Chicago, 2011

How Chicago Are You? is an evening discussion that will explore the role of place in the production of creative works. Intended to provoke questions about the existence of a regional style, Chicago based practitioners from the fields of art, architecture, cartooning, design and music have been invited to present a selection of images that represent their perceptions about the strengths and pitfalls of the city in which they live and work. Through analysis and conversation, the group will explore whether location has led to trends in artistic production. Panelists include Eve Fineman, Pamela Fraser, Geoff Goldberg, Jimenez Lai, Alex Lehnerer, Damon Locks, Todd Mattei, Anders Nilsen, Robert Somol, and Dan Wheeler. The panel will be moderated by Paul Preissner.

EVE FINEMAN received her B.A. Cum Laude in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis. After interning at the Smithsonian’s office of Exhibit Design and Production, she shifted her focus to interior environments and furniture design. She moved to Chicago in 1996 to pursue an MFA in Interior Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a full merit scholarship. There she explored the relationships between furniture, sound and the body through architectural installations and experimental furniture. Fineman is Associate Professor of Design at the Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago, where she has been teaching full-time since 2002.

www.evefineman.com

PAMELA FRASER is an American painter.  She received her BFA in painting (1988) from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA in New Genres (1992) from UCLA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York. Fraser’s solo exhibitions include Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne, Galleria Il Capricorno in Venice, Asprey Jacques in London, Vedanta Gallery in Chicago, and Casey Kaplan in New York.

www.pamelafraserstudio.com

GEOFF GOLDBERG has practiced in complex urban and architectural projects for 25 years. A native Chicagoan, he has been teaching design and technology at UIC since 1994. He founded his office in 1992 engaging both architecture and urban design projects.  Geoff has an M.Arch. from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (1982), a BA from the University of Chicago (1977). He has worked in the offices of I.M. Pei, Bertrand Goldberg, and the Mayor of Chicago, and is currently working on publications on Marina City and mid-20th century Italian mechanical engineering.

www.arch.uic.edu

JIMENEZ LAI is currently Clinical Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. He graduated with an M.Arch. from University of Toronto. Previously, Lai lived and worked in a desert shelter at Taliesin, AZ, and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Lai has received mentions in competitions in Japan, Europe and the US. Professionally, Lai has worked for MOS, AVL, RE X, OMA /Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam and New York.  In spring, 2011 he exhibited a large scale installation in LOT Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky.

www.bureau-spectacular.net

ALEX LEHNERER is an architect and urban designer, received his PhD from the ETH in Zurich and is currently based in Chicago where he holds a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. He is partner of Kaisersrot in Zurich, CH, and ALSO Architekten, and the director of the Department of Urban Speculation in Chicago. While appreciating the city as a panoramic projection, his practice explores urban and architectural conditions - their forms, ingredients and rules. This is done both in an academic and professional environment.

alexlehnerer.com

DAMON LOCKS is the frontman for the band the Eternals, creates digital prints, silkscreens and relief prints that play with two sides of “invisibility,” depicting neglected urban spaces, overlooked perspectives and marginalized people, while also envisioning cities not yet visible.  Some of his images recombine elements of Chicago, putting train tracks, buildings and buses in new and provocative relations. Locks’ printing process gives these pieces the scabrous texture of cracking brick and concrete, while the hues—in everything from faded walls and smudged “newsprint” to supersaturated skies—endow them with an aura of nostalgia for things to come. From desolate to populous, disconsolate to euphoric, the cityscapes and inhabitants imagined here provoke questions about race, urban planning, and socioeconomic disparity, all oriented around a hope summed up in the words emblazoned on one print: “Tomorrow starts today.”

www.damonlocks.com

TODD MATTEI is an artist and musician.  He received his MFA in Film/Video/Animation with Honors from Unniversity of Illinois at Chicago in 2005.  His individual and collaborative art work has been exhibited in Chicago and the US since 2003.  He was a member of the Chicago band Joan of Arc and has produced video and music pieces for film and commercial videos.

www.toddmatteiart.com

ANDERS NILSEN is a popular artist and graphic novelist who grew up in Minneapolis and lives in Chicago, IL.  He works on an ongoing comic series, Big Questions (Drawn and Quarterly), which has been nominated several times for the Ignatz Award. In addition, his comics have appeared in the anthologies Kramers Ergot and Mome. His graphic novel Dogs and Water won an Ignatz Award in 2005. An excerpt from Dogs and Water was featured in the inaugural 2006 edition of the Best American Comics anthology, and the book was expanded and reissued in hardcover in 2007. Other, more recent works include a graphic memoir, Don't Go Where I Can't Follow and a comic The End.

