Austin: The Latest Architecture and News

Join The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture for a lecture with Craig Dykers and Elaine Molinar of Snøhetta. In their lecture, “Towards a Peaceable Kingdom,” the UT Austin alums and designers for The Blanton’s New Grounds Project will explore projects that take into account the geological, ecological and cultural layers of a site, considering the many living species beyond our own.

Join The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture for a lecture with renowned artist and MacArthur Fellow Jorge Pardo, whose work explores the intersection of contemporary painting, design, sculpture, and architecture. The lecture will be followed by an on-stage conversation with Program Director for Interior Design, Igor Siddiqui. Free and open to the public.

Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has been working with various AI technologies since 2016. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs (generative adversarial networks) and their capacity for contemporary myth-making in architecture. In the same way that imaginative vocabulary and metaphoric style were primary, if literary instruments for the invention of new mythologies for the Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using AI are similarly a kind of matter metaphor-ed and made visible by the cyborg imagination. With these tools, Karel is interested in the re-enchantment of the architectural body—one that both foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions, and one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational. Her work in this realm has been exhibited at the 2021 Venice Biennale; the FRAC Institute, Orleans, France; Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis; and SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent essays in pursuit of this work include “Verto Pellis” in Offramp, issue 17; “Machines are Braver than Art” in “Rendering Fiction,” Paprika!, volume 7, issue 8; and “Machines À Rechercher,” in Log 55, summer 2022. Karel teaches currently at Washington University, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

As the field of landscape architecture evolves to combat the issues of our time—climate change and just futures—how we practice matters. Through design research, experimental methods of design process and ideation, and provocative questioning, TEN x TEN challenges the normative environment of professional practice through process-oriented ways of working, engaging, and seeing landscape. Our agency as landscape architects to address the issues of our time is grounded in part by our ability to challenge the critical foundation of the design process itself and to practice modes of discovery as a generative act.