IIDA Student Design Exhibition, June 24th - 26th at the Herman Miller Showroom

Please join IIDA for the first annual IIDA SoCal Student Design Exhibition. See the quality & breadth of what design students produce and vote for your favorite projects.

Featuring:
- Thesis projects from Southern California’s top design schools
- Finalist from the F3 Student Furniture Design competition
- Furniture pieces from Art Center, Bernhardt sponsored Design Studio

Participating students will display their work and provide resumes to interested parties. The exhibition will run from June 24th - 26th at the Herman Miller Showroom: 3641 Holdrege Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90016.

June 3rd Event Pics at LA Trade-Tech/LACCD hosted by FORM and AFLA

Event Images: Carolina Farias

This Thursday: AFLA Salon for New Voices

An Evening with Joshua G. Stein of Radical Craft.

The AFLA SALON FOR NEW VOICES is a forum for individuals & organizations whose unique visions deserve wider public consideration. This year they focus on the ideas of sustainability and social justice and its interplay in the fields of art & design.

Joshua G. Stein heads Radical Craft, a Los Angeles-based research and design studio operating between the fields of architecture, art, and urbanism. Through research into the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary fabrication techniques, Radical Craft examines material behavior and its potential to influence larger patterns of architecture and infrastructure.

At the Salon, Joshua will discuss the role of material, technique, and scale in the design of both the small and the large, from objects to regional planning.

Zero Net Energy Buildings Web Conference

This Thursday, June 17th, there will be a live web conference and teleconference at 11:00 AM-12:30 PM PT / 2:00-3:30 PM ET sponsored by AltaTerra.

Zero net energy (ZNE) buildings, which consume only as much energy as they produce on-site, are being developed and now mandated in the commercial marketplace. For instance, in the California Long-Term Energy Efficiency Strategic Plan, the state’s key energy agencies -- the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), California Energy Commission (CEC) and the Air Resources Board – put forth an ambitious goal: by 2030 all new commercial construction will be zero net energy, as well as 50 percent of existing commercial buildings. These goals are reflective of an emerging trend toward low-energy building designs, guidelines and initiatives, including Canadian and German residential standards, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative.

In this web conference, Reuben Schwartz of AltaTerra Research, along with guest presenter and renowned building systems designer David Kaneda, Founder and President of Integrated Design Associates (IDeAs), will discuss the evolution and current state of net-zero buildings in the nonresidential marketplace, including definitions, key design trade-offs, ‘sweet spots’, and lessons learned from ZNE buildings in operation.

For more information or to register, please click here.

UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale

John Briscella, “UGNB (Urban Gridded Notebook)” (detail), 2009SUPERFRONT LA is proud to present UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale, the second SUPERFRONT LA exhibit of 2010. Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence.  Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s).  Leveraging an interdisciplinary focus, UNPLANNED: RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTS AT THE URBAN SCALE boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale.

A group exhibit with more than twenty participants, UNPLANNED spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale. UNPLANNED opens March 25th with reception 5pm – 8pm.  On view through July 2nd, 2010 at Pacific Design Center (PDC) Suite B208, West Hollywood, CA 90069.