Third Floor Hallway Gallery – Foundation Building
Open to Students, Faculty and Staff

Reception and Gallery Remarks - Wednesday, October 3, 6PM

Recent Work presents eight projects that explore architecture’s relationship to technology across media and methods. They stem from a shared question: how are cities and architecture transformed by digital technologies and their attendant power relations? Together they reveal how buildings participate in an array of social, political, and technological networks, and that these networks are the primary forces shaping the possibilities of architectural practice. The interconnected web of digital media, data servers, software, and algorithms that lace the planet can be thought of as a governing system setting the rules and possibilities for human mobility, social communications, and urban development. My work makes these sites and processes tangible and manipulatable through investigations from the scale of the body to that of the planet. The projects reframe architecture as not only the design of discrete objects, but also of codes, platforms, and infrastructures. They also ask what the role of the architect is in critically navigating this techno-political landscape, and how design and dialogue can go hand in hand. From modeling the control matrices of smart cities to spatializing the cultural logics of social media, the works presented are, in a sense, an exhibition of exhibitions, producing a public discourse through the communicative power of design.

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is principal of Farzin Farzin and an Assistant Professor Adjunct in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. He holds advanced degrees from Columbia University and RMIT University. He has been a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and was previously a Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan. His research has been funded by the Veski organization and the Graham Foundation, and has been collected by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and elsewhere. Through Farzin Farzin and other ventures, his research investigates how architecture and cities are transformed by digital technologies and their attendant power relations, looking at scales from the corporeal to the planetary.

View the full Fall 2018 Lectures and Events List.