SCI-Arc has announced its Spring 2021 public lectures and exhibitions, continuing its commitment to maintaining a robust platform for interdisciplinary discourse with its spring 2021 series of lectures and exhibitions. SCI-Arc events are free and open to the public. 

SCI-Arc’s spring 2021 program will feature stellar speakers from a wide range of cultural practices, including artist Yinka Ilori, architect and sustainable designer Tatiana Bilbao, architecture scholar and professor Mabel O. Wilson, artist and filmmaker Khalil Joseph, writer and foresight strategist Madebo Fatunde, and researcher and architect Raúl Cárdenas Osuna.

Black Lives Matter Week of Action, held the first week in February, will feature lectures and programming focused on unapologetic conversations and presentations on Black culture, expression, and justice.

Exhibition Architectural Bestia, curated by Hernán Díaz Alonso and designed by M. Casey Rehm, will open April 2. SCI-Arc’s Spring Show exhibition, curated by faculty Zeina Koreitem and Aminatou Fall and highlighting the most revolutionary student work of the year, will open to the public on May 22. 

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

January 27: Richard Rothstein Lecture

February 1: Black Lives Matter Week of Action

February 3: Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski: Loudreading Post-Colonial Imaginaries

February 17: Tatiana Bilbao Lecture 

February 24: Yinka Ilori Lecture

March 3: Mabel O. Wilson: Studio &: A Black Study

March 17: Annie Chu and Rick Gooding: Friction: A Duality

March 24: Raúl Cárdenas Osuna Lecture

TBD: Khalil Joseph and Madebo Fatunde Lecture

Visit SCI-Arc's website for more information about upcoming lectures. All events begin at 7pm unless otherwise noted and are broadcast live online on SCI-Arc’s Livestream and Facebook page.

Lectures

January 27, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439537.

Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright, 2017). He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In addition to his recent book, The Color of Law, he is the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found through the Economic Policy Institute. Previous published books include Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Improvement to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap, and Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. 

Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the US and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems—it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. We’ve taken no serious steps to desegregate neighborhoods, however, because we are hobbled by a national myth that residential segregation is de facto—the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights. The Color of Law demonstrates, however, that residential segregation was created by racially explicit and unconstitutional government policy in the mid-twentieth century that openly subsidized whites-only suburbanization in which African Americans were prohibited from participating. Only after learning the history of this policy can we be prepared to undertake the national conversation necessary to remedy our unconstitutional racial landscape.

February 1 – 5

Virtually on Livestream 

Black Lives Matter Week of Action

Black Lives Matter Week of Action is a national, student-run event, held during the first week of February, dedicated to unapologetic conversations and presentations on Black culture, expression, and justice. SCI-Arc’s prestige is based on revolutionary conversations demonstrating a direct influence on the educational spectrum and the overall discourse of design.       

As a private institution with global recognition, SCI-Arc's student body represents over 50 countries—but with less than 3% being Black, there’s a deficiency of Black culture imbued in the development of architectural theory, practice, and design. SCI-Arc’s Black Lives Matter Week of Action embraces a unique opportunity to unite creative disciplines within cultural and societal issues, embodying the students’ mission to create a collective platform of speakers with diverse disciplinary interests ranging from art to activism.      

Black Lives Matter at School is a national coalition of educators, parents, administrators, and scholars organizing for racial justice in education. Supported and celebrated by thousands of schools, both K-12 and colleges/universities across the United States, a week in February is dedicated to the annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action to coincide with and augment Black History Month.

The distinguished roster of speakers includes Charles L. Davis II, Pascale Sablan, Elegance Bratton, Kordae Jatafa Henry, Ashten "Whoopi" Winger, Mira Henry, and Aminatou Fall.

February 3, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439540.

Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski: Loudreading Post-Colonial Imaginaries

WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels in 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author, and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author, and poet Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade school Loudreaders. The work of Garcia and Frankowski has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon. They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the upcoming book From Black Square to Black Reason: A Post-Colonial Architecture Manifesto. 

Under the increasingly global regime of necropolitical exploitation and capitalist extraction, the brutal forces once exerted on the colonies expand beyond the confines of occupied territories. In this depleting world of irreversible geomorphic transformations, incessant political paraphernalia, and monumental ideological symbols, post-colonial imaginaries outline the possibility to render new, solidary, and critical worlds. Learning from the persecuted alternative practice of education performed in the tobacco factories of the Caribbean of the twentieth century where lectores (Loudreaders) would share anti-capitalist and emancipatory literature with workers who were denied any other form of formal education, Garcia and Frankowski continuously search for critical forms of architecture. Through the development of manifestos and narrative architecture projects, new curricula and pedagogical experiments, publications and curatorial platforms, alternative forms of public engagement, and works of anti-capitalist realism they pursue models for Loudreading the possibility of other, pluriversal, anti-racist, intersectional, and emancipating worlds.