www.andersbrekhusnilsen.com

ROBERT SOMOL was appointed Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007. An internationally recognized design theorist, Somol was most recently Professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University and Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Architecture, and taught design and theory at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1997-2005. He has served as the Max Fishman Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and the Cullinen Professor at Rice University, in addition to teaching at Columbia University's GSAPP and Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Somol is the editor of Autonomy and Ideology (Monacelli Press, 1997) and has served on the editorial boards of Any and Log. His writings have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired, and focus on modernism and its modes of repetition, the emergence of the diagram in postwar architecture, landscape and interior urbanism, and the development of graphic or cartoon protocols within contemporary architectural practices. He is the co-designer of "off-use," an award-winning studio and residence in Los Angeles that extends his interest in combining the speculative discipline of modernism with the material excesses of mass culture: beinahe nichts meets la dolce vita. As an architectural designer, writer and educator, Somol is a central figure in efforts to displace architecture's modes of criticality by a renewed engagement with the projective ambitions of the discipline. His collection of essays, Nothing to Declare, is forthcoming from ANY Books and the MIT Press, and he is a member of the Research Board of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

www.arch.uic.edu

DAN WHEELER, FAIA has taught as an Adjunct Associate Professor within the School of Architecture since 1992, being elevated to Associate Professor in 2001. He teaches design, building science, drawing, and design/build. He served as the Interim Director of the school from 2006-7. He is co-author with Clinical Associate Professor Bill Worn of the schools integrated design/building science curriculum. He is past Interim Director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and remains on the Advisory Board of the Chicago Architecture Club and the Marwen Foundation. Professor Wheeler lectures both nationally and abroad.  Wheeler is a practicing architect and is a principal of the Chicago firm Wheeler Kearns Architects.   Work of the firm is regularly in print, including the monograph Wheeler Kearns Architects, Ten Houses (1999).

www.wkarch.com

PAUL PREISSNER is an architect and teacher, receiving his undergraduate education in architecture from the University of Illinois and his M.Arch. from Columbia University in New York.  He worked for Peter Eisenman, Philip Johnson and Skidmore Owings and Merill, before establishing his own office in 2006.  Currently, he is Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  His professional practice has developed an international profile through a recognized œuvre of commissioned and competition projects, all of which explore design’s highly visual relationship with its audience.  In 2006 he was awarded the second prize in the international open competition to design the Museum of Korean Pre-History in the Gyeonggi-do Provence of South Korea.  His architectural work been published and exhibited worldwide and is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.  He and his wife live in Chicago with their dog, Klaus.

www.paulpreissner.com

Reveal: Studio Gang Architects

About the Festival

The Architecture & Design Film Festival will showcase 39 films from 11 countries, and feature a dynamic program of films, including Graham Foundation funded films Citizen Architect – Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio by Sam Wainwright Douglas, Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm by Elizabeth Federici and Laura Harrison, and Wilderness Utopia by Terence Gower. There will also be panel discussions and Q&As with filmmakers, architects and designers.

Graham Foundation Pop-up Bookshop

The Graham Foundation will operate a pop-up bookshop at the Gene Siskel Film Center throughout the run of the festival. Recently published books funded by the Graham Foundation, new publications from William Stout Books and the Architectural Association, and magazines including Joseph Grima’s first issue of Domus and a special issue of Abitare featuring Zaha Hadid will be available.

Jeanne Gang Book Signing

Following a screening of Studio Gang Architects: Aqua Tower, Jeanne Gang will sign copies of her new book Reveal on Sunday, May 8 from 6:30-7:00PM.

The bookshop hours are as follows:
May 5, 8:15 – 10PM
May 6, 3PM – 10PM
May 7, 1PM – 10PM
May 8, 1PM – 10PM
May 9, 6PM- 10PM

For more information on the festival, click here.

Anne Griswold Tyng, “Form finds Symmetry in Geometry,” in Zodiac 19, 1969

In conjunction with the Graham’s current exhibition, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, Alicia Imperiale will discuss Tyng’s seminal essay Geometric Extensions of Consciousness, published in the Italian architectural journal Zodiac 19 in 1969.  In the article, Tyng proposes geometries that would open up architectural form by following natural laws of growth in plants and organisms. She writes, "I have found a geometric progression from simplicity to complexity of symmetric forms linked by asymmetric process,"¹ and goes on to demonstrate the power of geometry as the invisible driving force in natural forms intrinsic to her research, astonishing drawings, and architectural projects.

Zodiac was published in Milan from 1959-1973. In a number of issues, editor Maria Bottero assembled an extraordinary group of international architects around the themes of geometric studies and the influence of natural systems on architectural design. Imperiale will discuss Tyng’s work in relation to her contemporaries, such as Buckminster Fuller, Zvi Hecker and Alfred Neumann, Keith Critchlow, Robert LeRicolais, Moshe Safdie, Rinaldo Semino, Michael Burt, Renzo Piano, and others, also published in Zodiac.

¹ Anne Griswold Tyng, “Form finds Symmetry in Geometry,” in Zodiac 19, 1969, page 139.

