Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship: 20 years, 21 Banham Fellows (2000-2021)

A symposium

animated image of all the past Banham fellows headshots bouncing around

Saturday, March 6, 2021
1 pm - 5:30 pm

AIA continuing education credits pending (2 LU)

In celebrating Reyner Banham's 99th birthday and the 20th anniversary of Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo, “20 Years, 21 Banham Fellows” is a symposium organized around themes explored in Banham’s experimental criticism.

The symposium includes presentations and panel discussions by the School’s Banham Fellows – from 2000 to present – to both reflect and speculate on the fellowship as alternative forms of pedagogy and practice, through which design strategies, historical critiques, and disciplinary discourse are further problematized, enmeshed, and illuminated. Panel moderators are UB Department of Architecture former Chairs Kent Kleinman, Mehrdad Hadighi, and Omar Khan, with UB faculty Brian Carter, Dennis Maher, and Hadas Steiner. The event is organized and hosted by Zherui Wang (BF 2020-21), Mustafa Faruki (BF 2017-18), and Joyce Hwang.

Session 1: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies + Scenes in America Deserta

Presenters: 2016-17 Steven Chodoriwsky | 2013-14 Ludovico Centis | 2006-07 Sergio Lopez-Pineiro | 2019-20 Emily Kutil | 2008-09 Michael Kubo | 2011-12 Curt Gambertta | Panel Discussion joined by: 2002-03 Don Kunze

  • Steven Chodoriwsky (2016-17)
    2/26/21
    Steven Chodoriwsky is a designer, artist, writer, and educator. His research-centered practice engages with performance and interdisciplinary platforms, pedagogical models, and speculative acts of reading and writing for/with the built environment. His projects employ a diverse range of media including site-specific installations, workshops, bookworks, theatre pieces, and audio-visual artifacts.

    He is currently based in Salt Lake City, and is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Multi-Disciplinary Design program at the University of Utah. Prior to this, he taught at Cal Poly Pomona, Woodbury, Cornell, and at the University at Buffalo, where he held the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship for teaching and research. He was educated in architecture at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, as a recipient of the multi-year Monbukagakusho Government of Japan Scholarship. He has also held extended art/design research positions at the Jan van Eyck Academie, The Netherlands, and the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan.

    In collaboration with individuals, collectives, and institutions, he has presented and performed work at venues including, among others, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Centre Pompidou, Paris, de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, and the Suzuki Company of Toga International Theatre Festival, Japan. With curator Julie Niemi and graphic designer Chris Lee he is a member of Collective Question, a working group that studies power structures and forms of resistance through archival research, publication, and exhibition production.
  • Ludovico Centis (2013-14)
    2/26/21
    Ludovico Centis is an architect, founder of the architecture and planning office The Empire and co-founder and editor of the architecture magazine San Rocco. Centis has a PhD in urbanism (Università IUAV di Venezia). He has been a partner at the architectural office Salottobuono from 2007 to 2012. He has lectured at Università IUAV di Venezia (Venice), the Politecnico in Milan, Festarch (Cagliari), the Auditorium dell’Ara Pacis (Rome), the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism, the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Architectural Association School of Architecture (London), the Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre Horta (ULB, Brussels), the 21er Haus (Vienna), Cornell University (Ithaca,NY), Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar (Weimar), EPFL (Lausanne).
  • Sergio Lopez-Pineiro (2006-07)
    2/24/21
    Sergio Lopez-Pineiro is an interdisciplinary architect whose work explores voids as socio-spatial phenomena of freedom, diversity, and spontaneity. He is the director of Holes of Matter, a design studio whose mission is to imagine voids in patterns to redefine relations between individual and collective forms of life.
  • Emily Kutil (2019-20)
    2/26/21
    Emily Kutil is a Detroit-based architectural designer, researcher, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Technological University College of Architecture and Design.
  • Michael Kubo (2008-09)
    2/26/21
    Michael Kubo is Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator for Architectural History and Theory at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. He was previously the Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C and associate curator for OfficeUS, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. His recent publications on the history of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism include Imagining the Modern: Architecture and Urbanism of the Pittsburgh Renaissance (2019), Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (2015), and OfficeUS Atlas (2015). He holds a Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is currently preparing a book on The Architects Collaborative and the authorship of the architectural corporation after 1945, with particular attention to transnational exchanges between U.S. firms and architects and engineers in the Middle East. 
  • Curt Gambetta (2011-12)
    2/24/21
    Curt Gambetta is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Princeton University where he is writing his dissertation about the role of building materials in processes of self-making in postcolonial India. Prior to joining the PhD program at Princeton, he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning (2011-2012) and a teaching fellow at Woodbury University School of Architecture in Los Angeles (2012-2013).
  • Donald Kunze (2002-03)
    7/23/21
    For the past three years, Don Kunze has extended his interests in architecture theory, film, and topology to the study of psychoanalysis, participating in conferences and publications.

