Mar 20th 2017

CLOUD TALK: Kelly Shannon

Kelly Shannon will deliver the SOM Architecture and Urbanism Cloud Talk, "Settling Waters, Design Agency for Environmental & Social Justice," at 2 p.m. on Mon., March 27 in S.R. Crown Hall.

The lecture will briefly review the contemporary political context and its disturbing challenges that undermine climate change policies, as well as the parallel wave of movements that are rising to confront the neoliberal and technocratic order. It will then propose a series of principles to re-engage design as a form of resistance and specifically focus on projects that traverse scales from territorial reorganization to settlement structures. The case studies presented all have an inherent water logic that is disturbed by new manmade and natural regimes; design must resettle waters – from entire landscape morphologies to housing typologies.

Kelly Shannon is professor of Architecture and Spatial Sciences and Director of the Graduate Program of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California. She holds a part-time appointment as professor of Urbanism, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Architecture at KU Leuven. Shannon’s design research is at the intersection of interpretative mapping, projective cartography, urbanism and landscape. Her research engages numerous contexts (Belgium, Estonia, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, etc.), primarily in the public sector, and focuses on the development of robust landscape structures as a form of resilience at the territorial and urban design scales. She is co-founder of Research Urbanism and Architecture (RUA) whose projects include the master plan revision for Cantho (2013), the ongoing revision of the master plan for the Mekong Delta (from 2015), both in Vietnam, and was a member of the winning team for Pershing Square ReNew (in LA) with Agence Ter (2016). She co-edits the book series UFO: Explorations of Urbanism (Park Books, Zurich), was co-editor of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA) from 2000-15, and co-authored the book, "The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure" (2010). Before entering academia, she obtained her architect's license (NY) and worked at Mitchell/Giurgola (NYC), Hunt Thompson (London), Renzo Piano Building Workshop (Genoa) and Gigantes/Zenghelis (Athens). She received a B.Arch from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.Arch from the Berlage Institute, and a Doctorate in Applied Sciences: Architecture from KU Leuven.