Representation Lecture Series

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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, 11/09
Constance Vale
Director, 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.

Monday, 02/06
Alex Yueyan Li 
School of Architecture, Syracuse University
Design Faculty
Construction Rehearsal
1 p.m., Third Floor Gallery, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 4571 7483

Alex Yueyan Li joins the School as a Part-Time Instructor and will teach design studio and seminar courses. 

Before coming to Syracuse, Li served as the Irving Innovation Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where his research and teaching focused on historical and contemporary material techniques in architecture. Concurrently, he organized a series of graduate-level workshops that rethink the agency of representation through the lens of social, cultural, technological, and environmental issues.

Li’s experimental work explores the real-time capacity of computational tools to develop material techniques that are sensitive to time, process, and other dimensions of reality. His research has taken various forms ranging from machines, mock-ups, furniture, buildings, images, and texts, all converging under three distinct yet interrelated themes: material properties, construction standards, and tectonic assemblies. He has given lectures and served on juries at a number of institutions including Harvard, SCI-Arc, the University of Toronto, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Northeastern University.

Prior to establishing his own practice, Li was a project designer at MILLIØNS where he led architecture and art installation projects in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Taipei, and France. This includes managing an ongoing project that reimagines the east wing of I.M. Pei’s Everson Museum, in Syracuse, NY. He also has practiced with offices in the United States, Canada, Japan, and China, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Höweler + Yoon, and Shigeru Ban Architects.

Li received a Master of Architecture I AP with Distinction from Harvard GSD, where he was the recipient of the Clifford Wong Housing Prize and the Architecture Research Grant. He also holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies with Distinction from the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he received the President’s Scholarship and the First in Class Award.

 

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Monday, 02/20
Sam Schuermann
School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Activism Fellow
Desired Objects: Narratives of Domesticity
1 p.m., Third Floor Gallery, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 4571 7483
 
Sam Schuermann is a designer, maker, and educator whose work explores the aesthetics, objects, conventions, and material implications of domesticity. She holds a Master of Architecture from Rice University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Cincinnati, where she has taught studios in the School of Architecture and Interior Design. Prior to coming to UWM, Sam practiced as an architectural designer at LEVER architecture in Portland, Oregon. She has also served as a volunteer instructor for Your Street Your Voice, a program for high school students in Portland that positions design as a tool for social and environmental justice. While at Rice University, Sam was a research assistant, graduate assistant, and co-editor of PLAT Journal. Her work has been published in PLAT 7.5, exhibited at the Oslo Architecture Triennale and she has served on numerous juries.

 

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Monday, 03/06
Ekin Erar
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University
Design Teaching Fellow
Paper/Space; Image/Space
3 p.m., Third Floor Gallery, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 4571 7483

Ekin Erar is an architect and designer. She has previously lived in Istanbul, Boston, Houston, and Paris, and has worked on projects in Europe and the Americas. Her work has been featured in the Venice and São Paulo Architecture Biennales as well as exhibitions at Rice University and Pratt Institute. Erar's work brings together image construction, material research, and analysis and recreation of assembly processes, through which she explores the relationship between the real and the represented.

She holds a B.A. in Art History/Architecture double major from Wellesley College and an M.Arch. from Rice University.

 

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Monday, 04/06
salazarsequeromedina
School of Architecture, Montana State University and School of Architecture, Tulane University
Design Faculty
Remote Works
1 p.m., Third Floor Gallery, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 4571 7483

Salazarxsequeroxmedina is a collaborative architecture practice founded in 2020 by Laura, Pablo and Juan, with ongoing projects in Spain, Perú and the US. They currently hold positions at Montana State University, Syracuse University and Tulane University.

Laura Salazar-Altobelli  (Lima, 1990) is a Peruvian-American architect, and holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, 2017. She has extensive professional experience, most recently as project architect at Barkow Leibinger, in Berlin. Salazar has published in Pidgin Magazine, Sustainable Cities and Society, Lunch Journal, and PLAT Journal. Her work has been exhibited at Jewett Gallery when she was a fellow with the Alice C Cole Fund for Sculpture. In addition to practice and academia, Salazar has co-founded and coordinates Let’s Talk, a platform for architectural discourse. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Montana State University School of architecture, and at Syracuse University School of Architecture .

Pablo Sequero Barrera (Madrid, 1989) is an architect and designer, graduated with a Master of Architecture from the ETSAM, Technical University of Madrid in 2015. Sequero has been a collaborator at Rafael Moneo's studio in Madrid, and most recently with Barkow Leibinger in Berlin. In 2014, he received a Banco Santander grant for his collaboration with the office FRPO architecture landscape, where he was part of the team on the IX BIAU exhibition design, in Rosario, Argentina. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Montana State University School of architecture, and at Syracuse University School of Architecture, and has taught previously at Cornell AAP.

Juan Medina Revilla (Madrid, 1989) is a registered architect and a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Madrid. He studied Architecture at the ETSAM and the ENSA Paris-Belleville, obtaining his Master of Architecture in 2015. He was awarded the ARQUIA grant, which led him to collaborate in Álvaro Siza's practice in Porto. He also practiced in Madrid and Berlin for renowned offices such as Nieto & Sobejano, Sauerbruch & Hutton and Schmitt von Holst. He has published several research articles, his book The Limit of the Square was exhibited at the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2018. He is currently a Visiting Fellow Professor at Tulane University.

 

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Monday, 04/20
Shawn Lutz
Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston
Adjunct Professor
Type Type
1 p.m., Third Floor Gallery, CAP
Zoom Room: 933 4571 7483


Shawn M. Lutz is the founder and director of SML/A; an independent practice focused on communities by designing housing, houses, objects, exhibitions, and interiors. The office engages and leverages the architectural surface to speculate on the near future. We examine the architectural discipline by notions of scale—from objects to buildings for renewed dialogues and philosophies.
 
Lutz has worked for several practices in Houston, New York, and Chicago on urban design, airports, commercial, residential, interior, and graphic design projects. Many projects are sited in North America and Asia, while others remain ongoing and conceptual.
 
Lutz is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Houston with a pedagogical ambition to engage contemporary discourses of both new and traditional tropes in architecture through modes of representation in drawing, image, and model to enrich the pedological and architectural intelligence that contributes to our society. Adjacent to practice, Lutz focuses on research with spatial diversity of geometry informing the architectural surface and surrounding environments. Once founded through internal mechanisms, an architectural character sees a renewal of the surface in societies beyond localities—glorifying diversity. Before joining the University of Houston faculty, Lutz held teaching positions at Texas A&M University.
 
Lutz received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Houston and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.