This virtual symposium, hosted by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, assembles some of today’s most innovative architects, urban designers, and scholars for a two-part conversation exploring “piggybacking practices” in relation to contemporary forms of inequality in the built environment.
MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2021, 4-6 PM CDT
Session 1 will examine common piggybacking tactics such as niche inhabitation, resource sharing, and waste stream capture, and ask how these tactics can be leveraged in support of larger strategic aims.
PANELISTS
Clare Lyster
CLUAA, Chicago, IL
Dan Adams and Marie Law Adams
Landing Studio, Somerville, MA
Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb
New Affiliates, New York, NY
MODERATORS
Mason White and Lola Sheppard
Lateral Office, Toronto, Canada
MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2021, 4-6 PM CDT
Session 2 will explore the emancipatory potentials of piggybacking practices in relation to the wider discourse around advocacy and activism in architecture and urban design.
PANELISTS
Georgeen Theodore
Interboro, Brooklyn, NY
Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman
Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, San Diego, CA
Joyce Hwang
Ants of the Prairie, Buffalo, NY
MODERATOR
Dana Cuff
cityLAB at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
Hosted by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design
University of Arkansas
Organized by Brian Holland
Assistant Professor of Architecture
Both sessions are free and open to the public as part of the Fay Jones School’s Spring 2021 lecture series, co-presented by Places Journal and the University of Arkansas Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Register on Zoom
CLARE LYSTER is an architect and founding principal of CLUAA, a research design-based office in Chicago. She is the author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhâuser, 2016), that focuses on how contemporary digital platforms transform urban space, as well as co-editor of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan (ACTAR, 2017), that explores the relationship between urbanization and hydrology in the Great Lakes. She is a member of ANNEX, the curatorial team for the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021 and coeditor of the affiliated publication, States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (ACTAR, May 2021). She received the UIC CADA Distinguished Faculty Award 2019-2021; the 2019 UIC Distinguished Scholar Award in Art, Architecture and the Humanities; and the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize. Clare is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at UIC.
DAN ADAMS and MARIE LAW ADAMS are founding partners of Landing Studio in Somerville MA, where they focus on designing the intersection of infrastructural and industrial environments and the urban public realm. This work has resulted in shared-use landscapes like a salt dock-community theater, a salt dock-public park-COVID food hub, a department of public works-public park, and more, as well as installations, buildings, events, and operations and maintenance agreements. Dan is the Director of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University in Boston and Marie is a Lecturer of Urban Design in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.
JAFFER KOLB and IVI DIAMANTOPOULOU are the cofounders of the New York-based design practice New Affiliates. Their work explores how architecture is shaped by, and shapes, local economies and political systems through its practice and form. In addition to commissioned work for private clients and institutions such as New York's Jewish Museum and the Canadian Center for Architecture, New Affiliates is also working with the New York City government to identify alternative forms of reuse through public infrastructures. In 2018 Diamantopoulou and Kolb were named “Next Progressives” by Architect Magazine, and in 2020 they were awarded the Architectural League Prize by the Architectural League of New York and the AIA’s New York New Practices Award. Diamantopoulou is a licensed architect in Europe, an AIA International Associate, and is an assistant teaching professor at Syracuse University. Kolb was the 2015 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College and is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University GSAPP.
LOLA SHEPPARD and MASON WHITE are cofounders of LATERAL OFFICE, a Toronto-based experimental design practice operating at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Their recent work has focused on powerful design relationships between the public realm, infrastructure, and the environment. Sheppard and White’s work has been widely exhibited across the United States and Canada and received numerous awards including a 2016 National Urban Design Award; a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award; and a 2011 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York. They represented Canada at the 2014 Venice Biennale in Architecture and participated in the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Seoul Biennale in Architecture, and the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale. Sheppard and White are co-authors of Pamphlet Architecture: Coupling / Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism published by Princeton Architectural Press; and authors of Many Norths: Spatial Practice in A Polar Territory published by Actar. Sheppard is a professor at the University of Waterloo, and White is a professor at the University of Toronto.
GEORGEEN THEODORE is an architect, urban designer, and Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design, where she directs the Master of Infrastructure Planning (MIP) program. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she graduated with distinction. Theodore is founding partner and principal of Interboro, a New York City-based architecture and planning research office. Since its founding in 2002, Interboro has worked with a variety of public, private, and not-for-profit clients, and has accumulated many awards for its innovative projects, including the Curry Stone Design Prize Social Design Circle (2017), the Rice Design Alliance Spotlight Award (2013), the Museum of Modern Art PS1’s Young Architects Program (2011), the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award (2011) and Young Architects Award (2005), and the AIA New York Chapter’s New Practices Award (2006).
JOYCE HWANG is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Architecture at the University at Buffalo SUNY and Founder of Ants of the Prairie. For over a decade, Hwang has been developing a series of projects that incorporate wildlife habitats into constructed environments. She is a recipient of the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award (2014), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2013), the New York State Council on the Arts Independent Project Grant (2013, 2008), and the MacDowell Fellowship (2016, 2011). Currently, she is a University Design Research Fellow for Exhibit Columbus 2021. Hwang is on the Steering Committee for US Architects Declare, and serves as a Core Organizer for Dark Matter University. She is a registered architect in New York State, and has practiced professionally with offices in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Barcelona.
TEDDY CRUZ and FONNA FORMAN are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, investigating issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities. Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Cruz and Forman lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. Their work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and they represented the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. They have two forthcoming monographs: Top-Down / Bottom-Up: The Research and Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Berlin: Hatje Cantz); and The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (London: Verso). Cruz and Forman are both professors at the University of California, San Diego, and the pair are also this year’s John G. Williams Distinguished Visiting Professors at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas.
DANA CUFF is a professor, author, and practitioner in architecture, and the director of cityLAB at UCLA. Her work focuses on affordable housing, modernism, suburban studies, the politics of place, and the spatial implications of new computer technologies. Cuff's research on postwar urbanism was published in a book titled The Provisional City (MIT 2000), she edited Fast Forward Urbanism with Roger Sherman (Princeton Architectural Press 2011), and she recently coauthored Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City with her colleagues from the Urban Humanities Initiative (MIT 2020). She founded cityLAB in 2006 and has since concentrated her efforts around issues of spatial justice in the emerging metropolis. Dr. Cuff is widely published, the recipient of numerous fellowships, and lectures internationally. Three recent awards describe the arc of her career: Women in Architecture Activist of the Year (2019, Architectural Record), Researcher of the Year (2019, Architectural Research Centers Consortium), and Educator of the Year (2020, AIALA).
BRIAN HOLLAND is an architect, researcher, and educator, and the creator and organizer of the Piggybacking Practices Virtual Symposium and Exhibition. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, and the founder of Open Set (theopenset.net), a design studio working at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and ecology. From 2010–2011 he held the Howard E. Lefevre Fellowship at the Ohio State University, and from 2011–2018 he was assistant director of The New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, where he led research and design studios exploring the future of architecture and urbanism in New York City. Holland has previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and the American University of Beirut. He received his M.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania, his B.Arch from Cal Poly Pomona, and is licensed to practice architecture in California and Arkansas.