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.

August 2011: Semester of Water Kick-Off

ALI was honored and delighted that Woodbury University School of Architecture adopted water issues as the focus topic of the Fall Semester. Studios and seminars throughout the School issued ambitious design challenges to students, ranging from contaminated groundwater remediation sites to wetland restoration, from urban creek daylighting projects to transborder water conflicts. Faculty leading the charge include Jose Parral, Linda Taalman, Anthony Fontenot, Clark Stevens, Deborah Richmond, Jennifer Bonner. Woodbury San Diego “warmed up” their fall semester’s “Barrio Scenario” with an all-school workshop resulting in the transformation of back alleys and a side courtyard on the campus. Watch the fun here.

We are encouraged, and honored, to learn that schools around CA, the West, and the US have also taken on the drylands design competition brief as a basis for Fall studios