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UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Students to Represent U.S. at First International Architecture Biennale in the Netherlands

International event opens in Rotterdam May 7

UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design has been invited to represent the United States in the first International Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which takes place from May 7 to July 7.

Members of the UCLA team, under the direction of assistant professor Robert Somol, are Diego Arraigada, Brennan Buck, Penelope Dean, Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Georgina Huljich, Alexandra Loew, Danh Nguyen, Clare Olsen and Bianca Siegl.

The Biennale’s theme — mobility and infrastructure — will be explored in a diverse program consisting of multimedia exhibits, debates, lectures, publications and festival events.

The Biennale seeks to establish interdisciplinary discussion among architects, engineers, planners, urban and environmental designers, film producers, photographers, property developers, politicians and government commissioners, related professionals, critics, and journalists. It also seeks to foster a lively climate of dialogue, discussion and interaction and to become a laboratory for experimentation, a forum for interdisciplinary collaboration, a think-tank for visionary concepts and an international meeting point.

The Netherlands Architecture Institute will form the hub of the Biennale. Its galleries will be used for the main architecture in urban design exhibition, “World Avenue,” which focuses on how mobility (re)shapes the city and its landscape, now and in the future. This major exhibition highlights research findings as well as aspects of mobility as experienced culturally by daily road users around the world.

The research and design tasks will be performed by 10 internationally recognized schools of architecture from Belgium, China, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, the United States and the Netherlands.

The Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA will represent the United States through work focusing on Los Angeles and its freeway system. The nine UCLA students will be traveling to Rotterdam in late April to install their component of the exhibition, entitled “Manifest Mobility.”

Perhaps more than anywhere else, the freeway system in Los Angeles is not simply a neutral infrastructure but exists as a dynamic landscape and disciplining institution, a site of spectacle and media events, a moving scene of collective imagination and desire. It is arguably the one great public space of the city.

Thus, despite the fact that it may be the “youngest” of the case-study cities, Los Angeles has the longest and most intensive involvement with automobility and highway infrastructure as the primary informing agents of metropolitan life and morphology. It is the Rome of freeway culture.

The UCLA installation will be composed of four possible scenarios for the future of the Los Angeles freeway system and its culture of mobility.