INVITED SPEAKERS

 

 

Dr. Garnet Hertz, Concept Lab

Dr. Garnet Hertz is a Fulbright Scholar and contemporary artist whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is Artist in Residence and Research Scientist in Informatics at UC Irvine and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in thirteen countries including SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, Transmediale and DEAF and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based lecture series on DIY culture, electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.

 

More info: http://www.conceptlab.com

Chuck Hoberman, Hoberman Associates

Hoberman is the founder of Hoberman Associates, a multidisciplinary practice with clients ranging across sectors including consumer products, deployable shelters, and space structures. Examples of his commissioned work include the transforming LED screen that served as the primary stage element for the U2 360° world tour and the Hoberman Arch in Salt Lake City, installed as the centerpiece for the Winter Olympic Games (2002). Other noteworthy commissions include a retractable dome for the World's Fair in Hanover, Germany (2000); the Expanding Hypar (1997) at the California Museum of Science and Industry; the Expanding Sphere (1992) at the Liberty Science Center, Jersey City, New Jersey; and the Expanding Geodesic Dome (1997) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Hoberman's work has been exhibited several times at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2008 his commissioned installation Emergent Surface was part of the exhibit 'Design and the Elastic Mind.'
In 2008, alongside Buro Happold Principal Craig Schwitter, Hoberman formed the Adaptive Building Initiative (ABI). The joint venture united Hoberman's design vision with Buro Happold's 30 years of engineering excellence to develop retractable façades, responsive shading and ventilation, operable roofs, and canopies for the built environment. Between 2009 and 2010, ABI realized four adaptive architectural installations: an adaptive façade for the POLA's Ginza, Tokyo headquarters; an operable roof for Aldar Central Market in Abu Dhabi; a dynamic entrance for the Wyss Institute at Harvard University; and a kinetic façade for the Simons Center at Stony Brook University, New York.

Hoberman holds a bachelors degree in sculpture from Cooper Union and a masters degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He won the Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1997.

Lisa Iwamoto, Iwamoto Scott Architecture

Lisa Iwamoto is a principal at IwamotoScott Architecture is a San Francisco-based architecture and design practice. She received her Master of Architecture degree with Distinction from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Structural Engineering from the University of Colorado. She has worked as a Structural Engineer at Bechtel Corporation, and Architectural Designer at Schwartz Silver Architects, Thompson and Rose, and Architectural Intern at Morphosis. She has taught previously at the University of Michigan where she was a Muschenheim Fellow, and Harvard University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at University of California Berkeley where her design research concentrates on the perceptual performance of material and digital fabrication techniques.

Marcos Novak, transLAB

Marcos Novak is a pioneer in the field of virtual architecture. In the mid 90s, his contribution to International architectural discourse was further expanded by the coining and definition of the term "Transarchitectures". His approach: "we conceive algorithmically (morphogenesis); we model numerically (rapid prototyping); we build robotically (new tectonics); we inhabit interactively (intelligent space); we telecommunicate instantly (pantopicon); we are informed immersively (liquid architectures); we socialise nonlocally (nonlocal public domain); we evert virtuality (transarchitectures)." He has also posited a new "Soft Babylon," a theoretical stance which posits that our digitized architectural palette is causing us to create a wired Situationist city, while we struggle with some of the massive paradigm shifts that our era will and must face. Whilst articulating highly fluent theory, he has practiced, producing beautiful ethereal architectures that flux and shimmer as his algorithms run their designed logics. He received the Masters of Architecture at Ohio State university in 1983. Since that time he has taught at Ohio State, University of Texas Austin, the Architecture program at UCLA, the Digital Media program at UCLA, Art Center College of Art & design, Pasadena. He has published, lectured and exhibited his work internationally.

Joseph Rosa, University of Michigan Museum of Art

Joseph Rosa is the Director of the Museum of Art (UMMA), he also chairs the President's Advisory Committee on Public Art and is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Rosa has curated more than 30 exhibitions on contemporary architecture and design and is the author of 15 books. His writings have appeared in Praxis, Architectural Design, Assemblage, Casabella, The History of Photography Journal, Oculus, Architekur & Bauforum, and Progressive Architecture. He is also a noted scholar on the architect Albert Frey---the first disciple of Le Corbusier to build in America---and Julius Shulman, the highly acclaimed 20th-century architectural photographer.

 

Prior to joining the UMMA, Rosa was the architecture and design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the curator of architecture at the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the chief curator at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and the director of the Columbia Architecture Galleries in New York.

 

He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He has been a juror for the Pew Trust, USA Fellows and the James Beard Awards. He has also been an adjunct professor teaching architecture and design in schools for the past 15 years. Most recently he was appointed a professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Michael Speaks, University of Kentucky, College of Design

Michael Speaks is Professor of Architecture and Dean of the College of Design at the University of Kentucky. Speaks is former director of the Graduate Program and founding director of the Metropolitan Research and Design Postgraduate Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. He was also the founding editor of the cultural journal Polygraph and a former editor at Architecture New York and a+u (Tokyo), and currently serves as a contributing editor for Architectural Record. An influential writer and critic, Speaks has published and lectured internationally on art, architecture, urban design and scenario planning. Speaks has been at the center of debates about the role innovation and prototyping plays in design and has written a number of influential essays that argue for the importance of what he calls "design intelligence," or the various forms of design knowledge generated during design but which are often overlooked in favor of "the design."

Michael Weinstock, AA EMTECH

Michael Weinstock is an Architect, currently Director of Research and Development, and Director of the Emergent Technologies and Design programme in the Graduate School of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Born in Germany, lived as a child in the Far East and then West Africa, and attended an English public school but ran away to sea at age 17 after reading Conrad. Years at sea in traditional wooden sailing ships, with shipyard and shipbuilding experience. Studied Architecture at the Architectural Association 1982/88 and has taught at the AA School of Architecture since 1989 in a range of positions from workshop tutor through to Academic Head.