Andy Bako
Livestream or Recording:
TRAIN YOURSELF
Andy Bako (he/him) is a computational designer and licensed architect from Mississauga, Canada. Andy’s creative work and research explores the intersection between digital and physical realities, focusing on recent advancements in artificial intelligence and digital fabrication. Andy has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level at the University of Toronto and Carleton University. He is a founding partner of BAK\LASH, a multidisciplinary design group that operates in the threshold between our digital and physical realities. With BAK\LASH, Andy has developed digital platforms and contributed to exhibitions for institutions including MOCA Toronto, the Aga Kahn Foundation and the University of Toronto.
Andy holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with Advanced Placement and Distinction. He was the recipient of the Harvard GSD 2019 Digital Design Prize for his Master’s Thesis project, “Normal House”. He has worked in award-winning offices such as Adamson Associates Architects and OMA and has experience working at a multitude of scales ranging from large-scale commercial projects to custom residential work.
Andy’s work has been featured in Yale Paprika!, Kooz/Arch, SuckerPUNCHdaily, and the Hot Air Gallery in New York. He has contributed to international exhibitions including the “Countryside: The Future” exhibition held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Yasmin Vobis
Livestream or Recording:
Cheapskates, Again
Yasmin Vobis is a registered architect and co-founding Principal of ULTRAMODERNE. She studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University. She was awarded the Founders—Arnold W. Brunner— Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Architecture in 2016 and she is currently Assistant Professor in Architecture at UC Berkeley. ULTRAMODERNE is an award— winning architecture and design firm located in Berkeley, CA. Led by co—principals Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis, the office creates buildings and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous. The principals believe that design is not a luxury, but rather fundamental to the construction of all aspects of the built environment.
Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto
Livestream or Recording:
Weaponized Craft
Craft has unexpectedly returned to the architect.
Migrating from the job site into the exploratory space of the design studio, craft takes on new unprecedented dimensions. No longer strictly limited by material realities, or the routines of normative practice, the architect is free to engage with a project across scales and mediums, craft is for Reiser+Umemoto less a set of concrete techniques than an exploratory ethos. This radical mode of thinking and working is an ongoing dance between centuries-old and cutting-edge technologies. A crafty engagement with technology is essential; eluding the twin traps of conservative handicraft and process-based techno-purism. The practice seeks to chart a radically aesthetic passage between the two as the most resonant way to advance culture and society.
Like the effectiveness of the itinerant smith and Lockheed’s Skunk Works, which existed within larger machines: economic, political or otherwise, Reiser+Umemoto continue to leverage the vitality of independent thought beyond the constraints of normative practice, in service to the world.
Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture is an internationally recognized architecture office and design atelier founded in 1986 by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto. The firm works across continents and scales with projects ranging from large scale cultural and infrastructural projects to detailed object, furniture, and exhibition designs. Reiser+Umemoto, RUR is widely published, most recently in their sweeping monograph Projects and Their Consequences which traces thirty years of multidisciplinary investigations into form, structure, techniques and planning. Awards and honors include the Chrysler Award for Excellence in Design, the Academy Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Citation and John Hejduk Award from the Cooper Union, and the USA Booth Fellowship from United States Artists for Architecture & Design.
Jesse Reiser is a Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and co-founder of Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture.
Nanako Umemoto is a Professor of Practice at Washington University, a visiting Professor at Kent State University and co-founder of Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture.
Frank Barkow
Material Practice: Sticks and Stones - Bowen Lecture
Frank Barkow was born in Kansas City, USA, in 1957. He received his master‘s degree in architecture from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, in 1990, and a bachelor‘s degree from Montana State Universtiy, Bozeman, USA, in 1982. Since 1993 he has been leading the architectural practice
Barkow Leibinger in Berlin together with Regine
Leibinger. Frank Barkow is a design and research leader
in the practice and committed academic.
He has been teaching continuously at Princeton University, School of Architecture, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, the Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art in London, EPFL École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, among others. After visiting professorships in 1990-1992 and 2003 at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in Ithaca, New York, USA, he was again appointed by the college as Gensler Visiting Critic in 2021. In spring 2023, he taught as a visiting professor at Montana State University, School of Architecture in Bozeman.
In 2018, he was a member of the International Jury of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Italy, directed by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara.
