Join us for the presentation and book launch of Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentations in Concrete (Actar, 2024). While Félix Candela’s captivating structures in Mexico and across the globe made him one of the most important and iconic architects of the twentieth century, we know very little about his work in the United States and his life in Chicago during the 1970s. Understanding this transitional period, however, enables us to see his innovations in a new light and to reevaluate the contexts of his work. The book links analyses of his celebrated structures with the specific societal, economic, urban, and material conditions that first facilitated his work in Mexico, then prompted his departure, and eventually complicated his practice in the US. Therefore, it also adds to our understanding of architecture’s transnational exchanges, while further exposing its complicated and often troubled relationship with labor, capital, and politics.

During this presentation, Alexander Eisenschmidt, editor, along with contributors Robert Bruegmann, Geoff Goldberg, Jonathan Miller, and Kathryn E. O'Rourke, discuss the publication and their contributions.

The book includes texts by Alexander Eisenschmidt, Juan Ignacio del Cueto, Nader Tehrani, Elisa María Teresa Drago Quaglia, Kathryn O’Rourke, Jonathan Miller, George F. Flaherty, Stanley Tigerman, Geoff Goldberg, William Baker, Bob Bruegmann, Stuart Cohen, Ero Aggelopoulou-Amiridis, and Kenneth Schroeder, in addition to translations, interviews, and republications by Félix Candela, Reyner Banham, Ester McCoy, Alvin Boyarsky, and Carl W. Condit.

The manuscript for the book was awarded a Graham Foundation publication grant, a Creative Activity Award from the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research, and the Faculty Scholarship Support Grant at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The initial research for this project was sponsored by UIC’s Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research.

A reception and book signing follows the event. A limited number of copies of Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago are available for purchase at the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

This program is presented in partnership with the School of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and MAS Context.

Robert Bruegmann is a historian and critic of the built environment. After his 1976 PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979, where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history, architecture and urban planning. Among his books are The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago 1880–1918 (1996), Sprawl: A Compact History (2005), The Architecture of Harry Weese (2010), and the edited volume Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (2018). His main areas of research are the history of architecture, urban planning, landscape, and historic preservation.

Alexander Eisenschmidt is a theorist, designer, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture. He directs the Visionary Cities Project and leads Studio Offshore. Eisenschmidt is author of The Good Metropolis (2019), guest-editor of City Catalyst (2012), and the co-editor of Chicagoisms (2013) and The Project(s) of Modern Architecture (2017). His research and design works have been published and exhibited at a range of international venues such as the Venice Biennale (2012), the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Biennale on Urbanism in Shenzhen, China (2015), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in Portugal (2016).

Geoffrey Goldberg has practiced architecture and urban design in Chicago for more than 30 years. Projects done under his direction include planning for an urban airport, building a new city college, and design management of large public transportation initiatives. He has taught architectural design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, urban design at Harvard University, and the history of form at the University of Chicago. Goldberg has published architectural and engineering histories, and has been awarded for his work in design, urban planning, and historical research.

Jonathan Miller is an educator, critic, and artist. He is a studio associate professor in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes on film, architecture, cities, and landscape. For many years, he reviewed films and interviewed filmmakers on Chicago Public Radio. He has presented numerous public film series and served on film festival juries. His artwork has been exhibited in the United States and Europe.

Kathryn E. O’Rourke is an architectural historian and professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses on modern architecture and Latin American art. O’Rourke is the author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), which received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She is the editor of O’Neil Ford on Architecture (University of Texas Press, 2019), and is at work on two book projects: Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture (2024) and Archaism and Liberalism in Modern Architecture.

Image: Félix Candela and UICC Students posing below an experimental dome, south wall Art and Architecture Laboratories, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, c. 1972. Félix Candela Papers, Library and Special Collections, Princeton University

UPCOMING EVENTS

Ka Baird premieres Yomp, a performance piece featuring live-processed flutes, samples, electronics, voice, broken rhythms, and movement. Yomp plays with the idea of a march that repeatedly falls apart, taking various sonic detours throughout the performance.

“The general time pressures destroy all that has the character of a detour, all that is indirect, and thus makes the world poor in forms. Every form, every figure, is a detour. If walking lacks all hesitation, all pausing, then it freezes into a march.”—Byung-Chul Han

Ka Baird (b.1976, Decatur, IL) is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer based in New York City. They are known for their live performances that include extended voice and microphone techniques, which are combined with electronics and psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds.

In March 2024, Baird released their most recent record, Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos (RVNG Intl.), which was built on a Lampo commission. Other releases include Sapropelic Pycnic (Drag City 2017), Respires (RVNG Intl. 2019), Brooding Exercises (Longform Editions 2021), and Vivification Exercises (RVNG Intl. 2021).

Performances include the Unsound Festival, Krakow; Lampo, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MoMA PS1, Queens; Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; The Kitchen, New York City; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; TUSK Festival, Newcastle; Incubate, Tilburg; KRAAK, Brussels; Le Guess Who, Utrecht; and the Festival Of Endless Gratitude, Copenhagen. They have been artist-in-residence at We Jazz Festival, Helsinki; Sonoscopia, Porto; Inkonst, Malmo; ESS, Chicago; and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. Baird has received the Foundation of Contemporary Art’s Emergency Grant, a Jerome Foundation Artist-In-Residence at Roulette Intermedium, and is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow 2023–25. They are one of the core members of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, founded in Chicago in 2001.

