03/16/23

AMES, Iowa — Researcher, editor, author and educator Elise Hunchuck will lead the 2023 OPN Workshop from March 20–24 at Iowa State University.

Sponsored by Midwest design firm OPN Architects, the workshop series brings globally recognized professionals to campus to lead intensive educational sessions for Iowa State architecture students.

During this year’s workshop, undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Architecture will engage with the landscapes of Iowa through still and moving images and political ecology, said Peter Zuroweste, associate professor of practice in architecture, who is coordinating Hunchuck’s visit.

“They will be invited to develop critical perspectives on the material culture of the rural Midwest through the construction of historical and contemporary narratives,” Zuroweste said.

To inform their work with Hunchuck, participants “will take short field trips to local and regional destinations to conduct ethnographic field research with an emphasis on photographic and cinematic films as Great Plains representations.”

Hunchuck will also give a public lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 22, in Kocimski Auditorium, 0101 College of Design. The workshop and lecture are part of the Department of Architecture’s Spring 2023 Public Program Series, “Ways of Working.”

About the speaker

In her transdisciplinary practice, Hunchuck brings together architecture, landscape architecture and media studies to research sites in Canada, Japan, China and Ukraine. She employs cartographic, photographic and text-based methods to critically document, explore and archive the co-constitutive relationships between plants, animals and minerals in all their forms.

Hunchuck is the almanac and journal editor for transmediale and one of the curatorial directors of the transmediale annual digital art and culture festival in Berlin. She is an editorial board member of the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy. An adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Hunchuck also co-leads the architectural design studio ADS7 at the Royal College of Art in London.

Her writing and editorial works have been published in The Funambulist and FLASH Art International, and in publications by Archive Books, Edinburgh University Press, University of Minnesota Press, MIT Press, Onassis Foundation, Spector Books and Sternberg Press.

Hunchuck holds a bachelor of arts with honors in philosophy and geography and a master of landscape architecture, both from the University of Toronto.

Contacts

Peter Zuroweste, Department of Architecture Public Programs Committee, peterz@iastate.edu

Heather Sauer, College of Design Strategic Communications, hsauer@iastate.edu

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