LA Forum » Steve Rowell

The Infrastructural City, by Kazys Varnelis

thurman.grant — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 01:27:09 +0000

The Infrastructural City
Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
Edited by Kazys Varnelis

This book features 11 essays by 14 authors, photographs by Lane Barden and maps by Leah Meisterlin.

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture.

A project by the Network Architecture Lab and the LA Forum for Architecture & Urban Design featuring: Lane Barden, Barry Lehrman, David Fletcher, Steve Rowell, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Frank Ruchala, Matt Coolidge, CLUI, Warren Techentin, Ted Kane, Rick Miller, Roger Sherman, Deborah Richmond, Robert Sumrell.

Kazys Varnelis is the former President of the LA Forum Board of Directors, and directs the Network Architecture Lab (Columbia University) and the AUDC collective. For more about the book on the Network Architecture Lab website, click here.

The Infrastructural City is available on Amazon.com.

THE INFRASTRUCTURAL CITY: NETWORKED ECOLOGIES IN LOS ANGELES
Edited by Kazys Varnelis
Hardcover edition
March 2008
Published by: Actar
240 pages

Paperback edition
September 2009
Published by: Actar
256 pages

This project was made possible with support and funding from the Network Architecture Lab, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Graham Foundation.

Out There Doing It 2006

admin — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 21:47:02 +0000

The Los Angeles Forum’s annual Out There Doing It lecture series provides a forum for alternative, young, emerging, experimental, research-based, and conceptual design practices to speak about their work before their peers. Listen to and join in dialogue with the speakers about their work, how they are developing it, the practices they are building around the work, and the diverse routes the design profession is taking.

Thursday, September 7 : Aaron Whelton: aaw studio; and Janice Shimizu and Josh Coggeshall: Shimizu + Coggeshall Architects at the MAK center

Thursday, September 14: Christophe Cornubert and Mitchell de Jarnett at the MAK center

Thursday, September 21 : John Southern/uo and David Fletcher at the MAK center

Thursday, September 28 : Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess: Materials & Applications and Willem Henri Lucas at the MAK center

Thursday, October 5 : Sara Daleiden, Therese Kelly, Jenny Price, Emily Scott: L.A. Urban Rangers and Steve Rowell: unplugged from CLUI

*this lecture will occur at the Telic Arts Exchange 975 Chung King Rd.,Los Angeles, CA 90012

Thursday, Octeober 12 : PadLab and Alexandra Loew: from the desk of lola

*this lecture will occur at LOS ANGELES CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS 6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028

All lectures take place on Thursdays at 7:30pm. The lectures in September occur at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, 835 North Kings Road, West Hollywood. Parking is available on the street or in the West Hollywood garage at the corner of Kings Road and Santa Monica Boulevard (8383 Santa Monica Boulevard).

Admission is free for current LA Forum Members, $10 for non-members, $6 for students with ID. Lectures at the MAK center are outside, please dress warmly if its cold.

New Spaces, New Cartographers

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2004 23:27:04 +0000

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design launches its fall 2004 series, New Spaces and New Cartographers. New Spaces and New Cartographers examines the fields and networks defining contemporary spatiality together with the extraterritorial spaces remaining left over or deliberately excluded and proposes new methods of mapping for this emerging spatial regime.

Sunday October 10 : Trevor Paglen
Trevor Paglen will present some of the images and recordings associated with his research into secret military bases and installations in the American southwest. He will show photographs collected using specialized telephotography, creative use of the Freedom of Information Act, and loose networks of “secret-base” buffs, and present audio recordings of military activity collected with specially-modified scanners and radios. Along the way, he will discuss the peculiar problems of representation that arise when the “object” of representation is a state secret whose presence can only be inferred through barely-intelligible fragments. In addition to this, Paglen will speak about a new project entitled “Stealthwatchers: A Public Service” which involves organizing public expeditions to the vicinity of secret bases in California and Nevada.
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Forging a hybrid practice between contemporary art, social science, and investigative journalism, his work in “experimental lecture,” installation, photography, sound, and video has shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), U.C. San Diego (2004), the California College of the Arts (2002), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He is a contributing editor to the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, directs the Center for Experimental Geography at U.C. Berkeley, and develops tactical media projects with the prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance.
at the Mountain Bar in Chinatown, 475 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, 8:00pm.

Thursday November 11 : 34 North 118 West
34 North 118 West – Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman – uses live gps data and interactive mapping in downtown Los Angeles’s Artists’s District to reveal long-forgotten narratives about the area’s former role as a railroad hub.
at the Mountain Bar, 473 Gin Ling Way in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, 7:30pm.

Monday November 15 : Dead Malls Pamphlet launch with Julia Christensen
The Forum celebrates the launch of “Dead Malls,” the first pamphlet in a new series of Forum publications with a special presentation by artist-researcher Julia Christensen on the reuse of big box shopping centers [www.bigboxreuse.com]. A discussion with Warren Techentin, director of the Dead Malls Competition, follows. Buy your pamphlet here or online.
at The Mountain Bar, 473 Gin Ling Way in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, 8:00pm.

Thursday November 18 : Keller Easterling
Architect Keller Easterling’s new book Enduring Innocence explores hilarious and dangerous spatial products that mix all too easily with cunning political platforms. In “Believers and Cheaters” she presents misadventures in offshore worlds such as the island of Nauru. Nauru, the world’s smallest country, faces a ?nancial and ecological disaster over its depleted phosphate resources, a disaster impacting the world’s super powers.
at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, 8:00pm.

Sunday December 5 : AUDC
Steve Rowell, Robert Sumrell, and Kazys Varnelis of AUDC present two recent works. The first addresses the impact of tele-communications on urban form and human behavior and the second explores the growth of Quartzsite, Arizona, a town of 5,000 in the summer that swells into an instant city every winter with the influx of more than a million RV dwellers.
at the Mountain Bar, 473 Gin Ling Way in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, 8:00pm.

Sunday December 12 : Holiday Party celebrating Forumemo Portfolio 1 and Forum Annual 2004
Celebrate the start of the holidays and the end of the year with the Forum in an evening co-curated by Warren Techentin and Tom Marble. Cool cutting-edge art mixes with cold draft beer and Chinese food. Warm attitude required upon entry.