Sergio Lopez-Pineiro will present his latest book, Typologies for Big Words (ORO Editions, 2022), and the research that has followed it. The book is a collection of projects that reimagine traditional building and landscape types as openings within the vast interior of global capitalism, or, in other words, as holes within society’s big words. Each project– named after a spatial type and a big word–is an inseparable pairing of a design proposal and a theoretical essay. One of the types, the “Waiting Room of Democracy,” has triggered a new line of research about the need to update presently outdated democratic spaces.

Since the establishment of modern democracies and the associated emergence of the public sphere in the 18th century, political spaces continue to be imagined as august places to assemble multitudes (e.g., houses of representatives or public squares). Today, no political spaces are explicitly designed for face-to-face meetings, and these crucial conversations for American democracy typically occur in ordinary multipurpose rooms. The old spatial imagination deployed at the dawn of modern democracies must be renewed to meet the challenges of contemporary democracies.

Sergio will be joined in conversation after his presentation by CCA Professor Antje Steinmuller.

Sergio Lopez-Pineiro is an interdisciplinary architect operating at the intersection of architecture and landscape. His work explores emptiness and allied spatial concepts (such as voids, nothingness, or limbo) to imagine a public realm where groups of free, diverse, and spontaneous strangers become a public body. Currently, he is focusing on the spatial needs and expressions of democratic acts that generate trust between strangers, such as voting or conversing face-to-face with citizens of opposing political views.

He is the author of A Glossary of Urban Voids (Jovis, 2020) and Typologies for Big Words (ORO Editions, 2022). Lopez-Pineiro is the director of the design studio Holes of Matter and an Assistant Professor in Architecture at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars focusing on the public nature of the built environment. He has previously held the 2006-07 Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo and the 2014-15 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship at Harvard University.

Lopez-Pineiro is a licensed architect in Spain. He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and received his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize.

Antje Steinmuller is Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where she chairs the Bachelor of Architecture program and co-directs the Urban Works Agency research lab. Her research explores the role of design at the intersection of citizen-led and city-regulated processes – from new typologies of urban commons to new forms of collective living. Her work has been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Presented in partnership with the Center for Architecture + Design