School of Architecture Lecture Series
When
Over-Exposed
The lecture will discuss past and current work that seeks to reconstitute the U.S–Mexico border environment as design protagonist and its built environment
as design outcome, invigorating models for design research within the transboundary territorial field.
The work investigates the interconnected events of climate change, desertification, and urbanization as they unfold in this militarized context of the border and produces design methods to improve urban lives.
About the Speakers
Ersela Kripa is a Professor and Associate Vice Provost at Texas Tech University, where she is also the Director the Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso, and Director of Projects at the research center POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Stephen Mueller is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University and Director of Research at POST.
They are registered architects and founding partners of AGENCY, located on the US–Mexico border. AGENCY engages emerging publics in conflictual contexts by developing methods to identify and subvert subperceptual urban and atmospheric phenomena that endanger human rights. AGENCY’s work has been exhibited at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Their awards include the Rome Prize in Architecture, the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, among others.
Their book FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (AR+D, 2020), compiles original urban research and analysis, revealing the geography of codependence between the global security complex and urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates.
About the Firm
AGENCY is a collaborative interdisciplinary practice engaging contemporary culture through architecture, urbanism, and advocacy. AGENCY is an active thought leader in social practice, developing award-winning architectural projects and urban strategies at a variety of scales. Seeking productive anomalies in the overlooked, the under-represented, and the everyday, the practice identifies, synthesizes, and transforms emerging urban paradigms.
The practice draws on the partners’ extensive experience in architectural construction, fabrication, education, and independently directed research. The unprecedented challenges of rapid urbanization, ecological instability, and widespread resource depletion are matched only by an exponentially increasing capacity for innovation in architectural thought and production. Emerging technologies, communications, and models of practice offer a new generation the ability to identify and transform the most pressing urban and ecological issues through design.
AGENCY positions architectural design as a systemic instrumentation of material ecologies, social constituencies, political policies, and ethical thought, embracing a transformative role, and enabling new paradigms of cultural production. Partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller are the recipients of the 2010-2011 Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, and MacDowell Colony residency fellowships in 2009 and 2013. AGENCY is the winner of the 2010 ONE PRIZE, an international design competition for creating productive green space in cities hosted by Terreform 1. AGENCY’s work has been exhibited internationally, most recently through invited participation at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Sofia Architecture Week, Eme3 International Architectural Market in Barcelona, and SUPERFRONT Gallery in Los Angeles.