Big City Forum #10

Eames Demetrios
OMD
OMD

Big City Forum invites you to a round table conversation about place and its context. How does context impact our sense of place? How does language impact our sense of perception in general, but especially of place? Participants will join in direct dialogue around these issues with a dynamic and visionary pair of presenters.

Tuesday, Dec. 1,2009
7 - 9 pm

Santa Monica Museum of Art
2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Featuring:
Eames Demetrios, Eames Foundation & Kcymaerxthaere Project
Jennifer Siegal, Office of Mobile Design (OMD)

Eames Demetrios is the creator of Kymaerica and the Kcymaerxthaere, an alternate history of the world. He is the grandson of the legendary husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames.

The Kcymaerxthaere is "a global work of three-dimensional fiction" that overlays alternative stories onto the physical world. Eames Demetrios, the project's Geographer-at-Large, travels the world exploring stories of imaginary peoples, movements, even physical laws -- and then memorializing these stories on bronze plaques. Kymaerica, which Demetrios references in the talk, is one area within Kcymaerxthaere.

Demetrios is active in preserving the Eames legacy, as principal of the Eames Office, a clearinghouse of resources for researching, shopping and exploring the work of these legendary creative people. Demetrios was instrumental in creating the interactive version of the Eames' groundbreaking film Powers of Ten. Demetrios also curates the online DASFilmFest.com, with a new film each month on Design, Architecture and Sustainability.

Jennifer Siegal is known for her work in creating the prefab home of the 21st century. She is founder and principal of the Los Angeles’ based firm Office of Mobile Design (OMD), which is dedicated to the design and construction of responsible, sustainable, and precision-built structures.

She earned a master’s degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1994 and was a 2003 Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she explored the use of intelligent, kinetic, and lightweight materials. In 1997 she was the architect-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation and in 2004 a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in her hometown, Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Her innovative mobile structures include customized, prefab, green, modernist homes; the Mobile EcoLab used to teach students about the environment; and the Portable Construction Training Center created for the Venice Community Housing Corporation. Her most recent work is a modern, modular home product line called Take Home.

In 2003 Esquire named her one of the design world’s “Best and Brightest” and the Architectural League of New York included her in the acclaimed “Emerging Voices” program. Her recent built project The Country School, the first green prefab school, was recognized as one of the five best buildings in Los Angeles in 2007.

Big City Forum #9

Monica Nouwens


PATTERNS Architecture

Big City Forum #9
Featuring:
Monica Nouwens – Photography
Marcelo Spina, Georgina Huljich, - PATTERNS Architecture
Ted Kane – Polar Inertia journal

Thursday, Nov. 12th, 2009
4:00 - 6:00 pm
Otis College of Art & Design
9045 Lincoln Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90045
(310) 665-6800

An event featuring Monica Nouwens, Marcelo Spina, and Ted Kane in a conversation focused on issues about shaping and mapping the urban landscape.

Monica Nouwens is an LA based photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Stedelijk Museum Helmond, on Trafalgar Square for World Aids Day and with her mentor Marlene Dumas at Gallery Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam. Nouwens is a lecturer at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the University of California Irvine. Monica Nouwens was born in the Netherlands. She completed a postgraduate fellowship in Art Media Studies at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and ultimately attended the California Institute of the Arts exchange program for film and photography where she acquired a fascination with California’s urban landscapes.

PATTERNS is a design research architectural practice based in Los Angeles and operating globally. Founded in 1999 and headed by Co-principals Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich, PATTERNS work has gained international recognition for its innovative approach to design and architecture that fuses advanced computation with an extensive understanding of form, tectonics and materials. PATTERNS’s vision is to generate innovative spatial forms that actively engage, enhance and influences the body, constantly challenging its relationship to the built environment akin to the complexity of contemporary life. PATTERNS Co-Principal Marcelo Spina is one of the nominees for the Prestigious Ordos Prize, the most important architectural prize for an emergent architect to emerge from Asia.

Ted Kane is an architect, photographer, and writer working between Los Angeles and Shanghai. He holds a Bachelors of Architecture from the University of Kentucky and a Masters of Architecture from UCLA. Ted is the founder and editor of Polar Inertia, an online journal devoted to urban and nomadic and research (www.polarinertia.com), that is published 3 times per year. Ted’s urban research and photographs have been recently featured in the journal 306090 Dimension,as well as the book The Infrastructural city: networked ecologies in Los Angeles, and his own book Polar Inertia: Migrating Urban systems published in 2008. Ted is also a licensed architect at the firm Morphosis, where he is the project architect for the Giant Headquarters Building in Shanghai, China.