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.