“Stranger Optimisms” presentation by Andrew Santa Lucia, Assistant Professor, Portland State University and Director of Office Andorus

Time and Place

Time: 4:30pm
Location: Architecture and Urban Planning Building 170

Bio

Andrew Santa Lucia is a Cuban American architect, activist, critic and educator based in Portland, Oregon. He is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Portland State University’s School of Architecture, where he coordinates thesis research, as well as teaches architectural theory and design studios. His research examines the ways in which the architectural discipline mediates culture, connecting design, pedagogy, and criticism through the creation of plastic propositions for lifestyle, with the aim of challenging the way we perceive architecture. He runs the architecture collaborative Office Andorus, which, as part of the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, designed No Place like House, a two-room installation of ritual and performance altars inside Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois. Office Andorus also provides design services to community activists with the goal of influencing public policy through the architectural discipline, most evident in their project Safe Shape, a mock Safe Injection Facility traveling exhibit. Santa Lucia has published articles in broad media such as ACSA, Ampersand, Architect’s Newspaper, Artlurker, Dichotomy, Luxury Home Quarterly and eVolo. He has taught architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois Institute of technology and Florida International University. He holds a Master of Arts in Design Criticism from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Florida International University in Miami, Florida.

Lecture Summary

The place of optimism in the discipline of architecture has affected far more than attitudes of practitioners. By tracing a genealogy of architectural optimism from the Critical (modern function) through the Cruel (postmodern sign), the Strange offers the discipline both complexity and corroboration (customizable contemporary). Although different in scale and implementation throughout history, the optimistic entanglement with the audience of architecture is underlined by participatory models that give up traditional control of the discipline’s aesthetic and technical effects that caught stride during modernism’s more egalitarian engagement with the world. By ceding certain disciplinary controls, architects found new forms of disciplinarity in creating terms of optimistic engagement with architecture.

Optimism is a contentious term at best, sometimes associated with concepts like hope, utopia and instrumentality. First, a key cultural difference between optimism and hope is that hope deals in particular goals/outcomes tied to a situation, while optimism is a form of proactive engagement with the future. Second, the history of the term utopia is more closely related to the idealism of a “future without a past,” which differs from the real-time agency optimism offers. In regards to both hope and utopia, Aldo Rossi’s critique of naive functionalism locates the problem of idealism in the concept of function during Modernism, as a stand in or replacement to the structure and formation of architecture as a cultural, temporal and social element with a past and potentially negotiable future. It follows that the scale of architectural instrumentality is precisely the interface between discipline and culture that must be engaged when delineating a genealogy of optimism.

This lecture will define optimism(s) through a genealogy in architecture after modernism and develop a theory of optimism through examining existing or soon to be realized architectural projects of Office Andorus and their relationship to Strangeness.

In a more specific sense, this lecture will look at scales of public engagement with buildings and their relationship to formal, aesthetic and technical effects to suggest how architecture’s future is, was and might be tied into defining the terms of engagement with an audience

For more information about this speaker’s visit, contact Assistant Professor Kyle Reynolds.

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Get directions to The School of Architecture and Urban Planning building at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is located at 2131 East Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Questions, comments?

All lectures are free and open to the public.
Additional information about the lectures and exhibitions can be found by contacting the main reception at (414) 229-4014, and by emailing any inquiries to Gil Snyder.