The Third Place
Gentrification, Displacement and Creative Production
The health of Western societies and individuals has, in the modern era, depended upon the existence of “third places,” spaces for socialization separate from the usual environments of home and work. But increasingly, human interaction exists outside traditional systems, with improvised and alternative spaces serving dispersed communities and uses. The Third Place implicates issues ranging in scale, including the precarity of borders (visible and invisible), metropolitan networks, digital spaces as proxies, transition spaces, and, in the more colloquial sense of the term, spaces outside the dwelling or workplace. From immigration detention centers to the Metaverse to the neighborhood bar, these places coalesce around disparate perceptions of space and its uses, informing our social interactions, identity, and the cultural expression of place. Clemson itself inhabits a geographic position between metropolis and countryside that provides a unique perspective to examine problems of gentrification, displacement, and creative production outside perceived cultural hubs.
This Lecture Series showcases a diversity of speakers with varying positions regarding the notion of Third Place, ranging from critical practices or theoretical proposals, to historical analysis. The series will be coordinated with the First Issue of the Student Journal Inter-, whose editors are Rachel Glanton and Connor Smith.
Fall Lectures
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Richard O'Cain Lecture: Bryony Roberts | August 30th @ 2:30 p.m.
Bryony Roberts is a designer, writer, and educator. Having earned her B.A. from Yale University and her Masters of Architecture from the Princeton University School of Architecture, Roberts leads her own practice and teaches architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York. She has been awarded the Miller Prize of 2018, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for 2015-2016, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship in Architecture for Summer 2018, and was a finalist for the Wheelwright Prize from Harvard GSD in 2020. She recently edited the volume Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice, and previously edited the book Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation published by Lars Müller Publishers and co-guest edited the volume Log 31: New Ancients. She has also published her research in the Harvard Design Magazine, Log, Future Anterior, and Architectural Record. -
Douglas Spencer | October 4 @ 2:30 p.m.
Douglas Spencer is Director of Graduate Education and Pickard Chilton Professor in Iowa State University’s Department of Architecture. He has previously taught at the Architectural Association, the Royal College of Art and the University of Westminster. He has lectured internationally and contributed essays for publications including Log, The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy, Architectural Design, e-flux, The Avery Review, AA Files, New Geographies, and Volume. He has also contributed chapters for collections such as Marxism, Urban Critical Theory and the Urban Question in the XXI Century (forthcoming 2023), Landscape Is…(Routledge, forthcoming 2022), Architectural Affects after Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2020), Architecture and Feminisms (Routledge, 2017), Landscape and Agency (Routledge, 2017), This Thing Called Theory (Routledge, 2016) and Architecture Against the Post-Political (Routledge, 2014). His The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury 2016) has become a critically acclaimed, widely-cited, and standard point of reference in the analysis of contemporary architecture. His subsequent book, Critique of Architecture: Essays on Theory, Autonomy, and Political Economy, was published by Birkhäuser/Bauwelt Fundamente in 2021. -
Richard O'Cain Lecture: Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann | November 8th @ 2:30 p.m.
Ashley Bigham is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Previously, she was the Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the Taubman College of Architecture. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a MacDowell Fellow. Erik Herrmann is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Previously, Erik was the Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the Taubman College of Architecture. He is a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a MacDowell Fellow.
Ashley and Erik hold a Master of Architecture from Yale University School of Architecture and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design.
Outpost Office is a design practice based in Columbus, Ohio where principals and co-founders Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann teach at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Outpost Office seeks new public audiences through experimental creative production ranging from the serious to the absurd, often simultaneously. Inventive applications of off-the-shelf tools and industrial-grade materials often characterize the practice's work. Their designs propose that architecture can be projective and impactful while at the same time inexpensive, temporal, and open-ended. Particular focuses of Outpost Office include experimental platforms for gathering and speculations in and about the American suburbs.
