2016 Abedian School of Architecture Lecture Series

Jimenez Lai is the director of Bureau Spectacular, based in Los Angeles where he is also an Assistant Professor in the school of architecture at UCLA. Before founding Bureau Spectacular, Lai worked for various international offices, including OMA, as well as living and working in a desert shelter at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and residing in a shipping container on the piers of Rotterdam at the enclave of Atelier Van Lieshout. In the past years, Lai began building structures at an architectural scale, including the Taiwan Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architectural Biennale for the exhibition which he curated, and a 52' tall object (pictured above) for the 2016 Coachella Valley Music Festival. Lai is widely exhibited and published around the world, including the MoMA-collected White Elephant. His first manifesto, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Draft II of this book has been archived at the New Museum as a part of the show Younger Than Jesus. Amongst his other efforts, Lai organized the 14-volume Treatise publication series. Jimenez Lai’s work has been recognized with various awards, including the New York Architectural League Prize for Young Architects (2012) and the Debut Award at the Lisbon Triennale 2013. Lai is a graduate of the John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and formerly an academic at University of Illinois.

Other Architects is a small Sydney practice with a broad and global outlook. Working at a range of scales and across residential, commercial and institutional projects, Other Architects seeks out ‘other’ approaches that challenge conventional wisdom, popular opinion and architectural trends. Founded as an offshoot of Other Architects in 2013, Otherothers is a design organisation that engages in research, communication, competitions, curation, events, exhibitions and installations, operating beyond the scope of conventional architectural practice. Others founder Grace Mortlock is an architect and curator. Her work explores strategies of spectacle and spatial transformation, and she teaches in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). David Neustein is codirector of Other Architects, Associate of the UTS School of Architecture and The Monthly’s resident architectural critic. He is a recipient of the Adrian Ashton award for Architectural Journalism and the UTS Open Agenda prize. Mortlock and Neustein have participated in the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, exhibited at the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and are due to take part in New Cities, Future Ruins , a four year curatorial project launching November 2016 in Dallas, Texas. Widely published, their project Offset House has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CityLab, Architectural Record and Australian Financial Review. Runnerup and Highly Commended for the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2016 Architecture Commission, the pair are both cocurators (with Fleur Watson) and exhibition designers for Occupied , an exhibition of architectural propositions for the near future, which opens 29 July at Melbourne’s RMIT Design Hub Gallery.

The architecture of WOHA, founded by Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell in 1994, is notable for its constant evolution and innovation. A profound awareness of local context and tradition is intertwined with an ongoing exploration of contemporary architectural form-making and ideas, thus creating a unique fusion of practicality and invention. WOHA has won an unprecedented amount of architectural awards for a Southeast Asian practice, such as the 2011 RIBA Lubetkin Prize, 2010 International Highrise Award and the 2007 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The practice currently has projects under construction in Singapore, India, China, Australia and Indonesia. A travelling exhibition devoted exclusively to their work opened at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Germany, in December 2011, and three substantial monographs – WOHA: The Architecture of WOHA and WOHA: Selected Projects Vol. 1 and 2 – have already been published.

Distinct dialogues between ground and water

Landscape, by its very nature, is process driven and in a constant state of becoming

What is it about the open space on the Gold Coast that makes it unique?

Valuing empty space and other observations from a practice of landscape and art

Ritualised landscape as an origin for architecture and the city