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M00CH or MOOCH— A non-profit citywide lecture series on art, design, architecture and everything in between. Based in Chicago, M00CH was concepted in late 2008 and encompasses many other educational talks and happenings, including: SAIC's Midday Musings; UIC's Wednesday|Episodes and Gallery 1100 A+A lecture series; IIT A+D conferences. M00CH also serves as a meta-analyst, content provider and mapping stentorian of past and future events. Its goal is to inform and share with the public Chicago's intellectual wealth and capital, shrinking the spaces between the artists and architects of our great city.

NEWS!!!
This is it! Tonight is the final review and critique of the M00CH poster series at Art Institute. Event starts at 6PM, 36 S. Wabash Suite 1240. Wish us luck.

Forwards
May 30th, 2009: Fuller Gallery Talk: Success and Failure with Michael Rakowitz and Elizabeth Tunstall Saturday, 11 am @ MCA Meet in the fourth floor lobby Related exhibit: Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe In this series, artists, filmmakers, designers, architects, ecologists, anthropologists, and educators consider Buckminster Fuller's legendary work and enduring influence in thematic explorations of the exhibition.

Artist Michael Rakowitz and design anthropologist Elizabeth Tunstall discuss Fuller's successes and failures.

Michael Rakowitz is an artist who founded paraSite, an ongoing project to custom-build inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building's heating, ventilation, or air conditioning system. His work has been exhibited at major exhibitions worldwide, and his recent public project, Return, was presented by Creative Time in New York. He received a 2008 Creative Capital Grant for a collaboration with Emna Zghal and is also a contributing editor for Surface Tension: A Journal on Spatial Arts.

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, strategic planner, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a leader in bringing together the fields of anthropology and design, as she uses her background to help clients make better decisions by grounding their business and design assumptions in people's actual attitudes, behaviors, and actions. Her clients have included: US Army and Army Reserves, Sears, General Motors, and Nokia. Tunstall is associate director of the City Design Center and is active with Design for Democracy, a non-profit that increases civic participation using interdisciplinary design and research teams.

May 7th, 2009: Dubai and the World’s Tallest Building: the Burj Dubai 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. - John Buck Lecture Hall, Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan Sponsor: Chicago Architecture Foundation $15.00, $10.00 CAF members/students AIA/CES 1.5

Lecture by George J. Efstathiou, FAIA, Partner, and William F. Baker, S.E, C.E., P.E., FASCE, FIStructE, Structural and Civil Engineering Partner, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

Dubai has been the superlative of the decade: the biggest boom town with the biggest projects. Burj Dubai is the ultimate— a super tall building that defines the spirit of the George J. Efstathious and William F. Baker of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill discuss the Burj Dubai at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, May 7, 2009culture, commerce, and people of Dubai. This project represents not only state-of-the-art tall building design, but also the successful collaboration between architecture and engineering with its pioneering "buttressed core" system and sophisticated aerodynamics. Once completed, it will be the tallest man-made structure ever created.

Efstathiou and Baker will address the unprecedented growth of Dubai over the past decade and explain how the global economic downturn has affected this booming city. They will highlight the innovative systems and technologies that made the Burj Dubai possible and discuss the project’s current construction status as it nears completion during an economically uncertain time.

Purchase ticket on-line. Information: 312/922.3432 x 224 or on-line

May 7th, 2009: Archeworks Student Final Presentation and Review

Backwards
April 28th, 2009: Douglas Farr @ AIC Fullerton Auditorium April 22nd, 2009: Winny Maas of MVRDV @ UIC Architecture Department, Gallery 1100 April 20th, 2009: Michael Speaks @ UIC Architecture Department, Gallery 1100 "I just got back from a very compelling talk by Michael Speaks, Dean of Arch. & Design at the University of Kentucky, who made a very strong case for design thinking. This is not a new notion but his argument for its expedited presence in contemporary architecture circles made me draw a lot of parallels to our agency and the pressure for each of us to prove our worth and value as marketers in today's increasingly complex, demanding and fragmented world.

