Drylands Design Exhibit closes at A+D Museum Los Angeles.

We are grateful to A+D Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles for hosting the Drylands Design Exhibition, March 23-May 15, 2012. The exhibit showcased critical work from universities and firms from all over the world grappling with a complex issue. Thank you to A+D for serving as the launch for this traveling exhibit, and bringing new audiences to the challenges ahead.

Woodbury graduate and ALI Dry Studio alumnus Brandon Cohen photographed the installation for us —see his photos here.

Thank you to competition partners, California Architectural Foundation; supporters, Woodbury University and Woodbury School of Architecture; and exhibition funders: Bernard Friedman, ALI Advisory Board Chair; Desert Initiative:  Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University; and the Maxine Frankel Foundation.

For research funding leading up to the Drylands Design Initiative, we are grateful to HUD’s Office of University Partnerships; The Graham Foundation for the Visual Arts; the LEF Foundation; and the Bogliasco Foundation.

The exhibition’s travel itinerary is in development. Stay tuned.

Last Call at the Oasis

You may have seen clips as part of Drylands Design Exhibition at A+D Museum > Los Angeles.

On Friday May 4, Last Call at the Oasis opens in theaters.

Find a theater here: www.lastcallattheoasis.com

ARID: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology seeks submissions for Fall 2012 launch issue

ARID: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology is a peer-reviewed bi-annual journal focusing on cross-disciplinary explorations of desert arts, design, culture, and the environment for both scholarly and new audiences. ARID seeks submissions of scholarly articles, curriculum, visual essays, and other media including sound and video that investigate diverse aesthetic, social, cultural, historical, ecological, and political subjects related to desert regions of the American Southwest and beyond. ARID emphasizes the convergence of art, design, and culture with science, ecology, geography, and other related disciplines to create a unique snapshot of and dialog about desert environs and cultures with a vested and active interest in the desert as a point of creative investigation. ARID is an interdisciplinary online project jointly published by multiple institutions launching in fall 2012.

ARID seeks written submissions from independent scholars, writers, researchers, and journalists that showcase innovative, compelling, and intellectually rigorous storytelling. We also encourage visual, film, and audio submissions including photo essays, illustrations, cinema, soundscapes, music, and other forms of cultural production. We encourage both scholarly articles and papers as well shorter, more informal essays.

Authors are encouraged to submit related art and photography with their written pieces. Artists and photographers may submit stand-alone visual essays. Articles and essays must be original and unpublished and not under consideration by other journals at the time of submission. We will consider previously published media works on a case-by-case basis.

Submissions will be accepted for our first issue beginning April 1st through June 1st, 2012. For more information and media submission guidelines please visit: www.aridjournal.org.

We will consider submissions for the following categories:

Pedagogies
A place to publish hypotheses, experiments, and results for those attempting to redefine an education in art, media, and design along environmental and social practice lines. We are particularly interested in field-based pedagogy with an emphasis on desert geographies.

Practices
Practices, projects, and ideas referencing art, design, media, and other works related to ARID’s mission.

Policies
A place for discussion of the frameworks, rules, regulations and other structures that govern and legislate place, a vehicle to converse with our co-inhabitants, and a means to link to other desert communities.

Perspectives
An ongoing archive of dialogues, fictions, and freeform ideas concerning desert geographies from an array stakeholders, viewpoints, and positions. This section includes book and exhibit reviews.

For general editorial submission questions and concerns or to be added to ARID’s mailing list, please email editors@aridjournal.org.

ARID Journal

Extended to May 15: Drylands Design Exhibition at A+D

The Architecture + Design Museum > Los Angeles (A+D Museum) has extended the DRYLANDS DESIGN exhibition, now on view through May 15, 2012. A+D is located at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, directly across the street from LA County Museum of Art.

Opening night, March 22, 2012

DRYLANDS DESIGN features work by architects, landscape architects, engineers, and urban designers responding to the challenges of water scarcity in the face of climate change. With a focus on the US West, the exhibition presents a portfolio of adaptive strategies large and small, rural and urban, high tech and low-carbon. Since no single solution will meet the complex needs of the US West, the exhibition explores a range of approaches for how buildings and parks, houses and streets, industry and agriculture, cities and neighborhoods might be adapted to face a drought-prone future. DRYLANDS DESIGN recognizes water scarcity as an issue of global concern, and challenges the industrialized world to take a leadership position with water-conserving, low-carbon design innovation for its own backyard.

