Faculty News:

FOUNDATIONS : CRUST /
Thomas Klein, Tei Carpenter.

Thu Oct-07, 12-2pm EST
Free event – registration required >> Link to Eventbrite

Assistant Professor Carla Leitao , currently participating at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion, is hosting a conversation with Thomas Klein and Ted Carpenter on Thursday Oct-07, 12-2pm EST as part of the FOUNDATIONS Series. To join this free event, you must register in advance via Eventbrite.

Nuclear waste storage is one of the many legacies we embed in the crust of the Earth, along with an hyper-ethical system of memory markers that aims to prevent intrusion and its consequences. “Testbed” is a memory marker project for the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) facility that presents a novel idea for message permanence in a changing ecosystem. This session looks at the challenges of creating materials that outlast our lives and imaginations, the regulatory perspectives that think about deep futures, and mechanisms for embracing and following dynamic systems in search of identity/message persistence.

Thomas Klein has practiced in the field of Environmental stewardship, clean up, review and design for the past 40+ years. Mr. Klein received his Bachelors’ degree in Biology from Emporia State University in 1980 and his Masters Degree in Environmental Biology in 1984. Mr. Klein has been involved with the regulatory compliance aspects of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for the last 20 years. https://www.wipp.energy.gov/

Tei Carpenter is an architectural designer, educator and founder of Agency—Agency, an award-winning New York City based architecture and design studio. Her design and research work has been supported by a number of international organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts and BMW Mini. As an educator, she has taught design studios and seminars at Brown University, Columbia GSAPP, Rice University and the University of Toronto. Agency—Agency has been honored as one of the recipients of the 2021 League Prize by the Architectural League of New York, the 2018 New Practices New York award by the American Institute of Architects, as a Next Progressives by Architect Magazine, and featured in Domus Magazine’s 2019 list of the Best 100 Architecture Firms. http://agency-agency.us/

Carla Leitao is an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Architecture where explores the intersection of architecture, urban systems, technology, ubiquitous cultures and emergent materiality through immersive environments (https://www.clatcraive.net/).  She is an architect and writer living and working in New York and founding partner of AUM Studio and Spec.AE. Leitao’s work and events at the Venice Biennale are part of the “Space and Planetary Design Group” by Creative Director Ed Keller, for the Italian Virtual Pavilion.

FOUNDATIONS series.
Hosted by Carla Leitao

The FOUNDATIONS Series asks what layers will we purposely engrave, carry, remember and honor; and which clean slates will we want to produce – which assemblies will we step onto/into? Inspired by the increasingly connected “Spaceship Earth” (as named by Buckminster Fuller), the FOUNDATIONS series zooms into key moments of written material, systems, ideas around world building, making and thinking – proposing discussions on the new futures for life and livability, envisioned for our shared planet and beyond.

Any act of design integrates the foundations that ground us by both willfully ignoring and also actively relearning those foundations. The concept of the Anthropocene – accompanied by the Anthrobscene, or the Novacene – helped name and point at processes, contexts, figures, diagrams and agents of the transformation of our ‘ground’. With these reframings, we begin processes of inquiry into how to inherit pasts, inhabit presents and what to lay as groundworks or structuring foundations for an uncertain future.

FOUNDATIONS is a series of events, convened by Carla Leitao, at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion, Sezione del Padiglione Italia. Curated by Tom Kovac, RMIT University and Alessandro Melis Portsmouth University titled CITYX Venice responds to ‘How will we live together?’ curated by Hashim Sarkis MIT, organized by La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is open until the 21st of November.