February 17, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439541.

Tatiana Bilbao 

Tatiana Bilbao began her eponymous studio in 2004 with the aim of integrating social values, collaboration, and sensitive design approaches to architectural work. Prior to founding her firm, Bilbao was an Advisor in the Ministry of Development and Housing of the Government of the Federal District of Mexico City, during this period she was part of the General Development Directorate of the Advisory Council for Urban Development in the City. 

The work of the office intersects with research allowing to design for diverse circumstances and in reconstruction or crisis scenarios. Bilbao holds a recurring teaching position at Yale University School of Architecture and has taught at Harvard University GSD, AA Association in London, Columbia University GSAPP, Rice University, University of Andrés Bello in Chile, and Peter Behrens School of Arts at HS Dusseldorf in Germany. Her work has been published in The New York Times, A + U, and Domus, among others. Bilbao has been recognized with the Kunstpreis Berlin in 2012, was named in 2010 as an Emerging Voice by the Architecture League of New York, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture Prize by the LOCUS Foundation in 2014, as well as the Impact Award 2017 Honorees for ArchitzierA + Awards, Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal of 2020, and the Marcus Prize Award 2019.

February 24, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439547.

Yinka Ilori

Yinka Ilori is a London-based multidisciplinary artist of a British-Nigerian heritage, who specializes in storytelling by fusing his British and Nigerian heritage to tell new stories in contemporary design. He began his practice in 2011 up-cycling vintage furniture, inspired by the traditional Nigerian parables and West African fabrics that surrounded him as a child. Humorous, provocative and fun, each piece of furniture he creates tells a story, bringing Nigerian verbal traditions into playful conversation with contemporary design.

Yinka Ilori Studio was established in 2017 following a successful pitch to transform the Thessaly Road Bridge. The studio now consists of a team of color-obsessed architects and designers, with the expertise and capacity to take on large-scale architectural and interior design projects. The studio continues to experiment with the relationship between function and form, with an output that sits between traditional divisions of art and design.

March 3, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439549.

Mabel O. Wilson: Studio &: A Black Study

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and also a professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. With her practice Studio &, Wilson is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis II the recently published volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). For MoMA, she is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America. 

The “art of building,” that is architecture emerges concurrent with Europe’s colonial misadventures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Modernity builds its superior “culture,” with its forms, aesthetics, and practices, above and beyond the primitive, savage, barbarous, backward, folk, and the racial other. If as poet Fred Moten posits “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice,” then the body of work—writings, projects, exhibitions and performances—by Mabel O. Wilson and her transdisciplinary practice Studio & asks: can the practice of architecture become a “Black study”?

March 17, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439552.

Annie Chu and Rick Gooding: Friction: A Duality

Chu+Gooding Architects is an internationally acclaimed architecture and interiors firm with an emphasis on cultural, arts-related, educational, and institutional projects, and recognized for designing distinctive and sophisticated spaces. Since the firm’s establishment in 1996, principals Annie Chu, FAIA, IIDA and Rick Gooding have built an award-winning body of work as principals of their own firm and as partner or senior associates of the celebrated firms of Franklin D. Israel design associates, Richard Meier & Partners, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates in New York. With a hands-on and deeply collaborative approach, Chu+Gooding offers distinctive, human-focused design that thoughtfully integrates architecture, interiors, and landscape to create a refined experience of space, light, material, craft, and color.

Friction is a condition that foments a partnership. That’s the rub: two things happening at once; are two bodies, two heads better than one? The process can be smooth, but more often than not, it is a struggle—roughness against roughness that generates heat and slows us down—but ultimately propels us forward. This is the modality of our work process. The condition of overlap is critical, and paradoxically, any commonality is also founded in our difference. The rub scales up and down continuously from a pair to a group, and the work demands time to translate between ideas and materiality, to consider building craft, and to respond to the exigencies of our human condition. It demands a commitment to difference. Our difference is not always dissension, but it causes wear and tear over time. We are in a constant state of destruction and repair. With this process, ideas and operations are made material; without this friction, there is no structure, no trajectory, and no conviction.

March 24, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439555.

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna is the founder and director of Torolab, a collective workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, basing the studies in the realm of lifestyles to better grasp the idea of quality of life. He holds a degree in architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California in San Diego.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally at various venues including: MoMA, New York City; Museum of Modern Art of Louisiana in Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego; LA(X)ART, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Sydney; the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC; Havana Biennial; Liverpool Biennial; Beijing 2004 Biennial of Architecture; Mercosur Biennale, Brazil; and Lyon Biennale, France. His work is in private and public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego and the Jumex collection in Mexico. He is a two-time recipient of The American Center Foundation Award as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. His work and articles have been published in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Harvard’s Political Review, Boston Globe, Surface, Wallpaper, I.D., among others.

