Herwig Baumgartner is a licensed architect, principal
and co-founder of the architecture firm B+U, based in Los Angeles and a professor at the Southern California Institute of
Architecture (SCI-Arc).
Previously he taught at the University of California in Los Angeles
(UCLA) and conducted workshops around the country and abroad.
He received his diploma in Music and New Media from
the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and graduated with a Master’s degree in Architecture from Studio
Wolf D. Prix, University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1996.
Prior to founding B+U with Scott Uriu in 2000, Herwig
Baumgartner worked as a senior associate and project architect at Gehry Partners. He also collaborated with artist Richard
Serra and worked on several large-scale sculpt-ural projects in New Zealand, Naples, Toronto, and San Francisco.
B+U
work is often informed by experimenting with concepts and techniques outside the archi-tectural profession, including electronic
music, science and computation.
“Technology is the answer ... but what was the question?” (Cedric Price,
1966)
The Greek term téchne, is a term which up until today in European philosophy, coined the notion of Art, Science
and Craft. The history of technology could be described as the history of inventions in form of tools and techniques. At the
same time, it is closely connected to the history of science, economics and social agendas - a history of the very human condition
itself. Weather viewed through the topic of energy, information, productivity, machines, or social development, today most
of the world is accommodating a “technically civilized life” to some extent.
“It is the moral, economic, and political
choices we make, not the machines we use”, Lewis Mumford argues, “that have produced a capitalist industrialized machine-oriented
economy, whose imperfect fruits serve the majority so imperfectly.”
This years’s IoA Sliver Lecture series "Architecture
and Technology“ is trying to gather professionals to present versatile notions of technology and its impact on the discipline
of Art and Architecture. The invited lecturers will present their take on technology and reflect on the potentials which it
bears or what conventions it questions and how to approach those creatively/artistically.
Upcoming IoA Sliver
Lectures:
May 11: Martin Tamke, CITA
May 23: Liam Young, SCI-Arc
June 6: Ruth Schnell, Martin Kusch, Angewandte
www.facebook.com/sliverlectureswww.i-o.a.at/sliver
