What’s in a List?
Thursday, December 10, 5:00pm
UIC School of Architecture
3100 Architecture + Design Studios
845 W Harrison St
RSVP here
What’s in a List? brings together an international group of critics to answer this question with a simple assignment: visit the Chicago Architecture Biennial, excerpt a visual list, lay out your selective criterion, and define new zones of design criticism. The panel is presented by the Master of Arts in Design Criticism program at UIC, which promotes the pleasures and discriminations of candid writing about contemporary architecture.
Participants
Fabrizio Gallanti, Montreal
Florencia Rodriguez, Buenos Aires
Roemer van Toorn, Umeå
Fabrizio Gallanti is a founding member of the architectural research studio Fig-Projects (2003–present). He has taught design and architectural theory in Chile (Pontificia Universidad Católica and Universidad Diego Portales, 2002–2008), Italy (Politecnico di Milano, 2007–2010) and the UK (Architectural Association, 2014–present). He is currently Visiting Professor at Universite de Montreal and Lecturer at McGill University. Gallanti received his MArch from the Universita di Genova in 1995 and PhD from Politecnico di Torino in 2001. He has written for international magazines such as A+U, Domus, San Rocco, Clog, and The Journal of Architectural Education. Between 2007 and 2011 Gallanti was the architecture editor and web editor of Abitare magazine. Between 2011 and 2014 he was the Associate Director of Programs at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. In 2014 Gallanti was a Senior Fellow at the Princeton University School of Architecture. FIG Projects is currently curating the exhibition The World in Our Eyes for the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.
Florencia Rodriguez is an architect, critic, and the founder/editorial director of Piedra, Papel y Tijera publishers in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her editorial work is complemented by other development and dissemination activities aimed at triggering cultural “agitation” to provoke a collective evolution of the discipline. In 2010 Rodriguez created the publication PLOT, a platform committed to the dissemination of practices and critical thinking about contemporary architecture. One of its main aims is to integrate Latin American architecture within global debates and production, and to promote the active role of criticism and theory in the transformation of our built environment. With the same intention, she curated symposia and exhibitions such as What Criticism? at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (2014), hEX, Arquitectura Argentina Contemporánea (2007), Nunca Fuimos Eternos (2008) and Post Post Post (2009/11). She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s GSD in 2014 and currently teaches architectural theory and history at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella School of Architecture.
Roemer Van Toorn is an architect, writer, photographer, and curator in the field of culture and architecture. He is Professor of Theory and Media at the Umeå School of Architecture, Sweden. Between 1993 and 2010 he was head of the history and theory program at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam, and guest professor at the Delft School of Design at the University of Technology Delft, the Netherlands. Van Toorn has served as editor of several issues of the annual publication Architecture in the Netherlands (2005–2010), as well as advisor to Archis (Volume), Hunch, Domus, and Abitare magazines. He is co-editor of several books including The Invisible in Architecture (1994) with Ole Bouman, the acclaimed encyclopedic manifesto dissecting a range of cultural, economic, political, and philosophic outlooks within the contemporary architectural discourse. His photography work has been exhibited in Winnipeg, Los Angeles, and in the exhibition Cities on the Move curated by Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
What’s in a List? is made possible in part by an institutional grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.