He has taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana’s School of Architecture in Mexico; at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts in the US; and Université Rennes 2 in France. In October 2011, Cárdenas Osuna was awarded for best arts intervention project with social impact by Harvard’s Cultural Agents Initiative and in December has been named Person of the Year by Tijuana’s newspaper ‘Frontera’. Right now, he’s part of a new project at New York’s MoMA entitled The Art and Public Initiative; he directs the non-profit organization Sociedad de Agentes de Cambio A.C.; and is the director of the digital table for the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Tecate-Rosarito-Tijuana, where he currently lives and works.

March 31, 7pm

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9439559.

Anna Neimark

Anna Neimark is Principal of First Office, a practice co-founded with Andrew Atwood in 2011. Built projects have primarily focused on residential and office rehabs and gallery installations. Her texts, both independent and in collaboration with Atwood, have been published widely, in Log, Future Anterior, Perspecta, Project, and Think Space Pamphlets, and have recently been compiled in a Graham Foundation book, Nine Essays, published by Treatise Press. First Office has received numerous honors in competitions, including the Architectural League Prize, The Architect’s Newspaper Best of Young Architects, and the nomination as a Finalist in the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program 2016. Prior to joining the faculty at SCI-Arc, Neimark taught at the University of Southern California and worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and New York. She holds a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University and an M.Arch 1 from Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD).

TBD

Virtually: https://livestream.com/sciarc/events/9484883.

Khalil Joseph and Madebo Fatunde

Madebo Fatunde is a foresight strategist and a writer, building a practice at the intersection of arts, technology, and culture. His passion is using storytelling about the future to empower better decisions today. Some current projects of his include The Blackchain, a speculative future which imagines a world around a Pan-African blockchain network, and Unmanned Ode, a poetry collection exploring the codes of masculinity composed alongside and against a neural network. He is a member of the Guild’s Futurist Writers’ Room. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.  

Khalil Joseph is a Los Angeles-based American artist and filmmaker best known for his large-scale video installations. His most recent work, BLKNWS, is a two-channel fugitive newscast that blurs the lines between art, journalism, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique, and made its international debut in the 58th Venice Biennale earlier this year. He currently serves as the artistic director of The Underground Museum, a pioneering independent art museum, exhibition space, and community hub in Los Angeles that he co-founded with his late brother, the visionary artist and curator, Noah Davis. 

Exhibitions

April 2 – August 31, 2021

Virtually at channel.sciarc.edu.

Architectural Bestia

Curated by Hernán Díaz Alonso and Designed by M. Casey Rehm

Featuring work by BairBalliet, Hernán Díaz Alonso, Griffin Enright,Damjan Jovanovic, Alberto Kalach, Ferda Kolatan, Elena Manferdini, Fabian Marcaccio, Lucy McRae, P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Florencia Pita & Co, M. Casey Rehm, Ruy Klein, servo LA-Stockholm, Testa & Weiser,Tom Wiscombe, and Liam Young.

In every process of evolution, there is a period of extreme contamination that lends the possibility for the trajectories of species to begin to mutate. In the last thirty years, design has experienced multiple paradigm shifts generated by an eruption of new methodologies. These were derived mainly from new technologies, but also from a series of cultural changes, each prompting a reorganization in the culture of design, architecture, and art, and violating an old order, rendering it historical, obsolete. Today, perhaps as never before, we share a technical language that flows from discipline to discipline, altering the paths of previously discrete branches of knowledge. Many practices—art, architecture, fashion, film, music—explore similar ambitions, ideas rippling across and among them. The notion of authorship itself is in flux. This exhibition acknowledges and propels this phenomenon. It seeks to carve a path through a jungle of aesthetic and conceptual similarities to provoke contamination. Through artificial intelligence, the work featured will be exposed to a perpetual state of transformation and mutation. The exhibition gathers a key set of practices, primarily from architecture, but also from art and fashion, to reveal facets of the strange beast that the tumultuous paradigm shifts of recent decades have left behind.

Architectural Bestia is generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

May 22, 6pm 

Virtually on Livestream

Spring Show

Curated by Zeina Koreitem and Aminatou Fall

Opening with a public film screening, SCI-Arc's fifteenth annual Spring Show features work from all school programs. Bold displays of design studio projects from each of the school’s programs will be presented in an experimental film highlighting the aesthetic power of current architectural experimentation at SCI-Arc. 

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

Top image: Top (left to right): Annie Chu, Rick Gooding, Anna Neimark, Madebo Fatunde, Khalil Joseph; Middle: Richard Rothstein, Mabel O. Wilson, Raúl Cárdenas Osuna; Bottom: Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia, Yinka Ilori, Tatiana Bilbao.

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