Archinect Sessions – Details, episodes & analysis

​Archinect Sessions Next Up: Exhibit Columbus concludes today with our conversations with the recipients of The J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Today's final episode is a conversation with Sam Jacob​​.​

​Sam Jacob Studio​​ is a London-based practice that works at a variety of scales from urban planning to architecture, design objects, art, and curatorial work. Sam Jacob also currently works as a Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago​, and as a columnist for Art Review. Sam's installation for Exhibit Columbus is located on Washington Street. He treats the six city blocks as a design object in his project titled "Alternative Instruments," telling a story of Utopia from the perspective of both history and fiction, referencing a 16th century novel by Thomas More through symbolism, mapping, and the typography of the Utopian alphabet.

Archinect Sessions Next Up: Exhibit Columbus continues with sharing conversations with the recipients of The J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Today's episode is a conversation with Olalekan Jeyifous​​.

Olelakan, who also goes by LEk, as I refer to him in this conversation, is a Nigerian-born visual artist with an architecture degree from Cornell​. His work​ has been widely exhibited at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA, Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim Bilboa. His work ranges from large-scale art commissions in public spaces and festivals to commercial installations. His contribution to this year's Exhibit Columbus is a fascinating hybrid of physical and virtual space entitled Archival/Revival. The installation directly references exhibits at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, the site of the installation, from 1970, celebrating the Black and African arts.

This is the fifth installment of Archinect Sessions six-part series of conversations we've had with architects, designers, and others in the industry. The discussions address the challenges experienced navigating these uncertain times, from the stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, to the toll it's taken on jobs and the economy.

Conversations in this episode include Will Galloway, an architect/firm-owner and educator who has been stuck in Canada, his country of citizenship, while unable to return to Tokyo, his home of residence. We also speak with Sobia Sayeda, an architect in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Dillon Jones, a Portland-based architect who has been sheltering-in-place in California since getting furloughed. 

Architect Sean Lally of Weathers runs the podcast Night White Skies: "A podcast about architecture's future, as both Earth's environment and our human bodies are now open for design."

The podcast is in its infancy, but Lally has already logged some really fascinating interviews with the likes of Timothy Morton, architect Mitchell Joachim, and architects/authors Geoffrey Thün & Kathy Velikov. Lally joins us on this week's show to talk about the podcasting+architecture game, and the architect's collaborative role in science and technology.

Beginning today through October 1, Columbus, Indiana will celebrate its architectural history and identity with its very first Exhibit Columbus—an annual event alternating between a symposium and a design exhibition. Known for its rich architectural holdings of work by Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Kevin Roche, I.M. Pei, Deborah Berke, Richard Meier, Robert Venturi and others, Columbus has earned its "Athens of the prairie" tagline, and Exhibit Columbus hopes to honor that proud tradition into the future.

We're joined by key members of Exhibit Columbus, Richard McCoy (director of the symposium's parent company, Landmark Columbus) and Joshua Coggeshall (partner at Shimizu + Coggeshall and co-director of next year's Ball State University installations) to discuss the city's architectural heritage, and what's planned for this year's inaugural symposium.

Alvin Huang, founder and principal of Synthesis Design + Architecture in Los Angeles, joins us to talk about growing his practice into the award-winning firm it is today. Alvin dips back into his time in London, going to school at the AA and working with Zaha, and shares the terror and excitement that is starting your own firm. We also discuss taking criticism on social media, firm/teaching/life balance, and computation's role in design.

In a landmark decision last month, Columbia University graduate students won the right to unionize in a case filed against the National Labor Relations Board. As a result, graduate students in private universities across the U.S. now have the right to collectively bargain. What effect does this have on architecture student labor, and the valuation of architecture overall?

We're joined this week by special guest A.L. Hu, a third-year GSAPP MArch student and key organizer with Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC-UAW). Hu shared what's happening at the school after the landmark decision, and how these organizing efforts can affect the architecture profession overall.

We're joined this week by Devin Gharakhanian, co-founder and co-creative director of the online platform SuperArchitects, to discuss his work in architecture media and community-building, alongside issues troubling architecture education and the public's perception of the profession.

Gharakhanian was inspired to start SuperArchitects to share architecture theses globally, feeling they are under-appreciated and underexposed. Frustrated by the gap between education and practice he experienced after graduating from Woodbury, he left traditional architecture to focus on exposing architects and their work to as wide an audience as possible, mostly through social media platforms.

Closing out August's special theme of Games, we're joined this week by Quilian Riano to talk through all the ways games can help architects reimagine not only their designs and design processes, but also their own role in the system and structures of city building. We discuss Quilian's recent piece for Archinect on his own work with games in pedagogy, practice and protest, and share our other experiences at the intersection of games and architecture.

This week's show is dedicated to Louisville, and we're delighted to share the mic with longtime Archinect favorite Steven Ward. Steven is an architect and partner at Studio Kremer Architects, teacher and architecture critic/cheerleader for the local independent paper LEO Weekly. We discuss his recent writings, in particular his survey of the recently completed Speed Art Museum, and the differences between local architecture criticism vs national criticism. We also find our what's going on with OMA's Food Port project.