Work by Stuckeman professors featured in Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A project created by two Stuckeman School architecture professors in the College of Arts and Architecture that exposes how coal mine fires affect the environment is featured in the “Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground” exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh through Jan. 7, 2024.

Pep Avilés, associate professor of architecture and the Stuckeman Career Development Professor in Design, and Laia Celma,  assistant teaching professor of architecture, created their piece titled “Dystopian Carousel” for the exhibition. The piece focuses on the continued emissions caused by mine fires and their devastating effects on the environment, communities and the economy.

Avilés and Celma’s work consists of a large piece of anthracite, which sits atop a turntable that completes one rotation per minute. Atop the piece of coal are a series of props that reflect the data (gas emissions, soil temperature, microbial life, etc.) and the landscapes that coal extraction has left behind. On the wall near the anthracite is a photograph of the coal in motion on the turntable as a mise en abyme, which is a formal technique in Western art of placing a small copy of an image inside a larger one.

“Collectively, the [props] perform as a dystopian carousel of the culture of extraction,” explained Avilés. “The photograph presents the same piece in motion, blurred against a stream of smoke that appears to the spectator as frozen.”

The piece is to represent the fact that emissions from mine fires even from long ago continue to impact the environment today and will continue to do so into the future.

“It doesn’t matter that we keep collecting more data about those past events, the emissions they caused are the only thing that remains constant,” said Avilés.

According to the exhibition website, the show brings together historical artworks from the Carnegie collection along with contemporary projects and new work to “tell the complex stories of how fossil fuel economies have been produced and upheld, whom they have excluded and left vulnerable, and how they have shaped and disrupted cities, communities and ecologies.”

The Carnegie Museum held a public program Oct. 5-6 where artists and guests from Carnegie Mellon University, Rice University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other organizations, such as the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, gave presentations on the topics featured in the exhibit with gallery walkthroughs, panel discussions, talks and a musical performance.

Avilés and Celma spoke with three other artists and researchers on a panel moderated by the exhibit’s co-organizers Ala Tannir and Theodossis Issaias.

“In all stages of the project, we wanted to make visible what is invisible,” Celma said. “There are things happening below ground in the mines that we translate as data so it’s visible above [the ground.]”

Avilés and Celma collaborated previously on works for the Oslo Architecture Triennale and the Rouse Gallery in the Stuckeman Family Building on the University Park campus.

Stuckeman School’s fall lecture series concludes with architect and educator

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State will host J. Meejin Yoon, co-founder of Höweler + Yoon Architecture and the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, at 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 25 as the final guest this semester in the school’s 2023-24 Lecture + Exhibit Series. Co-hosted by the Department of Architecture, the lecture will be held in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and via Zoom.

In her lecture, titled “What’s the Matter,” Yoon will present works using the phrase “What’s the Matter?” as a framework to locate contemporary architecture and design in a broader cultural context. She will focus on research, environment and institutions, delving into what matters, and discussing how architects and creative practitioners can understand, enable and create.

“The term “matter” references not physical substance but rather the essence of something — specifically, the essence of the problems facing us today,” Yoon said. “Put another way: what are our values, beliefs and aspirations? As architects, artists and designers, how do we materialize what we value? Or, how does what we build convey our values? And, how do we build what matters?”

In practice, Yoon investigates intersections between architecture, technology and public space  with Höweler + Yoon. The firm has earned numerous awards, including the Best of Design Award in the Architect’s Newspaper, the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture’s Design Excellence Award, and Architect Magazine’s Progressive Architecture Award, among other honors.

Stuckeman symposium to highlight issues surrounding displacement in architecture

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State will host a research symposium on Nov. 13-14 to examine the relationship between refugee displacement, climate and architecture. Titled “(Dis)Place: From tent camps to the future of urbanism – The architecture of migration,” the event is presented by the Stuckeman School’s three research centers: Ecology plus Design, Hamer Center for Community Design, and the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing.

Registration for the event, which will be held in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and via Zoom, is free.

“Our goal is to bring together scholars and experts from different disciplines to tackle this multifaceted problem,” said Nasim Motelabi, the symposium chair and a doctoral candidate in informatics within the College of Information Sciences and Technology. “It’s about urban planning, it’s about refugee policies, and it’s about climate change and climate action.”

According to the European Commission, 108.4 million people were displaced worldwide by the end of 2022.

The symposium invites Penn State researchers across various disciplines to join the conversation and assist in setting a research agenda to tackle the issues at hand. Penn State students are invited to learn more about the research and learn about ongoing trends while engaging with academic and industry experts on the topic.

Motelabi, who earned her master’s degree in architecture from the Stuckeman School, conducts research on humanitarian informatics and the implications of technologies in the broader context of forced migration and refugees’ lifecycles. She also considers the countries receiving refugees and their management policies.

“The Afghan situation in 2021 and the Ukraine invasion in 2022 really triggered Penn State researchers to pursue this topic,” Motelabi said. “How are urban designers or architects helping refugees in those countries that are displaced in urban areas? What is the toll that has on infrastructure and environment, and how can we actually plan ahead of time for these situations?”

The event will open at 9 a.m. on Nov. 13 with featured guest speakers and panel discussions in three sessions starting. Featured speakers include: Theo Issaias, faculty member at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture and associate curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art; Achilles Kallergis, assistant professor at the New School for Social Justice and director of the Project on Cities and Migration at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility; Robert Beyer, data and research analyst at the International Organization for Migration; and Simone Sandholz, head of the Urban Futures and Sustainability Transformation Programme at United Nations University.

The second day of the event will be dedicated to a private workshop for invited researchers to start thinking about the next steps as to how they can start collaborating on this topic with an interdisciplinary approach.

“This is where our three centers come together to really showcase their work, and then try to stimulate collaboration,” Chingwen Cheng, director of the Stuckeman School, said about the symposium. “This will be a space to stimulate further conversations and innovative ideas moving forward to learn from each other and to explore what the next opportunities can be together.”

Learn more and register for the symposium via the event website.