Join LA Forum for a discussion on self-reliance and closed systems with Lydia Kallipoliti — architect-engineer, scholar and Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The event also marks the launch of the book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit? published by Lars Müller (2018), and the opening of the exhibition Closed Worlds, originally commissioned by the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York (2016).

Participants
Lydia Kallipoliti (RPI/ ANAcycle studio), Aaron Vaden-Youmans (Grimshaw Architects), Shane Reiner-Roth (Archinect), Ginger Nolan (USC), Marikka Trotter (SCI-Arc), Daniel Lopez-Perez (University of San Diego), Jimenez Lai (UCLA/ Bureau Spectacular)

Moderated by Anthony Fontenot (Woodbury University), panelists will discuss how the history of twentieth-century architecture, design, and engineering has been strongly linked to the conceptualization and production of closed systems:  self-sustaining physical environments demarcated from their surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter or energy. As partial reconstructions of the world in time and in space, closed systems identify and secure the cycling of materials necessary for the sustenance of life. Contemporary discussions about global warming, recycling, and sustainability have emerged as direct conceptual constructs related to the study and analysis of closed systems.

Closed Worlds document a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consensus in the form of a synthetic naturalism, wherein the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. While these ideas derive from a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture producing nature, The Architecture of Closed Worlds displays their integration into the very fabric of reality in our contemporary cities and buildings.