ABOUT

Marcelo López-Dinardi is an immigrant, researcher and educator based between Bryan, TX and New York City, and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University. He is also Partner of A(n) Office. Before joining A&M he taught at Barnard+Columbia, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Penn Design, Pratt Institute, and RISD. He holds a B.Arch. from the PUPR and a MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in architecture from the GSAPP, Columbia University.

Recent collaborators include: Tyrene Calvesbert, Mitch McEwen, Isabelle-Kirkham Lewitt, Harrison Ratcliff-Bush, Marina Otero Verzier, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, Francisco Díaz, Oscar Oliver-Didier, Pier Paolo Pala, Chau Tran, Yuliya Veligurskaya.

CONTACT

UNNATURAL DISASTER

The project Spatializing Debt: A Visual Audit was presented at Columbia GSAPP after an invitation by the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from Columbia University during the panel Unnatural Disaster: Infrastructure in Puerto Rico before, during, and after Hurricane Maria on November 9, 2018.

More information about the event and its video recording can be accessed here.

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‘IN-BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL: LOCATING GORDON MATTA-CLARK AND ARCHITECTURE’ AT ACSA-MARFA

In-Between the Physical and the Psychological: Locating Gordon Matta-Clark and Architecture, is a research-paper presented during the Fall Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture–MARFA, TX conference. The paper discuss the paternal/architectural weight of the artist-trained architect Gordon Matta-Clark and his father the surrealist painter–also trained architect Roberto Matta. Examining the archive of his works at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal it interrogates the archive as content but also as site from where to have access to his work in an anarchivic way, similar to his anarchitecture. 

Author, 2017.

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SPATIALIZING DEBT: A VISUAL AUDIT

Spatializing Debt: A Visual Auditing examines the intersection of architecture, political economy and visual imaginaries with the logics of state-financial debt under Puerto Rico’s current status, by giving territorial, spatial, and visual dimension to the so-called public debt.

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Investment Firms Information by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo of Puerto Rico.

Researcher, ongoing, 2017.

COCA – MADRID

COCA was the First Congress in Architectural Communication held at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM). I presented during the ‘Pedagogical Actions’ panels the work Spatial and Body Transactions developed by Barnard+Columbia students during the spring 2017 semester. It explored the conditions for transactions in an educational setting, that of the Barnard and Columbia campus in NYC. The project asks, where and how are formulated the transactions defining the codes for space and the body interaction. These relations are understood here to be a complex design and cultural operation of spatial, formal, legal, visual, political, aesthetic, and performative capacities. Projects ranged from archive research and documentation through drawing, photography, augmented reality or video.

Instructor, 2017.

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IDEAS CITY ARLES

Ideas City Arles was a week-long residency program organized by New York’s New Museum in collaboration with Luma Foundation (Luma Arles). “IdeasCity is a collaborative, civic, creative platform of the New Museum in New York that starts from the premise that art and culture are essential to the future vitality of cities.” Ideas City Arles considered the countryside and the challenges for a city in a “bioregion.”

Fellow participant, 2017.

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DOES A SURFACE SPEAK?

Does A Surface Speak? was my contribution for the collective exhibition, “Yes I’ve Had A Facelift, But Who Han’t” curated by Shyan Rahimi, Jessica Kwok and Adjustments Agency. Does A Surface Speak? is part monologue, part interrogation, part repository, and interactive piece that ask questions to the way (mostly) architectural surfaces are perceived and treated. The work engages with two forms of writing that have taken place in time over the existing walls of the former Bethlehem Church, an exceptional building within a historically contested neighborhood. One of the forms of writing is the graffiti that characterized the building before its “restoration” in 2014, and the current subtle overlaid texts by artist Robert Barry, remnants of a previous exhibition. Does A Surface Speak? utilizes augmented reality as a way to overlay questions to the treatment of these two forms of writing in the preservation histories without having to erase or add another surface.

Author, 2017.

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To see the work “off-site” download Aurasma app and search/follow speakingsurface and follow the pamphlet here: Does A Surface Speak pamphlet

Site specific at Bethlehem Church, Los Angeles, printed pamphlet and augmented reality app (Aurasma), April 9, 2017.

PROMISED AIR AT MoCAD

Promised Land Air, A(n) Office’s contribution to the 2016 US Pavilion for the architecture Venice Biennale, is now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit in its first tour stop. Projects will be on display in Detroit until April 16 and will continue their tour to Los Angeles. More about the project here.

Researcher, Designer, 2016.

