Archinect Sessions One-to-one

Tired of all those repetitive Pritzker-prediction lists? Always those same, predictable bigly names, and when was the last time they actually got it right? It's time to cut through all the crap and go straight to the source to get the info — the ones who operate at a higher level than any listicle or explainer-piece could. So we asked a psychic. After a quest to find a future-seer who would let me record the reading, I (Amelia) ventured deep into the depths of Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood and sat for 15 minutes with a psychic named Mary. She gave me the following tarot reading, responding to two questions: What are going to be the major concerns for architecture in 2017, and who’s going to win the Pritzker? Find out the answers in this season finale of One-to-One. After this, One-to-One will be going on indefinite hiatus for 2017. In the meantime, we'd love to hear your feedback on the show — things you liked, disliked, ways to improve, and people you'd like us to interview. Send any One-to-One thought

Shortly after Grafton Architects won RIBA's inaugural International Prize for their UTEC campus in Lima, Peru, I spoke with the firm's director, Yvonne Farrell, to get the backstory to the project and discuss how the award might affect the firm in the long run. As an academic building, UTEC joins a rich collection of other institutional projects by the Dublin-based Grafton.  

Missed out on Next Up: The LA River, Archinect Sessions' podcasting event? Now you can listen to the whole thing, released in two parts on One-to-One. Last week, we released the first half of the interviews, and this week we've got the rest.  This week's playlist of live recordings features interviews with: Lou Pesce (designer with Metabolic Studio) Julia Meltzer (director and founder of Clockshop, a non-profit arts organization) and Elizabeth Timme (co-director of LA-Más) Renee Dake Wilson (partner at Dake Wilson Architects and VP of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission) and Alexander Robinson (assistant professor of architecture at USC and principal at Office of Outdoor Research) Mia Lehrer (founder and president at Mia Lehrer + Associates)

Missed out on Next Up: The LA River, Archinect Sessions' live podcasting event? Now you can listen to the first half all at once, on One-to-One. Next week we'll release the full second-half. This playlist of live recordings features interviews with: Frances Anderton (host, KCRW’s DnA) and Christopher Hawthorne (architecture critic, Los Angeles Times) Steven Appleton (co-founder, LA River Kayak Safari) and Catherine Gudis (co-founder, Play the L.A. River game) Marissa Christiansen (Executive Director (formerly Senior Policy Director), Friends of the Los Angeles River) Deborah Weintraub (Chief Deputy City Engineer, LA Bureau of Engineering) About Next Up: The LA River When Frank Gehry's office was first attached to the L.A. River's master plan and redevelopment, the river began attracting fresh attention over a project that had already been evolving for decades. This October, in an attempt to do justice to the river's complexity and history (and the accompanying urbanist discourse), Archinect hosted 'Next

Through their work as visual strategists for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Delgado and Daniel Goods inspire scientists and make science inspiring. Under 'The Studio' at JPL, David and Dan help engineers and scientists sort through their own design problems using creative methodologies, while also framing JPL's research for a general audience—making things like travel posters for exoplanets and helping realize a giant listening station for orbiting satellites. David and Dan sat down with me to discuss their role in the JPL ecosystem, and the invaluable role their architect- and designer-collaborators play in imagining the future. David starts off the conversation by describing their 'Metamorphosis' project: visualizing the surface of a comet through sculpture, for the Rosetta Mission. Update 11/15/16: To clarify, the "Jason" Dan refers to ~2:08 is Jason Klimoski, of the architecture firm StudioKCA, whom NASA JPL asked to design the installation 'Metamorphosis'. David and Dan are not themselves design

Never Built New York, by curators and authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, is an astounding collection of architectural projects that never made it into being. The book features projects from the last two centuries, sited all throughout the five boroughs, that range from the monumental to the mortifying. Alongside infamous projects like Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Key Plan for Ellis Island, visions for an alternate New York-urbanism abound: aborted reflections of their time, place and politics. The book continues in the tradition of Goldin and Lubell's 2013 exhibition, "Never Built Los Angeles", including focused research on each project alongside gorgeous drawings and visualizations. I spoke with the authors about their curatorial approach to the book, and the projects that they were most excited by.

