Contributors
Nabil Ahmed is a contem-por-ary visual artist, writer, and curator. His works have been presen-ted inter-na-tion-ally, includ-ing at The 2012 Taipei Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, The Centre for Possible Stud-ies Serpent-ine Gallery, Reson-ance FM, CCA Glas-gow, Notting-ham Contem-por-ary, no.w.here, South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC) in Toronto, and the Royal Geographic Soci-ety. He has written for Third Text and Media Field Journal. He is co-founder of Call & Response, a sound art collect-ive and curat-orial project based in London. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London where he also teaches. He lives and works in London.
Meghan Archer currently works as a designer at Payette Associates in Boston. She was educated at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, where she graduated with a Masters in Architecture in 2012 with high distinction. Her interests lie in design that operates on multiple scales and engages the public realm, from infrastructure, to installation art. Meghan has served on architectural design reviews at several colleges, and has lead youth programs on architecture in the Boston metro area.
Adam Bobbette is a researcher, writer and designer based in Hong Kong with training in landscape architecture, philosophy, and cultural studies. He currently teaches at the University of Hong Kong. He has published widely and his work has been included in exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Graham Foundation, Architectural Association, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Eyebeam, among others. Currently, his research focuses on international comparative histories and theories of civic infrastructures and the urban ecologies of contingency, care, and danger. He is working on a monograph about the history of air in Indonesia. He is a co-founder and editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy.
Emily Cheng lives in Toronto, Canada, where she designs architecture, objects, and graphics. www.emcheng.com
Heather Davis is a researcher, writer, and community-based artist from Montreal. She is currently a FQRSC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Women’s Studies at Duke University, where she is working on a project which traces the ethology of plastic as a materialization of the philosophic division of the subject and object. She completed her Ph.D. in the joint program in Communication at Concordia University in 2011 on the political potential of community-based art. In 2010, she was a visiting scholar with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She explores and participates in expanded art practices that bring together researchers, activists, and community members to enact social change. She is the co-founder of Ouvert/Open, an art and activist collective which seeks to re-envision public space and circulation in Montreal and is an active member of Kabane 77, a radical art, film and education collective. She has written about the intersection of art, politics, and community engagement for Fibreculture, Public, Politics and Culture, Canadian Women’s Studies Journal, The Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, No More Potlucks, Scapegoat and Reviews in Cultural Theory.
Sara Dean is an architectural and graphic designer in the Detroit area, and the designer of Architecture in the Anthropocene. Her work examines the implications of digital methodologies on design and activism practices. She has a Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Design Research from the University of Michigan. Some of her work can be found at www.linch-pin.org
Seth Denizen is a designer and researcher trained in landscape architecture and evolutionary biology. Since completing research on the sexual behavior of small Trinidadian fish, his work has focused on the aesthetics of scientific representation, madness and public parks, the political ecology of desertification, and most recently the design of taxonomies for the mapping and historical analysis of urban soil. He currently lives in Hong Kong, where he teaches in the Division of Landscape Architecture at Hong Kong University.
Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis. His books include (with Adrian Hawker) Metis: Urban Cartographies (2002), (with Gillian Rose) Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (2003), (with Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill and Murray Fraser) Critical Architecture (2007), Warszawa: Projects for the Post-Socialist City (2009), and (with Frédéric Pousin) Vues aériennes: Seize études pour une histoire culturelle (2012). Recent essays include ‘Clouds of Architecture’, Radical Philosophy 144 (2007), ‘The Way the World Sees London’ in A. Vidler, ed, Architecture Between Spectacle and Use (2008), ‘Transcoded Indexicality’, Log 12 (2008), ‘The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturization’, parallax 15(4) (2009), ‘Falling Upon Warsaw: the Shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Culture’, The Journal of Architecture 15 (1) (2010), ‘On Google Earth’, New Geographies, 4 - Scales of the Earth (2011), and ‘Adventure on the Vertical’, Cabinet 44 (2011/12). He is member of the advisory board of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where he is organizing a research theme on ‘Atmospheres and Atmospherics.’ [formerly www.iash.ed.ac.uk/themes.atmospheres.html]
Elizabeth Grosz is Jean Fox O’Barr Women’s Studies Professor in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. She is the author of Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (Columbia University Press, 2008) and has written widely on French Philosophy.
Lisa Hirmer is an artist, writer, and designer based in Guelph, Canada. Her work can be divided between two main practices, though the thematic overlap is significant: she is an emerging photographer and writer producing work that reflects her background in architecture and is primarily concerned with examining material traces found in complex landscapes, especially those that act as evidence of unseen forces. She is also a co-founder and principal of DodoLab, an experimental arts-based practice that has been producing innovative public research and socially engaged projects since 2009. DodoLab’s work is focused on investigating, engaging and responding to the public’s relationship with contemporary issues. Hirmer has a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.
Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is director of the GSD Materials Collection in the Frances Loeb Design Library, and her research focuses on the expanded relations of construction materials used in landscape architecture. In 2010, she curated Erratics: A Genealogy of Rock Landscape, an exhibition that looked at the cultural and scientific antecedents to contemporary design’s interest in geology.
