CAP Representation Online Lecture Series aims to present emerging architectural practices that engage in innovative and speculative modes of representation.
Monday, 09/18
Carrie Norman
Founding Partner, Norman Kelley / Assistant Professor, MIT
11 a.m., RM 2005, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 2912 3131
Carrie Norman is an architect working at the intersection of observation, particularity, and alterations towards an architecture of social, cultural, and critical reuse. Prior to joining MIT, Norman was an Assistant Professor at Tulane University and has previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Barnard College, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In addition, she is the 2023 Louis Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University.
Norman received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with Honors from the University of Virginia and a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University. She is a licensed architect in the states of New York, Louisiana, and Illinois, and previously worked as a Senior Architect with SHoP Architects, in New York City.
In 2012, Norman co-founded the Chicago and Cambridge-based design collaborative, Norman Kelley. The practice works in the fields of residential architecture, commercial interiors, furniture design, exhibition design, and design criticism. Previous clients include Aesop, the Noguchi Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Notre, and the artist Brendan Fernandes, among others. Their work has been published in the New York Times, Log, Avery Review, The Architect's Newspaper, Cultured, Domus, Dezeen, Wallpaper*, and Frame. Norman Kelley has contributed work to the Venice Architecture Biennial (2014, 2021), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015, 2017), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2019). In addition, the practice received a United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture (2018).
Thursday, 10/12
Li Han & Hu Yan
Founding Partners, Drawing Architecture Studio / Visiting Critics, Syracuse University
Super Axon
11 a.m., RM 2005, CAP
Zoom Room: 915 4122 8995
Established in 2013 by Li Han and Hu Yan in Beijing, Drawing Architecture Studio (DAS) is committed to the practice of architectural drawing, architectural design, and urban studies.
DAS explores the possibilities of drawing, space and urban studies in a unique way. They use engineering drawing software as a tool and derive inspiration from architecture, art, popular culture, and daily life to create magnificent and complex images for urban landscape. At the same time, they consider infinite vector images as building materials, explore the multiple paths to bringing virtual images back to the material world, and break the boundary between image and space. DAS understands urban studies as an experience and narrative with open forms, and conducts experiments through various media such as architectural models, art installations, comics, and books.
Monday, 10/30
Kevin Hirth
Principal, KEVIN HIRTH Co. / Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Denver
11 a.m., RM 2005, CAP
Zoom Room: 919 3430 3005
KEVIN HIRTH Co. can be found in Denver, Colorado. A multivalent design practice, we design homes, offices, galleries, shops, kitchen tables, cabins, exhibitions, gardens, garages, towers, and tool sheds.
Founded in 2013, KEVIN HIRTH Co. has been recognized nationally and internationally through awards and publications including the Architects Newspaper, Dezeen, Designboom, ARCHITECT Magazine, ArchDaily, The JAE, and Archinect.
In 2022 the office won an Award in the 69th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards. In 2020 the work was awarded an Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award. In 2017 Kevin was awarded the Architectural League of New York's League Prize.
Kevin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning. Kevin holds a Master of Architecture with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Kevin has lectured and served on juries at Universities internationally including The University of Arkansas, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oregon, Anahuac University in Mexico City, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), California College of the Arts (CCA), Harvard University, Kyoto University, Texas A&M University, Syracuse University, Northeastern University, Texas Tech University, and the University of Illinois Chicago. Upon graduation from Harvard, Kevin
was granted the singular honor of receiving both the Harvard Faculty Design Award and AIA Henry Adams Medal.
Thursday, 11/09Constance ValeDirector, The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors / Associate Professor & Chair, Washington University in St.
Louis
11 a.m., RM 2005, CAP
Zoom Room: 957 3340 4515
Constance Vale is an associate professor and chair of undergraduate architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. She has previously taught at SCI-Arc and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a licensed architect and director of the architecture practice Constance Vale Studio
and the experimental research office The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors. She undertakes aesthetic and
conceptual investigations in the territory between architecture, art, theater, and emerging technology.
Vale is the editor and a co-author of the forthcoming Graham Foundation-supported book, Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture, with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. The symposium Decoys and Depictions: Images of the Digital, which Vale led in fall 2019, builds upon this research. She is also collaborating with Dr. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik in the McKelvey School of Engineering on The Architectural Design of a Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving and recently curated the related Kemper Art Museum Teaching Gallery exhibition The Autonomous Future of Mobility. In addition, she is among the architects recently selected for the international housing competition On Olive, which will result in a commissioned house in St. Louis. In 2015, Vale collaborated with Emmett Zeifman to complete a temporary pavilion in downtown Los Angeles for the experimental opera Hopscotch. Vale’s work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum, The Sheldon, and the Farrell Learning & Teaching Center, and published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the Los Angeles Times, Archinect, and CLOG.
Vale earned an MArch from Yale School of Architecture, where she received the Moulton Andrus Award for Excellence in Art and Architecture and two Feldman Nominations, and a BFA from Parsons School of Design. She has practiced at nationally and internationally recognized offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and her hometown of Pittsburgh.
Thursday, 11/30
Lexi Tsien
Co-founder, Soft-Firm / Design Critic, Harvard GSD
11 a.m., RM 2005, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 5235 9265
Lexi Tsien is an architect, educator, and co-founder of Soft-Firm based in Brooklyn, NY. Tsien is interested in new forms of representation, vernacular spatial practices, and their ability to shape and self-determine the built environment. Soft-Firm is a collective platform that is speculative and concrete: taking a playful and lo-fi approach to visual perception, elemental forms, and material contrast. Seeing architecture at the intersection of culture and built infrastructure, the firm reframes
and draws social paradigms to empower communities. The practice has designed across multiple scales, including objects, interiors, and buildings, and has built work across various programmatic types – including domestic environments, cultural and commercial spaces, and public installations in New York City and Downtown Brooklyn.
Soft-Firm’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including PIN-UP, Surface Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, AN Interior, PBS Newshour, Wallpaper’s Architects’ Directory of 2022, and Architect Magazine’s Next Progressives.
Tsien earned her Masters from the Yale School of Architecture and has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Visual Arts from Columbia University. She has taught representation courses and design studios at the Yale School of Architecture, the Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons The New School, The Cooper Union, Columbia GSAPP, and Syracuse University. Before forming her own studio, Tsien worked at Bernard Tschumi Architects, Davies Toews, and Diller Scofidio in New York and Barkow Leibinger in Berlin.
