Croquis.

This time the model in EAA Design Faculty’s drawing studio’s croquis is Henriika.
EAA Design Faculty’s drawing studio’s fb album
https://www.facebook.com/yllemarks/media_set?set=a.658254700865823.1073741826.100000438963959&type=3

http://www.riinao.com/
https://www.notjustalabel.com/designer/6un#page-1

Bernhard Sommer and Galo Moncayo Open Lecture to focus on energy efficient future cities

On November 3rd at 6 pm, the Open Lecture Series of the architecture faculty will be happy to present architect Bernhard Sommer from Exikon and architect and installation artist Galo Moncayo at Estonian Architecture Centre (Kultuurikatel, Põhja pst 27a, Tallinn). Sommer teaches energy design at one of the most exciting architecture schools in the world, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, and leads Exikon arc & dev architecture office, dedicated to the application of cutting-edge planning and building technology. Moncayo is an established installation artist and architect who teaches at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Open Lecture Series welcome all architecture students from across Estonia, professionals and general audience intrigued by spatial matters: the lectures are in English and free of charge.

From this academic year, and with generous help from Merko construction company, Sommer will also be teaching at the Estonian Academy of Art architecture department. In his Open Lecture, Sommer will explain how energy design can fundamentally change the way future cities are designed. In Estonia, the prevailing method of raising energy efficiency of a building has been dealt with by adding energy efficient components and materials to a project, whereas Sommer guides his students to employ smart spatial geometry to make cities and buildings more efficient. Sommer’s architecture office, Exikon arc & dev in Vienna, is dedicated to the application of cutting-edge planning and building technology. Its aim is the integration of scientific findings into the design process.

Bernhard Sommer teaches energy design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. Sommer also teaches building physics and holds seminars on sustainable design at the Technical University of Graz, the University of Cagliari and in the context of the Master Program Urban Strategies. In 2000, he has been awarded the Arch + Prize 2000, in 2002, the Schindler Scholarship of the MAK Center in Los Angeles. There he developed the transforming „desert cloud“ project that later was exhibited in West Hollywood and Vienna.

Galo Moncayo is an installation artist and architect currently teaching in the Energy Design Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, as well as a Assistant Professor in the Experimental Architecture Department at Innsbruck University. He has exhibited throughout the United States including in New York, and in Germany, Mexico, Austria, Spain and has been invited as a visiting artist/ lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, The George Washington University, among other universities in North America and in Germany, Mexico, Austria and Ecuador. Galo Moncayo received a Magister of Architecture from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in the Zaha Hadid Master Class, a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in the United States.

More about Exikon: http://www.exikon.at/

Open Lecture Series is supported by Estonian Cultural Endowment and organised by the Estonian Academy of Arts architecture department. The architecture department would also like to thank Merko for their support for this event.

Series curated by Sille Pihlak and Siim Tuksam (PART)
www.avatudloengud.ee

More info:
Pille Epner
arhitektuur@artun.ee

+372 642 0071

This time the model in EAA Design Faculty’s drawing studio’s croquis is Julia.

This time the model in EAA Design Faculty`s drawing studio`s croquis is Julia.
Photo: Erik Peinar

MARTTA TUOMAALA: Artistic methods for making a difference
On Wednesday, 19 October at 5 pm there will be an open lecture Artistic methods for making a difference by Finnish artist and filmmaker Martta Tuomaala. She is the guest lecturer at the graphic art and installation/sculpture departments at the autumn semester. The lecture will take place at EKA Lembitu 10B building in room no 144
Martta Tuomaala (b. 1983) is a visual artist, currently living and working in Helsinki. She gained a Master’s degree in Fine Art from Aalto University, School of Arts and Architecture in 2014.

Tuomaala is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses mainly on various forms of film, video and socially engaged art. Her works deals with social, societal structures and power relations. Tuomaala has been working in several low-paid sectors, which has made a strong impact in her artistic practice. The main focus of her interest is work: research of working culture, working conditions, labor struggles, workers’ rights and different forms of organizing, especially in the low-paid and precarious women-dominated fields. One of her biggest projects Cleaner’s Voice, which combines different methods of artistic practice and militant research, consists of a 16-channel installation which is based on the interviews of cleaners.

