Virginia San Fratello is tonight’s June Freeman Lecture Series presenter

Related imageArchitecture and Design Network (ADN) continues its 2019/2020 June Freeman lecture series with a lecture entitled “Borderwall as Architecure” with Virginia San Fratello, founding partner of Real San Fratello.

The program will begin at 6pm tonight (January 14) following a 5:30pm reception at the Windgate Center for Art+Design on the UA Little Rock campus.

San Fratello draws, builds, 3D prints, teaches, and writes about architecture and interior design as a cultural endeavor deeply influenced by craft traditions and contemporary technologies.  She is a founding partner in the Oakland based make-tank Emerging Objects. Wired magazine writes of their innovations, “while others busy themselves trying to prove that it’s possible to 3-D print a house, Rael and San Fratello are occupied with trying to design one people would actually want to live in”.

She also speculates about the social agency of design, particularly along the borderlands between the USA and Mexico, in her studio RAEL SAN FRATELLO. You can see her drawings, models, and objects in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Virginia San Fratello will discuss the long-term project, Borderwall as Architecture, an important re-examination of what the 700 miles of physical barrier that divides the United States of America from the United Mexican States is, and could be. It is both a protest against the wall and a projection about its future. She will present a series of propositions suggesting that the nearly seven hundred miles of wall is an opportunity for cultural and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling, the lecture will take the audience on a journey along a wall that cuts through a “third nation” — the Divided States of America.

On the way the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape are exposed and interrogated through the story of people who, on both sides of the border, transform the wall, challenging its existence in remarkably creative ways. Coupled with these real-life accounts are counterproposals for the wall, created by Virginia’s studio, that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Virginia proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue.

ADN lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.  Thank you to our presenting sponsor Malmstrom White and our title sponsors Terracon and Evo Business Environments. Supporters of ADN include the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the University of Arkansas Little Rock Windgate Center of Art + Design, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Arkansas Art Center and friends in the community.  For additional information contact  ArchDesignNetwork@gmail.com.

Jennifer Bonner of Mall and Harvard University Graduate School of Design is first 2019-2020 Architecture & Design Network speaker

Image result for jennifer bonnerIn partnership with the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the June Freeman Lecture Series is excited to welcome Jennifer Bonner, Director of MALL and Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Architecture II Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

“Before and After Haus Gables” is the topic of the program.  It will take place at the Windgate Center of Art + Design on the UA Little Rock campus.

Born in Alabama, Jennifer Bonner founded MALL, a creative practice for art and architecture in 2009. MALL stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability—an acronym with built-in flexibility. As a recipient of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Emerging Voices Award (AIA/Young Architects Forum), and Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award, her creative work has been published in architectural trade journals including Architect, Metropolis, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, and Wallpaper, as well as a+t , DAMN, PLAT, Offramp, and MAS Context . She is founder and author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta, editor of Platform: Still Life, and a guest editor for ART PAPERS special issue on architecture and design of Los Angeles.

MALL’s recent work includes a single-family residence constructed out of cross-laminated timber, a mid-rise tower that resembles a sandwich, an urban development for a small lot located in Atlanta, Georgia and a temporary installation for Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. The work can be described as pictorially graphic and out of place and playfully challenges the production of architecture through representation, materiality and color.

ADN lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.   Supporters of ADN include the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the University of Arkansas Little Rock Windgate Center of Art + Design, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Arkansas Art Center and friends in the community.  For additional information contact  ArchDesignNetwork@gmail.com.

“Project Row Houses at 25” is focus of Architecture and Design Network June Freeman Lecture tonight

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Architecture and Design Network (ADN) continues its 2018/2019 June Freeman lecture series by welcoming Eureka Gilkey, Project Row Houses’ Executive Director. Project Row Houses is a nonprofit organization in Houston, Texas that is dedicated to empowering people and enriching the Third Ward community through engagement, art and direct action. PRH was founded 25 years ago with a mission to be the catalyst for the transformation of community through the celebration of art and African American history and culture.

PRH’s work with the Third Ward community began in 1993 when seven visionary African-American artists recognized real potential in a block and a half of derelict shotgun houses at the corner of Holman and Live Oak. Where others saw poverty, these artists saw a future site for positive, creative, and transformative experiences in the Third Ward. So, together they began to explore how they could be a resource to the community and how art might be an engine for social transformation. This is how the PRH story began.

