Architecture lectures feature design, academic luminaries

A diverse group of leading architecture practitioners and academics will share their knowledge during the Fall 2012 Architecture Lecture Series at Texas A&M. The lectures, open to the public, begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Preston Geren Auditorium, located in building B of the Langford Architecture Center.

Fall 2012 lecturers are: Sept. 10 – Florian Idenburg , co-founding principal of SO-IL; Oct. 17 – Chris Kraus, curator, author, editor and filmmaker; Oct. 29 – Jonah Rowen , design studio faculty, Sci-Arc; Nov. 6 – Miguel Roldán , founding principal, R+B architects and adjunct professor of architecture for Texas A&M’s study abroad program in Barcelona, Spain; and Nov. 12 – Jason Payne , founder, Hirsuta and assistant professor of architecture, University of California-Los Angeles.

Florian Idenburg

Co-founding principal of SO-IL
Lecture: 5: 30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 10
Geren Auditorium

Florian Idenburg has designed an array of projects, including a master plan for a cultural campus in Shanghai, a series of prints for New York’s Guggenheim Museum, student housing in Athens, a park pavilion in Amsterdam and a community center on the Belgian coast.

His New York firm, [SO-IL] (http://so-il.org) , is involved in all scales and stages of the architectural process, and relies on extensive experience from architecture, academia and the arts. The firm has received numerous honors, including the [MoMAPS1 Young Architects Program] (http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/winner_of_2010_moma_p.s.1_young_architects_program_solid_objectives_-_idenb/) for an innovative urban playground and the AIA Young Practices Award.

SO – IL has been widely featured in international publications including [The New York Times] (http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/the-big-top-frieze-new-yorks-super-structure/) , [The Wall Street Journal] (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703615104575328910259931640.html) , [Fast Company] (http://www.fastcompany.com/1663898/dancing-shifting-architecture-installation-opens-queens) , Wallpaper and in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urbanism, Studio-X in Beijing and Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands.

A recognized voice in academia, Idenburg has held teaching positions at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Kentucky.

Chris Kraus

Curator, author, editor, filmmaker

Lecture: 5: 30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 17 | Geren Auditorium

[Chris Kraus] (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/chris-kraus/biography/) co-curated a 2012 [exhibit] (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/arts/design/radical-localism-art-video-and-culture-from-pueblo-nuevos-mexicali-rose.html) at a community center in Mexicali, Mexico, billed as a cultural and personal exchange between artists, journalists, activists and filmmakers on both sides of the border exemplifying possibilities of 21st century hybridized culture through the pursuit of artistic expression grounded in barrio life. The exhibit was featured in Artforum, May Revue and Generacion, a Mexico City publication.

Kraus has written many books exploring a variety of subjects including feminism, gender politics, philosophy and love such as “ [Summer of Hate] (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=13050) ,” (2012),  “Trick” (2009), “Catt: Her Killer” (2009), “Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature” (2007), and “LA Artland: Contemporary Art From Los Angeles” (2005).

Since 1990, she has directed a fiction series for Semiotext(e), an independent press, publishing work by avant-garde writers Kathy Acker, Barbara Barg, Fanny Howe and Eileen Myles.

She received the College Art Association’ s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2007.

Kraus, also professor of film at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, is well known as an influential film and video maker in the New York Downtown scene of the mid eighties. Retrospectives of her work have been exhibited in Berlin, Brussels, and Miami.

Jonah Rowen

Design studio faculty, Sci-Arc
Lecture: 5: 30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 29
Geren Auditorium

[Jonah Rowen] (http://www.jonahrowen.com/) is assembling a book of original essays by prominent architects reckoning with the legacy of Colin Rowe, a major intellectual influence on world architecture and urbanism century in city planning and urban design during the second half of the 20th Century.

He’s is also working on a collectionNee of conversations, curated with Alfie Koetter, Daniel Markiewicz, and Emmett Zeifman, with leading young architects including Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, Pier Vittorio Aureli, and Jesse Reiser, regarding the possibilities for developing an architectural project today.

Before his appointment at [Sci-Arc] (http://www.sciarc.edu) , Rowen worked at two prestigious New York design firms, Gage/Clemenceau and Esenman Architects.

At Gage/Clemenceau, he was a lead designer for the firm’s Te Wero Bridge and Taiwan Centers for Disease Control proposals. In 2007 he was invited to Copenhagen to teach as an assistant to Mark Foster Gage in the "Think Tank on Computational Aesthetics" held at the Royal Danish Academy.

At Eisenman Architects he worked on several projects, including a forthcoming book and exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture with design professor Matthew Roman’s analyses of 16th century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, widely considered Western architecture’s most influential practitioner.

Miguel Roldán

Founding principal, R+B architects; adjunct professor of architecture for Texas A&M’s study abroad program in Barcelona, Spain
Lecture: 5: 30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 6
Geren Auditorium

Miguel Roldán will present the opening lecture of a major Texas A&M College of Architecture [exhibit] (http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2012/7/24/spanish-arch-exhibit/) featuring emerging Spanish architects Nov. 6 at Preston Geren Auditorium.

The exhibit, “The Young Architects of Spain,” will showcase extraordinary work by emerging architects in a series of internally illuminated modules displaying photographs, videos and information of 62 works from public and private commissions consisting of new constructions and renovations to existing buildings.

Jesus Aparicio, who curated the exhibit, said it presents a variety of extraordinary, rigorously constructed work deeply sensitive to its cultural and natural environment.  Roldan’s work, such as the co-design of [Placa Europa] (http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2011/5/19/roldan-tower/) , a Barcelona social housing tower, has also won praise. An architecture critic wrote the design, created with [firm] (http://www.roldanberengue.com) partner Mercé Berengué, overcomes the strictures of regulatory protocols to the extent that it’s “hard to believe this is social housing.”

Roldán also developed a set of interior designs with Berengué [exhibited] (http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2012/2/14/roldan-work-magazine/) recently at Barcelona’s Catalunya College of Architects’ headquarters in Barcelona.

Roldán is interested in the moment when ideas move themselves into the territory of promises, in discovering the promises in a problematic site, in a confusing program, a low budget, an incomplete product or an uneven slope.

“A good problem,” he has said, “is a good resource.”

Jason Payne

Founder, Hirsuta; assistant professor of architecture, University of California-Los Angeles.
Lecture: 5: 30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12
Geren Auditorium

Informed by intensive research and an experimental approach, Jason Payne seeks to create a direct appeal to the senses in his [work] (http://www.hirsuta.com/index.html) , which specializes in advanced form and integration of emerging technologies in construction.

He has established a reputation as a leading designer in his generation; his recent work is credited as a major influence in pushing digital design and fabrication away from an overt focus on technique and process toward the explicit celebration of product, experience, affect, and atmosphere.

At a previous firm, Payne designed the [No Good Television Reception Bar] (http://murmur-la.com/no-good-television-reception-bar/) for a private residence in Beverly Hills, Calif., which netted he and fellow designer Heather Roberge an AIA design award in 2006.

At UCLA, Payne teaches core studios, elective studios and technology seminars. His teaching and research is characterized by exotic influences such as botany, hairstyling and pharmacology. The work produced in his courses establishes credibility for these strange hybrids and is distinguished by its extreme specificity, technical complexity, and the frequent use of rich colors and textures.

Payne has taught at Rice University, Pratt Institute, Bennington College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked as project designer for Reiser + Umemoto Architects and Daniel Libeskind Studio.