HOME-OFFICE: MESO-COSM Exhibition (HdSd)
Monday, September 18, 2023
6:00 pm -
MESO-COSM is a multimedia exhibition examining the relationship between architecture and large-scale ecosystem experiments in the Gulf Coast region, speculating on future forms of urbanization in Houston’s periphery. The exhibition presents 9 mesocosm case studies, 4 architectural experiments, and 1 full-scale prototype.
For more information, visit www.home-office.co/meso-cosm.
Project Leads: Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting
Design & Research Team: Anna Brancaccio, Nino Chen, Maximilien Chong Lee Shin, Harish Krishnamoorthy, Jane Van Velden
MESO-COSM is sponsored by the Hines Scholar as Design/Design as Scholar (HdSd) Program of the Undergraduate Architecture Program at the Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. The exhibition is also funded by the Diluvial Houston Initiative, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-supported project, and Rice Architecture.
About HOME-OFFICE
Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rice University and co-founder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. Her work examines the relationship between architecture, collective life, and environmental care. She previously taught at the University of Michigan as the 2017-2018 Willard A. Oberdick Fellow. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Routledge, 2023), and guest editor, with Albert Pope, of the special issue Log 60: The Sixth Sphere (Winter/Summer 2024).
Daniel Jacobs is an Instructional Assistant Professor in Architecture at the University of Houston and co-founder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. His work centers around the labor production and material ecologies of the built environment. He previously taught at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and practiced as an Associate at SHoP Architects in New York. Daniel is a registered architect in Texas and New York.
About the Hines Design as Scholar/Scholar as Design (HdSd)
This exhibition is part of the undergraduate architecture program’s new “Hines Design as Scholar/Scholar as Design” initiative, turning the spotlight to topic / advanced-level studios focusing on exploring design topics and opening lines of speculative design, research, and exploration in the context of global evolution, where faculty and practitioners respond critically to the emerging challenges of the 21st century.
Each semester, a curated list of renowned faculty covers different areas of inquiry: the global to the local; the environmental crisis to new digital imaginaries; contemporary ecological realities to novel material practices; and the molecular to the territorial. Topics evolve and change each year in response to global and local dynamics and to architectural discourse. At this level, the studios collaborate with academic themes to develop prompts and coordinate mini-lecture series, discussions, and juries, creating an extraordinary accumulation of drawings, essays, and new premises for fresh architecture agendas.
About the Lecture Series
Adaptation implies a response to change. To adapt means to adjust, modify, and alter one’s response to changes in its various forms: slow, radical, planetary, and local. Adaptation suggests acknowledging new ways, ideas, technologies, and mindsets reacting and responding to possible futures, messy pasts, and complex contexts. Adaptation also refers to switching genres and media to serve better communication or to reach new audiences.
The processes of adaptation are often not as transparent as we would like them to be. They invite analyses, careful investigations, and debates on usefulness, functionality, reuse, ruin, and waste. Adaptation may sometimes mean finding ways to survive conditions that are not ideal and out of control, whereas to adapt may mean recalibrating one’s expectations to fit into new paradigms. As we confront inequities emerging from discrimination, gentrification, and climate change, among other global shifts, adaptation is everywhere.
Our lecture series cuts across geographies and disciplines to look at crises and inflection points, changing extraction and expert cultures, mutating legal, regulatory, and mapping systems, preservation and surgical interventions, and innovative and interdisciplinary construction practices.
- Location
- Mashburn Gallery, Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design