Ka Baird last appeared at Lampo in March 2022, when they performed Bearings, which was commissioned for small audiences in the Lampo office. Ka explored the concept of “bearings” through a series of intimate performances, where they shifted guises between magician, shaman, clown, and athlete. This piece, in tandem with the heaviness of caring for a dying parent during the subsequent year, laid the groundwork for their 2024 album Bearings.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

PAST EVENTS

Modney and Ingrid Laubrock present solo works and duo improv for violin and saxophone and, Modney’s new work, Ascender. Although they have played in each other’s bands, this performance marks the acclaimed experimentalists’ first duo performance.

Josh Modney (b.1985, Albany, NY) is a violinist and composer working at the nexus of composition, improvisation, and interpretation. A highly detailed relationship to sound production on the violin is foundational to Modney’s creative practice, with a particular interest in complex timbres, Just Intonation, and in exploring the perceptual space between improvisation and notation. He has worked closely with leading composers of his generation including Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Eric Wubbels, Tristan Perich, and Rick Burkhardt, and with major figures including Kaija Saariaho, Mathias Spahlinger, Helmut Lachenmann, George Lewis, and Pauline Oliveros. Modney’s releases include Ascending Primes (Pyroclastic Records); Near to Each (Carrier Records), featuring Ingrid Laubrock, Cory Smythe, and Mariel Roberts; and Engage (New Focus); and an album of improvised chamber music with guitarist Patrick Higgins, EVRLY MVSIC (NNA Tapes). Modney is the violinist and executive director of the composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble, a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and a former member and co-founder of the Mivos Quartet.

Ingrid Laubrock (b.1970, Stadtlohn, Germany) is an experimental saxophonist and composer based in Brooklyn since 2009. She is interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and often evocative sound worlds. Laubrock has performed with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Mary Halvorson, Tom Rainey, Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, and many others. Awards include a Fellowship in Jazz Composition by the Arts Foundation, SWR German Radio Jazz Prize, and the German Record Critics Quarterly Award. She was named Rising Star Soprano Saxophonist in the 2015 DownBeat Annual Critics Poll and Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in 2018. Laubrock is one of the recipients of the 2019 Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize in Music Composition and has received composing commissions from the Shifiting Foundation, the Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, the Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, NYSCA, Wet Ink, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series and the EOS Orchestra.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Image: Left: Modney, photo by Frank Heath; right: Ingrid Laubrock, photo by John Thomas

Frederick Kiesler. Study for the development chart “Creation Mutation,” from the “Correalism Manifesto,” 1947-50. Ballpen on paper, 10.8 x 13.9 (27.5 x 35.4 cm). Copyright Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna

Join for a presentation by Mark Wasiuta, curator of the exhibition Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, as he discusses Frederick Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s.

Mark Wasiuta is codirector of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Wasiuta is recipient of recent grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, NYSCA, and the Graham Foundation, where he was an inaugural Graham Foundation Fellow. His research exhibition practice focuses on architecture’s media, politics, and environments through under-examined projects of the postwar period. His work has been exhibited widely, including at LAXArt, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, MAXXI, the Graham Foundation, and the Onassis Foundation. He is co-author and co-editor of Rifat Chadirj: Building Index (Arab Image Foundation, 2018), Dan Graham’s New Jersey (Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), and author of numerous articles. His upcoming publications include The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

For more information on the exhibition, Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, click here.

Join TAK Ensemble—Laura Cocks, flute; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Charlotte Mundy, voice; Marina Kifferstein, violin; and Ellery Trafford, percussion—for the workshop, The Creative Score: Unconventional Notation for Unconventional Music, to examine non-traditional scores from works within TAK’s repertoire, from the physical and symbolic to the graphic and spatial.

The workshop guides participants through learning excerpts of TAK’s most theatrical, uncanny, and strange compositions. Participants will also create their own notation systems and symbologies to be performed by TAK and other workshop attendees.

Intended for a general audience of the musically curious, participants may bring an instrument, but it is not required.

TAK Ensemble is also performing at the Graham Foundation on Saturday, October 19, at 7 p.m. Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Additional support for this program is provided by New Music USA’s New Music Inc program and the Farny R. Wurlitzer Foundation Fund.

Founded in 2013, the New York-based TAK Ensemble has premiered hundreds of works to date, including work by composers such as Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, Taylor Brook, Ann Cleare, Seth Cluett, Jessie Cox, Natacha Diels, Erin Gee, Bryan Jacobs, Brandon Lopez, Michelle Lou, Jessie Marino, Elaine Mitchener, Weston Olencki, Tyshawn Sorey, Eric Wubbels, Bethany Younge, and many others. They have released seven albums, including Oor (2019), which launched their in-house media label, TAK Editions. TAK has conducted residencies at Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, New York University, Oberlin Conservatory, Stanford University, and Wesleyan University. The ensemble has also collaborated with the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program and Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program. From 2022-­23, TAK served as the Long-Term Visiting Ensemble in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

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