Currently she is working on a project Finn-Spinning-Soumi-Perkele! dealing with generalized ideas of ‘Finnishness’, precarious work and the effects of austerity politics in Finland.

More information:

www.marttatuomaala.com
www.facebook.com/cleanersvoice

Olete oodatud!
You are warmly welcome!

We are glad to inform You about an upcoming open lecture in the Department of Art Education expanding upon the topic “Perspectives on art education in today’s global economy”.

Lecturers: Tomaž Zupančič, Professor at the Faculty of Education, University in Maribor, Slovenia
and
Jan van Boeckel, Professor in Art Pedagogy at the Faculty of Art and Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts

In our conversation we bring together the themes of art, art education and economy. Some people would hold that art is only worthwhile if it is completely interest-free (“l’art pour l’art”). But what happens when one engages with art for purposes that are external to its supposed own domain, for example when artmaking becomes an instrument to seek economic gains, to draw a spicy personal career plan or even to push society into a more sustainable direction? Is it still art then? And what are the implications of our views on this issue for the kind of art education we provide to young people?

Time: Wednesday 19 October, 12.30-14.30

Place: Estonian Academy of Arts,
Department of Art Education, Room 103, Suur-Kloostri 11, Tallinn

Info: Helen Arov (helen.arov@artun.ee)

Hope to see You soon!
Department of Art Education

Group of students of the department of glass – Maarja Mäemets, Sigrid Luitsalu, Külli Nidermann, Kateriin Rikken, Toomas Mäelt, Oleksandra Kotliar, Jay Siltavuo and Ida Leinonen – participated in the 10th International Blown Glass Symposium in Lviv, Ukraine. Tutor of the group, Professor Mare Saare, participated also as an invited artist, together with glass artist and drawing teacher of the EAA Peeter Rudaš in the program of the symposium, preparing exhibition works at the furnace of the Lviv Academy of Arts. The organizers of the event – in earlier years Prof Andriy Bokotei, now his son Mykhaylo Bokotei – also invited the students to participate in the exhibition at the National Museum in Lviv. Prof Saare was awarded with the Diploma of Honour of the Presidium of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts for her input into the development of international glass art. At the conference there were also presentations from Mare Saare and her students about Estonian Academy of Arts, and the creative work of Peeter Rudaš and Mare Saare. Piret Meos, one of the MA graduates of the dept of glass in 2016, was also presented at the exhibition with her glass object. The symposium is an important event in the international world of art glass, organized every second year and with participats from also as far as USA, Japan, and, of course Europe.

This time the model in EAA Design Faculty’s drawing studio’s croquis is Nikolai.

ARCHITECTURES, NATURES AND DATA:
THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTS

Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts
Tallinn, Estonia

April 20-23, 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS

Two themes stand out prominently in discussions, projects and strategies that are at the forefront of contemporary urbanisation. It is, on the one hand, the question of ecology, where the city and architecture are reconceptualised in “green” terms, such as sustainability, resilience, metabolic optimisation and energy efficiency. On the other hand, there is the cybernetic question, where the futures of architecture and urbanisation are staked upon the pervasive use of digital communication, interactive technologies, ubiquitous computing, and the “big data”. Moreover, these two questions have become increasingly intertwined as two facets of a single environmental question: while real-time adjustments, behaviour optimisation and “smart” solutions are central to urban environmental agenda, the omnipresent network of perpetually interacting digital objects constitutes itself as a qualitatively new environment within which urban citizens are enfolded. But, as digital networks become our “second nature,” we also hark back to the models derived from the “first nature.”

There is growing pressure on architects, urbanists and planners to deliver ecological and techno-informational solutions, with (self-)monitoring of citizens “behaviour”, optimisation of the buildings “performance” and smoothing of urban “flows”, along with the respective substitution of democratic politics by automated governance models. As such, it is ever more important to interrogate the historical, theoretical, methodological and epistemological assumptions beneath the above set of processes that can be described, following Michel Foucault, as environmental governmentality. These questions will be explored under three thematic tracks.

