/ FALL SEMESTER 2014 /

Benjamin Bratton

is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, art and design. He is associate professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. Starting in summer 2014, he is also professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming.

Nick Gelpi

is the Design Principal and Founder of GELPI Projects, a design firm in Miami Florida, dedicated to examining the relationships between material feedback and building concepts as they relates to the built environment.  Gelpi’s design practice has won numerous design awards including first place for his proposal “Table Distortions,” a twenty foot long digitally fabricated table on view at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, an ARCHITECT Magazine R&D Award, and a Pamphlet Architecture Honorable Mention for his proposal “System Failure.” He is currently a finalist in the international design competition for the new Wynwood Gateway Park in Miami Florida, and he has exhibited furniture, pavilions, and installation work in museums and galleries internationally.

Michael Hardt

teaches at Duke University and he serves as the editor of The South Atlantic Quarterly.  Together with Antonio Negri he is author of the Empire trilogy (Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth) and, most recently, Declaration.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

is a founding principal of Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss / NAO and co-founder of School of Missing Studies (SMS). He holds PhD from Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, Master of Architecture post-professional degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design and Diploma in Engineering and Architecture from University of Belgrade. His books include Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act (with Armin Linke, 2012), Almost Architecture (2006), Lost Highway Expedition Photobook (ed. 2007) and Evasions of Power: On the Architecture of Adjustment (ed. 2011).

Jean-François Lejeune

is a professor of architecture, urban design, and history at the University of Miami School of Architecture. He has written extensively and curated various exhibitions on Miami’s architecture and urban planning (such as The Making of Miami Beach 1933-1942 in 2000, Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream in 2007). His books Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America and Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean(with M. Sabatino) won CICA awards in 2005 and 2011. He is currently working on two monographs “De-urbanizing the European Metropolis, Rural Ideal and Modernity, 1914-1960” and “City and Architecture: Franco’s Spain 1939-1975.”

Gray Read

is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Florida International University.  She holds a PhD in Architecture from University of Pennsylvania and is a registered Architect. Her books include Modern Architecture in Theater: The Experiments of Art et Action (Palgrave Press, 2014), Architecture as a Performing Art, edited with Marcia Feuerstein, (Ashgate Press, 2013), and The Miniature and the Gigantic in Philadelphia Architecture: Essays on Designing the City to Human Scale, (Mellen Press, 2007).

Nick Srnicek

is a Fellow in Geopolitics and Globalisation at UCL. He is the author with Alex Williams of Inventing the Future (Verso, 2015), and the editor with Levi Bryant and Graham Harman of The Speculative Turn (Re.press, 2010).

Jan Verwoert

is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine, his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the de Appel curatorial programme. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006, the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010, together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013 and a second collection of his essays Cookie! published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2014.

Jason Dittmer

PhD in Geography, is a lecturer in Human Geography at UCL. He obtained a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Jacksonville University in 1998 and an MA in International Affairs from Florida State University in 1999. He is the author of Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (Temple University Press, 2013), Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) and is co-editor of Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions (Ashgate, 2010).

Keller Easterling

is an architect, urbanist, and writer. Her latest book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. The book won Yale’s Gustave Ranis Award for the best book by a Yale faculty member in 2005. Her previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats.

Léopold Lambert

is an architect who has successively been a Parisian, a Hong Konger, Mumbaikar, and New Yorker. In addition to his enthusiasm for design, he is the writer/editor of The Funambulist and the author of Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona 2012) that examines the inherent characteristics of architecture that systematically makes it a political weapon. He is also the coordinator/editor of Archipelago, the podcast platform of The Funambulist that releases conversations with thinkers and creators of the world on a weekly basis.

Matteo Pasquinelli

Ph.D., is a philosopher based in England. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and lectures frequently on philosophy, media theory, and life sciences. His texts have been translated in many languages and he has contributed to journals and newspapers such as Springerin, Multitudes, Fibreculture, Theory Culture & Society, Leonardo, Lugar Comum, Rethinking Marxism, Open!, Libération, Il manifesto, Der Freitag. Together with Wietske Maas he wrote the Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism. At NGBK Berlin he is co-curating the forthcoming exhibition The Ultimate Capital is the Sun.

François Roche

is an architect. His architectural works and protocols navigate and articulate real and /or fictional narration and physical production, and include scenario-based work and the development of apparatuses to transform situations. Although Roche originally trained and worked as a mathematician, he later graduated from the school of architecture of Versaille in 1987. He founded R&Sie(n) architecture studio in 1989 along with fellow French architects Stephanie Lavaux and Jean Navarro. Roche is currently focusing on developing technological experiments, from which they can create architectural ‘scenarios’. These experiments are designed as forms of cartographic distortion or territorial mutations, transforming nature into a dynamic element of the design.

Nathalie Rozencwajg

is an architect, and co-founder and director of rare. The practice exercises an ethos of mixing their commissions with research and education to produce tailored work using new materials, innovative typologies and advanced modes of design and production. Nathalie graduated from the Architectural Association in London in 2001 and has worked with Erick van Egeraat and Architecture Studio on projects in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including among others the Onassis Opera House in Athens. In addition to her practice she has been Unit Master at the Architectural Association since 2004 and coordinates their visiting school in Singapore. Nathalie’s wide-ranging international experience and particular knowledge of sustainable and integrated design contribute to rare’s innovative design strategies.

Leandro Silva Medrano

Ph.D., is an architect, urbanist, and professor at the Department of History of Architecture and Aesthetics of Design FAU-USP. His major works address the relationship between housing and urban development of contemporary cities. Theory of architecture and urbanism, urbanization, megacities, urban economics, urban sociology and urban planning are some of the fields involved in his recent research.

Marion von Osten

is an artist, author and curator. The main interests of her projects are the changed conditions of the production of cultural work in post-colonial societies, technologies of the self, and the governance of mobility. Since 2006 she’s held a Professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. From 1999 – 2006 she was a Professor for artistic practice at HGK Zurich and a researcher at the Institute for the Theory of Art and Design & Institute for Cultural and Gender Studies, HGK Zurich.