Moderated by Kent Kleinman and Dennis Maher

  • Kent Kleinman
    2/26/21
    Kent Kleinman was appointed provost of RISD in 2019. Prior to this, Kleinman was the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University as well as professor in the Department of Architecture from 2008–18. He has taught at institutions internationally including the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, and ETH Zürich, and was also a faculty member at the University at Michigan, chair of architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and dean at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
  • Dennis Maher
    4/2/24
    Clinical Assistant Professor - Department of Architecture
    dmmaher@buffalo.edu

Session 2: Megastructure + A Concrete Atlantis

Presenters 2018-19 Mustafa Faruki | 2009-10 Brian Tabolt | 2005-06 Jonathan Solomon | 2014-15 Jordan Carver | Panel Discussion joined by 2015-16 Ang Li | 2010-11 Kenny Cupers | 2001-02 Tsz Yan Ng

  • Mustafa Faruki (2018-19)
    2/24/21
    Mustafa is the founding partner of theLab-lab for architecture, a narrowly known purveyor of unbuilt work, unpublished volumes, and unsolicited pleasures. He is currently leading Sanatorium, a graduate studio option at the University at Buffalo. www.theLab-lab.com
  • Brain Tabolt (2009-10)
    2/24/21
    Brian Tabolt is a design practitioner and educator. He is a Senior Associate at Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), a design studio in New York City whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print. At DS+R, he has been the lead designer on a variety of cultural, institutional and landscape projects including the Tianjin Juilliard School, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, the Stanford McMurtry Art and Art History Building, the competition-winning scheme New Museum of Transport in Budapest, and Zaryadye Park in Moscow.
  • Jonathan Solomon (2005-06)
    2/24/21
    Jonathan Solomon is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a partner in Preservation Futures, a Chicago-based firm seeking equity in the built environment through research, action, and design.
  • Jordan H. Carver (2014-15)
    2/24/21
    Jordan H. Carver is a writer, educator, and designer based in New York. He is a co-author of America Recovered (Actar, 2019) and author of Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (UR, 2018). Jordan is the managing editor of Theory & Event, editor-at-large for the Avery Review, and a core member of Who Builds Your Architecture? He is currently a Henry M. MacCracken Doctoral Fellow in American Studies at New York University where he works on architecture, borders, and the construction of racial sovereignty.
  • Ang Li (2015-16)
    2/24/21
    Ang Li is an architect and Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. She is the founder of Ang Li Projects, a research-centered design practice that operates at the intersection between architecture, experimental preservation and public art to investigate the maintenance rituals and material afterlives behind architectural production.
  • Kenny R. Cupers (2010-11)
    3/1/21
    Kenny Cupers is a professor of architectural history and urban studies and head of the urban studies and social sciences departments at the Univesity of Basel. As a scholar and educator who works at the intersection of architectural history, urban studies, and critical geography, his work analyzes built spaces and systems in order to answer questions about power and historical change. His research focuses on the role of housing in urban and state transformation, the epistemology and geopolitics of modernism, and the power and aesthetics of infrastructure. Central to these interests is a focus on design—understood as a technique of governing and as a lens on human and material agency.
  • Tsz Yan Ng (2001-02)
    2/26/21
    Tsz Yan Ng's material-based research and design primarily focus on experimental concrete forming (hard) and textile manipulation (soft), often times in direct exchange with incorporation of contemporary technologies to develop novel designs for building and manufacturing. A common thread to her work investigates questions of labor in various facets and forms – underscoring broader issues of industrial manufacturing innovation, of human labor, crafting, and aesthetics. She’s the principal of an independent architecture and art practice with built works in the US and China. Her practice, collaborative in nature and interdisciplinary in scope, ranges in scale from textile manufacturing facilities to commercial retail interiors and installations. She received an Architect Magazine R+D Award for Robotic Needle Felting, an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative Grant to explore concrete 3D printing, and a New Researcher Award from ARCC (2020). She joined Taubman College, University of Michigan as the Walter B. Sanders Fellow (2007-2008) and is currently an Assistant Professor. She was also the Reyner Banham Fellow at the University of Buffalo from 2001-2002. Her co-edited book Twisted was released in 2018 and was co-editor for the JAE theme issue Work (2019). 

