Big City Forum #15

Sharif Guest Studio

Vivarium, Matter Management

Vivarium, Matter Management

Big City Forum #15
A conversation about presence, absence, and energy…in architecture.

Featuring:
Juan Azulay
Mohamed Sharif
Maria Guest

Saturday, May 29th, 2010
4 - 6 pm

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-0191

Juan Azulay is the director of the 10-year old Los Angeles-based firm Matter Management. His award-winning practice ranges widely in discipline, methodology and media – spanning works in architecture, such as the Aquatic Terrarium for the New Barcelona Zoo (2001) and a winning entry to the MAK’s Vertical Garden Competition (2006) and Vivarium (2010) to film – such as the feature-length The Blue Noon (2011), short film fest nominee short Yu Tsun (2008) and Flood stains (2010), a collaboration with legendary No Wave artist Lydia Lunch.
Azulay received his B.Arch. from SCI-Arc and his Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design (MSAAD) from Columbia University. He is currently on the Design, MediaSCAPES and Visual Studies faculty at SCI-Arc, as well as serving on the Academic Council and the Admissions Committee. Previously, he taught design studios at Columbia University’s GSAP and at the ETSAV in Barcelona. Azulay’s work has been featured in Abitare, Arquitectura Viva, Quaderns, Oeste, Design Boom, Vanidad, Chronomorphologies, Architect, La Vanguardia, Espai Picasso at COAC, Abstract, Architectural Record and LA Architect. His work is part of the permanent collection of contemporary architects at the MAK in Vienna. Juan sits on the Board of Directors of the Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment.www.ma77er.com

Sharif Guest Studio
Led by Mohamed Sharif and Maria Guest, Sharif Guest Studio is a design practice based in Santa Monica, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Drawing on their extensive experiences in the fields of architectural practice and education, Sharif and Guest focus on creating current and engaging works.

Maria Guest, based in Cambridge, is Principal of Sharif Guest Studio. Guest currently teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, where she has led Advanced Studios and Thesis Advising since 2007. Prior to teaching, Guest worked with leading architecture practices including Office dA, Daly Genik Architects and for Morphosis Architects where, from 2000 to 2006, Guest served as Job Captain for the US Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, Guest graduated from the GSAPP at Columbia University in 1996, where she was the recipient of the Outstanding Thesis Award, the William Kinne Travelling Fellowship, and a Federal Research Grant on the History and Preservation of 20th Century Construction Materials.

Mohamed Sharif, based in Santa Monica, is Principal of Sharif Guest Studio. Sharif currently holds the post of Associate Professor and is Assistant Chair of the Architecture/Landscape/Interiors Department at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Before joining Otis in 2008, he was an Associate at Koning Eizenberg Architecture in Santa Monica for three years. Prior to that Sharif worked on numerous award-winning projects with many architecture practices in the Los Angeles area. Over the past 16 years Sharif has taught at many architecture schools including Rhode Island School of Design, and has edited and published regularly, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. From 2007 to 2009 Sharif served as President of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design (LA Forum). He received his graduate (with highest distinction) and undergraduate degrees in architecture from the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen, Scotland (1993, 1994) and spent a year at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago as an exchange student in 1990-91. His undergraduate dissertation 'On Venturi and Scott Brown' was awarded an RIBA medal and is in the permanent collection of the RIBA Library. www.sharifgueststudio.com

Big City Forum #14

BIG CITY FORUM #14
Starting at the Beginning: Discussing, Seeing, Creating

As much a workshop as a presentation, this forum will present how two individuals--one a designer/educator, the other a writer/educator—stimulate seeing and thinking as means to creativity. Come prepared to talk, listen, think, collaborate, make, remake, and reflect.

Saturday, May 8th, 2010
4 - 6 pm

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-0191

Featuring:
Philip Yenawine
William Longhauser

PHILIP YENAWINE is Co Founding Director (with Abigail Housen) of Visual Understanding in Education, a non-profit developmentally-based research organization that studies how experience with art affects cognition generally. A principal result of their research is Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS.) He was Director of Education at New York¹s Museum of Modern Art from 1983-93, and has held similar positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Among other positions, he was founding director of the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado. He is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, an editor of Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, and has written six children's books about art -- Stories, Colors, Lines, Shapes, People and Places, as well as a dictionary, Key Art Terms for Beginners. He is President of Art Matters, a foundation supporting contemporary artists, and on the board of the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

WILLIAM LONGHAUSER is a graphic designer and professor. He is the Founding Director of the Outside Institute, an educational think tank dedicated to exploring new paradigms for design education. Before moving to Los Angeles in June, 2000, he was a tenured professor at the University of the Arts,
Philadelphia, where he taught in the graphic design department since 1977 and was chairman of the department for three years.

Longhauser¹s design work has consistently received awards and has been featured in international publications and exhibitions. Six of his works were included in "Typographism" an international exhibition of graphic design at the Georges Pompidou National Contemporary Art Center in Paris. His posters have been exhibited in international poster biennales held in Helsinki and Lahti, Finland; Warsaw, Poland; and Brno, Czechoslovakia. His work was in ³Design USA,² a major design exhibition traveling to nine cities in the Soviet Union. As one of seventeen graphic designers invited to represent contemporary graphic design in America, his posters were included in the exhibition, "Contemporary U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. Poster Exhibition" shown in Ohgaki, Osaka, and Tokyo, Japan.

His work has been published in Graphis Posters, Graphis Annual, Communications Arts magazine, Idea magazine, The Annual of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and Print's Design Annual. His posters are in the permanent collection of the Newark Museum of Art, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, and the Musee D'Histoire Contemporaine, Paris.