Alicia Imperiale, Architect, is Assistant Professor of Architectural History/Theory and Design at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Her design and written work focuses on the impact of digital technologies on art, architecture, representation, and fabrication. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Her dissertation is based on the theoretical projects of Italian architect Rinaldo Semino which contextualizes Semino’s work in a larger milieu of megastructural design, cybernetic studies, and radical political events in Italy from 1958-1973. Her essay Organic Italy: The Troubling Case of Rinaldo Semino was recently published in Perspecta 43: Taboo (Yale University Journal of Architecture, MIT Press, 2010). In relation to her work on the politics of the 1960s Imperiale is a co-curator of the exhibit Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X. She is a contributor to the recent book, of the same name published by Actar/Birkhäuser, 2010. Imperiale has taught design and visual theory at Southern California Institute of Architecture, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Parsons School of Design. She holds a B.Arch from Pratt Institute, an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College and an MA from Princeton University. She was a Van Alen/Dinkeloo Visiting Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Imperiale’s article, Dynamic Symmetries in the work of Anne Tyng, will be included in an exhibition catalog co-published by the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA) and the Graham Foundation.  Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry will feature drawings and documentation of projects by Tyng; photographs of the installations at both the ICA and the Graham Foundation; additional essays by Jenny Sabin and Srdjan Jovanoviç Weiss, and an illustrated chronology of Anne Tyng’s life by Ingrid Schaffner and William Whitaker. The catalog will be designed by Project Projects and distributed by DAP.

Interested in notions of surprise and abrupt change in sound, Florian Hecker will perform Speculative Solution for the first time in the U.S. on April 30, 2011. Speculative Solution is a series of “micro-chronics” or auditory sequences that range from extreme stasis to the most dynamic intensities. Hecker has set out to create new music exploring philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of “hyperchaos.”

Here is Hecker’s predicament: it may be impossible to create a rational presentation of hyperchaos because hyperchaos may not be experienceable. While any composition has a finite duration, “hyperchaos is a theory of time, a theory to show that time is not becoming,” as Meillassoux puts it, which we understand as a sort of continuity or reference to the infinite nature of the universe. And, achieving real disorder is impossible anyway, “because disorder is just another form of order than the one you expect,” where fast-moving sound is a cliché of randomness and merely another form of organization…

His performance delivers a perfect combination of theoretical underpinning and drop-dead digital disorientation. Urbanomic, the UK organization that originally commissioned the project, features a conversation between Hecker, Meillassoux and writer Robin Mackay on its website. Click here to access the PDF.

Recent performances by Florian Hecker (b. 1975, Augsburg, Germany) include Push & Pull, Tate Modern, London (2011); Instal, Tramways, Glasgow (2010); Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2010) as well as a series of collaborations with Aphex Twin at Warp 20, Cité de la Musique, Paris and Sacrum Profanum, Krakow, both in 2009. Solo exhibitions include MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2010); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2010); Bawag Contemporary, Vienna (2009) and Sadie Coles HQ London (2008). In addition, he has an extensive discography, and he also works closely with visual artists, including Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Florian Pumhösl and Cerith Wyn Evans. Hecker lives in Vienna, Austria and Kissing, Germany.

Hecker last performed at Lampo in October 2006, when he presented a new 6-channel computer work – a hybrid of his artificial neural network piece and other material that later became "Acid in the Style of David Tudor" (eMego 2009). In November 2002 Hecker and Yasunao Tone premiered "Palimpsest" at Lampo, in the duo's first U.S. appearance. Hecker also presented his solo work "Stocha Acid Vlook."

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art and intermedia projects. For information and to add your name to the Lampo list, contact info@lampo.org or visit www.lampo.org.

Film still, Saving Lieb House, 2009.

On April 26^th, 2011, in anticipation of Chicago’s first Architecture and Design Film Festival, the Graham Foundation and the Festival organizers will partner to present an evening of short films followed by a discussion with filmmaker Jim Venturi. Screenings will include:

Six Pound Chair (Dir. Eames Demetrious, 2004, 5 min.)
Eames Demetrios believes that, along with art and film, design is a process of discovery.  By examining Emeco and Frank Gehry's Super Light chair, the Six Pound Chair reveals the inner workings of this process.

Glenn Murcutt: Architecture for Place (Dir. Bruce Inglis, 2010, 11 min.)
Glenn Murcutt is Australia’s most internationally recognized architect. In 1992 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Institute of Architects; in 1996 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AO); in 2002 he received the Pritzker Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architecture; and in 2009 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. The short film "Architecture For Place" was made to accompany a touring exhibition of Murcutt's work.

Saving Lieb House (Dir. James Venturi, 2009, 24 min.)
In 1969 world-renowned architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown designed the world's first pop-art house. Forty years later, when the couple learned that their brainchild would be demolished, they enlisted their son, Jim, and friend and colleague, Fred Schwartz, to save the house. Saving Lieb House documents the 97-mile journey of the house from Barnegat Light, NJ through the rough waters of the Atlantic, under the Verrazano Bridge, past crowds of cheering New Yorkers, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, to its new home in Glen Cove, New York.

 James Venturi is a filmmaker and owner of Light From Light Films (LFLF). Venturi is currently working on, “Learning from Bob and Denise,” a documentary on the architecture and ideas of his parents, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.  “Learning from Bob and Denise” was supported by two grants from the Graham Foundation in 2006 and 2009.

From May 5 – 9 The Architecture & Design Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center  will showcase 39 films from 11 countries, and feature a dynamic program of films, panel discussions and Q&As with filmmakers, architects and designers and a pop-up architecture bookshop organized and operated by the Graham Foundation.

Related Links
Architecture and Design Film Festival
http://adfilmfest.com/

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