Moderated by Mehrdad Hadighi and Brian Carter

  • Mehrdad Hadighi
    2/26/21
    Mehrdad Hadighi is Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University and Stuckeman Chair of Integrative Design.  Mehrdad completed his post-professional graduate studies at Cornell University and holds a professional degree in architecture and a degree in studio art from the University of Maryland.  A licensed architect and founding principal of the Studio for Architecture, his premiated collaborative design competition entries include the Studentenheim + Bauernmarkt, Glockengasse, Public Space in the New American City, Atlanta, Berlin Alexanderplatz Design Competition, Austrian Cultural Institute in Manhattan, and the Peace Garden Design Competition.  Hadighi has been selected as one of “25 most intriguing, innovative and intrepid architects, from all over the world” by Wallpaper* magazine; and as one of “10 Young Firms Reshaping the Globe” by the Architectural Record magazine in their Design Vanguard issue. His work is the subject of a monograph by ACTAR and another by SHARESTAN. He is the author of Tschumi’s Architectural Manifestoes, and his work has been featured in the following books: Architecture Today; Concrete; Conversions; Small Structures, Green Architecture; Xs Green: Big Ideas, Small Buildings; Extensions and RenovationsUp, Down, Across: Domestic Extensions; House Plus, New House Design; and Architecture In Detail. His scholarly work focuses on drawing parallels between 20th century art, critical theory and the constructive principles of architecture.
  • Brian Carter
    7/12/23
    Professor - Department of Architecture
    bcarter@buffalo.edu - Hayes Hall 212 - 716-829-5886

Session 3: The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment

Presenters: 2017-18 Sarah Gunawan | 2012-13 Thomas Kelley | 2000-01 Hugo Dworzak | 2004-05 Hilary Sample | 2003-04 Grace Ong

  • Sarah Gunawan (2017-18)
    2/26/21
    Sarah Gunawan is an architectural designer, currently practicing at CO Adaptive in Brooklyn, NY. Her independent research and work entangles multi-species cohabitation, femist disability studies, misfitting human bodies, and posthuman theory, all in an effort to stay with the trouble. She was the Reyner Banham Fellow 2017-18 at the University at Buffalo where her teaching and research focused on disrupting normative design processes through the lens of human aging. She is an active member of Design As Protest, a coalition of designers mobilizing strategies to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression. Sarah Gunawan holds a bachelor’s degree and a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.
  • Thomas Kelly (2012-13)
    2/25/21
    Thomas Kelley was raised in Canberra, East Berlin, Warsaw, Tegucigalpa, Oxford, Lima, Washington D.C. and has worked in the architecture practices of Brasil Arquitetura Studio in São Paulo, Asymptote Architecture in New York, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in Chicago. Kelley is the recipient of the Reyner Banham Fellowship from SUNY Buffalo and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR ‘13). His teaching focuses on the role of representation in architecture as a technological, cultural, and historical instrument, and explores new possibilities for adaptive reuse in contemporary practice. His writing has been published by Log, the Avery Review, and the Architect’s Newspaper. Kelley has taught option studios at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Syracuse University’s School of Architecture. Kelley received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with Honors from the University of Virginia and a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University. 
  • Hugo Dworzak (2000-01)
    3/1/21
    Hugo Dworzak is an architect and teacher at the University of Liechtenstein. After finishing his architectural education at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 1989 he started his own practice in Dornbirn, Austria operating under the name Architekturwerkstatt – nomen est omen. Since 2000 Dworzak is lecturing at the University of Liechtenstein, having headed the school of achitecture from 2012 till 2016. He manages to keep mind and body together by combining teaching and practice, believing That’s one gains from other.his credo is to stay virginal – as much as possible.
  • Hilary Sample (2004-05)
    3/1/21
    Hilary Sample is the IDC Professor of Housing Design and Sequence Director of the Core Architecture Studios at GSAPP, and Co-Founder of the New York-based architecture and design studio MOS. Since its establishment in 2003, MOS has won major national and international awards and been recognized in significant publications. Monographs about the studio include an issue of El Croquis and Selected Works (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016).
  • Grace Ong Yan (2003-04)
    2/26/21
    Grace Ong Yan is an architectural historian and writer, educator, and designer whose scholarship explores alternate theories of modernism, intersections of media and the built environment, and interdisciplinary collaborations. She is currently Assistant Professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

Moderated by Omar Khan and Hadas Steiner

  • Omar Khan
    2/26/21
    Omar Khan is a professor and the head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Khan joined CMU from the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo (UB), where he served as department chair for seven years. During his tenure as chair, the department’s reputation grew in response to his pedagogical innovations, especially in design-build experiential learning and research-focused graduate education. His efforts also led to the largest increase of sponsored research at the department.
  • Hadas Steiner
    9/30/20
    Associate Professor - Department of Architecture
    hsteiner@buffalo.edu - Hayes Hall 215 - (716) 829-5888