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October 17, 2022
New York, NY —We invite you to a fundraiser and discussion at 7pm on November 2, 2022 at a83 Gallery in New York.
About the Zeke Endowment
The newly formed Zeke Endowment will support academic initiatives to help advance critical thinking in relation to the fields of writing, philosophy and music. Named in memory of Zeke Reiser, whose many passions included these three important disciplines, the endowment hopes to foster greater connection between the humanities and design through the creation of lectures, classes, workshops, and symposia. In the spirit of Zeke’s wide ranging intellectual pursuits, the lively conversations are expected to touch topics ranging from science to science-fiction, philosophical debate to situation comedy.
About the Fundraiser
We hope that guests support of the Zeke Endowment through the purchase of limited edition art created by Reiser+Umemoto ranging from prints and books to the elaborate Taipei Music Center box set. Special signed pieces will be sold exclusively during the event, with standard editions available for purchase online after the evening. In keeping with the inclusive spirit of the Zeke Endowment the pieces will range in price making them available to both the student and collector alike. The money raised will go directly to fund the Endowment and its mission to foster new and unique intellectual voices. Small and large donations will also be encouraged and greatly appreciated.
About the Box Set
Conceived as a “mini museum” in a box, the limited-edition box set was commissioned to commemorate the completion of RUR’s Taipei Music Center. Consisting of a folio of custom Risograph prints produced by a83 along with books and models related to the decade long struggle to realize what is now an integral part of Taipei’s vibrant cultural landscape. All proceeds from sales of the Box Set will go to support the Zeke Endowment.
This event is part of Weaponized Craft, RUR at a83 Gallery will be on display from September 29 thru November 6
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September 7, 2022
New York, NY —We invite you to celebrate over three decades of creative work with us at our upcoming show at 6pm on September 29, 2022 at a83 Gallery in New York.
This show surveys the 35-year career of New York based architects Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, presenting original works, both old and new, across a wide variety of mediums. In the face of the homogenizing effects of standardized construction and the consequent disappearance of skilled labor, craft has unexpectedly returned to the architect. Migrating from the job site into the exploratory space of the design studio, craft takes on new unprecedented dimensions. Reiser+Umemoto has deftly navigated the apparent paradox of expansion into public projects at the infrastructural scale, while remaining small and maintaining its commitment to intimacy and detail. This transformation offers the discipline a provocative alternative to today’s received notions of bigness.
Weaponized Craft, RUR at a83 Gallery will be on display from September 29 thru November 6
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April 6, 2022
New York, NY —We invite you to celebrate our recently completed Taipei Music Center with us at Cooper Union's Great Hall on April 6, 2022, at 6:30pm. The event is free and open to the public, and will include a musical performance, lecture, and panel discussion with dean Nader Tehrani, New York Times music critic Joshua Barone, Luaka Bop Records president Yale Evelev, Taipei Music Center spokesperson Sandra Hsu, architectural theorist and critic Jeffrey Kipnis, architectural historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin, and architects Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto.
This event coincides with the exhibition Lyrical Urbanism: The Taipei Music Center at Cooper Union's School of Architecture, on view from April 7 through April 29.
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February 23, 2022
Nashville, TN—By adapting architectural ideas from Jesse Reiser’s and Nanako Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics and Sanford Kwinter’s introduction “The Judo of Cold Combustion," Banning Bouldin, founder of Nashville-based New Dialect, has developed new means for generating contemporary dances. The result is a multiyear, collaborative effort coalescing in two cross-disciplinary productions, Atlas Kid and Guncotton.
Read more about the performances in our post Liquid Architecture.
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October 28 - December 10, 2021
New York, NY—a83 opens a new exhibition BITS featuring pieces of art and architecture by Takefumi Aida, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Graves and Edward Schmidt, Charles Luce, OMA / Rem Koolhaas, RUR / Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Bob Stanley, Sam Tippett, and Roger Welch. The selection of work included in BITS is largely comprised of pieces held within the a83 print archive–a collection of fine-art print editions and artifacts produced by and exhibited at 83 Grand Street under master printmaker John Nichols from 1978-1994–and reflects the confluence of art and architecture within the printmaking/exhibition operation.
