The Department of Architecture and Urban Design (AUD) at UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts) is pleased to announce its fall 2022 public program of talks and lectures. We are happy to note that AUD’s Perloff Hall and IDEAS campus will welcome guests from UCLA and beyond as our public program returns to its traditional in-person format. All event details are subject to change; please visit aud.ucla.edu for updates, especially as events are added to the program.
AUD’s fall 2022 public program includes:
Barbara Bestor
Monday, October 3, 6:30pm
Perloff Hall
Barbara Bestor and her LA-based Bestor Architecture have designed a number of award-winning projects, including headquarters for Beats by Dre and Snap; Blackbirds, a new small-lot housing development in Echo Park; Ashes & Diamonds, a new winery and event center in Napa; and a variety of form-driven residences, museum exhibitions, and retail projects, including an upcoming exhibition at LACMA. She is also the Director of the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University. Bestor’s varied, creative, and aesthetically progressive body of work expands the territory of architecture into atmospheric urbanism.
Symposium: Decolonizing Regionalism
Friday, October 7, 9am–4pm
Perloff Hall
Organizers: Ayala Levin, Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Los Angeles; Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Urban Studies and Planning, UC San Diego
On behalf of the UCHRI Multicampus Working Group Decolonizing Regionalism 2021–22
Somewhere between the scale of the site and the scale of the territory lies the “region”: a productively ambiguous term that subsumes notions of geography, ecology, economy, planning, and jurisdiction. What does this particular enclosure—of both spaces and knowledges—do to, and for, historical processes of colonial and decolonial upheaval? What can critical spatial histories of regionalism contribute to theorizations of decoloniality—and vice-versa? And what are we to make of it as a tool of expertise, most prominently in discourses of development for the so-called global South? This symposium will revisit regionalism as a heterogeneous and contested discourse encompassing geopolitical relations, economic frameworks, social formations such as race and ethnicity, ecological processes, and myriad articulations of technical expertise.
Book launch: Todd Gannon, Figments of the Architectural Imagination
Monday, October 17, 6:30pm
Perloff Hall
Todd Gannon is professor of architecture at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. His books include Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech, The Light Construction Reader, Et in Suburbia Ego: José Oubrerie’s Miller House, and A Confederacy of Heretics (with Ewan Branda). Gathering twenty essays written over twenty years, Figments of the Architectural Imagination explores the frontiers of speculative architectural design, theory, and pedagogy to offer clear-eyed and incisive treatments of some of the most important projects, practices, and polemics at work making contemporary architecture contemporary. Sharp and insightful texts combine frontline reportage, archival scholarship, trenchant prose, and impressive critical acumen to cut through the cacophony of recent architectural discourse with uncommon clarity, intelligence, rigor, and wit.
Germane Barnes
Wednesday, October 19, 6:30pm
Perloff Hall
Germane Barnes’ award winning research and design practice, Studio Barnes, investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences black domesticity. Barnes is also an Assistant Professor and the Director of The Community Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture. His work has been featured in a variety of international institutions and platforms; last year, Barnes won the 2021 Architectural League Prize, the 2021 Wheelwright Prize, and the 2021-2022 Rome Prize in Architecture, among other honors.
Enrique Walker: Open Work
Monday, November 7, 6:30pm
Perloff Hall
Enrique Walker is an architect and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where he also directed the Master of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design from 2008 to 2018, as well as at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Tokyo Institute of Technology. His publications include The Ordinary: Recordings (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018), The Dictionary of Received Ideas / Under Constraint (Santiago: Ediciones ARQ, 2017), Lo Ordinario (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2010), and Tschumi on Architecture: Conversations with Enrique Walker (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2006).
Alper Derinboğaz
Monday, November 14, 6:30pm
IDEAS Campus
Alper Derinboğaz (MArch II ‘08) investigates the possibilities of physical environment through the potential relationships between space and time. Through his Istanbul-based practice, Salon, his design approach mostly relies on the importance of understanding the context of the function or the location. Thus, his design varies in scale from the museums to installations, intending to uncover and question the essential elements of the given site and the theme. Derinboğaz has earned many awards, recognitions, and honors internationally–most recently, he was named among ArchDaily’s Best Young Practices in 2020, and among the “Europe 40 Under 40” by The European Architecture Center in 2019. His book Geospaces: Architecture as New Nature was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome as part of the Reading Room Installation in 2021.
Lunchtime talks: NOMAS at UCLA
Thursday, November 17, 12pm
Perloff Hall
A panel conversation among members of the AUD student chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students.
Book launch and panel discussion: Hina Jamelle, Under Pressure
Monday, November 21, 6:30pm
Perloff Hall
Hina Jamelle teaches architectural design at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where she is the Director of Urban Housing and teaches final year Graduate Option Studios. Jamelle joins AUD’s Kutan Ayata, Neil Denari, and Georgina Huljich to present her new book Under Pressure, a multi-disciplinary amalgam of research and design intelligence from thought leaders in the fields of architecture, real estate, economics, policy, material design, and finance, discussing instigation and design in urban housing.
