All Lecture Series Faculty Talks Symposiums Special Lectures

CEO of SBE and SCI-Arc Board of Directors’ member Sam Nazarian will discuss with SBE Chief Creative Officer Teresa Fatino their collaborations on SBE hotels, restaurants and nightclubs in a conversation moderated by SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss.

Sam Nazarian
CEO, SBE

Raised in Los Angeles, Sam Nazarian is the founder and CEO of SBE. Nazarian balances and directs SBE’s operating groups – which include its hotel, restaurant, nightlife, and real estate divisions; as well as Bolthouse Productions and Element Films – in all phases of acquisition, development and management.

From SBE’s first nightclub, Shelter, in 2003 which helped spur the rebirth of the Sunset Strip, to today’s collection of over 10 hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and lounges have reshaped the landscape of Los Angeles and beyond. In just five years, SBE has grown from an initial handful of like-minded people to its current roster of over 2,000 employees. To further SBE’s creative endeavors, Nazarian has personally secured exclusive partnerships with such visionaries as Philippe Starck and chefs Katsuya Uechi, José Andrés and Michael Mina.

In 2006, Nazarian was the youngest executive to be named one of the “Top 100 Most Powerful People in Southern California” by West, the Los Angeles Times’ Magazine and was named among “The Influentials” in Los Angeles magazine. He has also been featured and quoted in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, People, Fortune, W, Variety and The New Yorker. He is also a member of the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s Board of Directors, and generous supporter of the Beverly Hills Education Foundation. Raised in Los Angeles, Nazarian studied at New York University and the University of Southern California. He currently resides in Beverly Hills.

Theresa Fatino
Chief Creative Officer, SBE

Theresa Fatino oversees all aspects of SBE’s branding and design, both for its corporate divisions as well as its growing collection of venues. A chief strategist and architect of the company’s public image and product experiences, Fatino brings a breadth and depth of creativity and expertise to both her overall CCO duties and more specialized brand development responsibilities for SBE’s hotel, restaurant and nightlife divisions.

Fatino oversees all aspects of environmental, interior and graphic design, as well as orchestrates virtually every vital brand touchpoint including staff uniforms, ambient music, collateral, operating supplies, merchandising, brand extensions and retailing for SBE. She is also the organization’s key collaborator with master designer Philppe Starck on the company’s hotel, restaurant and lounge concepts, including the popular Katsuya restaurant brand, recently-opened S Bar and Foxtail, the upcoming SLS Hotels brand and XIV, an upscale supper club opening Fall 2008 on the Sunset Strip.

Founding Principal, NQH Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Architect Ngo Quan Hien is the founder of NQH Architects. He is a Vietnamese American who was born in Saigon and received his architectural training at The Southern California Institute of Architecture in the United States of America and graduated in 1993. With the internationally acclaimed firm of Kenzo Tange Associates (KTA) in Tokyo, he has contributed on several urban design projects and unique building design all over the world for several years. In 1997, he established an initial Ngo Quan Hien design studio in Vietnam starting with the Saigon South New City Detail Master Plan. Nowadays, Ngo Quan Hien design studio is a famous urban planning and architecture company in Vietnam.

NQH Architects assembles an experienced and professional design team educated from local and foreign countries. With the use of models and computer software technology, NQH Architects explores a variety of design solutions for clients. NQH Architects’ overall mission is to pursue the best in urban and architectural design. By carefully maintaining the delicate balance between the urban community, the architecture, and the individual, NQH Architects’ aims to create inspirational, delightful, and timeless architecture that blends naturally into society and into the urban landscape.

The lecture begins at 7pm in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall. All lectures are free and open to the public, with free secure parking in the SCI-Arc parking lot located at 360 Merrick St, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

This lecture was rescheduled from an earlier date.

This lecture presents an overview of several projects pursued over the past five years in laboratories at UC, Santa Barbara. All this research is based on a scientific model of sound initially proposed by Dennis Gabor (1946), and soon afterward extended to music by Iannis Xenakis (1960). Granular analysis (also called atomic decomposition) and granular synthesis has evolved over more than five decades from a paper theory into a broad range of applied techniques. Specific to the granular model is its focus on the microsonic time scale (typically 1 to 100 ms). Granular methods treat sound as a stream of acoustic particles in both the time domain and the time- frequency (TF) domain.