Michael's cautionary tale involves clients asking themselves why architects are needed. After all, they give the firm a problem (e.g. I need blue stairs) only to have it re-packaged and solved (blue stairs). It's problem solving for the known and does not seem to strike at the heart of the matter: why the need for stairs in the first place? It's design for a very specific situation in a very myopic scope. He emphasizes that the role of architects are increasingly threatened by engineers because of an inherent discipline engineers practice and subsequently master: rapid prototyping. In layman's terms, it's scenario planning through rapid brainstorms and iterative/repeat model making which allows the creator to to explore and re-explore the problem by re-framing it and designing against it over and over and over again. What ensues is not one "solution" but many. And herein, a sharper framework evolves that can be added to the engineer's toolbox and design knowledge. More critically, instead of solving for what he knows, this process has helped him discover that which he didn't know (unknown unknowns).

One of the questions he posed: Do we speculate enough? Or are we merely content to be trapped by the problem at hand? Because if we take the latter, our jobs will soon be extinct.

This reminded me of an article written by another Michael, Michael Fassnacht, a while back called Managing Uncertainty-- that "rather than attempting to predict the future with total accuracy, it is more important to build structures, tools and methodologies to deal successfully with uncertainty."

Like the engineer, as we continue to plan for these different scenarios, our inherent toolkit, planning intelligence and flexibility expands and multiplies.

Keep in mind that intelligence = the ability to store, remember and make a prediction.

This goes back to our CB handbook of reframing the problem. You are asked to design a new streetlamp. But before you pick up your pencil, reframe the problem and ask yourself: how can I design something that provides safety through light. By asking ourselves this, we can break through the shackle of having to design something in traditional streetlamp form but rather innovate towards something wholly different and perhaps even revolutionary." -TLin, 4/2009 April 16th, 2009: Ben Nicholson @ SAIC's Midday Musings April 15th, 2009: Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby @ SAIC

Click here for Bruce Tharp's interview with Dunne+Raby

April 2nd, 2009: Bauhaus to Green Haus lecture series @ AIC Morton Auditorium The Bauhaus to Green Haus lecture series brings to Chicago European architects/designers who draw on the Bauhaus tradition and address today's sustainability challenges. The first speaker in the series is Arturo Vittori, the co-founder of Architecture and Vision with Swiss architect, Andreas Vogler. Architecture and Vision specializes in aerospace technologies applied to architecture and design, and looks to understand and respect the principles of nature while recognizing architecture not as a formal trend, but as an answer to the needs of the society today and through the years to come. - Aimee L. Marshall, The Art Institute of Chicago, 3/31/2009

February 2nd, 2009: Reiser+Umemoto talk @ AIC Fullerton Hall They penned Atlas of Novel Tectonics. Click here for some wonderful selects from their book. Here's a video from Jesse Reiser's talk at HKU for a taste of their brilliance. Actually, the talk was with both Nanako Umemoto and Jesse Reiser. It was sublime. They walked us through their progress in Dubai. Our in class post-mortem centered around artist personality and interaction, teaching styles, and how that reflects in the artist's work. - TLin, 5/3/2009

Kyoto-born, New York-based architect Nanako Umemoto of award-winning firm Reiser & Umemoto has made her mark around the globe with projects that include the 0-14 office tower in Dubai — an architectural feat that boasts an innovative "hole-punched" façade — and one of six commissioned proposals for the World Trade Center. Through these and other endeavors in furniture, sculpture, landscaping, and set design, her firm's proposals have helped rethink the urban landscape. Tonight, she expounds on topics like the group's extensive use of computer-aided design to "free" structure from geometric constraints. - AAM, Chicago Flavorpill

Collaborators & Corroborators
Many architects, artists, educators and academic institutions have contributed to M00CH since its inception:


 * School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their Midday Musing events
 * Illinois Institute of Technology
 * Graham Foundation
 * Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
 * The Renaissance Society
 * Lynn Becker
 * Chicago Architecture Foundation
 * AIC
 * Extension Gallery
 * Merchandise Mart
 * Smart Museum
 * IIT Institute of Design
 * Archeworks

About this project
This project began as a non-traditional mapping and information exercise for Ben Nicholson's Spring architecture class: Issues in Contemporary Architecture & Design. It is an experimental poster project taking place in 2 parts: The first installment is a curated projection, or display, of all upcoming lectures and events around town. The second part of the final is intended to capture previous events that have taken place, a la Benjamin Button. Assignment notes:

I have received several emails asking whether it was okay to only touch upon the lectures you have attended when drafting your "benjamin button" poster (which, to repeat, is a different artifact than your M00CH poster which will also be due next Thursday).

