Wednesday, January 14 
Levent Ozruh
Beginning at the End

POSTPONED
Wednesday, January 28 
Cecilia Puga / Paula Velasco Arquitectura
Some character in search for an author
Mosaic Associates Architects Lecture

Wednesday, February 4
Florian Idenburg / Solid Objectives (SO–IL)
Once Again, but This Time with More Feeling
Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture
Lecture Begins at 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday, February 11
Sou Fujimoto
Between Nature and Architecture
Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture

Wednesday, March 11
Javier Senosiain
Organic Architecture

Note:

All lectures will start at 5 pm est. Design studios will end early to allow students and faculty to arrive on time.

Søren Pihlmann / pihlmann architects
Adding Less, Changing More – When Form Features Constraint
Wednesday, September 10

pihlmann architects was founded by Søren Thirup Pihlmann in 2021. Their portfolio ranges from temporary pavilions, over single-family houses to transformations in cultural environments worthy of preservation and cultural institutions.

To pihlmann, architecture is defined by the two outermost positions of the architectural scale – context and component – and the space in between is created as a result of these. philmann is involved throughout all phases of a projects: Conducting research and experiments with one hand while constructing with the other.

pihlmann projects are characterized by the idea of highlighting the material itself as the protagonist of architecture. By exploring the immanent processes and potentials of materials, they believe that robust and simple architecture comes to life. An architecture which inherits both character and atmosphere from the function and origin of the applied materials.

https://pihlmann.dk/

Sharon Johnston / Johnston Marklee
Architecture & the City: Extremes & In-Betweens
Wednesday, September 24
Frank Pitts ’75 Lecture

Sharon Johnston, FAIA, and Mark Lee are the founding partners of the architecture firm Johnston Marklee. Since its establishment in 1998 in Los Angeles, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 50 major awards and numerous publications.

Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning fourteen countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Recent projects include the Menil Drawing Institute, on the campus of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, which opened November 2018; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which opened in September 2017; the new UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; and the design of the new Dropbox global headquarters in San Francisco.

Johnston and Lee served as Artistic Directors for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2016 the duo was named USA Oliver Fellows for Architecture & Design by the United States Artists. A book on the work of the firm, entitled House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. This followed a monograph on the firm’s work, published in 2014 by 2G.

In 2018 Johnston and Lee were named Professors in Practice at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Mark Lee was appointed Chair of the Architecture Department. They have also taught at major universities including Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, and ETH Zurich and have held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry Chair at the University of Toronto.

Johnston Marklee’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich.

https://www.johnstonmarklee.com/

Canceled: J. Alfonso Quiñones / BAAQ
Due to unforeseen circumstances, Alfonso Quiñones / BAAQ’ will be unable to present his lecture scheduled for Monday, September 29 at EMPAC. We look forward to welcoming him at a future date.

20 years under the sun
Monday, September 29
Steven Ehrlich ’69 Lecture

BAAQ’ is an architectural firm founded by Alfonso Quiñones, based in Mexico City with a branch in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca. The office operates very much like a studio, because a studio is where things are made, where you imagine something and produce it.

As part of our resume, BAAQ’ was the local associate architect for Casa Wabi, the most recent project in Mexico by master architect Tadao Ando (1995 Pritzker Prize winner). We are currently working alongside the first project in our country by both Alvaro Siza (1992 Pritzker Prize winner) and Kengo Kuma.
Our projects have been recognized in various publications, and in 2012 we received an award at the 12th Mexican Architecture Biennial for our project “Casa del Río.”

http://www.baaq.net/

Barry Wark
The Architecture of Ecology
Monday, October 27

Born in Scotland, Barry Wark is an architect and designer who combines his New York-based design studio with research and teaching activities at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. The origin of his practice is deeply rooted in his hometown of Glasgow, where the climate and gritty qualities of the city nurtured his sensibility for eco-centric architecture. Barry’s work has been published internationally in both physical and digital media, most recently being the cover of frame magazine, a leading international publication focused on architecture, interiors, and product design. Barry has given lectures and workshops about his research to architects and other design disciplines such as film studios and game developers. His work has been exhibited internationally, most notably at the Dubai Museum of the Future (‘Nadarra’, 2023) and the Venice Biennale (‘Printed Parts’, 2022).

https://www.barrywark.com/

Michael Hansmeyer
Tools of Imagination
Wednesday, October 29

Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who explores the use of algorithms to generate and fabricate architectural form.

