Faculty News:

FOUNDATIONS: HABITAT /
ZBIGNIEW OKSIUTA

Sat Oct-30, 12-2pm EST
Free event – registration required >> Link to Eventbrite

Sr. Lecturer Zbigniew Oksiuta is participating this Sunday Oct-17 in the Foundation Series at the Venice Biennale, hosted by Assistant Professor Carla Leitao.

Our augmented perception, brings new perspectives on our place and roles in the re-making of the Biosphere, and as well on how the Biosphere builds us. How do we envision a novel relationship of inhabitation and connection with the world(s) around us, between us, in us – as we strive to rebuild models of collaboration between environment and body, artifacts and organisms?
HABITAT discusses the work of Zbigniew Oksiuta at the intersection between art, architecture and biology, to create biological habitats for humans and other species, in our biosphere and in outer space.

Zbigniew Oksiuta is an architect, artist and researcher experimenting with the possibility of designing biological structures, including projects “Spatium Gelatum”, “Biological Habitat” and “Breeding Spaces”, among others. He holds a Master of Architecture from The Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. His work has been exhibited at many prominent scientific and artistic venues worldwide and has lectured and presented his ideas at a number of universities, and art and scientific venues in Europe as well as the USA. Currently Zbigniew Oksiuta lectures at the School of Architecture, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY.

Links of Interest:
Breeding Spaces
Biological Habitat
Tasting Space
Zbigniew Oksiuta at culture.pl

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.