This event, part of the Academic Alliance between CCA & Autodesk Technology Center, brings together designers, researchers, and industry professionals to investigate the potential of biomaterials to reduce embodied carbon in building components.

As part of the Fall 2022 ‘Materialities of Care’ studio led by Adam Marcus, Cade Hayes and Jesús Robles of the award-winning Tucson architectural practice of DUST will give a guest lecture on their innovative work with rammed earth construction.

As part of the Fall 2022 ‘Ecological Tectonics’ seminar led by Adam Marcus, Jonathan A. Scelsa of op.AL and Pratt Institute will give a guest lecture on his innovative work with 3d printed ceramics.

As part of the Fall 2022 ‘Ecological Tectonics’ seminar led by Adam Marcus, Alexander (Sandy) Curth of the Design and Computation Group at MIT’s Department of Architecture will give a guest lecture on his innovative work with 3d printed natural materials.

As part of the Fall 2022 ‘Materialities of Care’ studio led by Adam Marcus, Lola Ben-Alon of Columbia GSAPP’s Natural Materials Lab will give a guest lecture on her innovative research into earthen construction techniques.

Please join us on Thursday, April 14, for a talk by multidisciplinary artist and author Jenny Odell, keynote for the 2022 Ecopoesis gathering. The Ecopoesis Project is a multi-year sequence of collaborative think-tanks exploring front-line concerns around ecology, climate, and spatial expression. As our everyday lives are increasingly suffused by the impacts of climate change and climate chaos, The Ecopoesis Project explores the language, syntax, diction, form, media, and representations of ecological uncertainty. Odell will deliver a public keynote talk reflecting on these themes as well as the outputs of the 2022 Ecopoesis workshop, an interdisciplinary gathering taking place the weekend before.

As part of the Spring 2022 ‘Ecological Tectonics’ seminar led by Adam Marcus and Alex Schofield, Edouard Cabay of IAAC Barcelona will give a guest lecture on his innovative work with 3d-printed earthen structures.

As part of the Spring 2022 ‘Ecological Tectonics’ seminar led by Adam Marcus and Alex Schofield, Joshua Stein will give a talk on his research designing and fabricating modular systems of architectural ceramics. Stein is founder of Radical Craft and Professor and Interim Chair of Sustainable Practices at Woodbury University.

As part of the Spring 2022 ‘Ecological Tectonics’ seminar led by Adam Marcus and Alex Schofield, Shelby Doyle of Iowa State University will give a guest lecture on her innovative research with 3d-printed ceramics. Doyle is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Stan G. Thurston Professor of Design Build at the Iowa State University College of Design, co-founder of the ISU Computation & Construction Lab (CCL), and director of the ISU Architectural Robotics Lab (ARL).

As part of the Spring 2022 ‘Ecological Tectonics’ seminar led by Adam Marcus and Alex Schofield, Nathan Lynch, chair of Ceramics and Glass at CCA, will give a guest lecture on his work designing and fabricating ceramic habitat modules for seabirds.

As part of the Fall 2021 ‘Materialities of Care’ studio led by Adam Marcus, Ariane Lourie Harrison of Harrison Atelier will give a guest lecture on her work designing for multi-species clients, including the recent Pollinators Pavilion in New York’s Hudson Valley.

As part of the Fall 2021 ‘Materialities of Care’ studio led by Adam Marcus, Gena Wirth of SCAPE Landscape Architecture will give a guest lecture on her work designing for multi-species clients, including the Living Breakwaters project for Staten Island in New York.

As part of the Fall 2021 ‘Materialities of Care’ studio led by Adam Marcus, Joyce Hwang of Ants of the Prairie will give a guest lecture on her work designing for multi-species clients, including the recent project To Middle Species, With Love in Columbus, Indiana.

Please join us on Saturday, April 25, for a keynote talk by Prof. Joanna Zylinska, concluding the 2020 gathering of The Ecopoesis Project, a multi-year sequence of collaborative think-tanks exploring front-line concerns around ecology, climate, and spatial expression.

Join AEL Professors Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones, and Leslie Carol Roberts with Dr. John Oliver from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories for a lecture at Maldives National University on the work of the Architectural Ecologies Lab. During their research trip to the Maldives, the team will present the Buoyant Ecologies and Ecopoesis research projects.

CCA B.Arch alumnus Leif Estrada will present his research that spans fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and technology. Estrada will present his project “Towards Sentience: Attuning the Los Angeles River’s Fluvial Morphology,” thesis research completed at Harvard Graduate School of Design. The project leverages advanced workflows of computation, ecological simulation, and real-time sensing in the design of a robotic machine that continually attunes the L.A. River.

Please join us on Monday, April 8, for a keynote talk by Prof. Timothy Morton, to mark the launch of The Ecopoesis Project, a multi-year sequence of collaborative think-tanks exploring front-line concerns around ecology, climate, and spatial expression. As our everyday lives are increasingly suffused by the impacts of climate change and climate chaos, The Ecopoesis Project will explore the language, syntax, diction, form, media, and representations of ecological uncertainty.

Seth Denizen, Alexander Arroyo, and Eliza McCullough of Scapegoat will present the newly launched Scapegoat 11: LIFE, which revisits the old western metaphysical distinction between life and non-life—the living and the non-living—that lies within the new rationalist core of architectural modernity. This distinction has increasingly become a site of political struggle in the built environment, linking struggles over reproductive rights, environmental justice, climate change, archaeology, and urban design.

The LIFE issue documents evidence of architecture’s ongoing metaphysical work in the use of architectural building codes as a tool to limit women’s reproductive choices in Texas, the US military’s conversion of the Aleutian archipelago into its own private radiation sensor, the management of racialized ghosts in Indonesian squatter settlements, the rise of neo-vitalist urbansim in Europe, and the introduction of the logic of automation into burial practices in Tokyo.

Mark Thompson is a Professor of Fine Arts at CCA and an interdisciplinary installation artist whose experiential, sculptural environments and performances explore the relationships between natural processes and human activities over time using the resources directly related to a particular site. Often these include such natural elements as honeybees, beeswax, water and sunlight, as well as the social, historical, physical, and spatial resources of the human communities. His focus is on these borderlands between human cultural activity and the natural world with an emphasis on a return to first principles of direct experience. His creative effort is giving clearer definition to this poetic space, to this threshold between these two worlds, between the wild and the domestic.

The footprint of our existence has had a catastrophic impact on ecosystems across the the world. In particular, coral reefs are being decimated by human-induced conditions quicker than they can recover and grow. In this lunchtime talk, CCA faculty member Alex Schofield will discuss his collaboration with the Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center in material research and application of 3D printed coral. Together their goal is to give polyps, the living organism of coral, a leg up by fabricating and reseeding the skeletal structure with a synthetic coral scaffold in hopes of supporting the marine ecosystem.

Lesley Green is the founding director of Environmental Humanities South and an associate professor of Anthropology in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her work focuses on the intersection of science studies, anthropology and philosophy in the anthropocene, and her current research work spans fisheries, energy policy, and ecological modeling. Her talk, Ocean Regime Shift, will discuss the complex nexus of ecological and political issues surrounding Cape Town's water and sanitation infrastructure.