———Optimised urban ecosystems

While urbanisation had for centuries relied on nature as its constitutive outside—as a resource and as a fantasy—it is only during the 1970s that the urban-nature dichotomy was subjected to the paradigm of limits and risks. Protection, conservation and sustainability had been institutionalised as regulative planning ideas in the following decades and the city itself was thereby reconceptualised as an ecosystem. More recently, however, urban “ecosystems” are being subjected to the criteria of resilience, and the ideals of harmony and balance replaced with emergence and complexity. Urban planning and development are transformed into variants of metabolic governance, the objective of which is to optimise energy flows, smooth eco-infrastructures, and stimulate ecosystemic self-organisation, even at the price of insulating the optimised, smooth and self-organised from the labour on which it essentially rests.

What are the histories and futures of sustainability, resilience and ecological optimisation and how can they be addressed as epistemic categories beyond their implied “solutionist” imperative? What roles have architectures and urbanisms played in these epistemic transformations? What are the broader political consequences of thinking the city as an ecosystem and urbanisation as a metabolic flow? To what extent is the widely analysed shift from planning and government to management and governance (or from Fordism to post-Fordism more generally) itself rooted in the urban ecological imperative of the last 40 years?

———Architectural turn to nature?

In terms of their relationship with nature, urbanisms and architectures today are caught in a peculiar paradox. On one side these disciplines recognise that there is no pure nature, that nature has been “planetary urbanised”. On the other hand, they are drawn to the idea of pure nature as a blueprint for spatial action. The morphology and morphogenesis of biological organisms inspire ostensibly resourceful tectonic solutions and efficient material performance. The evolutionary model and the ecological cycling of nutrients inspire ostensibly non-deterministic, open-ended models of urbanisation.

But why and how have biomimesis and ecomimesis come to constitute an unquestioned ideal for architecture and urbanism in the first place? What is a more fundamental historical and epistemological stake underneath their biomimetic and ecomimetic impulses? Why has nature, as described by natural sciences, been appropriated as a model and a teacher? Why is nature viewed as inherently efficient and intelligent and how does current architectures’ “turn to nature” differ from earlier such turns? What are the social costs of urbanisms’ green, “clean-tech” imaginations?

———”Big data” and urban subjectification

Similar questions can be directed at the notions of human nature and subjectivity. As the proliferation of data de-stabilises human subjectivity, rendering individuals into profiles and substituting individuation with algorithmic personalisation, the idea of a human-friendly city continues to inform urban design. While we expect that “big data” will help us to better design “for people” and make cities more “liveable”, we tend to ignore how these data simultaneously undo the very meaning of people and life. The ultimate embodiment of this paradox is the “smart city,” wherein puerile idea of a desirable urbanity correlates with the transformation of life into a data stream.

How have the environmental powers of architectures and urbanisms mutated since these disciplines started to unfold subjects in cybernetic environments? Who are the past, present and future subjects of digital governmentality-through-environments? Who is the “smart”, optimised, efficiently behaving and algorithmically desiring citizen? And, in what sense, if any, can they be called a democratic citizen? Have social classes and political parties been replaced by de-territorialised swarms? Has government been replaced by environmental modulation?

——————————————

Authors are welcome to submit analytical papers, theoretically well-grounded case studies, or architectural counter-projects for presentations while indicating their preference for one of the above tracks. At the same time, we ask that their contributions consider specifically how natures and data are intertwined in architectural and urban politics today, how the politics of environments is simultaneously ecological and cybernetic.

Please submit your proposal (max 400 words) and a short bio (max 50 words) to architecturesnaturesdata@gmail.com by November 1, 2016.

Conference keynotes will be given by Matthew Gandy, Antoinette Rouvroy and Douglas Spencer.

For further information, please visit www.architecturesnaturesdata.com.