His recent projects include two full-scale 3D-printed sandstone grottos, the production of an intricate Muqarna for Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the installation of a hall of columns at Grand Palais in Paris, and the design of the 3D-printed Tor Alva aka White Tower in the Swiss Alps. His work has been exhibited at museums and venues such as the Museum of Arts and Design New York, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Design Miami / Basel, and the Gwangju Design Biennale. His designs are featured in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre and Centre Pompidou.

Michael has taught architecture as a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Southeast University in Nanjing, and as a lecturer at the CAAD group of ETH Zurich. He previously worked for Herzog & de Meuron architects, as well as in the financial and consulting industries. Michael holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University.

https://michael-hansmeyer.com/

As part of the lively experimental music and performance downtown scene of the 80’s, Ericka Beckman has made acclaimed works across Super-8mm, 16mm, and expanded cinema formats since the 1980’s. Engaging live-action choreographed sequences, as well as handcrafted layered animation, and face paced soundtrack, Beckman transforms the cultural norms communicated through common-place material such as fairytales and games.

Beckman is highly revered by contemporaneous peers and collaborators. She has influenced the generations that follow her in numerous ways, especially in  relationship to what she describes as “the performance of the image”.

This screening and discussion will draw on Beckman’s longstanding exploration of how physical action, and our memory of it, constructs cultural images and influences both our behavior and perception of reality.

How does liberation feel in the body? How do structures of violence shape the spaces around our bodies and around our planet?

In this premiere of a new, multisensory performance-talk in development, cultural practice architect Mario Gooden delivers a rapid-fire oration drawn from an expansive bibliography of Black authors and references to outer space. Three-channel projections of archival images and film clips intersect with new footage shot by writer-filmmaker Thuto Durkac-Somo. These visual frictions are synthesized in the movements of choreographer-writer Jonathan González, performed both live and onscreen. By collaging spoken text, embodied movement, and moving image, these artists open a portal for imagining how the spatial practices of Black liberation unfold on bodily, architectural, and cosmological scales.

In A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1998), theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking defines a black hole as a region of space from which escape is impossible: “It is a bit like running way from the police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get clear away!” Amidst the present planetary reckoning with  systemic oppression, Black Holes Ain’t So Black begins with this charged image, where cosmological space slips into social choreography. From there, the performance-talk moves through a cascade of juxtaposed images, gestures, and quotations, creating a barrage of sensory and conceptual connections. Following the presentation, the artists will join the audience in conversation, moderated by curator Tara Aisha Willis.

How does dance take up space in the world? Why pay attention to the histories of the places where people gather to create and watch choreography? What happens when those places are contested?

This dialogue between Arabella Stanger and María Firmino begins with a simple premise: dancefloor histories matter. Bringing their respective research into conversation, together they explore the often ambivalent relationships between concert dance and other forms of performance, land use, and histories of social struggle. Stanger and Firmino each approach choreography as a process both embodied and geographic, unearthing its relationship to territorial seizure, racialized displacement, and acts of defiance to such conditions. Both celebrating and complicating dance’s promise to release bodies into space, their conversation suggests that acts of hope might arrive through observing the power dynamics of performances—embedded in their material contexts—from Stanger’s analysis of the “violent ground” beneath Merce Cunningham’s utopic experiments at Black Mountain College, to Firmino’s engagement with “telluric” performance in the context of Mexican and Guatemalan necropolitics, and even to this festival at EMPAC.

Often combining analog video and experimental film transfers with sculptural elements and ambient radio sound, Na Mira’s work is attuned to the signals that arrive from the past into the present, and from the spiritual into the technological. What if what seems to have departed hasn’t fully disappeared? What if it remains still latent, waiting to be picked up like a radio frequency?

In her talk, Mira reflects on her work and artistic research through the lens of the theater lobby—a space that traditionally marks the passage from the everyday into the fictive. She considers how an artistic medium becomes a site that either absorbs or negates the foreign material she introduces—as if summoning energies from afar.

