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.