Urban Design

SET OFF, a design exploration off the beaten path, features final projects by emerging designers from four graduate design programs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The largest of five new SAIC exhibitions on view during NeoCon, North America's largest design exposition, SET OFF is online at saic.edu/setoff.

Also opening June 10, the 2013 Post-Baccalaureate Exhibition features 20 students completing SAIC’s Post-Bac in Studio and Post-Bac in Fashion, Body and Garment curricula. The Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio is offered in the Departments of Art and Technology Studies; Ceramics; Fiber and Material Studies; Film, Video, New Media, and Animation; Painting and Drawing; Performance; and Visual Communication Design.

The opening reception is Monday, June 10, 6:00–8:00 p.m., and a SET OFF panel discussion will be held in the galleries 4:00–5:30 p.m.

All shows are free and open to the public Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m, June 8–July 5 (closed July 4).

The GFRY Studio exhibition "A View with a Room," and "whatnot" and "Functional Fiction"—a pair of design exhibitions originally presented in Milan and New York City, are also featured in the Sullivan Galleries.

A list of participating students and more information is available in the press release online at bit.ly/188gITp

saic.edu/exhibitions | 312.629.6635 | exhibitions-saic@saic.edu

PechaKucha Chicago style is this week - Tuesday December 4th (doors at 6pm, place is hopping by 7:30, and we'll start at 8:20)
What do the winners of the Prentice Future Competition, the managing editor of the Chciago Tribune and a red-headed rock n roll band have in common?
For one, they are all presenters at PechaKucha Night Chicago Volume 24 on Tuesday evening.
If you haven't been to PK in a while, it's time to get back in the habit and join iconic Chicago designer Jordan Mozer, Chicago's loudest band White Mystery, Roche Scholarship recipient Anne Dudek, Tribune Managing Editor Jane Hirt, art and design advocate Tess Landon, young architects Wallo Villacorta and Cyril Marsollier, Dose Market’s April Francis, brand innovator Tom Marquardt, molder of minds Sandi Dumich and 2014 AIA Chicago Board member Juan Moreno.

No snow yet, but if it's the first December in Chicago then at least there's a guaranteed PechaKucha Night. Loads of fun and festivity for all family members (over the age of 21).
Our presenters are ready to chit-chat for 400 seconds while you guzzle egg nog and snuggle round the open fire (aka Martyrs' stage).

It'll be so much fun, and you'll certainly learn something you didn't know before.
Come and open your presents early at Martyrs' - Tuesday, December 4th at 8pm (but get there a bit early for conversation and libations).

Martyrs'
3855 N Lincoln Avenue, Chicago
Tickets at http://www.martyrslive.com

Links to presenters at http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/chicago/24

Inventive. Collaborative. Research-driven.

Led by principal and founder Jeanne Gang, Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects has established itself as one of the premier architectural firms working today. Inside Studio Gang Architects presents an engaging workshop-like environment that showcases and reveals the practice's creative process as they seek architectural solutions to pressing contemporary issues.

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.
It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of "chit chat", it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

See the Pecha Kucha Chicago Website for more info: http://pecha-kucha.org/night/chicago/

The world is getting only more complex. Entire industries are undergoing seismic transformations wrought by technology, global economics forces and a host of cultural factors. Designers are becoming central to addressing the large, ambiguous problems of our time. Whether the arena is health care, economic development, learning or public policy, design methods are helping solve seemingly impossible problems.

So, why design? You are invited to the Institute of Design (ID), to learn about the methods and frameworks we teach, talk one-on-one with faculty, students and alumni, and find out how design makes a difference.

Come learn about our Master’s and PhD degree programs (http://bit.ly/PDddd8), executive education programs (http://bit.ly/PTXXu8), and faculty and student research (http://bit.ly/PDdZqG), as well as the divergent community of graduate students from around the world that you can be a part of.

Program:

William Skelton and Jamie Munger, MDes/MBA ’12, will discuss conducting fieldwork in Haiti to help them conceive economic opportunities for the rural poor.

Guillermo Krovblit, MDes/MBA ’11, co-founder of Peapod Labs (http://bit.ly/QWk66m), connects parents and kids through learning with award-winning educational apps. “Peapod Labs is an unlikely meeting of minds and hearts that just might, unsuspectingly, become leaders in media literacy for preschoolers." - Wired.com (http://bit.ly/N4saF0)

Lauren Braun, a second-year student, will share her experiences as an intern at McDonalds and MAYA and talk about school projects done with the City of Chicago and WBEZ Radio.

RSVP to design@id.iit.edu or call ID Graduate Admissions at (312) 595-4900. Feel free to share this invitation with anyone you know who may be interested in design. Everyone is welcome. Refreshments will be served.

