We were lucky to receive two lectures today: Greg Lynn and Nader Tehrani. Greg teaches at UCLA and was giving a lecture as part of a Fall Open House for the school to prospective students. It was mostly an introduction to his work so I had seen most of it before although he presented a large development project in Las Vegas that was interesting. His various schemes for incorporating functions across multiple city blocks relates to our discussions in Research Studio and Thom's belief that architects will more often have to play the role of city planner. Lynn's preferred scheme was more sectional locating public functions at elevated volumes between ground and high-rise. Urban Design seems to be increasingly relying on sectional differentiation more than simple vertical extrusions.
This week's Monday night lecture was a principal from Office DA in Boston. Their work has a formal basis that breaks surfaces down to intricate geometric components. They also were doing a large urban project in Kuwait. Pretty sophisticated geometrically and materially, it outshone his meager lecture, http://www.officeda.com/