Your M00CH "Ben Button" poster should, in a sense, be a narrative--a personalized mapping. Maps attempt to make themselves appear as neutral and egalitarian as possible--legible as THE experience of space to its readers--but, as we know, no map is a neutral object. Yours should adamantly and flamboyantly be personalized.

By all means, focus on the lectures that interested you on the M00CH poster; however, I would encourage you, again, to consider the relevance of those lectures that you never attended. Just because you did not attend a lecture does not mean that you didn't attend to it by engaging in our postmortem discourses in class when we gathered, recollected, and connected the lectures that, at least collectively, we had attended. If you can weave in references, recollections, oblique connections, ancillary and overlapping texts that were brought up in relation to the lectures that interested you, but drew from the lectures you missed, than not only did you actually attend TO the lectures you were absent from--inadvertently, indirectly, ventriloquist-like--but they were also part of the lectures you attended.

This is very much a point of this class: capturing the invisible rhizome that connects "contemporary issues" in architecture by the very fact that they are contemporary within a given space (Chicago:UIC, IIT, AIC, SAIC, MCA etc) and a given time (Spring semester 2009). String them together (they already are), represent them as your journey, and when tacked to a wall, side by side with your classmate's mappings, we will get the richer, oral history account of architectural history that is more compelling and accurate than any you would get from Penguin press." - TRhodes, T.A., 4/28/2009

"It looks like we should have a very good review for the last class, Lynn Becker has confirmed and Studio Blue, Graham Foundation and ad agency Draftfcb will send critics. It should be a very high level of discussion. The two pieces of work to be reviewed will be the April M00CH Lecture series poster/twitter/google/wikipedia/event delivery system to get the word out about what's going on in design and architecture. The second work to review will be the Benjamin Button poster/etc, which traces all the lectures/events/ classes/themes/associations of the semester into one glorious everythigndiagram." - Professor Ben Nicholson, 4/27/2009

"This is not a project in designing "another" poster to go next to the other pretty posters plastering architecture school hallways. You are tasked with capturing the character of MOOCH and of the speakers who will be talking. Last session we conjectured about 1. a "preview" concept for midday musings; 2. A distributable poster 3. an engaging object (wallet-size; water bottle label...etc). The point is: how can your "poster" get others to do exactly what you have done this semester--to go out an MOOCH off Chicago's lecture-circuit."  - TRhodes, T.A., 4/14/2009

"I have added the most readily harvestable lecture information onto a public google calendar. Please go to:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=taylor.lowe%40gmail.com&ctz=America/Chicago

If you can think of other sites, mine them! Also, when designing the poster, weigh legibility and navigability with a 2D form that best expresses what you have come to consider to be the nature or form/formlessness of contemporary architecture discourse. Bear in mind your past readings, past lectures, who says who is who and who isn't, etc. Use--if you would like--what you can make of the "Thousand Plateaus" and "Lethal Theory" as a primer on how to conceive of non-linear, "rhizomatic" time, and then try an attempt a corresponding visual representation of the upcoming architecture lectures given your meandering experience of architecture discourse over the past 1 1/2 months. For examples look at situationist maps:

- TRhodes, T.A., 3/30/2009

Meta Readings
[This is] a reading that corresponds with the form of mapping... the Mooch Poster. This piece has proven to be one of the most oft-cited texts of the Parametric age for its conception of epistemological systems as being "rhizomatic." -TLowe, 3/2009
 * A Thousand Plateaus
 * Lethal Theory