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Authors in Architecture: Bracket: Architecture, Environment, Digital Culture, issue #1: on farming

Presented by American Institute of Architects (AIA Houston) and Houston Public Library at Architecture Center Houston (ArCH)

October 21, 2010

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Architecture Center Houston and the Houston Public Library are pleased to announce Authors in Architecture: Bracket: Architecture, Environment, Digital Culture, issue #1: on farming, Thursday October 21, at the Architecture Center Houston (ArCH), 315 Capitol, Suite 120, Houston, TX. 6pm Authors' Presentations. 7pm Reception and Book signing.

Bracket: Architecture, Environment, Digital Culture, issue #1: on farming -
Bracket is a new book series that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. Seeking new voices and design talent, Bracket is structured around an open call for entries. Conceived as an almanac, the series looks at emerging themes that are shaping the built environment in radically significant, yet often unexpected ways.

The series will chart the emergence of this current design generation. A generation raised when the internet was commonplace, when environmental issues reached a critical 'inconvenient truth,' and when the cultural capital of architecture was in need of new vision. The Bracket series will address the complex impacts of globalization on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Bracket 1 is titled “On Farming” and looks at the capacity for architecture to address ideas and issues of productive landscapes and urbanisms. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community.

Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. Farming is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production.

The issue collects original design projects, installations, and essays which interrogate new typologies, forms, and formats of the built environment. With almost 40 design proposals and 12 essays, “On Farming” collects emerging designers and thinkers internationally.

Edited by Mason White & Maya Przybylski.

Bracket: issue #1 on farming presented Texas Contributors Neeraj Bhatia, Jason Sowell, and Ned Dodington.

Neeraj Bhatia received his Masters of Architecture + Urban Design from MIT. He has worked for Eisenman Architects, Coop Himmelblau, Bruce Mau Design, OMA, ORG and Lateral Office and has taught at the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and was most recently awarded the 2010-2011 Wortham Teaching Fellowship at Rice University. His research has been published in Volume/Archis, Thresholds, Footprint, and Yale Perspecta. He is co-editor of 'Arium: Weather + Architecture' (with Jürgen Mayer H., Hatje Cantz Publishing, 2009), which examines the relationship of building and weather. In 2008, Neeraj became a co-director of InfraNet Lab, a non-profit research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. The Lab’s research into urban infrastructures will be published in Pamphlet Architecture 30 (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). Neeraj received the 2010 Lawrence B. Anderson Award to document traditional and contemporary housing in the Canadian Arctic.

Jason Sowell is an assistant professor in the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. His research and design work engage questions of infrastructure and measure. His projects have received several awards and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally; The University of Texas at Austin’s counterMEASURES [co-designed with Nichole Wiedemann] and Cleveland Design Competition 2007 2nd place [co-designed with Hope Hasbrouck]. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee, and a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Ned Dodington received a B.A. in Art History from Carleton College in 2003 and an M.Arch from Rice University in 2009. While at Rice, Ned devoted his graduate career to studying potential points of architectural design intervention in biological systems. His work has been published in Architectural Design Magazine, Texas Architect, Rice Working, and the Columbia University GSAP yearly review, and he has written for The Architectural Society in New York, Manifold Magazine, and the Houstonist. His built installations have been shown in Minnesota and Houston. He has been awarded both the Technos international traveling fellowship in 2002 and the Mitchel Travel Fellowship in 2006. Ned is currently employed at PDR in Houston, Texas and manages two small businesses devoted to fostering creative communities in Houston, Caroline Collective and C2Creative.

Debuting in January 2009, Authors in Architecture is a collaboration between the Houston Public Library Downtown and the Architecture Center Houston (ArCH). Our aim is to create a dialogue between these two cultural centers and their patrons.

This series is free and open to the public.