Curtis Roads (Doctorat, Université Paris 8) teaches and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and technology. He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association in 1979. A researcher in computer music at MIT (1980-1986), he also worked in the computer industry for a decade. He was invited to teach electronic music composition at Harvard University, and sound synthesis techniques at the University of Naples. He was appointed Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC (later CCMIX) and Lecturer in the Music Department of the University of Paris VIII. He is currently Professor of Media Arts and Technology + Music, University of California Santa Barbara.

Among his books are the anthologies Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press) and The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press). His textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is widely adopted as a standard classroom text and has been published in French (1999, second edition 2007), Japanese (2001), and Chinese (2008) editions. He edited the anthology Musical Signal Processing in 1997. His book, Microsound (2002, The MIT Press) presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles. Certain of his compositions feature granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. He developed the Creatophone, a system for spatial projection of sound in concert. Another invention is the Creatovox, an expressive new instrument for virtuoso performance that is based on the synthesis of sound particles. The Creatovox, developed in collaboration with Alberto de Campo, was first demonstrated to the public in March 2000.

His composition Clang-tint (1994) was commissioned by the Japan Ministry of Culture (Bunka-cho) and the Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo. His music is available on compact discs produced by the MIT Media Laboratory, Wergo, OR, Mode, and Asphodel. Roads's new book is Composing Electronic Music (forthcoming) Oxford University Press. A new revised edition of The Computer Music Tutorial by The MIT Press is also forthcoming. He is keenly interested in the integration of electronic music with visual and spatial media. Since 2004, he has been researching a new method of sound analysis that is the analytical counterpart of granular synthesis called dictionary-based methods (DBMs). This research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Peter Macapia is an architectural designer and theorist. He is the founder, director, and principal designer of the Design Office for Research and Architecture (labDORA) in New York. Peter has studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, and Columbia University. He started DORA in 2002 as an office investigating problems of geometry, design, computation, and matter after receiving his PhD from Columbia where he was the recipient of the Presidential Fellowships.

In 1999 Peter started teaching at Columbia’s GSAPP on architecture and ontology and has since taught internationally at SCI-Arc, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, the Ecole Special d’Architecture, Malaquais and other schools.

His work and writings have been published internationally and his designs have won distinction in international competitions. In 2007 Peter won the Seroussi Pavilion design competition and in 2008 his project Dirty Geometry 1 and Dirty Geometry 2 were acquired by the FRAC Centre in France for their permanent collection. Currently he is working on his first major urban project, Dirty Geometry Pavilion 1, for Performa, the international biennial of performance art in New York City. His interests involve the problem of geometry in the age of computation, the geometry and topology of matter/energy relations, and the possibility of an elastic density in the contemporary metropolis. Peter was been awarded grants from Columbia University and Pratt Institute to research sustainability, architecture, and urbanism focusing on density, hybrid architecture and infrastructure, and advanced computation.

His upcoming lecture at SCI-Arc titled “The Smell of Geometry” is an investigation of geometry and models of meaning in the age of algorithm and computation.

Benjamin H. Bratton is on the faculties of the University of California, San Diego, where he teaches in the Dept. of Visual Arts, and as primary researcher at CALIT2, and of Southern California Institute of Architecture, where he has taught since 2001. The Culture Industry helps large organizations plan for the overlaps of physical and computational spaces. His research, writing, and practical interests include contemporary social theory, the perils and potentials of pervasive computing, architectural theory and provocation, inverse brand theory, software studies, systems design and development, and the spatial rhetorics of exceptional violence.

Bratton is trained as a sociologist. He is a multi-media theorist working within and across multiple institutional contexts --academic, artistic, corporate, theoretical, projective, literary-- experimenting with their systems of production, and with how the means of representation allowed by each can work in strong and weak relation to each other when bound by the close proximity of a single biography.

His research, writing, and practical interests include contemporary social theory, the perils and potentials of pervasive computing, architectural theory and provocation, inverse brand theory, software studies, systems design and development, and the rhetorics of exceptional violence. Since 2001 he has taught design and theory in the graduate program at SCI-Arc, one of the world's most progressive and experimental architecture schools, and from 2004-08 co-directed the Brand Lab at UCLA Department of Design|Media Arts, and is a Founding Fellow of the Center for Software Studies at CAL-IT2 at UC San Diego.

Among his most recent writings, "The Logisitics of Habitable Circulation," Bratton's introduction to the new edition of Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics was recently published by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Suspicious Images/ Latent Images (with Natalie Jeremijenko) is available for download and purchase from Situated Technologies. 

