In recent years, the topic of infrastructure has seen renewed interest from the fields of architecture and landscape architecture. In the case of the former, this has ranged from Frank Gehry’s work on the LA River and Michael Maltzan’s work on the Sixth Street Aquaduct to Bjarke Ingels’ resilient strategy for Manhattan. At the same time, most of this work is being engaged by multidisciplinary teams, in which architecture plays only one role within a larger field of actors.

The questions that emerge from this new reality are largely disciplinary in nature, and touch on issues of expertise, competence, education and licensure. They ask whether the profession of architecture represents specialist or generalist knowledge, whether design education should be retooled in response to these transformations, and if it is possible we are seeing the emergence of a new, synthetic and a-disciplinary model of practice. Or does the participation in such work by architecture merely signal a new type of expansionist dilettantism? The Realignments Symposium will attempt to offer to some provisional thoughts on these ongoing disciplinary transformations.

Moderator: Jason Rebillot, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Graduate Architecture, Woodbury University School of Architecture

Speakers: Aleksandra Jaeschke, Adjunct Faculty at Woodbury University School of Architecture and co-founder studio AION; Courtney Coffman, Adjunct Faculty at Woodbury University School of Architecture and co-director at Materials & Applications; Aja Bulla-Richards, Adjunct Faculty at Woodbury University School of Architecture and Creative Director, Arid Land Institute; Alan Loomis, Adjunct Faculty at Woodbury University School of Architecture and Deputy Director of Urban Design, City of Glendale

Woodbury University, Burbank CA, March 28, 2017