Michelle Delk
Livestream or Recording
Exploring Duality
Michelle Delk is a passionate advocate and designer of the public realm. Her work is evocative of a foundational premise shared with Snøhetta: to create places that enhance the positive relationships between people and their environments. Michelle encourages innovative approaches to collaboration that are non-hierarchical and trans-disciplinary. Both aspirational and pragmatic, she seeks to discover and expand the urban landscape vernacular; striving to express the subtleties of place through the incongruities of memory, environment, and social perceptions. She also enjoys and actively supports a variety of landscape advocacy organizations, curatorial projects, and academic institutions.
Pablo Moyano Fernandez
Livestream or Recording:
Opus Versatilium
Pablo Moyano Fernandez is an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis where he has been teaching since 2006. Pablo has extensive experience in the field of architecture, developing his career in firms with a strong connection to construction. His teaching and research focus on the performative qualities of concrete applied to building enclosure systems using innovative methods of fabrication coupled with the latest concrete technologies. His comprehensive research integrates several awarded research and teaching grants with built projects at multiple scales using concrete as a resilient and sustainable building material. Pablo served as the Faculty Project Design Leader for CRETE House, WashU’s proposal for the Solar Decathlon 2017, which was awarded second place in the Architecture Category contest. He is the coordinator of Building Systems, a foundational course that examines contemporary building practices in terms of materials, assemblies and methods of construction. Recently, the Army Corps of Engineers commissioned him to design and construct a bird blind using innovative concrete methods. Pablo holds a Professional Degree in Architecture from the University of Buenos Aires, a Master of Architecture, and a Master of Urban Design from Washington University in St. Louis.
Karin Tehve
Livestream or Recording
Taste, Bias & Artificial Intelligence
Karin Tehve is a Professor of Interior Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY, where she coordinates the theory and undergraduate thesis curriculum in Interior Design. She earned her Master of Architecture degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her own research and writing concentrates on taste, media and identity, and their intersection with the public realm.
Karin founded her practice KT3Dllc in 2001 pursuing projects in architecture, interiors, and site‐specific art. Conference presentation include IDEC, ACSA and Common Ground. She has published in the Journal of Design History, The Journal of Interior Design, The International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design, and Interiors Beyond Architecture. As a member of Interior Provocations, Karin is co-editor for and contributor to Interior Provocations: History, Theory and Practice of Autonomous Interiors, Appropriate(d) Interiors and the forthcoming Interiors on Edge.
Her book, Taste, Media and Interior Design, was published by Routledge in 2023.
Jennifer Yoos
Praxis and Practice
Jennifer Yoos became University of Minnesota’s Head of the School of Architecture in June of 2020. She is an architect and educator and has previously taught as the NADAAA Visiting Professor at Cooper Union, the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, the John G. Williams Distinguished Professor at the University of Arkansas, and as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota (1997-2015).
Jennifer is principal and president of VJAA. Based in Minneapolis, the firm is known for its innovative approach to architectural practice, environmental design, and highly crafted buildings. VJAA's practice is grounded in the study of how architecture is interwoven with its social, cultural, and material context. VJAA's work is research-based, experimental, and intentionally diverse, including a wide range of scales from urban design and infrastructure to architecture, adaptive reuse, installations, and furniture.
VJAA has received significant recognition, including twenty-two national design awards. The firm has been awarded six National American Institute of Architects Honor Awards, six Progressive Architecture Awards, and two American Institute of Architects/Committee on the Environment--Top Ten Green Building Awards. VJAA is the recipient of the 2012 National American Institute of Architects Firm Award. Jennifer has presented their work as a guest lecturer at numerous schools of architecture.
Jennifer's practice, research, and teaching are grounded in the study of how architecture is interwoven with its social, cultural, and material context. She has developed research and scholarship that explore ideas prevalent in her architectural practice through collaborative publications that include two books; Parallel Cities and a monograph on the work, VJAA, published by Princeton Architectural Press. This work focuses on four themes: Environment and Social Space (which includes sustainability), Digital fabrication and Systems Integration (which includes structures, mechanical systems, thermal properties and daylighting), Embodied Intelligence (as a form of historic preservation), and Urbanism (which is focused on contextualizing the collective social program for architecture). Jennifer is co-author, with partner Vincent James, of a monograph on their practice published by Princeton Architectural Press as well as their recent book Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis (2016). Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis, published in 2016, with co-author Vincent James, was preceded by an exhibition at MIT's Keller Gallery (2014) and was included in the exhibition, "Open City" at the International Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam (2009). International Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam (2009).