Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles, a World Wide Storefront participant, is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Neutra VDL Research House .

BCF asks artists, writers, architects, designers, musicians, and curators to reflect on how they currently live, what they’ve learned through experience, and what they’d like to pass along to others. Through dialog we seek to identify the connections that run through our creative processes and daily lives. We intend to tell the story of Los Angeles through the words and work of its most inventive participants.

Big City Forum presents a Sunday brunch conversation between Luis Callejas (LCLA office), and Wonne Ickx (Productora). Please join us for coffee, bagels, and a lively exchange of ideas.

Luis Callejas is founder and director of LCLA office. In 2013 he was awarded with the Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects and in 2010 selected as one of the world’s ten best young practices by the Iakov Chernikhov International Foundation. Prior to founding his own prac­tice, Callejas collaborated for two years on the renovation of the Medellín Botanical Garden. In 2010, he completed the aquatic centre for the XI South American Games, with Edgar Mazo and Sebastian Mejia, and in 2011 completed the renovation of “El Campin” Stadium in Bogotá, Colombia.Callejas is the author of Pamphlet Architecture 33: Islands, Atolls (Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), which asks how architecture might critically repurpose its traditionally limited disciplinary tools in order to make a meaningful impact at a territorial scale. He is a lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

www.luiscallejas.com

Wonne Ickx (Antwerp, 1974) studied civil engineering and architecture at the University of Ghent, Belgium and the ETSAM in Madrid, and Urban Studies at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies (CEMET) in Guadalajara, Mexico. In 2006 he founded his own studio PRODUCTORA in Mexico City, together with Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya and Victor Jaime. PRODUCTORA has received numerous national and international prizes and recognitions. Recently they were selected as ‘emerging voice 2013’ by the Architectural League of New York and soon the Spanish editorial 2G will publish a new monograph on their work.

Ickx has been teaching architecture and urbanism at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Universidad La Salle and Centro de Diseño in Mexico City and will now start teaching again at UCLA, where he also taught as a guest professor in 2012. He has lectured worldwide about his work. He is founding director of LIGA, Space for Architecture, Mexico City, an independent exhibition platform that since 2011 promotes young architects from Latin American. He is also part of the editorial board of Arquine since 2010.

Wet Horizons and Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles are part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project. Additional support provided by Harvard Graduate School of Design, Bestor Architecture, and AECOM.