Bratton has published widely, from AD and Volume to BlackBook and 34, and has been an visiting lecturer and critic at Columbia, Pratt, Yale, Architectural Association of London, Penn, USC, UCLA, Art Center College of Design, Brown, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, among many others.

He was also co-chair of ambient:interface, the 54th (and final) International Aspen Design Conference. This venerable institution,Reyner Banham, for many years, closed with how 'all design is interface design' for our third machine age.

New York City–based architect and associate professor at Columbia University, Michael Bell is the Director of the Core Design Studios as well as Coordinator of Columbia’s Housing Studios. As the Director of the Columbia Project on Housing, Bell teaches planning courses on the development, design and financing of public and affordable housing.

Jean-Pierre Hebert (b. 1939 in Calais, France) lives and works in Santa Barbara. From the 70s on, he has pioneered computational drawing and focuses on defining algorithmic drawing processes and translating them into images in traditional and new media. He has been artist-in-residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara since 2003, and has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2006.

Hebert has exhibited his work internationally at institutions including The Brooklyn Museum (New York), The Kiasma Museum (Helsinki, Finland), The Block Museum at Northwestern University (Chicago), and The Tweed Museum at University of Minnesota (Duluth), and at independent venues including the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Arizona State University Computing Center (Tempe), and the San Luis Obispo Art Center, at galleries including Galerie Alphonse Chave (Vence, France), SolwayJones Gallery (Los Angeles), and DAM (Berlin), and at conferences including Isea, Siggraph and Imagina.

Hebert has coined the word Algorist and founded the Algorists group with Charles Csuri, Manfred Mohr, Ken Musgrave, Roman Verostko, Mark Wilson. His work is present in collections including The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The Brooklyn Museum, The Getty Research Institute, The Block Museum, and the Tweed Museum.

Stan Allen, AIA, is a registered architect, principal of Stan Allen Architect and Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University. From 1989 – 2002, he taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he was also the Director of the Advanced Design Program. He was educated at Brown University (BA, 1978), The Cooper Union (B.Arch, 1981), and Princeton University (M.Arch, 1988). After working for Richard Meier and Partners in New York and Rafael Moneo in Spain, he established his own practice in 1990. His built work to date includes galleries, gardens, workspaces and a number of innovative single-family houses. Current and recent projects include a 45,000 square-meter Contemporary Music Center in Taichung, Taiwan, buildings for the Botanical Garden of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, and at Paju Book City, an “urban wetland” outside of Seoul Korea. A prototype weekend house in Sagaponac, New York is under construction. Parallel to this realized work, he has addressed questions of urbanism, infrastructure and public space through competition work and design research. His architectural projects have been published in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton, 1999) and his theoretical essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (G+B Arts, 2000). Responding to the challenges of contemporary urban life and new technologies in creative ways, SAA has developed an extensive catalogue of architectural and urbanistic strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practices of architecture and urban design. This experimental work is in turn complemented by a series of smaller scale, realized projects that exhibit precision of detailing, formal restraint and spatial invention. In addition to design awards and competition prizes, he has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1986 and 1990), The New York State Council on the Arts (1992), a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), and a Graham Foundation Grant (1993). In 1988 he was winner of the Young Architects Competition at the Architectural League of New York. In 1994 he was selected for the “Emerging Voices” series, and in 1995 for “40 Under 40.” In 2002 he was recognized with the President’s Citation for exceptional contributions to the Architecture Profession from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Tom Farrage, a Californian by birth, studied architecture in Santa Monica and Lugano, Switzerland, at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCIArc) where he received a degree in 1987. After a brief apprenticeship with local architects and fabricators, he founded Tom Farrage/Co. in 1988.

Specializing in the conceptualization, design development and fabrication of unique and artistically-demanding projects, he works primarily in metal, but has also constructed projects in wood, plastic and glass. His clientele consists mainly of award-winning architects and firms such as Morphosis/Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Franklin D. Israel, ROTO as well as special projects for Frank 0. Gehry, Moore Rubel Yudell and Coop Himmelblau. His work has been widely published by leading international art and architecture magazines. In addition, Tom has been a guest lecturer at the UCLA Design Dept., SCI-Arc and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urbanism. He teaches workshops and seminars at local schools as his schedule allows.

In 1993 Tom responded to the increasing demands for his architectural services, by establishing an architectural firm Nakao :: Farrage Architects. Based on a design / build concept they together have completed projects such as Smashbox Studios-Culver City , Chiemsee Clothing-Laguna Beach and are presently engaged in the design and construction of a Maronite Catholic Church in Anaheim, California.