With the founders engaged with a community of creative thinkers and the neighbors around them, Project Row Houses quickly began to shift the understanding of art from traditional studio practice to a more conceptual base of transforming the social environment. While they were artists, they were also advocates.
Over the next 25 years the organization brought together groups and pooled resources to materialize sustainable opportunities for artists, young mothers, small businesses, and Third Ward Residents helping to cultivate independent change agents by supporting people and their ideas so that they have tools and capacity to do the same for others.

PRH is, and has always been a unique experiment in activating the intersections between art, enrichment, and preservation. The lecture will cover PRH’s rich 25 year history and how the nonprofit became an international model for artists and communities to address their needs for historic preservation and community enrichment.

Architecture and Design Network lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required. Supporters of ADN include the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and friends in the community.

“Taking the Time,”a lecture by Rick Joy, FAIA tonight

Amangiri Resort and Spa.

Architecture and Design Network (ADN) continues its 2018/2019 June Freeman lecture series by welcoming Rick Joy, FAIA, Principal of Studio Rick Joy, a 32 person architecture and planning firm established in 1993 in Tucson, Arizona.

The lecture starts at 6pm at the Arkansas Arts Center. A reception starts at 5:30pm.

From the beginning, each of Studio Rick Joy’s works has been exhibited and published extensively and have won numerous awards.  Joy received the 2002 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture and in 2004 won the prestigious National Design Award from the Smithsonian Institute/Cooper-Hewitt Museum.  He periodically serves as a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Studio Rick Joy has realized architectural works throughout North America with extensive experience with lifestyle based projects from numerous single family residences to an ultra-lux resort and large scale master-plans.  The office has several active residential commissions in New York City, Long Island, Turks and Caicos.  Studio Rick Joy is currently completing the prestigious commission of the new Train Station and Campus Gateway Buildings to Princeton University, a luxury resort hotel with private compounds in Mexico, an apartment building in Mexico City and a new luxury boutique hotel in Austin Texas.

Architecture and Design Network lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.  Supporters of ADN include the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and friends in the community.

Landscape Architecture Now! Case Studies in Mexico and Latin America is topic of lecture tonight

Vistas Cerro Grande Linear Park in Chihuahua City: A Public Mile Designed with and for the Community. Photos by Delfoz.

Vistas Cerro Grande Linear Park in Chihuahua City: A Public Mile Designed with and for the Community. Photos by Delfoz.

Architecture and Design Network (ADN) continues its 2018/2019 June Freeman lecture series by diving into the discipline and profession of landscape architecture by analyzing a double context:  first, the larger context of the Latin American continent; and second, Mexico as a specific context.

The program will begin at 6:00pm tonight at the Arkansas Arts Center. A reception will precede it at 5:30pm.

Gabriel Diaz Montemayor, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin and Founder of Labor Studio, will present these findings in ADN’s second lecture of 2019 year, “Landscape Architecture Now!  Case Studies in Mexico and Latin America.”

The discipline and profession of Landscape Architecture is not the same in Latin America as in the United States. It should not be the same. A brief historic chronology will be traced to explain the different origins and meaning of public space in this continent while addressing the need to identify the unique national and regional differences, avoiding -often done- common generalizations. Recent project case studies will be synthesized to portray the current condition of the discipline in the Latin American context.

The contemporary condition of Public Space in Mexico will be explained as one of the unique conditions assembling the Latin American mosaic. The country has recently gone through dramatic changes in public life, society, culture, and politics. A set of case studies in Landscape Architecture and Public Space, where Montemayor has been involved in different capacities, will be employed to explain the challenges and opportunities for Landscape Architecture in Mexico.

The Mexican projects include applied academic studios trying to fill the void between the planning and the implementation of public infrastructure projects needing landscape architectural methods and matter. These will also include professional public space commissions based on community reconstruction, engagement, and participation. Both applied studios and professional projects operate in a third context, northern Mexico. This will lead to a final proposition reflecting on a potential future for the border region between the United States and Mexico, one where societies are reconciled with their common ground.

Gabriel Diaz Montemayor, ASLA, is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. Through Spring 2019, he will hold the Garvan Chair and Visiting Professorship in Landscape Architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

Montemayoris an architect educated at the School of the Desert:  The Superior Institute of Architecture and Design (ISAD) at Chihuahua, Mexico, from where he graduated in 1998. He holds an architect degree from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico, and received his Master of Landscape Architecture from Auburn University in 2007.  Montemayoris a founder of LABOR Studio, an architecture, urban design and landscape architecture practice based in Chihuahua, Mexico, since 2002. The studio has engaged in a variety of private and public commissions.

Architecture and Design Network lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.  Supporters of ADN include the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and friends in the community.