Clifford Pearson, director of the USC American Academy in China (AAC) and lecturer at the USC School of Architecture, organized a forum on the collaboration between Asian developers and American architects in creating three of the largest building projects in downtown Los Angeles. The AAC-sponsored event entitled “Is LA Ready for Vertical Urbanism,” took place at USC on May 9 at 6:30 PM. Participants were: Robert Jernigan of Gensler and Wu Chao of Greenland USA talking about the Metropolis complex; Mark Nay of CallisonRTKL and Tin Hovsepian of China Oceanwide Holdings talking about Oceanwide Plaza; and Tammy Jow of AC Martin and Chris Park of Hanjin International talking about Wilshire Grand. Paul Tang of  Verse Design and the founding academic coordinator of the AAC moderated the panel discussion, along with Pearson. 

Adjunct Associate Professor and Office of Mobile Design (OMD) Founder, Jennifer Siegal, won a 2017 AIA/LA Residential Architecture Award for her private home ‘Vertical Venice Prefab’. The home was featured on the cover of Dwell’s 2017 Prefab Issue and will be available to view at the Dwell on Design home tours in June. She will be speaking on an expert panel on June 24th at the Dwell of Design event in Los Angeles. Siegal is the inaugural design interview for the launch of Hunker.com out this April. OMD’s work is featured in Mobitecture: Architecture on the Move (Phaidon Press) and the Swedish publication RUM’s Los Angeles Issue. Siegal was made representative for her 2003 GSD/Loeb Fellowship class.

Patrick Tighe, FAIA, Adjunct Professor has the following news this month,

Tighe was awarded the 2017 Star of Design Award during Westweek, given by the Pacific Design Center. Other awards include: three AIA LA Residential Design Awards, a Architizer Award, two Calibre Award nominations and one Los Angeles Architecture Award

R. Scott Mitchell and Sofia Borges’s MADWORKSHOP Homeless Studio won the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award for their Homes for Hope prototype. Their work is also featured in this month’s Metropolis Magazine, Architect Magazine, and Business Insider. 

Lorcan O’Herlihy FAIA will be speaking at Architectural Record’s Innovation Conference West, The Future of Architecture and the Public Realm, at UCSF’s Mission Bay Conference Center San Francisco on Wednesday, June 7. He will discuss urban culture in Los Angeles and Detroit, emphasizing the need for social and civic connectivity in two complex and rapidly evolving regions. Lorcan was also featured in the April 2017 issue of Architectural Record, which focuses on the public realm. In the issue, Lorcan shares his thoughts on rebuilding Detroit and discusses ways of integrating the public realm and social housing through his MLK1101 project in South Los Angeles. Over the next several months Lorcan will be lecturing at University of Colorado Denver, Washington University in St. Louis, and will give the Convocation Lecture at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Alvin Huang, AIA was granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. He will be a keynote speaker at the 2017 AIA Wisconsin Conference on Architecture in Madison, WI on May 17-18, and has been invited to give a lecture and conduct a design workshop at the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Xiamen University in Xiamen, China from June 23-27. 

Eric Haas’s firm DSH // architecture was a finalist in Architizer’s 2017 A+Awards in the Architecture + 3D printing category for their research project Spiral Kitty, a wholly 3D-printed, reciprocally-structured cat shelter, donated to benefit the nonprofit Architects for Animals. The firm is in construction on two preschool and infant care centers in Hollywood, and beginning work on new facilities for Children’s Institute.

Associate Professor Ken Breisch has completed his manuscript for American Libraries: 1730-1950.  This is to be published by The Library of Congress and W. W. Norton in September 2017. In February and March he lectured on his new book The Los Angeles Central Library: Building an Architectural Icon, 1872-1933 at the Los Angeles Public Library and before the Society of Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter, and participated in a podcast conversation on this same topic with Jim Cuno, President of the J. Paul Getty Trust, for his series Art + Ideas. In March, he gave a lecture on the Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building for the Annual Meeting of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Construction Specifications Institute and was invited by Pasadena Heritage to lecture on the significance of architecture of the recent past.

Mina Chow, AIA, NCARB is the architecture expert for a new National Geographic series called “Origins: The Journey of Humankind.”  Throughout the episode, she talks about the revolutionary aspects of building systems furthering the progress of civilization on “Building the Future.”  The episode aired on MON, April 17, 2017 and FRI, April 21, 2017 9:00pm ET/ 6:00pm PT on the National Geographic Channel.  In addition, the film she is directing/producing about the erosion of America’s international image “FACE OF A NATION:  What Happened to the World’s Fair?” just completed their original music.  The film featuring Frank O. Gehry, and Barton Myers will be ready for film festivals in the Fall 2017.

Assistant Professor of Practice, Lauren Matchison, served as the AIA mentor and faculty advisor to the winning student team in the 2017 AXP Design Competition (hosted by AIA San Fernando Valley). USC undergraduate students, Taylor Abbott and Tyler Gates, won the $1000 first place prize for their design of a Los Angeles-area park and community center.

Laurel Consuelo Broughton and her studio WELCOMEPROJECTS presented a new urban project, “The Fantasy Compact” as part of cityLAB UCLA AUD’s exhibition, “cityLAB, times 10,” which imagined speculative futures for Los Angeles along with five other Los Angeles offices and work from cityLAB’s archives at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. The show runs from February 3- April 9, 2017. 

Construction was recently completed for Geoffrey von Oeyen‘s design for the Project and Idea Realization Lab (PIRL), a new design technology lab and classroom for a middle school in Pacific Palisades, California, that celebrates the design process as integral to education. Both indoors and out, the two teaching spaces in PIRL provide comprehensive learning opportunities that enable an exploratory approach toward multidisciplinary, design-based collaboration. The interior classroom, taking spatial and programmatic cues from Stanford’s Institute of Design, provides a technology platform for creative collaboration on projects ranging from robotics to filmmaking. The student-operated retractable canopy fabricated by a racing sailboat rigger is a didactic expression of architecture, engineering, and sailing design that creates a covered outdoor teaching and making space. www.geoffreyvonoeyen.com