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Graduate Thesis Public Events, Summer 2021
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Graduate Thesis at SCI-Arc is an opportunity for M.Arch students to explore a set of relevant disciplinary issues as they complete their programs of study and research with a presentation and public exhibition of an individual disciplinary position that expands the boundaries of contemporary architectural practice. SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis is coordinated by Kristy Balliet and John Cooper.
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The avatar: Lidija Kljakovic
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PLANET THESIS
PLANET THESIS is SCI-Arc’s annual Graduate Thesis symposium. It marks the landing of every graduate thesis on the territory of its realization. If spring thesis prep represents the research and planning of a mission, its eventual take off and departure to another part of the architecture discipline’s cosmos, and its finding an orbit and preparation of instruments of speculation, summer thesis begins with the first moment of unpacking the mission and getting to work. The instruments, vehicles, and protagonists of the thesis are in their situation and have an orientation: now the real speculative constructions can begin. This symposium launches the final phase of the thesis. It provides a crossover for the design advisors and History + Theory cultural agents who will be working together in summer 2021. Out of the variety of thesis projects in process at SCI-Arc, three broad territories of collective concern have been identified and serve to group student projects selected for their outstanding rigor and commitment to urgent issues in the discipline and in the world. In the company of invited guests, faculty, and students, PLANET THESIS will probe the thesis work being done at SCI-Arc, develop it through collective thinking, and respond to the question of what constitutes an architectural thesis here and now in the present moment of summer 2021. Moderated by Kristy Balliet, John Cooper, and the avatar. Guest speakers include Michael Young, Sylvia Lavin, and Cyrus Peñarroyo. More info
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This series of graduate thesis lectures titled FORM@ and arranged by Graduate Programs Chair Elena Manferdini is organized around the intent to challenge the current notion of an architectural archive, in support of a more inclusive history of architecture. Alternative formats of archiving will be at the center of the discussion of how and what records could and should be stored, as well as what the participatory rules to our institutional memory are and can be. Databases, artificial intelligence, social media, the internet, the permanent collection, digital libraries, the informal, performance, the oral and written tradition, data privacy, and ADA will be some of the topics this lecture series will bring to the fore.
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Passing Ships: Making Moments on a Changing Landscape
Checkowski will discuss his work, which convenes at the intersection of storytelling, design, and technology, as an exploration of the fleeting nature of modern language. (Intro by Elena Manferdini). More info
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06.21.21
Mimi Zeiger (M.Arch ’98)
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New Middles
New Middles presents the city of Columbus, Indiana as an architectural archive ready for reflection. As co-curator of the 2020-21 Exhibit Columbus, Mimi Zeiger will discuss the modernist legacy of Columbus and its relationship to the Mississippi Watershed ecology. By exploring the history of Columbus and the design installations commissioned for the current exhibition, she’ll expand an understanding of the Midwestern city to address questions of colonization and civil rights, as well as posit meditations on cultural and materials histories latent in the celebrated buildings. (Intro by Jasmine Benyamin). More info
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06.28.21
Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks
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The Poetics of Sanctuary and Place: Paul R. Williams
Paul R. Williams design of Los Angeles’s First African Methodist Church is one that emphasized both function (in terms of how the structure was “used” by its congregation) and sanctuary—a holy and sacred space of safety. Built during the era of legal racial segregation and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, how can we better understand the symbolic importance of the concept of sanctuary, here, as a built structure. What’s more, how can we include Los Angeles’s African American communities as extensions of this sense of sanctuary and “structure” as racist land covenants weighed heavily on the city’s African American communities. This talk will explore these subjects, and hopefully, help explain the legal and social strictures that helped form the city we know today. (Intro by Marrikka Trotter). More info
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New ways of seeing the Pattern
There is a critical need for new tools and techniques to visualize, filter, interpret, and share high-dimensional datasets. This talk will discuss the use of gesture and a 320° immersive workspace at Oblong Industries to prototype, design, and build real-time, interactive, software-based environments that explore datasets from early heart formation to the news. (Intro by Elena Manferdini). More info
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Ancientness and Future Forms of Coexistence
The lecture will explore a contemporary position on what has traditionally been called ‘our relationship to nature,’ discussing new aesthetic and spatial possibilities of an ecocentric architecture. (Intro by Kristy Balliet). More info
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Justine Poulin (M.Arch ’20), Richard Mapes (M.Arch ’20), Liang Yu (M.Arch ’19), Irvin Shaifa (M.Arch ’20)
SCI-Arc alumni share their experience and past theses with the current Graduate Thesis class, followed by a Zoom SCI-Arc Mentorship Mixer open to all SCI-Arc students and alumni to connect with a mentor or mentee via the SCI-Arc Alumni Platform. (Intro by Elena Manferdini)
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08.02.21
Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch
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Crip Technoscience: Disability Culture as Design
Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch offer “crip technoscience” as a critical project that centers the experiences of disabled people as designers. Too often in architecture, product design, and urban planning, disabled people are treated solely as users, not as makers. This ignores the long history of disabled people’s ways of shaping design, both in a professional capacity and in everyday life. Crip technoscience provides a different analytical framework that also explains why disabled ways of designing are political: they challenge the imperatives to be typical, productive, and functioning, instead inviting strategies based on friction and contestation. (Intro by John Cooper). More info
Image description (top left): Aimi Hamraie, an olive-skinned Iranian person with short dark curly hair and rectangular glasses, smiles at the camera. They wear a blue button-up shirt and a blue-green blazer. Behind them is a blurry green background.
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