Paul and Amelia are joined in-studio by the co-founders behind RotoLab, Michael Rotondi's new start-up. Along with Nels Long and M A Greenstein, Rotondi has ambitions to create uniquely VR-environments for architectural education and practice, and in the process, completely upend how we learn and work. Inspired by decades of experience in architecture and VR’s imminent future, Rotondi and his co-founders spoke about socializing in VR, gaming as education, and what this new frontier could mean for tomorrow’s architects.  

You probably don’t recognize George Tsypin’s name, but you’re almost certainly familiar with his projects. After training as an architect in Moscow, Tsypin moved to New York to study theater design, and it’s now safe to say millions upon millions of people have seen his work. He’s designed stage sets for the MTV VMA’s, operas, Broadway plays, and the 2014 Winter Olympics’ Opening Ceremony at Sochi, among many others. Tsypin's work is now captured in GEORGE TSYPIN OPERA FACTORY: Invisible City, released on October 18 by Princeton Architectural Press. We spoke about designing for theatrical and mass media performances, and how his architectural training grounds his practice. Our interview begins with Tsypin's account of working in 5Pointz, the infamous graffiti building in Long Island City. Special thanks to Princeton Architectural Press for helping coordinate the interview.  

Aside from their role as workshop co-chairs for the ACADIA conference, this week's One-to-One guests are both architects who work and teach at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Their focus on fabrication led them to their roles at ACADIA, with McGee directing Taubman's FABLab and Newell serving as Director of the Master of Science in Material Systems and Digital Technologies. ACADIA stands for the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, and this year's conference, "Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers and Cognitive Machines" (October 27-29) attests to the extreme collaborative depths humans and machines have come to in architecture. I spoke with Catie and Wes about what they have planned for the conference workshops, taking place October 24-26, and just how close architects are to achieving the singularity.

The small town of Columbus, Indiana is packed with the works of famous modernist architects, but unlike cities like New York or Chicago, Columbus’s pedigree isn’t so often brought into the national architectural discourse. Exhibit Columbus, a new symposium and exhibition happening annually in the city, is hoping to change that. Deborah Berke, architect and dean at Yale, has worked extensively in Indiana and was a keynote speaker at this year's inaugural Exhibit Columbus symposium. She joined me on the podcast to reflect on the local and regional influences of Columbus IN, and the impact they've had on her career.

Steven Holl is globally renowned for monumental works that specifically invoke light, color and porosity in both programmatic and aesthetic ways. Holl can also be thought of as an artist’s architect—his firm has done work for many arts institutions, he methodically sketches his projects in watercolors, and his style is heavily influenced by art practice and theory. He’s also very interested in the phenomenology of architecture—how it’s sensed by humans, and its impact on our existence. We spoke in a totally unremarkable conference room at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the day before Holl was scheduled to give a keynote presentation for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture’s conference.

Tomas Koolhaas is a filmmaker in Los Angeles, whose most recent project, a documentary about his father Rem, recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival. REM follows its titular architect around the world, visiting his projects and investigating their human impact. Aware of his special perspective on the film's subject, Tomas didn't want REM to be a teary biopic or heady architectural salvo, but something more impressionistic and accessible, appealing to emotions over intellectualism. We speak about managing family relationships in creative work, his influences as a filmmaker, and film's role in architectural media at large.    

Martino Stierli took over as MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design in 2015, when the museum was already undergoing major changes. Diller Scofidio + Renfro's redesign was underway, and the architecture and design galleries faced something of an uncertain future in the expanded museum layout. On the podcast, Stierli dispels the rumors that the galleries would be closed permanently, and discusses MoMA's strategies for exhibiting architecture, as well as his plans to diversify the museum's collection.  

