2016-2017

Spring 2017 Department of Architecture Public Program

Beyond: Architecture and Its Outsides Lectures*

For the full archive of past recorded events, click here.

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19 April, 2017: Peg Rawes, e Bartlett, UCL, London

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12 April, 2017: Cooking Sections (Royal College of Art, London) OPN Master Class Lecture

Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, spatial practitioners who together are known as Cooking Sections, taught a master class April 10-12 at Iowa State University and presented a public lecture Wednesday, April 12, in Urbandale.

According to Fernández Pascual and Schwabe, since the collapse of the housing market in 2008, a number of international investors and CEOs have shifted their activity from real estate into “natural capital,” which is based on different environmental resources ranging from water to geology to non-human species.

“This approach follows the ‘No Net Loss’ policy, whereby the net amount of biodiversity remains theoretically constant,” they said. “Mitigation banking reconfigures the ways we extract and preserve the value of endangered species and their habitats. But what does ‘no net loss’ mean within a context of climate change, impossible quantification of nature and human-induced geological transformations?”

Part of the ISU Department of Architecture 2016-2017 Public Program Series, this lecture was co-sponsored by OPN Architects, the Department of Architecture, College of Design, Department of Art and Visual Culture, Department of Community and Regional Planning and graduate program in urban design.

10 – 12 April, 2017: OPN Master Class with Cooking Sections in King Pavilion, Hansen Exchange, 715 Bissell Road, Ames, IA 50011

Check out photographs taken during the OPN Master Class on our Facebook page.

Climavore: Post–Hyper–Fertile

Increased precipitation leading to recurrent floods, longer-term winter temperatures, more frost-free days, higher summer humidity, soil eroding faster, plants flowering sooner, birds arriving earlier in spring, increase in asthma and allergies… Climate seems to be changing in Iowa and the Great Plains and resulting in new pest outbreaks, spreading invasive species, and accelerated wildfire activity amongst many other impacts. Different from the now obsolete cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, climatic events spanning over days, months, years or centuries, are constructing the landscape anew. They happen discontinuously and repeat in non-linear cycles. Hence, CLIMAVORE proposes to investigate how to use food as a form of built infrastructure in order to rethink the landscapes of the future. What is the diet of a globally financialized landscape? What do we eat during seasons of polluted aquifers, periods of severe drought, or overpopulation of invasive species. CLIMAVORE questions the geopolitical forces that are creating new environmental pressure points for local inhabitants while restructuring climate in Iowa. The exponential growth of the fertilizer industry and the need to increase food production on a global scale has ensured we receive grains, fruits and vegetables all year round. This workshop will explore the edibility of our new climatic seasons. CLIMAVORE sets out to frame these new seasons of food production and consumption that are appearing as a result of human-induced climatic events. When soil nutrients are exploited to the point of exhaustion, productivity and efficiency are dependent on synthetic inputs; fertility becomes relative. When seasonal volatility transforms the internal clocks of species and all life is forced into a shielded interior, climate becomes relative.

Outcome and Method

This workshop will look at Iowa’s landscape infrastructure and speculate how architecture can intervene in the production of other forms of landscapes. Organized around three days of working sessions, the workshop will include site visits, archival research, representation exercises and less conventional formats like using food and cooking as an exploration of landscape tactics. The outcome of the workshop will consist of three deliverables:

• a) a collective atlas of food infrastructures (grain elevators, bridges, distribution centers, barns, mills, containers, refrigerators, greenhouses, agricultural tires and machinery, feedlots, egg-producing farms, disassembly lines, slaughterhouses…);
• b) a projective speculation on CLIMAVORE infrastructural landscapes for a less greenwashed future based on recent climatic events in the Great Plains;
• c) a last supper as a modeling exercise.

Gallery of Cooking Sections OPN Master Class, Van Tour, and Lecture:

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29 March, 2017: Keetra Dean Dixon, fromktoj.com, Alaska, co-hosted with Industrial Design

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8 March, 2017: Irene Cheng, California College of the Arts, San Fransisco

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3 March, 2017: Felicity Scott, Columbia University GSAPP, NYC
Richard F. Hansen Lecture (FRIDAY LECTURE!)

In the wake of Haight-Ashbury’s legendary Summer of Love in 1967 and the People’s Park movement in Berkeley a few years later, and in the midst of the ongoing U.S.-led war in Indochina, disenchanted California hippies did not only head back-to-the-land when seeking to experiment with alternative environments and forms of life. In June 1970 a disillusioned group from the Bay Area rented a vacant six-story industrial warehouse in downtown San Francisco and founded Project One as an urban commune of architects, artists, filmmakers, musicians, craftspeople and, in turn, video and media collectives and computer programmers.
Like other aspects of the California counterculture, Project One was haunted both by war and technologies born of the Space Race, and it served as an intense environment for negotiating communal ways of life and the networks to which they gave rise. Focusing on Resource One — a group of computer programmers within the commune who remarkably acquired an SDS940 computer — along with the media collective Optic Nerve and their 1972 video, Project One, Scott’s lecture traces how Project One served, for a short while, as a key node within the emerging communication networks of the 1970s.
Moreover, it puts this late moment of the alternative culture of the 1960s into a dialog with British critic Reyner Banham, who in 1971 and with typical lyrical flair, incisively revealed the limitations of ideals of alternative networks and emergent models of participation in architecture.

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15 February, 2017: 5468796 Architects, Winnipeg, CA. (NEW ADDITION!)

The founders of Winnipeg-based collaborative design studio 5468796 Architecture discussed the conditions and ambition required to challenge the Midwest status quo in a lecture at Iowa State University on 15 February, 2017.
5468796 Architects Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic presented “Operating in the Margins” in Gallery 181, College of Design, at Iowa State University. The lecture was part of the ISU Department of Architecture Spring 2017 Public Programs series.

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10 February, 2017: Orit Halpern, Concordia University, Montreal

co-hosted with CRP and MUD (FRIDAY LECTURE!) – postponed

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Events

Apr 7 Datum Launch (TBA)

Apr 12 AIA Spring Meeting (9:00-4:45)

Apr 16-17 Computational Foundations Colloquium

Jun 7-9 BTES Conference

*All lectures, unless otherwise noted, will be held on Wednesdays at 5:30 PM in the Kocimski Auditorium, College of Design, and are subject to change.