Eleanor Kaufman is professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001), Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Johns Hopkins, 2012), and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press); and co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minnesota, 1998).
Amy Catania Kulper is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she teaches theory and design. For the 2010-2011 academic year she was the Steelcase Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Humanities Institute, working on a book manuscript entitled Immanent Natures: The Laboratory as a Paradigm for Architecture’s Experimental Practices. She is a three-time recipient of the Donna M. Salzer Award for teaching excellence. Kulper is the Design Editor of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). Her publications appear as chapters in Experiments: Architecture Between Sciences and the Arts edited by Ákos Morávansky and Albert Kirchengast; and Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City edited by Diana Periton and Vittoria di Palma. Her articles appear in the Journal of Architecture, Candide: Journal of Architectural Knowledge, and Field: Journal for Architecture. Kulper holds masters’ degrees from both the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of architecture from Cambridge University. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Architecture on the subject of ‘City Air.’
Clint Langevin and Amy Norris co-founded the research and design studio Captains of Industry after completing professional degrees in architecture at the University of Toronto in 2011. The studio investigates the problems and potentials of our industrial heritage. Their work has been exhibited internationally at the 2012 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and Arup’s Phase 2 Gallery in London, and featured in publications such as OnSite Review 29: Geology, Volume #31: Guilty Landscapes, and the forthcoming BRACKET [at extremes]. Their most recent work includes an installation at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre as part of the exhibition titled Rapid Response - Architecture Prepares for Disaster, where they explored the relationship between human activity and natural ecosystems, and our own complicity in the occurrence of natural disasters. www.captainsofindustry.ca
Michael CC Lin is a Toronto-based designer working in the field of Architecture & Design. Having graduated from University of Toronto with a Master of Architecture, and from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Architectural Studies, Michael is embarking on a long journey in a medium that engages and challenges him continuously in new and exciting ways. His Master of Architecture Thesis, AnthroPark, is a labour of love borne from Michael’s passion for stories, films, art, and philosophy over the course of his studies. AnthroPark won the Kuwabara-Jackman Architecture Thesis Gold Medal (2012), was featured in Scapegoat journal (2012), and was exhibited in Here Be Monsters (2012), as well as inspiring various commissions. Working with Omar Aljebouri under the alias ccomma design, the duo has exhibited work such as Cabinet of Curiosities: Toronto Expedition 001 (2011-2012), testing the theme of identity and the city. www.anthropark.com
Territorial Agency is established by John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog. Territorial Agency is an independent organisation that promotes and works for integrated sustainable territorial transformations. Its works combine analysis, contemporary architecture and urbanism, advocacy and action. Projects include the Anthropocene Observatory, Museum of Infrastructural Unconscious, North, Unfinishable Markermeer, Kiruna, Taiwan Project, The Coast of Europe. They convene Diploma unit 4 at AA Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and have initiated the AA Think Tank. They are research fellows at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where John also convenes the MA studio seminar and researches for his PhD. He has been Research Advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and previously led the research activities of ETH Zurich/Studio Basel – Contemporary City Institute, and he is a founding member of Multiplicity. Ann-Sofi has been a researcher at ETH Zurich/Studio Basel – Contemporary City Institute. She is a research fellow at AHO Oslo School of Architecture.
Chester Rennie works as a designer at Public Work, a Toronto-based design studio engaged in building the contemporary city.
François Roche is the principal of New-Territories (R&Sie(n) / [eIf/bʌt/c]). He is based mainly in Bangkok, [eIf/bʌt/c], sometimes in Paris, R&Sie(n), and during the Fall in New York, with his studio of research at GSAPP, Columbia University. Through these different structures, his architectural works and protocols seek to articulate the real and/or fictional, the geographic situations, and narrative structures that can transform them. His architectural designs and processes have been show at, among other places, Columbia University (New York, 1999-2000), UCLA (Los Angeles, 1999-2000), ICA (London, 2001), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2004), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2003), MAM / Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris, 2005, 2006), the Tate Modern (London 2006) and Orléans/ArchiLab (1999, 2001, 2003). Work by R&Sie(n), New-Territories were selected for exhibition at the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennales of 1990, 1996, 2000 and 2002 (they rejected the invitation that year), and for the international section in 2000, 2004, and 2008, and, in 2010, for both the International and Austrian Pavilion; in 2012, for Dark Side Curating, Slovenian Pavilion, and Writing Architecture. Among the teaching positions held by Roche over the last decade are guest professor at the Bartlett School in London in 2000, the Vienna TU in 2001, the Barcelona ESARQ in 2003-04, the Paris ESA in 2005, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2006, the Angewangde in Vienna in 2008, the USC-Los Angeles in 2009-10-11 and currently Columbia, GSAPP every Fall since 2006. In 2012, François Roche was the guest editor of Log #25, NY Critical Revue, for the issue released in July 2012 reclaim resis(lience)stance. www.new-territories.com
Isabelle Stengers (b. 1949) teaches philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Brussels, Belgium. She began her career in collaboration with Nobel Prize Laureate Ilya Prigogine, co-authoring La Nouvelle Alliance, which presents physics as a passionate adventure rather than as the triumph of objective knowledge. She has gradually extended her approach, resisting a model of scientific objectivity that silences the diverging multiplicity of scientific practices. Instead, she emphasizes the need for these practices to cultivate the risks of relevance, developing the concept of an active ecology that embeds scientific practices in democratic and politically demanding environments. She is the author of numerous books, many of which have been translated into English, including Order out of Chaos with Ilya Prigogine, A Critique of Psychoanalytical Reason with Léon Chertok, A History of Chemistry with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Power and Invention: Situating Science, The Invention of Modern Science, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell with Philippe Pignarre, Cosmopolitics I and II, and Thinking with Whitehead.
