Banham in Buffalo: 5 Years of the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo Department of Architecture - Paperback

by Peter Reyner Banham (Author)

Peter Reyner Banham, the renowned architectural historian and cultural critic, taught in the newly-founded architecture program at the State University of New York at Buffalo between 1976 and 1980. During his tenure at Buffalo, inspired by the daylight factories and the grain silos of the region, he conducted research that led to his seminal book, A CONCRETE ATLANTIS, illuminating the relationship between American industrial buildings and European Modern Architecture. The Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship program at Buffalo was established in 2000 to celebrate Banham's legacy at Buffalo, and, most importantly, to project new work that is inspired by Banham's foundational body of scholarship on material and visual culture. Each year, the Banham Fellow engages the students and the faculty of the department through research, creative activity, and teaching, and presents that body of work through an exhibition and a lecture.

Author Biography

Mehrdad Hadighi:
Prof. Hadighi completed his post-professional studies at Cornell U, and holds a professional degree in architecture and a degree in studio art from the U of Maryland. His scholarly work focuses on drawing parallels between 20th century theory and criticism and the constructive principles of architecture. Hadighi's premiated design competition entries include the Studentenheim + Bauernmarkt, Glockengasse (1995), Public Space in the New American City, Atlanta (1994), Berlin Alexanderplatz Design Competition (1993), Austrian Cultural Institute in Manhattan (1992), and the Peace Garden Design Competition (1989).
He has produced site specific installations for galleries in Washington, DC, Buffalo, Ithaca and NYC, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Council on the Creative and Performing Arts.
Brian Tabolt:
Brian Tabolt received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and holds a B.S. in Architecture with High Honors from the U of Virginia, where he was the recipient of the Z Society Edgar J Shannon Award for Design Excellence. Tabolt has worked in the offices of SHoP Architects and Agrest & Gandelsonas in New York among others. He has been an invited critic at Syracuse U, Parsons School of Design, the NJ Institute of Technology, and Barnard College in addition to teaching architectural design studio at the U at Buffalo. Tabolt has also been an assistant instructor at the U of Virginia and Princeton U.
Tabolt's research focuses on reestablishing instrumental links between architecture and the contemporary American city. Essential to this research is an investigation of the formless quality of the contemporary city, read as the product of a collision between avant-garde ambitions and mass-cultural desires. The megastructure - modernism's last gasp to organize and combat the dispersed condition its own urban schemes had helped create - will be brushed against the grain of its original intentions for rigid management to create architectural proposals more open to this formless context. Through this technique, the normally strategic ambition of the megastructure becomes a tactic for rethinking the relationship between architecture and the city, the individual and the collective, at a variety of scales.
Michael Kubo:
Michael Kubo studied at the U of Massachusetts, where he received his B.A. in Architecture magna cum laude in 2000, and at the Harvard U Graduate School of Design, where he received the M.Arch in 2006, completing his thesis with distinction. Kubo's research at Buffalo focuses on the history of publications by architects--manifestoes, monographs, pamphlets, magazines, articles, and interviews--that have constituted this parallel form of architectural practice in the 20th century.
Kubo's current work extends this research to the question of strategic practices in architecture and its related discursive practices. Primary in this undertaking is his study of the strategic Cold War architecture of the RAND Corporation, currently being developed for publication with the support of the Graham Foundation. The RAND headquarters was the epicenter of strategic military thought in the postwar period, designed according to a diagram drawn by a mathematician as a literal extension of the Corporation's interdisciplinary research model. The built result of a complex set of ideas on how to stimulate creative thinking in a group environment, the RAND HQ was itself one of the most important strategic products to emerge from the Cold War: a spatial experiment in human interaction and creative thinking conducted at the scale of a building for 300 people.