Livio Sacchi (1955), Architect, is full Professor at the School of Architecture of Pescara, “G. D’Annunzio” University of Chieti, President of the Rome Section of Inarch, Istituto Nazionale di Architettura, Counsellor of the Ordine degli Architetti, P.P. e C. di Roma e Provincia. His editorial positions include Editor of the magazine Op.Cit., Selezione della critica d’arte contemporanea, Vice-editor of the magazine il Progetto and Editor for Architecture, Urban planning, Design and Art for the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana – Treccani.

Sacchi was among the curators of the XVII Milan Triennale as well as one of the curators of the travelling exhibition “From Futurism to a Possible Future in Contemporary Italian Architecture;” organized at the CNAPPC, Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti, Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori and by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and which has travelled to Tokyo, Kobe, Kuala Lumpur, Brussels, Oslo, Reykjavik, Caracas and Istanbul. He was also among the curators of the Italian Pavilion for the 10th Venice Architectural Biennale.

Among his many books include Il disegno dell’architettura americana, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1989; La rappresentazione della modernità, in Richard Meier, Electa, Milano 1993; L’idea di rappresentazione, Kappa, Roma 1994; L’architettura del Rinascimento e L’architettura del Manierismo, in Dalla architettura al design, L’Italia e la formazione della cultura europea, UTET, Torino 1994; L.A., California, Modo, Milano 1998; Daniel Libeskind, Museo ebraico Berlino, Testo & immagine, Torino 1998; Il Novecento, in Topocronologia dell’architettura europea, Zanichelli, Bologna 1999; Architettura e cultura digitale (ed.), Skira, Milano 2003; Tokyo, City and architecture, Skira, Milan 2004 (Flammarion, Paris 2004; Rizzoli-Universe, New York 2004).

His recent architectural projects include the New Korean Evangelical Church in Rome (2007).

His projects and essays are published by many Italian and international magazines such as: Abitare, AD, Architectural Design, Anfione e Zeto, Any, l’Arca, l’Architettura, cronaca e storia, Area, Casa Vogue, Contributi, Costruire in laterizio, CR, Costruttori romani, d'A, d'Architettura, Disegnare/idee immagini, Disegno, Disegno Industriale, Domus, Domus web, Ecclesia, Il Giornale dell’Architettura, L'Industria delle costruzioni, Integra, Lotus International, Metamorfosi, Modo, Op. Cit., Selezione della critica d’arte contemporanea, Paesaggio urbano, Palladio, Phalaris, Piano Progetto Città, il Progetto, Quaderni Di, Rassegna, Nuovi orientamenti dell’architettura, Specchio, Ulisse, il Venerdì, and XY, dimensioni del disegno.

Livio Sacchi currently lives and works in Rome, Italy.

Eric Owen Moss holds Masters degrees in Architecture from both Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Eric Owen Moss Architects was founded in 1973. The office, located in Los Angeles, California, is currently staffed with twenty-five professionals designing and constructing projects in the United States and around the world. The firm has garnered over sixty design awards from Progressive Architecture magazine and the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1999, Moss won the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2001 the firm won the LAAIA Gold Medal for Design; and in 2003, Moss won the Gold Medal Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California at Berkeley.

There are ten published monographs on the Moss office, including three by Rizzoli and one, Gnostic Architecture by Monacelli Press. Most recent is Eric Owen Moss—The Uncertainty of Doing, published by Skira in 2006.

Moss continues to build, teach, lecture and exhibit. In 2002, the firm won two competitions in St. Petersburg, Russia, one for the New Mariinsky Theatre, the second for the redevelopment of New Holland. In 2003, Eric Owen Moss Architects won the international competition for the Queens Museum of Art in New York. In 2006, they won the Future Cities competition—LA, NY, Chicago —sponsored by the History Channel. The firm has featured regularly at the Venice Biennale, with exhibits that have included the controversial proposal for the New Mariinsky at the Russian Pavilion in 2002, and the international competition entries for the National Library in Mexico City and the Smithsonian Institute in 2004. In 2006, the firm exhibited the Los Angeles/Culver City project in the Cities, Architecture, and Society section.

Eric Owen Moss first taught at SCI-Arc in 1974, and was appointed director in 2002. He has held chairs at Yale and Harvard universities, and appointments at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna and the Royal Academy in Cohenhagen.

