Thursday, January 16, 2014

Big City Forum: Global City at the Skirball Center


National Art Museum of China, competition rendering. Image courtesy of Safdie Architects.
Big City Forum - Global City
 
Adrianna Cuellar
&Marcel Sanchez-Prieto 
Analia Saban
Peter Zellner



Saturday, Feb. 8th
2 - 4 pm

In conjunction with the exhibition Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie, Big City Forum presents an interdisciplinary event that examines the ways in which we view, interact with. and respond to public space. 


After a weekend of research on the Skirball campus, a team of local artists, designers, and architects will present their reflections and responses to Moshe Safdie’s work and how it relates to current issues within urban, social, and political contexts. Participants include contemporary artist Analia Saban, Cro Studio’s Marcel Sanchez-Prieto and Adriana Cuellar, and AECOM Principal and Studio Design Lead Peter Zellner.

“Global City” is produced by Big City Forum.  The presentation will be facilitated by artist, curator, and founder of Big City Forum, Leonardo Bravo.
For reservations: http://www.skirball.org/programs/expert-insight/global-city

Adriana Cuéllar received her Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a Master on Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she received the Annual Award for Excellence in Housing Design. She is a recipient of the 2006-2007 Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Design by the American Academy in Rome where she expanded her interest and research on experimental cartographies that capture the erosion of everyday urban landscape. Currently she is an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Diego and at The New School of Architecture and Design where she teaches at graduate level and co-directs the Rome study abroad program. For several years Adriana worked for estudio Teddy Cruz on the design of housing projects and on the investigation of the cultural/spatial relations at the border region of Tijuana-San Diego. She has also worked for Rafael Viñoly Architects in New York on large-scale cultural and residential projects.
 

Marcel Sanchez received his Bachelor of Architecture from Iberoamerican University in México and a Master in Architecture from University of California, Los Angeles, where he was awarded the Director’s scholarship award. Currently he is a full time assistant professor at Woodbury University San Diego where his research has been the development of design methodologies that expand on geometry as tool for urban sensing and architectural innovation. He has been critic, invited lecturer and taught at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia University, RMIT, South Eastern University in China, Iberoamerican University and The New School of Architecture and Design, where he co-directed the Rome study abroad program. For several years he participated in a wide-range of urban studies along the México-US border with San Diego State University, University of California San Diego, Colef-College of the Northern Border, the Municipal Planning Institute of Tijuana and the San Diego Association of Governments; with the intention to comprehend and explore the morphological and social implications of this region. He has worked for Kieran Timberlake and Frank Gehry in technology driven projects, researching on methodologies of digital design, fabrication and material assembly. 

Analia Saban, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is an artist currently working in Los Angeles and living in New York City. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, her works often include plays on art historical references and traditions. Paintings can become sculptural forms and sculptures are presented on stretched canvas, all while using the process of trial and error with new techniques and technology. Saban has participated in the Hammer Museum's "Made in LA" exhibition in 2012, and most notably the recipient of the Norton Museum’s annual "Rudin Prize,” a juried exhibition for emerging photographers. Saban has had solo exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, Thomas Solomon Gallery in LA, Praz-Delavallade in Paris and Sprueth Magers in Berlin, amongst others.  The artist is in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, NY; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA.  

Peter Zellner is Principal, Studio Design Lead, Los Angeles at AECOM and professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).  He was also the founding principal of ZELLNERPLUS, an award winning architectural design, planning and research firm located in Venice, California. ZELLNERPLUS has designed public and private art galleries, residences, institutional facilities and corporate spaces in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. He has been recognized as an emerging architectural voice in national publications such as The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Art+Auction magazine included Zellner in its annual "Power 100" selection of influential people in the art world. Zellner was also named by the Los Angeles Times one of "10 Faces to Watch in 2012 in Dance, Theater, Architecture and Art," while Harper's Bazaar included him in its Editor's Selection "Best of What's New - Designers to Watch." 

Zellner holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard (1999). At the Harvard Graduate School of Design he was a participant in the Harvard Project on the City led by Rem Koolhaas. He received a Bachelor of Architecture with First Class Honors from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1993) in Australia, where he also taught between 1994 and 1997.  Zellner is the author of numerous essays and books including Hybrid Space (Thames & Hudson, 2000) and Pacific Edge (Thames & Hudson, 1998). He has curated exhibitions such as Sign as Surface (Artists Space, 2003) and Whatever Happened to Los Angeles (SCI-Arc, 2005). 

Zellner has held Visiting Professorships in Architecture at UC Berkeley, FIU, the University of Southern California, the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris and the Institut fur Stadtebau und Raumplanung (Institute for Urban Design & Urban Planning) at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2012, Zellner completed his first free standing project, the Matthew Marks Los Angeles Gallery. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne described the project as "...one of the most conspicuous architectural debuts to appear in Southern California in a number of years." The project recently won an AIA|LA Design Award (Merit).

About Big City Forum

Big City Forum (BCF), founded in 2008 by Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and activist Leonardo Bravo and co-directed with artist/graphic designer River Jukes-Hudson since 2013, is an independent, interdisciplinary project that explores the intersection between design-based creative disciplines within the context of public space, the built environment, and social change.