U-til-e-ku-cha
Recently, as a special Friday LunchMEAT, the entire Utile staff participated in the firm’s first ever U-til-e-Ku-cha, a Pecha-Kucha style presentation of some of the firm’s currently active projects. With just 5 slides and 30 seconds per slide, staff gave concise overviews of projects between bites of pizza. Exercises like this not only help team members to practice communicating their work, but also facilitate the exchange of ideas within the firm.
Michael Kubo: LunchMEAT
Independent writer, editor and publisher Michael Kubo shared his work with Utile in March. As the founding editorial director of Actar Publishers, New York, Michael’s publications include The Function of Ornament, with Farshid Mousavi (2006), Desert America: Territory of Paradox (2006), Seattle Public Library (2004), Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark (2003), and The Yokohama Project (2002). Michael’s work challenges the typical conception of publications as tools for presenting research, and proposes that they can act as forms of research in themselves. In a lecture titled “Publishing as Practice,” Michael presented a series of recent research-driven publications to illustrate ways of using the book to give shape, structure and context to architectural ideas, independent of and sometimes beyond the constraints of building.
LunchMEAT (Meaningful, Engaging, and Apropos Talks) is a weekly, in-house program that gives us the opportunity to connect with designers, developers, architects, engineers, planners and academics on topics related to architecture and planning.
Eran Ben-Joseph: LunchMEAT
Eran Ben-Joseph, a planning professor at MIT, joined Utile on Friday August 31st to share his work on urban design simulation tools. He discussed several prototypes for visualizing urban design proposals and their massing, environmental and transportation impacts. A collaboration between MIT’s planning department and the Media Lab, the projects rely on cameras, computers and screens to communicate building shadows, traffic patterns and other data in real-time while individuals work with physical models of topography and building massing.
LunchMEAT (Meaningful, Engaging, and Apropos Talks) is a weekly, in-house program that gives us the opportunity to connect with designers, developers, architects, engineers, planners and academics on topics related to architecture and planning.
Shauna Gillies-Smith LunchMEAT
On Friday June 19th, Shauna Gillies-Smith joined us for lunch and discussed innovative green roof design. After working with Martha Schwartz for several years, Shauna is establishing a new office - Ground Public Art & Urban Design - in order to specialize in the unique technical and aesthetic challenges of green roofs.
LunchMEAT (Meaningful, Engaging, and Apropos Talks) is a weekly, in-house program that gives us the opportunity to connect with designers, developers, architects, engineers, planners and academics on topics related to architecture and planning.