Van Alen Institute - common room and Telic Arts Exchange, New York Prize Fellow

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common room and Telic Arts Exchange
The Public School (for Architecture)

Fellowship Term: Fall 2009
Project Area: Culture and Politics

The Public School (for Architecture) is a self-organizing educational program for which the curriculum and schedule are proposed by the general public. Administered by common room and the Telic Arts Exchange in collaboration with Performa, the courses of The Public School (for Architecture) will be taught throughout New York City as itinerant installations during Fall 2009. The curriculum for The Public School will be developed through public access to its web site, and the development of course topics and class participation will be open to non-architects and architects alike. The school’s mission is to create a public for architecture while opening up architecture for the public.

The Public School (for Architecture) New York grows out of common room and Telic’s combined interests in the social, political, and economic aspects of architecture and awareness that the process of working to-scale in the built environment is a productive form of negotiation. Expanding The Public School beyond its existing posts in Los Angeles and Chicago, common room’s Maria Ibañez, Lars Fischer, and Todd Rouhe and Telic’s Sean Dockray seek to operate within and between those spaces in New York that have been opened up by current economic crises. While the Los Angeles Public School operates from a permanent location, and the network of users is established in reference to a single art space, the New York-based Public School will be more transient. Through open-ended discourse and alternative approaches to practice, common room and Telic propose to reactivate dismantled professional networks of the New York architecture community into a productive force that – while unable to repair the economic situation – can collectively begin to make sense of it and explore techniques for adaptation. The Public School (for Architecture) locates areas where new ideas are possible, suggests ways that architecture can be engaged even while financial support is diminishing, and seeks to identify and activate a community of users beyond affiliations to a single organization or discipline. During their Van Alen Institute fellowship residency, common room and Telic Arts Exchange will administer all courses in The Public School (for Architecture) New York through nyc.thepublicschool.org. Over the course of three academic terms, they plan to install classrooms in semi-public transitional spaces within institutions throughout the city—waiting rooms, lobbies, and large corridors—and will publish a corresponding course reader.

Fall Schedule:

September 30: Open House
October 13-25: Class Session I
November 1-22: Class Session II (in collaboration with Performa, as part of Performa09, the third visual art performance biennal)
December 1-11: Class Session III

Visit http://nyc.thepublicschool.org to propose classes, comment on or register in a class, offer to teach a class, and find out when and where classes will take place.

BIOS

common room (www.common-room.net) was established in 2006 by Maria Ibañez, Lars Fischer, and Todd Rouhe as a space for collaboration with a focus on the built environment. As a practice, common room is structured to promote a dialogue that explores the contingent relationship of workplace to community. By questioning existing institutional and physical structures, common room looks for a critical approach to theory and practice. Through architecture-based projects and exhibition activities, the participants of common room are able to re-evaluate the priorities typically ascribed to modern architecture and practice by considering how each project should be situated relative to personal, educational, and work-related histories. If space has been identified as a critical medium of modern architecture, then common room has observed that the space their work defines, through an engagement with the built and social environment, is a space of negotiation. common room is based on the Lower East Side of New York City.

LARS FISCHER was born in Duisburg, Germany in 1971. He is an architect, a founding member of common room and operates an individual design practice. Fischer previously worked in the Berlin office of Daniel Libeskind and in the New York offices of Marble Fairbanks and Leslie Gill, and he currently teaches at the New York Institute of Technology. He studied mechanical engineering at Case Western Reserve University and received his Masters in Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

MARIA IBAÑEZ DE SENDADIANO was born in Pasaje, Ecuador in 1968. She is an architect, a founding member of common room and a principal partner with Todd Rouhe in IdSR architecture. She has previously worked with Smith-Miller and Hawkinson Architects, Bryce Sanders, and Tsao and McKown architects. She studied architecture at the University of Florida Gainesville and received her Masters in Architecture from Princeton University.

TODD ROUHE was born in Riverside, California in 1968. He is an architect, a founding member of common room and a principal partner with Maria Ibañez de Sendadiano in IdSR architecture. Rouhe previously worked in the Berlin office of Daniel Libeskind and in the New York offices of Marble Fairbanks and Leslie Gill, and he currently teaches in the Columbia/Barnard Architecture program and at the New Jersey School of Architecture in Newark. Rouhe studied architecture at the Southern California Institute for Architecture and received his Masters in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University.

Telic Arts Exchange (www.telic.info) was founded by Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton as a place for multiple publics to engage with contemporary forms of media, art, and architecture. Currently comprised of three projects—The Public School, the Distributed Gallery, and Berlin—its program emphasizes social exchange, interactivity, and public participation to produce a critical engagement with new media and culture. Telic often distorts curatorial conventions to create experimental exhibitions, scenarios, and projects that occasionally throw its own institutional identity into question. Telic Arts Exchange is based in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

SEAN DOCKRAY was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1977. He is an artist, writer, and a founding director of Telic Arts Exchange. Dockray is a founder of The Public School and AAAARG.ORG as well as the media exhibition platforms, the Distributed Gallery and Berlin. He has contributed writing to X-TRA, Bidoun, Volume, and Cabinet magazines, and his video and sculptural work have been exhibited at Gigantic Art Space, ESL, the Cheekwood Museum, the Turtle Bay Museum, and the Armory Center for the Arts. Sean studied architecture at Princeton University before receiving his Masters in Fine Arts from University of California Los Angeles.