P.C. Vincent Tullo
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December 9, 2021
Tokyo, Japan—Following the recent completion of the Taipei Music Center and the success of the O-14 office tower in Dubai, Jesse and Nanako will discuss the precarious position of architecture in relation to the arts and sciences. Whereas the latter speaks to a general form of knowledge applicable to a variety of conditions, the former speaks to the specificity and irreproducibility of a given situation. Having developed a sustained project in architecture for over 30 years, Jesse and Nanako will demonstrate, through their built and speculative work, how the interplay between architectural theories and ideas; the hard constraints of given sites, programs, and budgets; and the chance happenings that occur during a project’s lifespan converge nonhierarchically in the most successful architectural projects, thereby reinforcing architecture’s autonomy as a distinct cultural practice.
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November 3, 2021
New York, NY—The Atlas of Novel Tectonics (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) is featured in John Hill’s recently published Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books (Prestel, 2021). The Atlas was originally designed by Reto Geiser and Donald Mak, and is cited by Hill for fusing “the realms of intellect and design…speculating on architecture’s path forward, and influencing many students of architecture in the process.”
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May 10, 2021
Venice, Italy—Geoscope 2, a split-sphere, multi-media installation, will appear at the Biennale Architettura 2021 in Venice, showcasing over a dozen (and counting) contemporary voices inside and outside architecture, ranging from Pritzker Prize winning architect Kazuyo Sejima to radical ecologist and philosopher Timothy Morton.
Inspired by Daniel López-Pérez’s provocative and luminous book R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern Thinking (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), architect Jesse Reiser and team were challenged with displaying the breadth and quality of its content for an exhibition at Princeton University in February 2020. The result was a first iteration of Geoscope 2: a pneumatic, spherical multimedia environment and continuation of Fuller’s original geoscopes, reimagined through contemporary means. A year later, Princeton University is thrilled to see the second iteration on view at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.
The first geoscopes, constructed by students of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) 60 years ago, were conceived as embodiments of the world looking at itself”, and a means of comprehensively understanding one’s relationship to the world. In response to the Biennale’s question “How will we live together?” Geoscope 2 flouts the idea of a single world body in favor of “many worlds” — chaos generated by multiple bodies interacting with each other — by literally splitting the sphere in half and opening it up to multiple contributors and perspectives.
“Fuller’s Geoscopes, while conceptually ambitious, were technologically limited by their times: literally analog vinyl spheres covered in decals in the shapes of the continents,” note López Pérez and Reiser. “The way we see it, new technologies and advances in how we view the world have allowed us to simultaneously reimagine and challenge Fuller’s original project. We believe that disunity, disjunction, and dissensus — ‘worlds’— are to be celebrated as evidence of true diversity in how we think, act, and interact with one another. This is our critical take on how will we live together: spirited agon as opposed to polite relativism.”
Visitors to the installation at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini will find themselves enveloped in a panoramic multimedia experience projected over 42 individual faces. Comprised of an international cast of contributors, Geoscope 2: Worlds generates a complex, kaleidoscopic ecosystem, a tableau of world-thinking on the edge.
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October 14, 2020 - January 10, 2021
Munich, Germany—Computers have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Whether in the office, at the cash register in the supermarket, or in the living room—bits and bytes are now part of almost all technical devices. Today, computers are also the norm in architectural practices, aiding the design as well as the visualization of new projects. They have become “architecture machines.” For the first time in the German-speaking world, the exhibition takes a comprehensive look at digital development in architecture. From its beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s to the present day, the architecture museum tells this exciting story in four chapters and presents the computer as a drawing machine, a design tool, a storytelling medium, and an interactive communication platform. The fundamental question behind it is simple: has the computer changed architecture, and if so, how?
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November 10, 2020
Chicago, Il—The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has selected O-14 for a 10 Year Award of Excellence. The CTBUH Awards program honors projects and individuals that have made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, and that achieve sustainability at the highest and broadest level.
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September 10, 2020
Taipei, Taiwan—The Taipei Music Center has been awarded an Outstanding Public Works Award by the Taiwanese government. The project is expected to open to the public in October 2021.
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April 27, 2020
Los Angeles, CA—The Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA has announced Reiser+Umemoto as one of six finalists proposing alternative schemes for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Reiser+Umemoto’s proposal, titled “Re(in)novating LACMA,” aimed to create a coherent, retroactive masterplan that builds off the campus’ prior successes, seeking to engage and reinvigorate the full breadth of the museum’s collection. The competition jury comments that “the architects found a way to make the plaza into a connective tissue and strategically make the existing buildings work as an ensemble.” The entry was also commended for its clear circulation scheme that employed new interstitial spaces to move people through the building’s interior spaces.
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July 10, 2018
Kaohsiung, Taiwan—The Taiwan Port Corporation held a topping out ceremony for the Kaohsiung Port and Cruise Terminal this morning. The project is expected to be completed in 2022.