Host includes LA Forum’s Out There Doing It series. Select emerging architects, designers, and writers present work and reflect on Southern California’s cultural landscape. Their work ventures, sometimes organically and sometimes parasitically, into extra-disciplinary territories and includes film, gaming, publishing, and narrative.

2014 OTDI Participants
Erin Besler and Ian Besler
Laurel Consuelo Broughton and Andrew Kovacs
Jose Sanchez, Plethora Projects
Katya and Alexei Tylevich, Friend & Colleague

Moderator
Sarah Lorenzen

Erin Besler was born in Chicago, Illinois. She is faculty at the University of California Los Angeles in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design where she was the 2013-2014 Teaching Fellow. Her work has been presented and exhibited in Beijing, Los Angeles, Paris, and San Francisco. She has worked for Tigerman-McCurry Architects and VOA Associates in Chicago and for First Office and Zago Architecture in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Yale University and a Master of Architecture with Distinction from the Southern California Institute of Architecture where she was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal.
www.erinbesler.com

Ian Besler was born in Chicago, Illinois. He is an award-winning writer and designer whose work explores consumer-oriented technology and the role of the amateur, bystander, hobbyist, or spectator, especially as it pertains to the production, dissemination, and consumption of media imagery and models. His background is in journalism and graphic design; he holds a Bachelor of Science in News-Editorial Journalism from the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and a Master of Fine Arts from the Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he was the Milken Family Foundation Post-Graduate Design Fellow.
www.ianbesler.com

Laurel Consuelo Broughton is a designer and director of WELCOMEPROJECTS in Los Angeles. Her design work has most recently been exhibited at the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, The New York Art Book Fair, and in galleries in Los Angeles and New York as well as featured in numerous publications includingPaper Magazine, Vogue Italia, Elle, Newsweek, Marie Claire Italia, Lucky Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Surface Magazine, and Nylon Magazine among others. With her label WELCOMECOMPANIONS, Laurel was just named by Racked.com as one of the fifteen official members of the 2014 class of Racked Young Guns, a juried search for the next big thing in fashion design. WELCOMECOMPANIONS is a project that reinterprets everyday sartorial accessories and objects through a formal and surrealist lens. The project seeks to inject a sense of play, suspense, and narrative into the objects we interact with and depend on, on a daily basis.

On the architectural side, WELCOMEPROJECTS’ first house is currently under construction and slated for completion in January 2015. Prior to founding WELCOMEPROJECTS, Laurel worked for Johnston Marklee in Los Angeles and was the managing editor of zingmagazine, a curato-
rial crossing in New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts from New York University (NYU) in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory and her Masters of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_arc). She is also adjunct design faculty at the University of Southern California, School of Architecture where she teaches core design studios, thesis studio, and seminars on the history, theory, and culture of architecture and design.
http://www.welcomeprojects.com/projects/
http://welcomecompanions.com/

Andrew Kovacs was born in Chicago, Illinois. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA Architecture & Urban Design in Los Angeles. Kovacs studied architecture at Syracuse University (B. Arch), The Architecture Association in London, and Princeton University (M.Arch). Professionally, Kovacs has worked for REX in New York City, OMA/Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam and Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo.

In 2011 Kovacs received a Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in Architecture from Princeton University for his proposal A Tale of Two Masterplans to study the architecture and urbanism of the two major cities in Kazakhstan—Astana and Almaty. In 2012-2013 Kovacs was the inaugural UCLA Teaching Fellow and produced GOODS USED: AN ARCHITECTURAL YARD sale at the Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2014 Kovacs was part of Younger than Storefront, a residency at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York for which he produced ARCHITECTURAL CLIFF.

Recently Kovacs was part of COME IN! S,M,L,XLA at the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles for which his installation ARCHIVEMARK 34° 3’ N / 118° 21’ W contained 200 unique postcards of Kovacs’ work. His written work on architecture and urbanism has been published in journals such as Pidgin, Project, Clog, Domus, and Fulcrum. Additionally, Kovacs is the creator and curator of Archive of Affinities—a website dedicated to the architectural B-side.
http://andrew-kovacs.com/
archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com

Jose Sanchez is an Architect / Programmer / Game Designer based in Los Angeles, California. He is partner at Bloom Games, start-up built upon the BLOOM project, winner of the WONDER SERIES hosted by the City of London for the London 2012 Olympics. He is the director of the Plethora Project (www.plethora-project.com), a research and learning project investing in the future of on-line open-source knowledge. The project has over 180 videos and an open-source library of code with over 700.000 completed video session since 2011. His background in computational design and digital manufacturing is linked to Biothing with Alisa Andrasek, were he was one of the principal designers in numerous projects and exhibitions since 2009. Today, he is an Assistant Professor at USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles. His research ‘Gamescapes’, explores generative interfaces in the form of video games, speculating in modes of intelligence augmentation, combinatorics and open systems as a design medium.
www.plethora-project.com
www.bloom-thegame.co.uk

Friend & Colleague is Katya and Alexei Tylevich. A more accurate name would be Sibling & Colleague. They work together on editions and art projects. In 2013, they presented Word Bites Picture, their ongoing collaborative project with noted contemporary artists, at The Storefront for Art and Architecture. Recently, they exhibited two shows (Happy Nothing and Word Bites Picture, second edition) at Design Matters Gallery in Los Angeles, published two corresponding books, and participated in the Competing Utopias exhibition at the Neutra VDL House. Katya and Alexei also work as a team on arts and architecture features for international publications such as Elephant, Mark, Frame, Domus, and White Zinfandel. Their filmed interviews with artists such as Thomas Demand and Takashi Murakami have been featured on NOWNESS. Since 2009, they have continued their project, Happy Nothing, in which they create new fictions out of old news.
www.happynothing.com
www.friendandcolleague.com
www.katyatylevich.com