LITERATURE + LECTURES

Architecture Center Houston and the Houston Public Library are pleased to announce Authors in Architecture:  Pamphlet Architecture 30 - Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, Thursday, January 20 at the Architecture Center Houston (ArCH), 315 Capitol, Suite 120. 6pm Authors' Presentations. 7pm Reception and Book signing. Featuring Co-Authors: Neeraj Bhatia & Contributor Christopher Hight.

Participants in the Pamphlet Architecture 30 competition were asked to respond to the theme “Investigations in Infrastructure,” and propose new directions for architecture, transportation, energy, cities, and agriculture at a continental scale. The winning entry, Coupling, imagined six daring projects: a high-speed rail system across the Bering Strait that also collects freshwater from the seasonal iceshelf; a decommissioned airport transformed into a geothermal data farm and agriculture site; a call to include landfills in the list of preserved open spaces; an approach to deploying soft infrastructures in the Canadian Arctic; Re-Rigging existing oil infrastructure in the Caspian Sea; and a saline terminal lake turned into a water farm, recreational retreat, and habitat haven.

Coupling argues that infrastructures behave as artificially maintained natural systems. Rather than a New Deal approach of massive engineering or iconic infrastructure, Coupling employs adaptable, responsive, small-scale interventions whose impacts are global in scale.

Neeraj Bhatia is the Wortham Teaching Fellow at Rice University, where he is developing research on the intersection of architecture, landscape and urbanism to form a political project of plurality. He received his Masters of Architecture + Urban Design from MIT where he was studying as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto and has worked for Eisenman Architects, Coop Himmelblau, Bruce Mau Design, OMA, ORG and Lateral Office. 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 between the envelope 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. Neeraj received the 2010 Lawrence B. Anderson Award to document traditional and contemporary housing in the Canadian Arctic, a project he is developing with InfraNet Lab entitled ‘Next North’.

Christopher Hight is an associate professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, where he is pursuing design and research on architecture’s potential at the nexus of social, natural and subjective ecologies within the built environment. In collaboration with colleagues and student researchers he has recently completed a design strategy for the bayou system in Houston, available at www.hydraulicty.org, and is working with John Anderson on a book examining alternative models of coastal development based on the case study of Galveston Island.

He has been a Fulbright Scholar and obtained a masters degree in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association, and a Ph.D. from the London Consortium at the University of London. He has taught in the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory, and has worked for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. He has lectured and published internationally in books and journals includingHarvard Design Magazine, Praxis, Perspecta, and AD. He is the co-editor of Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture (2009), and AD: Collective Intelligence in Design (2006), and has recently published a book on subjectivity and epistemology since the middle of the 20th century, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics (2008). He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Rice Design Alliance.

Other authors of Pamphlet Architecture 30, Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism are Maya Przybylski, Lola Sheppard and Mason White; Other contributions by Keller Easterling, David Gissen, and Charles Waldheim. Princeton Architectural Press.

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.

Parking is free with validation at the Hobby Center Parking Garage and Theater District Parking.