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.

Big City Forum #8

Big City Forum #8


Featuring:

Alexandra Grant

Michael Pinto


Thursday, October 15, 2009

7 – 9 pm

6:30 pm reception


Neutra VDL Research House

2300 Silverlake Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90039

http://www.neutra-vdl.org/site/

An event featuring Alexandra Grant and Michael Pinto in a conversation focused on issues around practices related to community renovation and activism, and sustainable urbanism.

Alexandra Grant is a text-based artist who uses language and networks of words as the basis for her work in painting, drawing and sculpture. Her work has been the subject of shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Contemporary Museum (Baltimore), and galleries in the US and abroad. Grant’s work maps language in different media: from intricate wire filigree sculptures to large scale drawing/paintings on paper. She investigates translation not only from language to language, but also from text to image, spoken language to written word, and representations in two dimensions to three dimensional objects
Grant is currently at work on a public art collaboration with Watts House Project in Los Angeles, an artist-driven redevelopment of the homes across the street from Watts Towers. She is also preparing a second solo show with Honor Fraser Gallery in 2010.

Michael Pinto is an architect, educator, and community activist. Michael teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) where he is also coordinating of SCI-Arc’s Community Design Program, which engages students in researching and constructing design-build projects for nonprofit and civic agencies. Additionally, Michael is Design Principal at Osborn Architects, where he steers design toward an expressive functionalism: work highly influenced by the realities of program, structure, and building technology while aspiring to beauty, simplicity, and harmony with nature.

Michael is the founder of Project Food / LA, a group of educators, chefs, artists, architects, planners, nutritionists, growers, and caring individuals concerned with improving access to healthy food choices in underserved communities. The organization grew out of Michael’s research on the relationship between urban infrastructure and food systems. In service of larger projects focusing on infrastructure, planning and sustainable urbanism, Michael founded Intercision, a global collective of like –minded practices. The collective includes architects, engineers, ecologists, and planners interested in radically rethinking contemporary urban models. Michael holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Penn State University, and a Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc.

A contribution of $10 will be asked towards the renovation campaign for the Neutra VDL House.


Big City Forum is an interdisciplinary project and collective network of leaders, formed to sustain efforts in the creative community that promote the civic and cultural vitality of metropolitan and urban communities. Through various formats such as gatherings, symposiums, exhibitions, and special events, Big City Forum fosters dialogue and engagement around capacity-building approaches that engender cultural growth and community transformation, Ultimately, Big City Forum functions as an “idea lab” to develop new solutions to key problems that impact contemporary urban centers.

Big City Forum events are BY INVITATION ONLY


Please rsvp to this event at:


bravoarts@gmail.com