Elena Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later from University of California Los Angeles (Master of Architecture and Urban Design). She is the principal of Atelier Manferdini, a design office that specializes in the cutting edge of computer-aided design of exotic forms.

Because of her combination of degrees, Elena Manferdini's practice applies construction and manufacturing technologies from the engineering field to architecture, object design and fashion. Atelier Manferdini is designing for numerous industries and is currently collaborating with Fiat, Nike, Alessi, Guzzini, Ottaviani, Leucos, Valentino and FolliFollie. Manferdini's architectural projects have been exhibited internationally in both architecture and art museums: her work was showcased at Skin and Bones at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Recently she was invited to curate the West Coast USA session of the Beijing Biennale exhibition and she designed the West Coast pavilion for the Chinese Millennium Museum. Elena Manferdini has been featured in several publications, including Domus, New York Times, Elle, Vogue, ID, Icon, Form, Contemporary, Metropolis, and Architectural Design.

In addition to leading her design practice, Elena Manferdini teaches design studios and seminar at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Robert Davolio is the principal of Form and Structure, a consulting company in Hong Kong specializing in 3D designs and construction projects in a hands-on environment, ranging from design and incorporation of structural engineering detailing to procurement and international production supervision. He developed an interest in long span structures and integration of architecture and engineering while completing his Masters degree at Columbia University. As the project manager at engineering firm Advanced Structures Inc. in Los Angeles, he worked on the Umbrella building in Culver City for Eric Owen Moss Architects, and has also worked for Foster and Partners on Beijing Airport and the National Museum in Beijing.

Evan Roth (aka fi5e) is an artist with interests in technology, tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture. Roth graduated from the University of Maryland with a B.S. in architecture. After working as an autocad monkey for a year in DC and another two in LA he returned to the east coast to attend the Parsons Design + Technology MFA program where he was awarded a 5' plastic trophy for graduating as valedictorian. During this time he developed Typographic Illustration, Explicit Content Only, Graffiti Taxonomy and his thesis project, Graffiti Analysis.

After Parsons, Evan spent two years experimenting in creative open source R&D at the Eyebeam OpenLab where he created a slew of projects and co-founded the Graffiti Research Lab. Currently Roth is teaching MFA courses at Parsons ranging from visual programming to internet fame to geek graffiti (a course labeled "an invitation to break the law" by city council memeber Peter Vallone Jr.), and is in the process of co-founding F.A.T. (Free Art & Technology), Brooklyn's first and only R&D lab for the public domain.

Roth's projects have recently shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Moma, the Tate, the New Museum, and on BET. Evan's work has been published in the New York Times, Time magazine, Rolling Sone, and Esquire, and is the number one return for the google search "bad ass mother fucker".

Evan lives in Hong Kong with his wife and enjoys spending his free time violating laws related to copyright and vandalism. Current and past work is archived at evan-roth.com.

Jessica D’Elena is a media designer working in animation and web development in Los Angeles, CA. Her independent artistic and cultural focus for the last 5 years has been a sociological study of postmodernism, technology, gender identification, and urban landscape dynamics. She uses several platforms including photography, video production, print, and other digital means as her primary channels for communication.

Jason Payne has worked as project designer for Reiser + Umemoto/RUR Architects and Daniel Libeskind Studio and co-partnered the award winning office Gnuform, best known for the NGTV™ Bar (2006 AIA Design Award) and the 2006 PS1 entry “Purple Haze.” With the launch of his new office, Hirsuta, Payne continues to promote a new materialism with a distinctly sensual bias. Informed by intensive research and an experimental approach, his work engages material dynamics in the production of form to create a direct appeal to the senses.

Hirsuta pursues both built and speculative projects, generally at the small to medium-scale. The office is a full service architectural, interior, landscape, and object design firm specializing in advanced form and the integration of emerging technologies in construction. Payne’s work and research is characterized by unusual couplings of intrinsic architectural values with such exotic extrinsic influences as botany and hairstyling. His work establishes credibility for these strange hybrids and is distinguished by its extreme specificity, technical complexity, commitment to materialization, and the frequent use of rich colors and textures.

Payne has established a reputation as a leading designer in his generation. His work of recent years is credited as being a major influence in pushing digital design and fabrication away from an overt focus on technique and process toward the explicit celebration of product, experience, affect, and atmosphere. He holds degrees from SCI-Arc and Columbia, and is currently on faculty at UCLA.