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	13.05.2011	Politics of Fabrication Laboratory
		Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso - Chile
		From Felix Candela’s double-curvature concrete shells to Eladio Dieste’s undulated brick surfaces or Alberto Cruz Covarrubias poetic wood constructions, Latin American architecture has demonstrated an outstanding vitality in material expression. However, the work of these architects not only traced new symbolic and expressive architectural trajectories in the history of modern architecture, but also challenged the relationship between architecture and the public in a broader sense. Following this tradition, Politics of Fabrication Symposium (PFS) explores the changing political implications of material experimentation when applied to the construction of public spaces. The symposium brings together academic leaders, practitioners and architectural personalities to open up a conversation on the implications between particular socio-cultural conditions and current digital fabrication techniques.
	08.10.2010	Alternative Initiatives: Cuba
		RIBA - London
		Alternative Initiatives is conference series that examines the influence of politics and economics on architecture situated in various regions of the globe. Held in London, the conference brings together leading economists, politicians, historians and architects to discuss the key architectural, developmental and urban issues of the focal region. The goal of the conference is to expand the knowledge of architects, academics, students and the public and to promote debate on the future of the architecture of the regions in question. Alternative Initiatives Cuba Conference explored the impact of Cuba's political and economic conditions on its architecture and speculated on the future of Cuban architecture and development. The event was curated by Melissa Woolford of NOUS and Francisco Gonzales de Canales and Nuria Lombardero of Canales & Lombardero. The conference coordinator was Heather Picov.
	+ Exposiciones / Exhibitions
	14.06.2010	Havana: The Death Body of Paradise
		Architectural Association - London
		“In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of this World” Alejo Carpentier Havana… The Dead Body of Paradise shows some glimpses of the research work of Inter 8 students on the city of Havana in January 2010. Revolution, Declamatory Art and Propaganda, Biological Exuberance, Rururbanity, Flesh Bursting and Decay, Collective Recycling, Dialogue and Confrontation, Archaic Machines, Low Commerce and Traditional Labour configure the cosmography of a city where imagination seems to be overwhelmed by the boldness of its material reality. The photographs here exhibited convey this message to the visitor. To the myth of being the capital of rumba, tobacco and rum, Havana responds with a heavy physical presence, hardened by a vertical sun which doesn’t allow any concealment of the ruin of its urban fabric. The pearl of the Antilles, the city of infinite wealth in the colonial world, is now a rotting paradise that reeks of sweat and debris, made of human physical contact, material recycling and constant wheeling and dealing. Fifty years of economic embargo have faded any heroism into an agonic expression of survival on the outskirts of the hegemony of global modernization. However, as peripheral, Havana seduces by demonstrating its otherness within the global condition. It traps its visitors in an intense tapestry of smell and touch that allows a different vantage point from which to redefine our idea of material expression --from a detached external object to an internalized and commonly shared biological process within the city. By chance or by fate, the decay of the city portrays this kind of Real-Marvelous condition as defined by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpertier. Yet this should not be seen as the sublimated reality romanticized by magical realisms, but the condition by which the biological processes of decay, dejection, and contamination subsume the collective imagination into the experience of everyday life, and the construction-destruction of the city.
	11.2009	First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentations of the 60s and 70s
		Architectural Association - London
		The mask one wears when entering a profession becomes one's authentic face' Friedrich Nietzsche During a tumultuous period in the 1960s and 1970s, new generations of architects began careers amidst a period of profound social change, new conditions to architecture and the city, and lasting changes to popular and critical forms of culture and its production. FIRST WORKS tells the story of this period and re-assesses the conditions of architecture and the beginnings of architectural careers today through a selection of projects world-wide undertaken during the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition presents a single key early project or other kind of architectural realisation by Archigram, Archizoom, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Norman Foster + Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Rafael Moneo, Morphosis, Renzo Piano, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Paul Virilio + Claude Parent. It seems clear today that in any discipline related to the production of culture the question of how one starts a career is absolutely central. Not by chance, successive generations of architects have found in their first works the basis for long-term interests, agendas and even obsessions. More interestingly, these beginnings often represent a kind of compressed architectural portfolio of an architects' career, marking key discoveries, breaks or shifts in how they think, work and learn architecture. FIRST WORKS offers a broad selection of this experience through the arrival of a generation that went on to, and continues to, profoundly influence architecture. A key objective of this exhibition is to trace the origins of contemporary architecture through the formative projects of its most celebrated figures. The projects included will allow students and architects to reconsider practices now often better known through their current or later works. FIRST WORKS provides a timely opportunity to resituate the crucial role of these projects, and their various forms of realisation – built, and otherwise – through which critical forms of architectural practice can be seen to emerge and later influence architecture. At a time when the launching of an architectural career and the work of young architects is itself undergoing great change and experimentation, this exhibition provides the basis for reassessing some of the world's most important and vital projects and personalities today.