For nearly 30 years, Michael Arbib taught computer science, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, and mathematics at the University of Southern California, and is known for his prolific work on brains and computers: essentially, what the mechanisms of one can teach us about how the other works. Gathering together all aspects of his work, he’s sharpened his focus on the connection between architecture and neuroscience, and developed the concept of neuromorphic architecture. He is now associated with the NewSchool for Architecture and Design and UC San Diego, and has played a major role in the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, based in La Jolla, California. We spoke about the Academy’s upcoming conference, and what architecture practice can realistically take from neuroscientific research.

Kunlé Adeyemi founded NLÉ in Amsterdam and Lagos in 2010, after over eight years at OMA. Raised in Kaduna, Nigeria, with an architect father who was constantly redesigning his childhood home, Adeyemi studied architecture in Lagos before getting an MArch II at Princeton, studying with Peter Eisenman. His work at OMA included pivotal roles in projects such as Lagos’ master plan and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Throughout his work, he focuses on issues of rapid urbanization and climate change in the Global South. I spoke with Kunlé this past August, for his keynote presentation at the AIA Tennessee Convention in Chattanooga. We cover his work in wide breadth: how he focuses on cities’ relationships to water and infrastructure, quickly iterating projects like the Makoko Floating School prototypes in Lagos and at the Venice Biennale, and why he left OMA to start his own firm in the first place. Due to a technical glitch in the live recording, the episode starts about ten minutes into our conversation.

Los-Angeles based architect Michael Maltzan may be best known for his multiple residential projects with the Skid Row Housing Trust, and the longer-than-the-Empire-State-Building-is-tall residential mixed user, One Santa Fe. But Maltzan’s office is also designing Los Angeles’ new Sixth Street Viaduct, a since-demolished infrastructural icon of the city that bridged the Los Angeles River between downtown and Boyle Heights. Michael shares his relationship with the growing identity of downtown Los Angeles, and his perspective on the style of urbanism arising on LA’s westside in the “Silicon Beach” neighborhood of Playa Vista. We also discuss the effect of China’s ban on “weird” architecture for LA-architects practicing there. This episode originally aired on March 14, 2016.

Design/Build with Jersey Devil: A Handbook for Education and Practice is a wonderful mixture of history, interviews, experiments and how-to’s, all focused around the design/build pedagogy and practice of its 1970s pioneers, Jersey Devil. Author Charlie Hailey, who is also an architecture professor at the University of Florida, spoke with me about Jersey Devil's beginnings at Princeton University, and the implications of design/build pedagogy for today’s academic climate. Special thanks to Princeton Architectural Press for helping coordinate this interview. This episode's title is a reference to architect and writer Michael Sorkin's description of the firm: Jersey Devil “put the funk back in functionalism".

In the spring of 2015, we ran a Working Out of the Box feature with Abraham Burickson, the practicing architect who founded Odyssey Works—a theater company that produces performances for an audience of one, often lasting days. Participants are extensively researched and the performances are rigorously planned, so that the whole thing unfolds before them spontaneously, as they move about the world. To Burickson, theater and architecture are one and the same—their objective is to immerse the audience, and make them feel something. And in preparation for this month’s theme of Games, it's impossible not to see Odyssey Works' performances in the same genre of experience: game-like interventions that change the way we experience the built environment. The following interview is our conversation from February of 2015, edited for time and clarity.

Dora Epstein Jones is the newly minted executive director of the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles. With a doctorate in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism from UCLA, Epstein Jones came to A+D after nearly 15 years at SCI-Arc, where she led the coordination of humanities and theory courses, and served as the founding coordinator of the General Studies program. Now situated in L.A.’s booming Arts District, A+D is neighbor to downtown’s own museum renaissance, not to mention the SCI-Arc campus. In our interview, Epstein Jones imagines how A+D could become the L.A version of Storefront, while working to keep it accessible to the local community.

Architect Jose Sanchez is the co-creator of Block'hood, a city-building computer game that runs on real city data. Under his practice, plethora-project (covering architecture and indie game development), he focuses on how play can initiate design practice.  In Block’hood, players build cities out of 80 preset block types, and are rewarded for thinking “ecologically” and creating diverse cities. Sanchez wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, not just urban planners or architects, and to ultimately be both a learning tool and fun in its own right. Sanchez's interview is part of our special August focus on Games.