Lisa Iwamoto is Founding Partner with Craig Scott of IwamotoScott Architecture. IwamotoScott has received numerous awards including the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices and Young Architects, Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard, over twenty AIA Design Awards, a P/A Award and numerous other architecture and interior awards. Their work has been published in hundreds of journals, and exhibited in over fifty museums and galleries. Lisa received her Master of Architecture degree with Distinction from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Structural Engineering from the University of Colorado. She is author of Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques published in 2009 by Princeton Architectural Press, and is Professor at the University of California Berkeley.
In Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative” from 1969, two voids: one, the edge of an existing canyon; the other, a machine-made cut, intersect to infer a third – the double negative. This artwork and the wider spatial implications of the double negative serve as touchstones for our work; we privilege the design of void and volume over syntax and surface. Unlike earthwork sculpture however, architecture cannot rely upon the mere act of digging to unveil the magical and unified confluence of form, site, space and material. Instead, we grapple with how to create resonance, abstraction and multiple readings using formal geometry and common building materials assembled in innovative ways. This has become a pervasive question in our work where we try to achieve a unique design synthesis across multiple scales. Lisa Iwamoto will discuss the work of her firm, currently in a moment of transition from installations and speculative proposals toward building.