The exhibition features sixty-four projects selected from hundreds of submissions to the William Turnbull International Drylands Design Competition (www.drylandscompetition.org), hosted by the California Architectural Foundation and Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University. Proposals range in scale from water-smart building systems to regional plans, and focus on both agricultural and urban economies. Geographically, proposals range from Albuquerque to Yuma, Lubbock to Fresno, San Diego to Salt Lake City, Reno to Los Angeles.

Exhibition designed by Annie Chu of Chu + Gooding Architects with April Greiman of Made In Space.

Through drawings, models, graphics, and film clips drawn from Participant Media’s forthcoming documentary, Last Call at the Oasis, the exhibition frames the challenges facing 30 million people in the US West, and how those challenges are shared throughout the arid regions of the world. The exhibition introduces a wide swatch of the public to the possibilities for envisioning a new, adaptive West through design possibilities both practical and poetic. The exhibition speculates on how solutions for the US West might be adapted to meet the urgent needs of drylands cultures worldwide.

An intergenerational and interactive educational installation created by architect and grey water specialist Leigh Jerrard and landscape artist Jane Tsong, entitled Water Lab, accompanies the exhibit in the Stephen Kanner Education Center for Architecture + Design. Water Lab offers children and adults an opportunity to design and implement their own variation on efficient water systems in an artful, user-friendly and inspiring environment.

DRYLANDS DESIGN is an initiative of the Arid Lands Institute (ALI), a design-based education and outreach center based at Woodbury University that recognizes water scarcity and hydrologic variability as the defining challenge facing the West. Woodbury School of Architecture is a proud supporter of the ALI’s mission and activities. The exhibition advisory board includes Michael Lehrer, Lehrer Architects and Mia Lehrer, Mia Lehrer + Associates; Peggy Weil, HeadsUp!; Jonathan Katz, Cinnabar; Alicia Sams, filmmaker; Louis Molina, Woodbury School of Architecture; Greg Esser of Desert Initiative: Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University; and Cliff Garten, Cliff Garten Studio.

Principal Sponsors of the Drylands Design Initiative include:
US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of University Partnerships, HSIAC Grant 09-CA-39
A+D Architecture + Design Museum > Los Angeles
ARC Riot Creative Imaging
California Architectural Foundation
Desert Initiative:  Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University
Bernard Friedman
Maxine Frankel Foundation
Metropolitan Water District
Olson Visual
Participant Media
Production Resource Group Los Angeles
Takepart.com
UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Woodbury University
Woodbury University, School of Architecture

Research support leading to the Drylands Design Initiative:
Graham Foundation
LEF Foundation
Bogliasco Foundation
ALI students, past and present, teachers all.

Big Thank You

The Drylands Design Conference—a month ago!–yikes!—-was quite a wonderful milestone in the public conversation around water scarcity and design of the built environment.  One hundred seventy people attended.  The feedback has been very positive, and we will be harvesting its fruits, from design proposals to pedagogy and policy recommendations, for some considerable time to come.  

In the meantime, ALI sends a big (if belated) thank you to the behind-the-scenes teams —–

The logistics teams led by Yvonne Correa at Woodbury and Laura Thompson and Ellen Robinson at Your Great Event produced an event that was impressive in its hospitality and polish for its guests. Mathew Stanley and James Ly of IT;  Erin Malleus of Bon Apetit; and Mimi Zeiger of Architecture/Communications provided great support to that team, from live streaming, to yummy food, to photography and press.  

Jeremy Delgado, Woodbury alum, Dry Studio Veteran, and Principal at Friendly Office, provided amazing digital/social media support.

Woodbury School of Architecture—esp. Jeanine, Anthony, Linda, Nick, Debbie, Clark, John, and Jennifer—-Thank you for joining in with us this fall to generate so much thoughtful studio work. Louis Molina and Thurman Grant, great job with year-long Aquifer series in the Wedge Gallery.

We think Anne Swett Predock of Swett Shop Graphic Design is amazing, and we hope you enjoyed the look of the conference, in print, on the web, and around campus.  