Paulo Tavares is a Brazilian architect and urbanist based in Quito/London. He is currently developing a project on the violence of planning and the politics of ecology in Amazonia at the PhD Programme of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, UK. Tavares teaches architecture at the Universidad Católica de Ecuador - Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Arte, Quito, and previously held teaching posts at the Centre for Research Architecture - Goldsmiths, and at the Visual Lab of the MA in Contemporary Art Theory, also at Goldsmiths, UK. Writings appeared in many publications worldwide and his work has been exhibited in various venues including CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts - Glasgow, Haus der Kulturen der Welt - Berlin, Portikus - Frankfurt and the Taipei Biennial 2012.
Etienne Turpin is the director of anexact office, a design research practice committed to multidisciplinary urban activism, artistic and curatorial experimentation, and applied philosophical inquiry. Etienne is also a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Faculty of Engineering & Information Sciences, and an Associate Fellow with the Institute for Social Transformation Research, Faculty of Law, Humanities, and The Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. With the support of this joint appointment, Etienne is living and working in Jakarta, Indonesia, where his research helps produce strategies for community resistance and resilience among informal settlements of the urban poor facing the combined violence of climate change and rapid development. www.anexact.org
Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Spatial & Visual Cultures, and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011, he also directs the European Research Council (ERC) funded project - Forensic Architecture - on the place of architecture in International Humanitarian Law. Since 2007, he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett (UCL) in London, at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and is a Professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He lectured, curated, and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sternberg Press 2012), Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), the co-edited A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1, 2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines, and edited books. He has realized a number of architectural and design commissions including the Ashdod Museum of Arts, set design for Electra (with Rafi Segal), the installation Page in Berlin (with Zvi Hecker and Mich Ullman), and a permanent pavilion for Gwangju, South Korea, amongst other projects. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Grey Room, Humanity, Inflexions, Political Concepts, and Cabinet where he is an editor at large, and has also edited a special issue on Forensics (Issue 43, 2011). He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide and was member of B’Tselem (the largest Israeli human rights organization) board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard in NY, as a jury member for architecture at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and of other academic and cultural institutions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (with Sandy Hilal and Alessandro Petti for DAAR), and was invited to deliver many key note addresses and memorial lectures for Nelson Mandela (Bob Hawkes Prime Ministerial Centre, Adelaide), Edward Said (University of Warwick), Rusty Bernstein (University of The Witwatersrand), Paul Hirst (Birkbeck College), the Edward H. Benenson Lectures (Duke), and the Mansour Armaly (MESA), amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his Ph.D. at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College.
Jane Wolff is associate professor and former director of the landscape architecture programme at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto. She was educated as a documentary filmmaker and landscape architect at Harvard University. Ms. Wolff’s research interests deal with the hybrid landscapes formed by interactions between natural process and cultural intervention. The author of Delta Primer: a field guide to the California Delta, she is a partner in the Gutter to Gulf initiative, which provides information about urban infrastructure and ecology in New Orleans through its website, www.guttertogulf.com. Her current projects include an exhibit at the Exploratorium of San Francisco on the cultural landscape of San Francisco Bay and initial studies for an atlas of Toronto’s landscape as infrastructure. In addition to her academic work, she also serves as a member of the Design Review Board of Waterfront Toronto and on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation. Ms. Wolff’s work has been supported by two Fulbright scholarships and by research grants from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Graham Foundation, the Great Valley Center, the LEF Foundation, the Ohio State University, the University of Toronto, the Exploratorium and the Seed Fund of San Francisco. In 2006, she was Beatrix Farrand distinguished visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Guy Zimmerman is a playwright and director, and has served as the artistic director of Padua Playwrights in Los Angeles since 2001. Under his direction, Padua has staged over 35 productions of new plays, moving several to venues in New York City, Atlanta and abroad, and garnering a host of LA Weekly, Ovation, Garland, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards and nominations. As a playwright, his critically acclaimed work includes the plays La Clarita, The Inside Job, Vagrant, and The Black Glass, which opened at the Ballhaus OST in Berlin in February 2013. He is also the Supervising Editor of Padua Press, which has published six anthologies of new work by such nationally prominent playwrights as Maria Irene Fornes, Murray Mednick, John Steppling and John O’Keefe. His essays about film, theatre, art, and politics have appeared in Theater Forum, LA Weekly, LA Theater Magazine, the LA Citizen, and Times Quotidian, where he serves as Associate Editor. Zimmerman received a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania; he is currently completing a doctorate in Drama and Theatre at UC Irvine.