LECTURES, 2009-10

Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 12:00-1:00 PM
Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center

a WEDNESDAYS AT THE CENTER program

REFORMING ARCHITECTURE

KRISTINA LUCE
Visiting Assistant Professor
School of Architecture, UNC Charlotte

Presented by INNOVATING FORMS, the 2009-10 FHI Annual Seminar

Kristina Luce trained as an architect at Miami University in Ohio, receiving her M.Arch. in 1996. After working for several years in preservation and historic rehabilitation in Cincinnati, Ohio, Luce returned to academia to study drawing’s role within the process of design. In 2006-2007 she was a fellow at Michigan’s Institute for the humanities, and in 2007-2008 she was a Predoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her dissertation, entitled Revolutions in Parallel: The Rise and Fall of Drawing within Architectural Design, defines drawing as a conceptual medium for architecture and goes on to explore how this medium encodes a certain definition of architecture circumscribing the design problem. Luce is currently a visiting assistant professor at the UNC Charlotte.

This lecture explores how the medium of design both reflects and informs the discipline. Moving between the moment of drawing’s conventionalization during the Renaissance and the emerging over-throw of drawing in favor of computational design methods, this presentation explores what is at stake for architecture as design media shift. Through the close reading and juxtaposition of Raphael’s drawing of the Pantheon and two of Evan Douglis’ recent works—today’s architectural changes are put on par with those that gave rise to the discipline.

Event podcast (requires iTunes): video