Taubman College Newell to lecture at the Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad Politécnica de Puerto Rico
As part of the Craft of Architecture lecture series, Assistant Professor of Architecture Catie Newell will present at the Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad Politécnica de Puerto Rico on February 5th. The lecture is titled: Elsewhere and will focus on her recent research and built installation work.
The Craft of Architecture lecture series invites designers that contribute to the varied ways in which architecture is crafted through the careful consideration of technology, environment, and human skill. The core of Newell’s lecture will be the Once Residence series, an ongoing body of work that is immersed within the peculiar physical and immaterial circumstances of our contemporary strained urban settings. The work is characterized by intricate installations that manipulate and respond to former domestic spaces as a means to simultaneously situate and obscure the present realities of ailing cities, while making compelling new environments that provoke or deny occupation.
Unified by the medium of spaces that were once a residence, each project also shares the underlying interest of manipulated material attributes, attenuated depths, and harnessed illumination (or lack thereof). Further, as a disruption to the assumed domestic inhabitation, each project can also be described as an Inhabitable Texture, an on going study by *Alibi Studio that utilizes the aforementioned traits to agitate the occupation of material assemblages. Newell works directly with each existing space determining a tectonic capable of revealing the relevant circumstances of the city, and the obscuring the physical details of its extents. Each installation therefore remains quite distinct in technique, palette, and resultant, and its ongoing life in the city.
Newell will also lecture on the resultants of her ongoing research into glass in collaboration with Wes McGee, Lucy Olewchowski and Aaron Willette that is characterized by tool and material manipulation. Specified as a component within nearly every building envelope and abundant in the built environment, glass is an ever-present and easily overlooked aspect of our surroundings. The project challenges existing modes of working with glass across a range of applications and scales, interrogating the connections between craft and the explicit control offered by custom developed manufacturing processes and tooling.
For more information on the lecture series, please visit ArqPoli.