For staging grounds, Mira’s Autoasphyxiation is on view in EMPAC’s theater lobby.

With shots tracking the Dragon Hill military garrison in Seoul, Autoasphyxiation fixates on the border surrounding this zone, which has been controlled by various state forces since its construction by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1906. Mira stages this landscape as a live transmission, where this boundary wavers between presence and disappearance, signal and silence.

This interactive experience explores how engaged social practice can serve as a methodology for collective research and restorative community building. Through facilitated invitation, inspired by the work of Pauline Oliveros (musician, humanitarian, and founder of Deep Listening), participants explore presence and play, cultivating capacity for orientation to what is emerging in this moment. This work positions the body as our wise collaborator, a friend that we welcome, as is, into our practice.

Jane Rigler is a musician whose lifelong performative practice has transformed into an invitational social practice that promotes play, connection, and imagination as embodied research. With foundations in flute performance from Northwestern University (B.M.) and experimental music from UCSD (M.M., Ph.D.), Jane’s international career spans performance, composition, education, and facilitation. As an international performer and composer, her works explore movement, languages, and ancestral songs, and are featured worldwide at electronic music festivals and on various labels. Jane’s artistic journey includes prestigious residencies (Civitella Ranieri, Montalvo, Ucross) and international research, from studying Noh theatre during her US-Japan Friendship Fellowship to exploring Irish (Gaeilge) traditions on a Fulbright Award. As a (former) Associate Professor at the University of Colorado (2010-2024), she taught flute, composition, computer music, sound art, and co-taught interdisciplinary humanities studies courses that embedded listening practices as ecological consciousness and collaborative creations.

The Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has named the founders of Ecovative Design the 2025 recipients of the William F. Glaser ’53 Entrepreneur of the Year award. The honorees, Eben Bayer ’07 and Gavin McIntyre ’07, will be recognized for pioneering the use of biodegradable mycelium-based materials in construction, fashion, consumer packaging, food and more.

Established in 1990, the Entrepreneur of the Year award honors Rensselaer graduates who have achieved success as entrepreneurs and now serve as role models for current students and aspiring entrepreneurs. The annual honorees bring the world of entrepreneurship into the classroom by sharing their career experiences with students. 

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place on Nov. 6 at 1 PM in the EMPAC theater on RPI’s campus. In addition to the awards ceremony and a fireside chat with RPI President Marty Schmidt ’81, the event will include a startup pitch competition and poster presentations by RPI students and faculty. Pitch and poster topics include a wide range of products, from healthcare and e-commerce to energy and space technology. 

Full news release

How do we build a world from the detritus of a faltering society? How are we responsive to the environment, people, and objects around us? What are the ways that we can hold a more sacred relationship to one another? This in-progress installation from artist Yanira Castro and her design team—including Kathy Couch and RPI alum Stephan Moore—invites you to enter and effect a rumbling, buoyant, weather-like microcosm constructed of shipping pallets, clothing bundles, tarps, and emergency paraphernalia. Explore how your own actions, presence, and storytelling influence the space and atmosphere. Then stay to share your experience of the project at this early stage of development with the artistic team.

TOPOS presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by celebrated composer-performer Sarah Davachi. The Rose Dialogues, scored for two violas, cello, organ, and electronics, begins with the simplest of musical devices—the canon (or, which can colloquially be thought of as a round)—and spins an oceanic world of unexpected harmonies, haunting melodies, and formal surprises.

The topos of Davachi’s work is listening itself. Her music invites a deep attention, drawing us gently into the slow blossoming of her sonic landscapes. Within the veritable ocean of alternate tunings and temperaments, we are carried by waves of respite and repose, a darker pull that nudges us toward the unexpected.

Joined by musicians Eyvind Kang, Whitney Johnson (violas) and Lucy Railton (cello), Sarah Davachi’s piece moves slowly and with a precise ear for timbre and harmony. Its surprises feel hard-won, emerging from a rigor rooted in early Western compositional techniques: counterpoint, canon, heterophony, polyphony. And yet, her music is timeless, a dilated present that inches towards an uncertain yet harmonious future. A future that, in listening, seems to go on without end.

The premiere performance of Davachi’s The Rose Dialogues & Interludes at TOPOS is preceded by an onstage conversation with the composer.