Design/Social Action/Change

Touch "Uniendo Puntos" installation

TOUCH showroom

Aguiniga installation at CAFAM

Tanya Aguiniga

Big City Forum in conjunction with Marine presents Design/Social Action/Change. You are invited to an intimate conversation with a leading contemporary designer, Tanya Aguiniga, and a curator and product developer, Zoe Melo, as they share their work using design as a transformative tool for social, community, and personal interconnectedness.

Thursday, April 28
7 - 9 pm

Marine
A Contemporary Art Salon
716 Marine Street
Santa Monica, CA 90405

www.marineartsalon.com

Featuring:

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based furniture designer and artist who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design, and is a current faculty member at Otis College of Art and Design. She created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists' group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. She recently founded the group, Artists Helping Artisans, through which she helps spread knowledge of craft by collaborating with traditional artisans. Her work has been exhibited from Mexico City to Milan and she was named a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts.

Zoë Melo is a co-founder of TOUCH, a brand that develops, markets and promotes social and sustainable design projects. She also consults designers and brands on a variety of projects worldwide. Over her career, Zoë has collaborated with some of the most talented and renowned designers, photographers and art directors in fashion, art and product design. Her work has received worldwide attention and media coverage. In 2008 Dwell recognized Zoë as a Nice Modernist for her work in social and sustainable design. She has organized and curated important design events and exhibits, such as Inter-Connected, a showcase of Portuguese and Brazilian design during New York Design Week in 2010. She also co-curated "Uniendo Puntos" during Valencia Design Week, showcasing designers and products from Latin America held in the fall of 2010. She was a featured speaker at TEDx Amazonia in November of 2010. Recently she has been implementing the operations of TOUCH in Brazil.

Big City Forum: Detroit - Brooklyn - Los Angeles

Big City Forum in conjunction with SUPERFRONT LA presents an architecture panel in response to the exhibition DETROIT: A BROOKLYN CASE STUDY.

This event is an opportunity to expand upon the themes of the DETROIT: A BROOKLYN CASE STUDY exhibit with a dynamic group of LA-based architects and theorists. This engaging conversation will ask participants to consider Los Angeles as an additional set of circumstances in which the ideas ...of post-industrial transformation, the shrinking city, and other terms of the DETROIT: A BROOKLYN CASE STUDY exhibit can be understood.

Saturday, March 26th, 2011
1 - 3 pm

Pacific Design Center # 208

8687 Melrose Avenue | West Hollywood, CA | 90069


Featured Presenters:

DANA BAUER has recently launched a design practice based in Los Angeles, groundup LLC. Current projects span domestic and urban realms and include a new residence in the Hollywood Hills and the re-imagining of a Los Angeles strip mall for a start up design community. Her prior experience includes award winning work at Michael Maltzan Architecture in Los Angeles on such projects as MoMa QNS, the UCLA Hammer Museum and Kidspace Children’s Museum. At Gensler, in New York, her work for HBO and ESPN received numerous accolades. In addition to her 12 years practicing and teaching architecture, she has professional experience in set and costume design, fashion and photography. Working between design disciplines has enabled her to explore concepts across diverse venues and a wide range of audiences. By exposing unlikely and underlying socio-cultural mechanisms, her work proposes ways in which urban and social solutions may be represented, communicated and implemented.

DAVID FREELAND is principal of FreelandBuck in Los Angeles and adjunct faculty at Woodbury University. With over 10 years of experience in architecture, he has worked on award winning projects with a number of offices in New York and Los Angeles including Michael Maltzan Architecture, Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design, RES4, AGPS, and Eisenman Architects. He is a graduate of University of Virginia and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design.

ALI JEEVANJEE has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Ali has taught architecture at Cal Poly Pomona and at USC, and is also serving on the editorial team of the internationally recognized website Archinect.

Prior to founding LOC with Poonam Sharma, Ali worked in the office of Frank O. Gehry where he worked on The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, on which he worked closely with the Guggenheim Museum, and the Vincor Winery in Ontario, Canada. Prior to this, Ali gained extensive experience with the Los Angeles office of Ellerbe Becket, where he worked on several large-scale sports and entertainment projects. He also worked very closely with landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson on the bridge and garden terrace at South Coast Plaza. Prior to which he was a studio assistant to Venice based artist Laddie Dill.

KAREN LOHRMANN is a Los Angeles based urbanist, artist, educator and researcher. Previously located in Berlin, she initiated Lorma Marti focusing on studies of spaces, cultural manifestations and resultant landscapes, together with Stefano de Martino in 2002. Their work is published and exhibited internationally, most recent books are Update: All Possible Worlds (2008), How we spent it (2009) and Waiting Land (forthcoming 2011). She is co-editor of Clear Skies with Patches of Grey (2003) and the periodical Correspondents (since 2009). With a focus on urban studies and related scenography, she places her work at the crossroads of disciplines, from site to non-site. Educated at Aachen University, ETH and University of the Arts Zurich, she graduated from the TU Berlin School of Architecture, Urbanism and Society.

Currently on the faculty at UCLA she teaches the Suprastudio Culture Now - The Contemporary American Condition, together with Thom Mayne. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck (2003-2010) focusing on environments, landscape, urban and cultural studies and an assistant professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism TU Berlin (1998-2003).

ANDREW ZAGO is an architect and founder of Zago Architecture in Detroit and Los Angeles. He is design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, has taught at UCLA, the Ohio State University, Cornell University and the City College of New York.

Moderated by:
Mitch McEwen/Chloe Bass
SUPERFRONT LA-BROOKLYN

http://losangeles.superfront.org/