13 February 2012

Bimal Mendis and Joyce Hsiang on Territorial Practices

Please join us at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, February 15 in CDL110 for when Bimal Mendis and Joyce Hsiang will present the lecture Territorial Practices.

Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis conduct research on urbanism and global development. Their work applies architectural thinking, analysis and cartographic methods to strategize and reconfigure social economic, cultural and political infrastructures. Their approach independently originates and generates research as a self-curated entrepreneurial process. Through a critical examination of collective issues, and an identification of sites and methods for intervention, their methodology is operatively embedded within research and development. Their work emerges from the indeterminacy of contemporary global practice, where they are as much a part of the formulation of the project and its framework, as the design itself.

Ongoing projects include the design of a Sustainability Index to measure and manage urban development, which was awarded a Hines Research Grant for Advanced Sustainability in Architecture in 2009 and an AIA Upjohn Research Grant in 2010; the WorldIndexer, which examines the scale of global development as a continuous and integrated domain; and The Maldives Spatial Plan, which repositions the archipelago of 1200 islands, linking and interconnecting their anomalous geospatial, environmental and infrastructural systems.

Award wining projects include the winning entry for an urban tidal park in Buzzard's Bay, USA and the 2011 Modern Atlanta Prize for an ecological masterplan for Gadeokdo Island in South Korea. Their research on urban development and strategies of indexing have been widely exhibited, most recently in the 2011 Chengdu Architecture Biennale in China and the 2011 Eye on Earth Summit in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Ms. Hsiang and Mr. Mendis both teach at the Yale School of Architecture. Mr. Mendis is also the Assistant Dean and Director of Undergraduate Studies.

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