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PUBLIC ASSEMBLIES OF WORK

PUBLIC(S) ASSEMBLIES OF WORK was a graduate architecture studio at NJIT that considers what and who constitutes the publics (in plural) of the town of Harrison, New Jersey, and how their identification and critical analysis can inform the production of a program and a project for architecture, or an assembly of work. The studio investigated subjects, communities, legal frameworks, technology and contemporary forms of work that are informed by or resist the neoliberal logic of economical performance metrics as well as our service and sharing economies. The studio was informed by various authors ideas and research about work in a our contemporary society, where the future has no particular form yet. The public was understood here as a plural condition including public as: subjects, spaces, infrastructure, commons, non-private, or interface.

Studio Instructor, 2016.

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THE MEDIA OF ARCHITECTURE: PRINT, EXHIBITIONS, AND COMMUNICATIONS AT COLUMBIA GSAPP

“The Media of Architecture: Print, Exhibitions, and Communications at Columbia GSAPP” December 9, 12:30pm at GSAPP Incubator / New Inc.

Rather than examine these methods within the production of architecture itself, this event explores architectural narratives as they are expressed within academic, critical, and cultural settings. We will consider the role of exhibition making, print and digital publications, as well as communications strategies with senior staff members from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. How might the exhibitions, events, publications, and social media content produced by an architecture school such as Columbia GSAPP provide a useful case study for evaluating design storytelling on a broader scale?

Speakers
Steffen Boddeker, Senior Director of Communications and Events, GSAPP
James Graham, Director of Publications, GSAPP
Irene Sunwoo, Director of Exhibitions, GSAPP
Moderated by Marcelo López-Dinardi, Partner, A(n) Office and GSAPP Incubator Alumnus

If you are not part of the GSAPP Incubator or NEW INC community and would like to attend this event, please send your RSVP to: aes2280@columbia.edu.

More info here.

INCUBATING NEW YORK

“Incubating New York” will take place at the GSAPP, Columbia University on December 2, 2016 at 1pm. A panel discussion about the ideas and work developed during my residency at the GSAPP Incubator between 2015-2016.

More info here and video recording of the event here.

IDEAS CITY ATHENS

IDEAS CITY Athens was a week-long residency program organized by New York’s New Museum in collaboration with Neon Foundation. “The five-day residency will bring together emerging practitioners working at the intersection of community activism, art, design, architecture, and technology in cities around the world. IdeasCity Fellows will live and work in the Athens Conservatory and will transform the space into a multifunctional hub of cultural activity [it] will observe Athens from the perspective of two key forces that are defining cities today: the flow of humanity and the flow of capital.” 

Fellow participant, 2016.

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US PAVILION 2016 PROMISED L-A-N-D AIR

Promised L-a-n-d Air, the A(n) Office proposal for Mexicantown/Southwest Detroit, engages the consequences of North American infrastructure for urban housing, industrial plants, international institutions, and air quality. The program for the almost 10-acre site is conceived as layers of remediation–remediating the displacement of nearby residents, remediating the proliferation of trucks in residential neighborhoods, and remediating the air pollution emitted by industry and diesel engines.

Exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Researcher, Designer, 2016.

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UNDISCIPLINED CMU: A DESIGN-BUILD MASONRY STUDIO

UNDISCIPLINED CMU: A DESIGN-BUILD MASONRY STUDIO is the book that document the project of the same name. The book was done during the Summer of 2015 in collaboration with Pier Paolo Pala, Chau Tran and Yuliya Veligurskaya, students who took part on the Spring semester making the project. The book is available for purchase here and to view online here.

Studio Instructor, Editor, 2015.

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UNDISCIPLINED CMU

UNDISCIPLINED CMU is the second iteration of a second year undergraduate studio project at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in which a construction is developed as part of a masonry studio. Material is investigated as a given condition and turned into an unexpected object after intense exploration. The resultant object is a concrete construction that, as an education device, opened the possibilities of reimagining and reconsidering the banality of the most typical, and less valued material in the construction industry, by literally cutting it; aiming for an expanded consideration of disciplinary knowledge and industry in the academic setting.

Students: Mariza Antonio, Spoorthi Bhatta, Rawad El-Aawar, Monica Girgis, Freddy Martínez, Brian Mourato, Chit Yee Ng, Joel Nuñez, Pier Paolo Pala, Eliott Pérez, Lauren Rose, María Silva, Roman Schorniy, Chau Tran, Yuliya Veligurskaya, Jeffrey Youmans.
Studio Instructor, 2015.

