On Saturday, June 1, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design and cityLAB, an urban think tank at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, will present the symposium OP CITY: Figuring the Urban Future and its Audiences.

Date: Saturday, June 1
Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Location: 230 College Street, Room 066

Click here to view the schedule!

As the world’s population increasingly shifts into metropolitan regions, so too does the need to better conceptualize, represent, and communicate our ideas about urban life. This coincides with a growing number of increasingly sophisticated technologies and media that can help us better achieve these goals.

Through the presentation and discussion of four collaborative proposals by teams of architects and media artists, OP CITY will explore how our urban future may be extrapolated or “produced” by observing the city in new ways afforded by these technologies — from mapping and diagrams to graphic narrative, gaming/motion graphics and digitally-manipulated photography. The aim is to break down disciplinary divides and develop new methodologies and alliances with often-overlooked audiences.

OP CITY will bring together groups of architects, designers, and media artists to present case-study experiments that employ new, popularly accessible analytical and visualization techniques in ways that enable designers, and others, to see the city in different ways. Both the featured projects and resulting discussion will initiate the creation of a cityLAB-curated website/web blog that will serve as an archive intended to call attention to and stimulate other current, ongoing such experiments.

Participants include: Eve Blau, Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Richard Sommer, Dean of the Daniels Faculty at Univ. Toronto; Roger Sherman, Architect/Urban Designer and Co-Director, cityLAB/UCLA; and Dana Cuff, Professor of Architecture at UCLA and Director of cityLAB. The international group of design teams are: McLain Clutter/Matt Kenyon; Jonathan Crisman/Steven Beckly; Michael Piper/Matthew Allen/Ultan Byrne (with Azadeh Zaferani, Sasha Bears and Mahan Javadi); and Christopher Marcinkoski/Andrew Moddrell/ Nicholas Pevzner.

This day-long symposium is free and open to the public.

The Daniels Faculty and cityLAB would like to thank the Graham Foundation for its support of OP CITY: Figuring the Urban Future and its Audiences.