Come Check out a special edition Pecha Kucha Night at the Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago! Speakers include:

Doug Fogelson
Steven Haulenbeek
Karen Kice/Claire Cahan
Troy Klyber
Jon Langford
Jason Lazarus
Liz Neely
Sally Timms

Come have a drink and enjoy the show!
For more info go to the PK website: http://pecha-kucha.org/night/chicago/newsletters/2625

Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture announces the launch of River City: Waterfront Design for Civic Life, a series of exhibitions and related public programs that consider riverfront design as a powerful tool for urban reinvention. On view beginning July 26, 2012, with an exhibition exploring Brooklyn Bridge Park, River City investigates how innovative designs for waterfront spaces can address the paramount cultural and ecological questions of our time.

Today, across America and around the world, cities are reclaiming rivers as sites of cultural, environmental, and economic vitality. At the same time, the urgent challenges of climate change and demands for social equity have focused interest upon these complex urban landscapes. While revived waterfronts offer vast canvases for new development and recreation, converging ecological and economic forces have spurred strong debate about the river’s place in civic life. Exploring the key role design plays in addressing these challenges, River City asks:

• How can the cultural value of rivers be rediscovered and celebrated through design?
• How can innovative planning and design balance the need for working waterfronts while accommodating public open space, new housing, and ecological restoration?
• How can new riverfront infrastructure catalyze self-sustaining communities?

To engage these questions, River City’s first exhibition, Immensity and Intimacy: Brooklyn Bridge Park, explores the reborn landscape on New York City’s East River as a prototype for reimagining the urban waterfront. Informed by the magnitude of the site’s contextual scale, the park’s design, by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, engages and reshapes the urban edge as a site of richly layered cultural, ecological, and historical contexts. Through an inventive series of strategies, including sculpting the site’s complex maritime edge, reusing salvaged materials, and embedding ecology and experience, the design redefines the Brooklyn waterfront as a central place in the civic imagination.

Subsequent exhibitions in the series will examine the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, Korea, where a long-buried urban waterway has been remade as a metropolitan-scale public space; and the Mississippi River Delta, where the leveed and channeled river is being reimagined as the heart of a self-sustaining natural system that also serves as a cultural catalyst for New Orleans and its surrounding communities.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Immensity and Intimacy: Brooklyn Bridge Park

July 25, 4-8 p.m. Member & Press Preview
July 26, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Exhibition Open through October 19
September 12, 7-9 p.m. Exhibition Party
October 4, 7 p.m. Waterfront Design Debate
Fred Kent (Project for Public Spaces)
Michael Van Valkenburgh (MVVA)
Adrian Benepe (NYC Parks Commissioner), moderator
October 10, 7 p.m. The Urban Polder: What New York’s Waterfront Can Learn from the Dutch

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design announces a major retrospective exhibition:

UNFINISHED BUSINESS – 25 Years of Discourse in Los Angeles, running from July 13th through August 26th, 2012 at the WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design has been at the center of the city’s architectural discourse since 1987. Through each decade – the scrappy 1980s, the experimental 1990s, and the booming 2000s – the Forum has vigorously interrogated the culture of architecture and urban design in Los Angeles. Although geographically positioned on the far edge of the continent, the organization nonetheless impacts the discipline at large: Forum events and programming routinely introduce emerging talent; issues of contemporary design are captured in its exhibitions; and its publications and competitions speculate on urbanism and often challenge the conventions of what architecture means in L.A.

The retrospective Unfinished Business unpacks the organization’s archive, revisiting a history of commentary and debate. In looking backward, the exhibition finds within the Forum’s history the architectural questions, urban design conversation starters, and critical loose ends that are just as relevant now as they were over the past quarter century. Unfinished Business doesn’t come to any fixed conclusion, but opens up a rich and potentially provocative dialogue.

The Architecture & Design Society of the Art Institute of Chicago presents the Modern Ball, which celebrates 30 years of the Architecture & Design Society and honors the lifetime achievement of Stanley Tigerman. Enjoy cocktails, dinner and a silent auction, followed by dancing of the Terzo Piano's terrace at this elegant event. Proceeds benefit the Architecture & Design Society's Education and Acquisition Fund.

SAIC Graduate Exhibition Tele Vision Closing Event
Film Screening and Panel Discussion "Where Design Meets Art? - New Practices in Design Architecture and Fashion"

The practices of design, architecture, and fashion are shifting in interesting new ways. Non-traditional approaches to projects are being embraced, with film and installation work increasingly appearing alongside models and prototypes. These themes are very much in evidence in the work of SAIC’s graduate students, whose work is on show in the Tele Vision exhibition. On the final day of the exhibition, a film screening and panel discussion will uncover these modes of working and examine what these changes mean for this generation of graduates.

The screening will show two short films by influential designer/film maker Noam Toran, whose work sits astride the collapsing border between design and contemporary art. This will be followed by a panel discussion featuring SAIC faculty and guests.