Jeannette Kuo is a founding partner of the architecture practice KARAMUK KUO based in Zurich. Established in 2010 with Ünal Karamuk, the work of the office focuses on the intersection of spatial concepts and constructive technologies, recognizing architecture as a social and material discipline.

The office works on projects of a range of scales, from schools and housing to complex cultural projects, and has been published in numerous international journals including Archithese, Werk, Bau + Wohnen, Metropolis, and Casabella. Recent projects include the International Sports Sciences Institute in Lausanne, the Augusta Raurica Archaeological Center, Weiden Secondary School, and Cham Apartments. This year they were recognized by Domus as one of the 50 best architectural firms of 2020.

Beyond her practice, Kuo regularly contributes to the architectural discourse through her academic commitments and writings, as well as participation in conferences and symposia. Her publication, “A-Typical Plan: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office Building,” received the 2013 Most Beautiful Swiss Book award. She regularly serves on international competition juries and most recently was European jury president for the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.

In 2006, Kuo was the recipient of the competitive Maybeck Teaching Fellowship at UC Berkeley as well as an award for her research project “(Infra)Structural Opportunism.”  Since then, she has also taught at MIT, and from 2011 to 2014 held a visiting professorship at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In addition, she has lectured and had been a guest critic at numerous institutions such as ETH Zurich, Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design, Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, Pratt Institute, Hong Kong University, and the University of Toronto.

Kuo received her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from U.C. Berkeley, a Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard, and a Master of Advanced Studies from ETH Zurich.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
https://www.fib-international.org/
https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/jeannette-kuo/
https://www.karamukkuo.com/
https://casabellaweb.eu/

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 4th december 2021, in Zürich, Switzerland.

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Urs Meister, in collaboration with Johannes Käferstein, has been running the architectural practice Käferstein & Meister Architekten, based at 275 Limmatstrasse in Zurich's industrial district, since 1996 and is strongly rooted in the city and its building culture. The office team consists of an average of 10 employees. The firm is committed to high-quality, multi-layered architecture that is dedicated to the human being. In particular, there is an interest for an approach that focuses on the satisfaction of buildings and their robust materiality instead of an over-instrumented comfort.

Käferstein & Meister Architekten are active in the fields of residential and commercial construction and are involved in all project phases. Having a wealth of experience in dealing with existing structures, in "building on" and in densifying, particularly with regard to the preservation of historical monuments, is an important part of it. In recent years, new challenging building projects and urban planning studies have been added, in which this knowledge of the interplay between the built environment and the context is applied on a larger scale for public and institutional clients.

Both business owners are active at several schools of architecture in the European universities since the beginning of their professional career and regularly serve on juries of architectural competitions, advise clients and sit on cityscape commissions. Urs Meister has held a professorship at the University of Liechtenstein since 2002.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• https://www.uni.li/urs.meister?set_language=en
• https://www.kaefersteinmeister.ch/9296777
• https://www.google.com/search?q=sensory+homunculus&source=lmns&bih=843&biw=1598&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjMuqS80rn2AhWkgv0HHReiDe8Q_AUoAHoECAEQAA
• https://brazilianconcrete.wordpress.com/tag/joao-filgueiras-lima-lele/

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 5th March 2022, in Zürich, Switzerland.

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Sony Devabhaktuni is assistant professor of design in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) where he joined the architecture faculty in January 2016. He has taught design studios and elective seminars in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He also teaches an introduction to architectural representation for 1st and 2nd year students from across the university as part of the Common Core program. His research uses drawing to describe how architecture is situated within the world–understood both as a set of ecological relations and a site for human exchange. Before arriving in Hong Kong, he taught and practiced in Switzerland and France. He is both a writer and an architect and is currently working on several publications that focus on the entanglement between politics, architecture and urbanism.

His research and teaching looks at collaborative processes in architectural design and at urban infrastructure. He is interested in architecture’s capacity to engage critically with political and economic concerns – both using tools such as drawing, and with methods borrowed from the social sciences. Ongoing projects include: research funded by the Hong Kong SAR government’s University Grants Committee on collaborations between dance and architecture ; HKU funded research on the planning and development of a new capital for the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh; and an ongoing study on the ‘curb-scale’ infrastructure of the Hong Kong street.

With John C.H. Lin, he is the co-author of the forthcoming As Found Houses (Applied Research + Design Publishers)(2020). The book documents self-built renovations to traditional house typologies in rural China. His writing on collaboration includes, with co-author Min Kyung Lee, the essay “Collaboration: Unresolved Forms of Working Together in Contemporary Architectural Practice” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White, eds)(2019). He is the co-editor, with Nasrin Seraji and Xiaoxuan Lu, of From Crisis to Crisis: Debates on why architecture criticism matters today (2019).

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• https://www.platformspace.net/home/traces-of-protest-and-curb-scale-infrastructures-in-hong-kong
• https://www.arch.hku.hk/staff/arch/devabhaktuni-sony/
• https://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp02123

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 14th of may 2022, in Paris, France.

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Paolo Tombesi is Professor of Construction and Architecture at the School of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he directs the Institut d'architecture et de la ville. 

He studied architecture in Italy and graduated from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1990. A former Fulbright Fellow, he received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1997. That same year he joined the University of Melbourne, where he was awarded the Chair of Construction in 2009.

Paolo Tombesi has long cultivated a specific interest in the relationship between the intellectual dimension of building and the social and technical aspects of its execution. He is an international authority on the industrial organisation of architectural practices and the analysis of the construction process, applying industrial economics, labour theory and regional development models to examine the relationship between design, technological innovation, knowledge production and the construction market.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• THE ARUP JOURNAL OCTOBER 1973 | Sydney Opera House Issue
• The forgotten columns at the Sydney Opera House | Tombesi, P. ; Stracchi, P. ; Cardellicchio, L. | 5th International Conference for Structures and Architecture (ICSA 2022), Aalborg, Denmark, July 6-8, 2022
• Beyond the spherical solution: The contractor’s contribution to the roof of the Sydney Opera House | Cardellicchio, L., Stracchi, P., Tombesi, P. | fib Symposium, 2021, pp. 387–394
• Capital gains and architectural losses: the transformative journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994) | Tombesi, P. | Journal of Architecturethis link is disabled, 2016, 21(4), pp. 540–563
• Learning from failures: Reflections on the role of project design and design management in the procurement of non-standard buildings | Cardellicchio, L., Tombesi, P.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXBCaGb0dy8
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkLDBMUFGWQ
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-U_MeBekJwInteresting facts about Sydney Opera House - Sydney Opera House

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 8th of august 2022, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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