Our beloved family members, Jerri, Hedi, and Josie Arnold, gave deeply of their time to make the conference a success for us in many hidden ways, and in one very big way:  documenting every talk (all of which will be posted in ALI’s rich digital archive the coming weeks).

To our Woodbury, CAF and AIA collaborators, thank you for working with us to bring participants, audience, funders, and new friends to this fantastic, complicated, and challenging discussion.  We were delighted to have the financial support of old friends—Burbank Water and Power; Metropolitan Water District; and Bernard Friedman—and new:  AC Martin and Concrete Masonry Association of CA and NV; and the production assistance of ARC Riot. One new friend, Kelly Duke of Valley Crest, blogs about the conference here; enjoy!  

To our friends at CAF, who came to us a few years ago and said, let’s play together…. Thank you!  The WIlliam Turnbull Competition was a huge opportunity for both organizations to create culture shift, and the conference and exhibition are an extension of that.  We appreciate your joining with us, and we think we might just be seeing the shift both organizations set out to create.    

(+ Let’s not forget:  Neither organization could have pulled off such a successful competition, and the programs that followed, without the deeply-hands-on volunteerism of competition maestro Bill Liskamm.  We all owe him a big one.)

UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability: We loved working with you all. The input into the evolving competition entries was invaluable, and we learned a lot from putting our heads together with yours.

To Madlyn Wohlman-Rodriguez and HUD’s Office of University Partnerships: We are grateful for HUD’s generous support of ALI’s partnerships with the City of Burbank and with Rio Arriba County, NM.

REGISTER NOW

Seating at the Drylands Design Conference is limited.

To register, click here.

AIA Continuing Education credits are available.

DRYLANDS DESIGN CONFERENCE MARCH 22-24

ALI, in partnership with the California Architectural Foundation (CAF), hosts the Drylands Design Conference from March 22–24, 2012 on the Woodbury University campus in Burbank. Retrofitting the West: Adaptation by Design brings together architects, landscape architects, artists and engineers with leading environmental thinkers, scientists, and renowned conservationists to debate a range of design strategies for a water-stressed future. More than 225 educators, design professionals and students are expected at the conference where the arid and semi-arid west will be re-examined as a vast field of opportunities for water-smart design innovation at a range of scales, from building systems to infrastructure and landscape spaces.

The Drylands Design Conference kicks off with an opening reception at the Architecture + Design Museum (A+D) in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 22. On view at the museum is Drylands Design, featuring selected work from CAF’s William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition (www.drylandscompetition.org). The exhibition showcases work by architects, landscape architects, engineers, artists, and urban designers responding to the challenges of water scarcity in the face of climate change. With a focus on the US West, the exhibition presents a portfolio of adaptive strategies large and small, rural and urban, high tech and low-carbon. Since no single solution will meet the complex needs of the US West, the exhibition explores a range of approaches for how buildings and parks, houses and streets, industry and agriculture, cities and neighborhoods might adapt to a water-stressed future. Following its run from March 22-April 26, 2012, the exhibition is scheduled to travel in the US and abroad.

In an innovative cross-disciplinary collaboration, ALI and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability provided technical and policy advising to five research award winners chosen from the CAF William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition. At the conference on Friday, March 23, the five award-winning teams will present their design proposals and discuss the policy implications they suggest. Research award winners include:

Meghan Storm, University of Pennsylvania; Ellen Neises, advisor
Off the Reservation: A Seed for Change

Gini Lee, with Brooke Madill, University of Melbourne
Reinvesting the Line:
Small infrastructures, micro-communities, and communication ecologies

Robert Lamb, AIA; Los Angeles
Silver Lake Microshed

Laurel McSherry, Virginia Tech; and Robert Holmes, architectural designer
Drylands Design: The Commonwealth Approach

Ye Hua, USC; Alex Robinson, advisor
A Colorful Walk: Salt Pool Exploration, Owens Valley

These design case studies and the panel discussions they inform raise important questions about de-coupling energy and water, localizing resources, restructuring watershed governance, the scaleability of small systems, the relationship between water infrastructure and public architectures, and the role of the arts and design in shaping a working public landscape.

