Creativity Conference 2021 – Day 1

Creativity Conference 2021 – Day 1

Organizing Committee: AIALA Interior Architecture

This is a virtual conference. Zoom log-in information will be emailed to registrants 24 hours in advance from events@aialosangeles.org. If you do not receive a confirmation 24 hours prior to the event, please email events@aialosangeles.org.

CES Learning Units: 2 LU/per day

Where does you creative inspiration as an architect come from? A favorite building? A beloved city? Or another architect that inspires you? If you were to dig deeper, you’ll find the answer entwined in your life story…a transporting novel, a moving music score or an evocative abstract painting.

What about other creators? How did they achieve creative success?

This conference explores the work and creative motivations of artists and designers outside of architecture. Discovering the sources of their intellectual and creative energy.

By taking a look the worlds of product design, art, filmmaking and curation, we’ll see how alike and different creative processes and lives are. We’ll look into the parallels with our own engagement with the human experience and explore how the creative boundaries can blur, setting up the potential for multi-disciplinary approaches. In seeing how others create, architects will find new inspiration for their own designs.

Moderators:

Hsinming Fung, AIA – Design Director, Hodgetts + Fung Design Lab
Hsinming Fung, AIA has been Principal and Co-Founder of Hodgetts + Fung since 1984, a studio with expertise in the design of unique places for learning, cultural events, and civic functions. H+F’s approach is multifaceted, embracing visitor experience, technology, and iconic presence in a disciplined process, resulting in a bold, uncompromising architecture. The firm’s award-winning projects include the design of the renovated Hollywood Bowl, Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center, CalArts’ Wild Beast Pavilion, Jesuit High School Chapel, and Nashville’s new Ascend Amphitheater. Current projects include the renovation of Culver City’s historic Robert Frost Auditorium and a West Hollywood mixed-use development. H+F was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the AIA CC Firm of the Year Award.Fung has taught at Yale, Ohio State, and Cal Poly Pomona. She is a Past President of both AIA Los Angeles and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. She was appointed by Bill Clinton as a Council Member of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has served as a national peer for General Services Administration.

Craig Hodgetts – Partner, Hodgetts + Fung Design Lab
With a broad background in theater arts, automotive engineering, and architecture, Craig Hodgetts brings a far-reaching vision to the design of complex, multi-faceted environments. While best known for the ingenuity he applies to projects requiring a high degree of technical and aesthetic synthesis, he is equally at home in a dynamic collaboration with multiple stakeholders. His celebrated design for a tensile structure at UCLA with partner Hsinming Fung, was followed by a series of landmark civic and cultural facilities including the Hollywood Bowl and the Egyptian Theater. In the years since, he has been granted patents for a mobile logistics center, a prefabricated classroom, and an evacuated tube structure for the hyperloop transportation system. Always a passionate advocate for technical innovation and its bearing on culture and sustainability, Craig has created innovative projects for the California Institute of the Arts, Art Center College, and the City of Nashville. A prolific writer, he has contributed essays and observations to LOG, the Los Angeles Times and The Architect’s Newsletter, as well as signature books on science-fiction icon Syd Mead and architect James Stirling, and has just published “Swimming to Suburbia” a collection of critical essays he has written on design and urbanism.

Presenters:

Jasna Sokolovic – Co-Founder, Dear Human
Jasna Sokolovic studied architecture at the University of Sarajevo and at the University of Belgrade in former Yugoslavia before immigrating to Canada during the war. She completed her studies in fine arts at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Noel O’Connell – Co-Founder, Dear Human
Noel O’Connell is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He is a Fulbright scholar in art and architecture and spent six years studying and working in art restoration and ceramics in Thailand and China.

Carmen Zella – Principal, NOW Art 
Carmen Zella is an award-winning public art curator and producer. She is the Owner and Creative Director of NOW ART, an established art agency in Los Angeles that designs, consults, produces, and installs artworks for both civic and private clients. In 2016, along with distinguished curator, Heidi Chang, she co-founded the non-profit organization NOW ART FOUNDATION to bring progressive and socially important public art works to Los Angeles. Having worked with numerous international and local artists, Carmen’s adherence to the intrinsic value of art in the public realm, and her belief in site-specificity, has resulted in widespread acclaim. She has produced highly recognized projects, across a variety of platforms; including the renowned Liquid Shard in downtown Los Angeles’ Pershing Square; the revitalization of the Triforium, recipient of the LA2050 grant; and the activation of the air-raid sirens for the LA Philharmonic’s production of War of the Worlds. She has collaborated with a diverse range of partners, such as the City & County of Los Angeles, Lincoln Property Company, Trammell Crow Company, and the Museum of Social Justice. In 2019, Now Art and its collaborators were recipients of the Building Team of the Year award by the American Institute of Architects LA for the cultural murals at La Plaza Village. Carmen’s most recent work is Luminex LA, a sound/video exhibition of video artwork from six internationally-recognized artists, projected across a select group of downtown Los Angeles buildings. As an exploration of environment and meaning, and in keeping with Carmen’s belief in the necessity of accessible art, this event was free to the public.

Learning Objectives:

+ Creative Parallels – Understand various perspectives and approaches to the concept of creativity through design disciplines outside of architecture
+ Interdisciplinary Approaches – Explore in depth the value other design fields bring to places and events and consider how architects can collaborate with these disciplines in a world becoming rapidly interdependent.
+ New Lens on Spatial Design – Understand and draw inspiration for architectural design including interiors from ways that other design fields approach space as an element and manipulate it as part of their narrative presentation.
+ Narrative/Human Experience – Identify various forms of story-telling, its central role in the creative act, and the many methods of expressing story.