UB School of Architecture and Planning

Heather Roberge

Murmur Los Angeles

SHEET LOGICS

Question: What new roles do material and geometry play in contemporary design culture?

Heather Roberge is a practicing architect and educator in Los Angeles. She is associate vice chair of the Department of Architecture at UCLA and director of the undergraduate program in architectural studies. She teaches graduate courses in design and technology. Formerly, as co-principal of Gnuform, Ms. Roberge explored an architecture of effective atmospheres through a vitalist-materialist model of practice. Murmur continues these investigations, with a special focus on the spatial, structural and atmospheric innovation made possible by emerging digital design and manufacturing techniques. Ms. Roberge’s research focuses on the atmospheric implications of contemporary surfaces with particular interest in formal and material experimentation that engages the senses. Ms. Roberge received both her Bachelor of Science and her Master of Architecture degrees at the Ohio State University, where she received the AIA Certificate of Excellence and graduated summa cum laude. In 1995, Ms. Roberge studied at the Architectural Association in London.

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Curt Gambetta, Reyner Banham Fellow

UB School of Architecture and Planning

FROM EXODUS TO ATTACHMENT: WASTE INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF PUBLIC LIFE

Question: How can architectural research be an act of design? What politics can it generate outside of architecture to shape new forms of public life?

Curt Gambetta is the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow for 2011-12. Since 2003, he is the moderator of the Urban Study Group mailing list for the Sarai program in Delhi, India, where he was also a resident between 2002 and 2005. He graduated with a B.A. in political science from Vassar College in 2002. In 2009, he received his M.Arch from Rice University, and was subsequently the coordinator of publications and events at the Rice School of Architecture prior to joining the faculty at UB in 2010. His research focuses on the material history of architecture in 20th century India, as well as the public life of infrastructure—with a particular focus on waste. He is currently editing, with Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a forthcoming issue of the Indian journal Seminar, entitled “The Future of the Street,” and is teaching a year-long seminar about waste infrastructure and methods of research as part of the Banham Fellowship.

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Matthew Dalbey, Ph.D.

Director, Federal & State Division
US EPA's Office of Sustainable Communities

THE HUD-DOT-EPA PARTNERSHIP FOR SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES: An insider's guide to a new federal approach to community-driven, place-based public policy

Question: How are the politics, framing, and messaging of sustainable approaches to community design and planning impacting research, practice, and implementation?

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M. Paz Guttierez

Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley. Founder/director, BIOMS research group.

TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH/RESEARCH TRANSFORMATIONS

Question: What makes research innovation in design sustained?

Paz Gutierrez is an architect, researcher, inventor, and assistant professor at UC Berkeley. In 2008 she founded BIOMS, an interdisciplinary research group at UC Berkeley that intersects architecture, engineering, and sciences to develop self-regulated building systems. BIOMS’ research is supported by the US-National Science Foundation, DOE, and EPA. Gutierrez is recipient of the prestigious 2010 NSF-EFRI SEED award and the 2011 Bentley Educator of the Year Award in recognition of her interdisciplinary research innovation. Her recent design prizes include the Blue Award 2009 First Prize (sustainable buildings-supervisor), and the 2011Evolo Skyscraper Competition Finalist. Gutierrez is a 2011 Fulbright Nexus Scholar and was recently appointed as Senior Fellow of ECPA by the US Dept. of State.

David Gissen

California College of the Arts, San Francisco

MAINTENANCE ENVIRONMENTS

Question: What does the historicization of space and objects look and feel like?

David Gissen is the author of the book Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, and editor of the "Territory" issue of AD. His work explores novel conceptions of nature within architecture and the foundations for experimental forms of historical inquiry. He is an associate professor and coordinator of history and theory in the Division of Architecture, California College of the Arts.

Keller Easterling

Yale University

DISPOSITION

Question: How can space be information?

Keller Easterling is an architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University. Her book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. A previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft: global infrastructure and political arts, examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.

Gary Hack

Professor Emeritus of Urban Design, University of Pennsylvania and MIT

IBRAHIM JAMMAL MEMORIAL LECTURE: CHINA FACES ITS URBAN FUTURE

Question: Industrialization spurred the massive urbanization of China, but Chinese cities are now in the midst of a second generation of urban development based on consumption, services and creativity. What now?

Gary Hack is professor emeritus in the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, where he served as dean for 12 years. Prior to that, he was professor and head of the urban studies and planning program at MIT. An urban designer and planner, he has done projects in many cities of the US and across the globe, including the planning of the West Side Waterfront in NY, redevelopment of Prudential Center in Boston, preparing a new metropolitan plan for Bangkok, and overseeing redevelopment of waterfronts of several Canadian cities. He is the co-author/editor of Site Planning, Local Planning, and Urban Design in the Global Perspective. He was educated in architecture and planning at the University of Manitoba, University of Illinois and MIT, and received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University.

Clarkson Chair in Architecture: Antoine Picon

G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Co-Director of Doctoral Programs (PhD & DDes), Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design

Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Co-Director of Doctoral Programs (PhD & DDes) at the GSD. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment(1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary "deep structures" of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. Whereas Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la Curiosité d'un classique (1988) traces the origin of these changes at the end of the seventeenth century, L'Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne, L'Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992) envisages their full development from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1850s. Picon has also worked on the relations between society, technology and utopia. This is in particular the theme of Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), a detailed study of the Saint-Simonian movement that played a seminal role in the emergence of industrial modernity. Picon’s most recent book, Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010) offers a comprehensive overview and discussion of the changes brought by the computer to the theory and practice of architecture.

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Birdair Lecture: Shohei Shigematsu

Partner, Director of OMA New York

OMA NEW YORK RECENT WORKS

Shohei Shigematsu joined OMA in 1998 and became a partner in 2008. He has led the OMA office in New York since 2006, overseeing OMA’s operations in North America including the recent completion of Milstein Hall at Cornell University and the construction of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Shigematsu was also project leader for the winning competition entry for the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Headquarters, the Whitney Museum extension in New York, and Prada Epicenters for Shanghai and London. He is a visiting faculty member of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; and for Kyoto University of Art and Design.