades and new restrooms. The more the merrier so if you're interested hit that little Contact Me link in the sidebar and send me a note.
Now I just have to figure out how to be in two places at once...
If the plethora of links on the sidebar don't float your boat, I recommend contacting your alderman. Often times they will have a list of not-for-profits on their website. At the very least, they will have someone on staff to point you in the right direction.
Can't weasel out of work today? Here are two ideas for tomorrow. As mentioned in a previous post, Rebuilding Together is conducting interviews of homeowners as well as scoping their homes to qualify them for their rebuilding day in April.
Also tomorrow, I'm coordinating a team on behalf of Architecture for Humanity Chicago Chapter to head out to Peoples Church to do some field measuring. They provide church services on Sunday, yes, but the rest of the time they provide shelter for the homeless on their other floors. Here are some photos. The ultimate goal will be to document this beautiful and historic building but they have an immediate need for ADA upgrades and new restrooms. The more the merrier so if you're interested hit that little Contact Me link in the sidebar and send me a note.
Now I just have to figure out how to be in two places at once...
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