The conference puts both young and established design leaders in dialog with thinkers from an array of disciplines, including Wiliam DeBuys, Ph.D., writer and conservationist, author of seven books, the most recent A Great Aridness; Paul Bunje, Ph.D., Managing Director, Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability, supported by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Stephanie Pincetl, Director, Center for Sustainable Urban Systems, UCLA; James Workman, award-winning journalist and author of Heart of Dryness; and Barry Taylor, Ph.D., Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

On Saturday March 24th, design educators are invited to a workshop on interdisciplinary methods for advancing Drylands Design regionally and globally.

Schools, NGOs, and design firms are encouraged to engage the conference from remote locations by subscribing to live-streaming. For a complete program, including registration and live streaming details, see: drylandsconference.org

Drylands Design Winners Announced

The California Architectural Foundation has announced the winners of the William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition. On Friday, January 13th, the jury met at Woodbury University to review 205 submissions and select 9 awards:

Students:
Merit Award $1250
#T271 Chau Nguyen, Cal Poly Pomona and Orange Coast College
Local Urban Farming: Fresno Reimagined

Honor Award $2500
#T159 Rebecca Lederer, University of Pennsylvania
New Man’s Land: 14 Sister Cities Along the US-Mexico Border

Professionals:
Merit Award $1250
#T097 Geeti Silwal, AICP, San Francisco
Resource Infinity Loop: Watershed Urbanism in San Francisco

Honor Award $2500
#T020 Thomas Kosbau, Ore Design, Brooklyn, NY
LA20: Large Scale Desalination with Repurposed Civic Infrastructure

Research Award Winners: $10,000 each
In addition to the William Turnbull Prizes, the design jury also selected five projects for further development. Working in partnership with ALI and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment, research award-winners will work to advance each proposal technically and to tease public policy implications from them. In March, award-winners will present their design research and the policy implications they suggest at ALI’s Drylands Design Conference (March 22-24, 2012).

#T178 Meghan Storm, University of Pennsylvania; Ellen Neises, advisor
Off the Reservation: A Seed for Change

#T016 Gini Lee, with Brooke Madill, University of Melbourne
Reinvesting the Line:
Small infrastructures, micro-communities, and communication ecologies

#T249 Robert Lamb, AIA; Los Angeles
Silver Lake Microshed

#T161 Laurel McSherry, Virginia Tech; and Robert Holmes, architectural designer
Drylands Design: The Commonwealth Approach

#T218 Ye Hua, USC; Alex Robinson, advisor
A Colorful Walk: Salt Pool Exploration, Owens Valley

We are looking forward to working with the research award winners over the next sixty days and sharing the results of their work, and the competition as a whole, in March. We hope you will join us.

Look for an online gallery of competition entries shortly.

Registration for the conference opens on Monday, January 30.

Drylands Design Competition Jury Meets 1/13/2012

ALI is grateful to the California Architectural Foundation, the outreach arm of the AIA/California Council, for joining with us to explore the challenges of good design for a water-scarce west. We are honored by the magnitude of the response generated by the 2011 William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition.

Three hundred teams—half of them professional, half academic; representing 29 states and 12 countries—registered for the competition. Two hundred five entries were submitted by December 15th, 2011. Teams put forth proposals for radical new building types, insurgent infrastructures, and remade landscapes, from Lubbock to Salt Lake City, from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, Denver to San Diego, Yuma to eastern Washington.

Tomorrow, Friday, January 13, the design jury meets at Woodbury to finalize their selections for 9 awards: 5 research awards, two honor awards, and two merit awards. Announcements will be made on January 17th, and selected projects will form the basis of an exhibition and conference opening in March.

Details to follow, but for now, we simply want to say: Hats Off. In a landscape of scarcity, design teams have shown us an abundance of possibility. Thank you, and all the best for 2012.

Hadley + Peter Arnold
co-directors/ALI

Video Now Online: Thinking Water_A Briefing for Designers

Video from Thinking Water: Water, Energy, and Climate Challenges Facing the U.S. West_A Briefing for Designers, a half-day seminar and briefing for designers on the critical water challenges facing the U.S. West is now available.

The future of development across the western United States is intricately linked to the availability of water. A precious, but often overlooked and misunderstood resource, water impacts policy, the environment, and economics. Addressing these issues, a team of scientists and researchers from UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability presented findings, briefed attendees, and answered questions on water, energy, climate change, and strategic design opportunities for a water-smart future.

For more information: please see: http://aridlands.woodbury.edu/public_programs/thinking_water_2011.html