Speakers
Frank Escher, Architect and Principal, Escher GuneWardena Architecture. Mr. Escher, trained at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Zürich, Switzerland), is a principal with the Los Angeles firm Escher GuneWardena Architecture, whose work ranges from small, conceptually rigorous projects to ecologically and socially innovative urban design proposals. Frank Escher and partner Ravi GuneWardena’s interest in contemporary art has led to collaborations with artists, such as Sharon Lockhart, Mike Kelley, Olafur Eliasson, and Stephen Prina, and the installation design of dozens of exhibitions in American and European museums. Escher GuneWardena's work on historic structures includes the restoration of John Lautner’s Chemosphere, Phase 1 restoration work of the Eames House (in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute), as well as houses by A.Q. Jones, Richard Neutra, Paul Williams, and Gregory Ain.
Escher is the editor of the monograph John Lautner, Architect, was the administrator for the John Lautner Archive (1995-2007), and serves on the boards of the John Lautner Foundation, the Julius Shulman Institute, and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Escher has taught at the University of Southern California, he and GuneWardena have been visiting professors at Cal Poly Pomona, at the University of Oregon, and at the Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) for the 2016-2017 academic year, where they taught as part of the school's Technique et Sauvegarde de l'Architecture Moderne (TSAM) program. In June of 2017, Clocks and Clouds, a monograph on Escher GuneWardena was released by Birkhäuser.
Jia Yi Gu, Executive Director, Mak Center. Jia is an architectural historian, educator, and curator who works on, thinks about, and occasionally writes about minor institutional spaces, ethics of care, and media-based practices in architecture. She is currently Director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture. From 2015-2020, she served as Executive Director of Materials & Applications, a Los Angeles based project space for experimental architecture. In 2016, she co-founded the architecture research and design studio Spinagu with Maxi Spina. She is a PhD candidate in Architecture History at UCLA and is Visiting Faculty in Architecture at the California College of Art.
Judith Scheine, Department of Architecture, University of Oregon. Dr. Sheine is a Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon and is an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor. Sheine served as UO Department of Architecture Head 2012-17 and, previously, was Professor and Chair of the Architecture Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, 2002-12. She is the Director of Design for the TallWood Design Institute, a collaboration between the University of Oregon’s College of Design and Oregon State University’s Colleges of Forestry and Engineering focused on the advancement of timber manufacturing and design. Sheine is also an award-winning architect whose projects have been published internationally and she has been recognized as the leading authority on the work of R.M. Schindler; her publications on the architect include R.M. Schindler (Phaidon Press, 2001) and her most recent book, Schindler, Kings Road and Southern California Modernism (University of California Press, 2012), co-authored with Robert Sweeney.