Spring Lectures
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Javier Arpa Fernández | January 31 @ 2:30 p.m. | Clemson
Lee 2-111
Javier Arpa Fernández is the Research and Education Coordinator of the Why Factory at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. The Why Factory is a think-tank led by Prof. Winy Maas that explores possibilities for the development of our cities by focusing on the production of models and visualisations for cities of the future. Javier currently also holds a position of lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA). He has been lecturer at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the USA, ENSA-Bellevile and ENSA-Versailles in France, and IE University in Spain.Javier was Editor in Chief for a+t research group, one of Europe’s leading publishers in architecture and urban design He is the curator of the exhibitions “Paris Habitat”, held at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and is the author of the monograph “Paris Habitat: One Hundred Years of City, One Hundred Years of Life”. In 2013, he co-organized the conference “The City That Never Was” in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York. This event used the recent economic and urban crisis in Spain as a lens through which to consider future global patterns of urbanization and settlement. As lecturer and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently conducting the research project “Africa: An Atlas of Speculative Urbanization”, and curated the exhibition “African Speculations” at the Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival.
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Richard O'Cain Lecture | Boonserm Premthada | February 20 @ 5:30 p.m. | Clemson
Madren Center Auditorium
Architect and artist, Boonserm Premthada is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University and Founder of Bangkok Project Studio. Boonserm’s work has won many international awards including, the ar+d Award for Emerging Architecture in 2011. He has also been shortlisted for the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture 2013, the Grand Prize International Brick Architecture 2014, Overall Winner The Plan Awards 2017, Acknowledgement Prize, Regional LafargeHolcim Awards 2017 Asia Pacific, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2018, the Royal Academy Dorfman Awards 2019, The Winner of 2021 Wallpaper* Design “Best Sanctuary” Elephant World and The Golden Madonnina 2021 of The Design Prize in the category Social Impact, Italy. Boonserm has lectured and exhibited at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine (Paris), the Hongkong Pavilion as part of 16th International Architecture Exhibition (Venice), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), University of Tokyo, University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore, The Bartlett School of Architecture – UCL and several other international universities. This year, his pavilion, ‘The House for Human and The House for Elephants,’ represents Thailand at Biennale Architettura 2021.
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Mithūn | February 28 @ 12:30 p.m. | Charleston
Mithūn is an integrated design firm dedicated to creating positive change in people’s lives. As a national practice with offices in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, we are a unified design studio with an open and collaborative spirit founded on a process of inquiry and listening. Our team of Architects, Landscape Architects, Interior Designers, Urban Designers and Planners creates seamless experiences that are unique expressions of each client, community and place. We work in a wide range of typologies and scales – with a focus on urban environments and places where people live, work, and learn. Mithun is an internationally recognized leader in sustainability, combining exemplary design with a focus on building and site performance, human health and social equity. Since the inception of the practice in 1949, our work has been recognized with hundreds of peer and industry awards including six AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten project honors as well as ranking among the nation’s top design firms.
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Rebecca Popowsky | March 27 @ 2:30 p.m. | Clemson
Lee 2-111
Rebecca Popowsky is a landscape architect and Research Associate at OLIN, where she leads the firm’s research and development group, OLIN Labs. Her project-near and grant-funded research includes waste-based material design and innovation in practice-based research models. Since joining the studio in 2009, Rebecca has contributed to a wide-range of design, planning, and construction projects. Her portfolio includes Canal Park in Washington, DC, Dilworth Park in Philadelphia, and collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers to restore the FEMA floodplain at the Potomac Park Levee on the National Mall.
In addition to practice, Rebecca teaches core and advanced design studios and professional practice courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Rebecca earned dual master’s degrees in Architecture and Landscape Architecture from PennDesign and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Urban Studies from Yale University. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Practice-Based Research at Virginia Tech. -
Frank Harmon | April 03 @ 12:30 p.m.| Charleston
Frank Harmon, FAIA, has designed sustainable modern buildings across the Southeast for 30 years. He discovered architecture as a child playing in the streams and woods of his native Greensboro, North Carolina. His work engages pressing contemporary issues such as placelessness, sustainability, and restoration of cities and nature. The buildings he designs are specific to their sites and use materials such as hurricane-felled cypress and rock from local quarries to connect them to their landscapes. Airy breezeways, outdoor living spaces, deep overhangs, and wide lawns embody the vernacular legacy of the South while maintaining a distinguished modernism. Frank Harmon is a graduate of the Architectural Association in London and a professor at the North Carolina State University College of Design. He has taught at the Architectural Association and has served as a visiting critic at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Auburn University’s Rural Studio.