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SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Spatial Construction: Occupying a Grid is an exercise for the Introduction to Architecture and Visual Culture studio for non-majors at Barnard and Columbia. It is focused on the better understanding of space within a set of given parameters. First, it will work around a virtual cubic structure (12″x12″)that will contain a formal grid. This will define one “spatial” and “formal” boundary to be enhanced, explored, challenged or disrupted. Second, following your home-to-studio-trip record and experience, you will elaborate a spatial construction based –but not limited to– your trip. 

Studio Instructor, 2015-16.

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ASCENDING, DURATION, ROOMS

Ascending, Duration and Rooms (13:54 each) are the three short films based on the un-construction of the House Opera in Detroit. Each film disassemble and reconstruct the footage of one-week of work into three themes: sound, time and space respectively. Exhibited at the BEB Gallery in the Rhode Island School of Design as part of the exhibition and lecture Methods and Media, 2015.

Filmed by Marcelo López-Dinardi
Text by Mitch McEwen
Edited by Tyrene Calvesbert

Author, 2015.

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METHODS AND MEDIA

Methods and Media is an exhibition and a lecture at the BB Gallery of the Rhode Island School of Design after an invitation by faculty members Emanuel Admassu and Aaron Forrest. 

Methods and Media, the exhibition, is the exploration of the unconstruction process of the A(n) Office/McEwen Studio House Opera, as I video-documented it during a single week in Detroit. The exhibition includes three 13:57 minutes films, Duration, Ascending and Rooms, and one 1:52 minutes video showing the transformed house. Each film shows a rather systematic approach to the measured capacities of the video-media, and dissects the five-days of footage, analyzing the time-extensions of each clip taken, the sound variations, and the ambiguous perception of space through the camera lens.

Exhibition Design, Curatorial Framework, Lecturer, 2015.

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THE DAY AFTER THE CARNIVAL

The Day After the Carnival: The Hangover of Work (in Late Capitalism) was a graduate studio taught at Penn Design in the University of Pennsylvania, inquiring the intersection of work-production as a mode of carnivalesque action in the form of hangover. Students researched and draw existing program-buildings near Northern Liberties, analyzed their local-global logics, composed programmatic drawings, developed strategies and formulated and architectural assembly combining them all, including a large cultural programming.

Studio Instructor, 2016.

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HOUSE OPERA | OPERA HOUSE

The House Opera project seeks, through architectural innovation, to propose a fertile alternative to the blight binary of neglect versus demolition. The project seeks to explore what might occur when the borders of a house open up to annihilate the borders between art and community, makers and receivers of art, museums and home.
House Opera | Opera House aims to open and produce new possibilities of public engagement for architecture as a discipline and for houses as a built typology, investigating the means by which a formerly vacant house may serve as a node of cultural infrastructure. As historian Reinhold Martin argues, infrastructure is what is reproduced (financial, political or social infrastructures), the House Opera | Opera House is the product and produces communal infrastructures.
The House Opera | Opera House was originated and led by Mitch McEwen when she bought the house and received funding by grants from the Knight Foundation, Graham Foundation, University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and individual donors from a crowdsourcing campaign with matched funds by Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

Location: 1620 Morrell Street, Southwest Detroit, Michigan, USA
Designers: Marcelo López-Dinardi, Mitch McEwen, A(n) Office, McEwen Studio
Structural Consultant: Sarah Millsaps Towles
Collaborators: Ye Fu, Salam Rida, Rebecca Curtis, Juan Martínez
Video documentation here.
House Opera website here.

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URBAN_NEXT INTERVIEWS

urbanNext* conducted three interviews on my “work with A(n) Office” in Detroit, a “Designer’s Approach” and my “Curatorial Approach” for the US Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. 

They can be accessed here.

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* urbanNext is an online platform aiming to generate a global network to produce content focused on rethinking architecture through the contemporary urban milieu.

 

REPLACING SPLITTING

Artist Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting’s house photographs were superimposed in the location where the house stood before demolition in 1974. Re-placing took place on April 2013 in Englewood, New Jersey.

RE-PLACING SPLITTING is part of Destructive Knowledge: Tools for Learning to Un-Dō, a theoretical investigation between docility, knowledge and discipline through the artist’s work.

Physical Installation, Digital Photograph, Author, 2013.

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CMU I

A complement to the 2nd year studios at the New Jersey Institute of Technology students work on a masonry build-mock-up, a competition based project in which students create a masonry construction with the help of masons, typical solid CMU blocks were cut in order to create the space of “staged interactions” within the school environment. The inquiry of the concrete masonry unit, the most typical construction element, offered the opportunity to reconsider a usually overlooked material and its capacities. First prize.