Kubo is an Adjunct Asst. Prof. of Architecture at Pratt Institute and a consulting editor at the Harvard U Graduate School of Design. He has taught studios and seminars at the UT at Austin, and at the Harvard U Graduate School of Design in collaboration with Farshid Moussavi. He worked previously with Actar Publishers in Barcelona as founding director of its editorial office in New York, and with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam as Associate Editor for the Harvard Project on the City. His publications include The Function of Ornament (2006), with Farshid Moussavi, Desert America: Territory of Paradox (2006), Seattle Public Library (2004), Phylogenesis: FOA's Ark (2003), The Yokohama Project (2002), and the Verb Boogazine series, published since 2002. He has also edited books by various authors including Sanford Kwinter's Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture, Kazys Varnelis's The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, and Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik's Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice. His work has been exhibited at the Van Alen Institute in NY, Galeria RAS in Barcelona, Studio X / Columbia U in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla.
Eva Franch-Gilabert:
Eva Franch Gilabert studied at TU Delft, at ETS Arquitectura Barcelona where she received her Diploma in Architecture with Honors in 2003 and at Princeton U where she received the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize and her M.Arch II degree in 2007. Franch's work draws on cultural, political, social, technological and formal archeologies in addressing the contemporary need for local desires and global understandings. Her research in architecture focuses on the search of representation of collective aspiration through conceptual, ideological and formal constructions of meaning through doubt. Her current research at Buffalo -- "Architecture of doubt" focuses in three operative fields: utopias (historic), metaphors (formal-cognoscitive) and atmospheres (experiential). "Utopia as doubt" is a research seminar that intends to identify and redefine the limits of utopia, histories, stories and projects of the twentieth century in order to construct possible pasts, and simultaneously possible futures. Parallel to the composite figure of utopia, "Generative metaphors" is a research on banality and the production and conceptualization of architecture that imply a turn from a rhetoric of representation to a hermeneutic of generation. Finally, "goose bumps" or the architecture of effect, is a research on the (im)Possibilities of discourse and representation of atmospheres in architectural practice. Franch's work has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture in NY, , Korean Institute of Architects in Daegu, FAD Barcelona, NAI Rotterdam, Shenzen Biennale of Architecture, SOA Princeton, COAR Rioja and ETSA Barcelona among others. Selected publications include "CityThemeCity" and "Content_A" in Pidgin, "Dementia" in Postboks, "Pause Pavillion" in Pasajes, "Generative metaphors" in Sources of architectural form, and "R.E.D. studies" in Imagined Spaces. She is a registered architect in Catalonia.
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Perez:
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro received his Diploma in Architecture from ETS Arquitectura Madrid in 1998 and his MArch degree from Princeton U in 2004, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. He has previously worked as an architect at Foreign Office Architects (London, 2000-02) and at no.mad (Madrid, 1998-2000). Currently, he maintains an independent practice, Holes of Matter.
Sergio's work is dedicated to the production of a psychological space for the global urban context. Located in-between the scales of architecture and urbanism, this space occupies the gap produced by the aging of our current concept of public domain. The design of this space requires the unification of several political, social, and urban actors, such as wireless networks, NGOs and new formal coherences.
Jonathan Solomon:
Jonathan D Solomon is an American architect based in Hong Kong; his work explores future forms of urbanism through multidisciplinary collaborations. Solomon is a founding editor of 306090 Books, a publication series featuring novel developments in architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism that published its 14th volume, Making a Case, in 2011. In 2010, he co-curated Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice, at the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2009, his design for Ooi Botos Gallery, an adaptive reuse project in a Hong Kong street market, won two AIA awards. He is the author of several essays on the contemporary Asian city in the journal Log, and his proposals for converting a Bronx highway into a public park were published as the 26th volume of the acclaimed Pamphlet Architecture series from Princeton Architectural Press. Solomon has taught design at the City College of NY and, as a Banham Fellow, at the U at Buffalo, as well as the U of Hong Kong. He is a licensed architect in the State of Illinois and Member of the American Institute of Architects."