As Umeå School of Architecture (UMA) enters its second decade, the school invites its teachers to respond to a fundamental provocation: what is architecture?
In this series of public lectures, UMA-teachers will share their interpretation of what constitutes architecture, its theory, and the methodologies through which these ideas are explored in studio teaching. The lectures will represent the plurality of approaches to architecture, which embodies the UMA collective.
About the lecture Empowerment Machinery
The first lecture of the series, Empowerment Machinery, will be by Alejandro Haiek, teacher at Umeå School of Architecture. The lecture will look into cooperative reengineering initiatives across projects that aim to intervene in time more than in space. The process develops a series of hybrid and flexible civic artifacts that promote cultural activities to regenerate the existing ecosystem and degraded context redefining the urban sprawl. A series of social, technological and environmental strategies propose new forms of urban life in order to revitalize community networks and alternative circular economies through citizen participation, public consultation, knowledge democratization and symbolic capital.
Alejandro Haiek is an Architect, Master in Science with honors in Architectural Design at Central University of Venezuela. His research examines collective landscapes, post-industrial ecologies and network governability politics developing community project in an intersection between design, arts and engineering. The projects integrates applied science and local traditions as a sustainable approach to human, environmental and material resources. In his manifesto, Public Machines, he declares Architecture as a logistic chain of events that, eventually, would transform into a complex social, performative and environmental apparatus.
His studio Lab.Pro.Fab was declared New Talent in Metropolis Magazine by MoMA curator Martino Stierli and have been awarded by the International Public Art in Shanghai, the International Festival of Architecture in Barcelona, the Civitella Ranieri Architecture Prize, and recently nominated by Royal Academy Dorfman Award London, the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize and the Oscar Niemeyer Award for Latin American Architecture. He is also a teacher at Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University, Sweden.