Studio Instructor, 2014.

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URBAN INTERVENTIONS I

Barnard + Columbia Introduction to Architecture and Visual Culture studio for non-majors in architecture. Students were asked to develop a Urban Intervention based on active verbs that they first enacted in person. Verbs were interpreted and informed by the students’ body through conceptual drawings, then translated into site-specific interventions.

Studio Instructor, 2014.

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ARCHITECTURE OF INDUSTRIOUSNESS

Architecture of Industriousness is a short text part of House Housing: An Untimely History ofArchitecture and Real Estate in Nineteen Episodes, exhibition’s pamphlet, made for the traveling exhibition Venice’s Casa Muraro during the summer of 2014, and off-Venice Biennale site. Also available on the web at http://www.house-housing.com. 

Research and Production Coordinator for the Venice part of the exhibition by the Buell Center of the Study of American Architecture, 2014.

 

 

POST-SPECULATION ACT I

Post-Speculation Act I was an exhibition at P! Gallery featuring HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN. A project with A(n) Office, we designed the exhibition and installation of multimedia images and videos, as well as objects. 28 screens where displaying news and artists’ work related to urgent racial issues, subverting the typical surveillance display into a revealing and exposure device. It engaged the public audience of the street outside as well as the gallery visitors from within.

Designer, 2014.

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VISITING SPLITTING

Visiting Splitting was a film screening and conversation held around two films depicting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting work, including the film Visit To Humphrey Street House, a first public screening after revealing the film from the artist’s archive. In discussion with Kelly Baum, Jessamyn Fiore, GH Hovagimyan and Mark Wigley. Event held at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Moderator, Organizer, 2014.

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Image courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada.

More info about the event, including video documentation, can be found here.

LOCATING OUT-SOURCING

PG-Arch, a project for the exhibition Locating Out-sourcing at Studio-X Mumbai, departs from the acronyms used in the industry as a provocation for its architecture, from the Perfectly Generic Architecture (equivalent to the Professional Golf Association) to a Politically Generated Architecture. Photo shows Pangea3 headquarters, one of the largest legal-outsourcing services provider based in New York and Mumbai (photo by author, 23″x23″).

Curator, Designer, Participant, 2013.

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PROMISCUOUS ENCOUNTERS

Promiscuous Encounters, a day-long event held at the GSAPP in March 2012, examined the interplay between the critical, curatorial, and conceptual capacities of architecture, neither audio nor video recordings were made.

This publication is, then, the vehicle for the event’s documentation and the site where the interpretations of both participants and audience are made public, thereby contributing to build up the vocabulary for a theory of promiscuous practice.

Contributors: Keller Easterling, Andrés Jaque, Reinhold Martin, Mitch McEwen, Markus Miessen, Felicity D. Scott, Pelin Tan, Rodrigo Tisi, and Mark Wasiuta.
Publisher: GSAPP Books / Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Editors: Francisco Díaz, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, Marcelo López-Dinardi, Marina Otero-Verzier
Designer: Dsñotipo – Gabriel Piovanetti and Luis Antonio Díaz.

Available here.

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PROMISCUOUS ENCOUNTERS: ADRESSING/ASSESING ADHOCRACY

Promiscuous Encounters: Addressing/Assessing Adhocracy, a day-long event held at the Galata Greek School after an invitation form the curatorial team for the first Istanbul Design Biennial in November 2012, examined the exhibition ADHOCRACY curated by Joseph Grima through the lens of: invisibility, design, value and commons.

Participants: Ethel Baraona Pohl, Ute Meta Bauer, Francisco Díaz, Bogachan Dundarlp, Joseph Grima, Nikolaus Hirsch, Omer Kanipak, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, Marcelo López-Dinardi, Marina Otero-Verzier, Erhan Oze, Felicity D. Scott, Pelin Tan, Mark Wasiuta.

Organizer, Moderator, 2012.

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INTERPRETATIONS: PROMISCUOUS ENCOUNTERS

Interpretations: Promiscuous Encounters, a day-long event held at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in March 2012, examined the interplay between the critical, curatorial, and conceptual capacities of architecture, and their promises exchanges. Neither audio nor video recordings were made.

Participants: Keller Easterling, Andrés Jaque, Reinhold Martin, Mitch McEwen, Markus Miessen, Felicity D. Scott, Pelin Tan, Rodrigo Tisi, and Mark Wasiuta.

Curated by: Francisco Díaz, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, Marcelo López-Dinardi, Marina Otero-Verzier.

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