Dr. Felecia Davis’s CD Lecture (10/03)
Seams: Crafting an Architecture
Monday October 3rd, 5:00pm -7:00pm ET | Kresge Theater
Abstract:
The path that one walks as a Black architect or designer has many seams, or places that one improvises and stitches together to make a story, or really understand where one is in the world and how to make sense of things that cannot under any circumstances make any sense and never did. There are many gaps and lacunae that are bridged by these seams. Working along these gaps constructs a place of creativity, and ways of making that integrate fragments from the past but in fact also project a future. Davis will present prior and current works in computational textiles or textiles that use sensors or microcontrollers or simply the natural properties of the textile itself to communicate some information to people. These projects are examples of soft architectures and work along a seam.
Bio:
Felecia Davis’ work in computational textiles questions how we live and she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Davis is an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing in the School of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University and is the director of SOFTLAB@PSU. She completed her PhD in Design Computation at MIT. Davis’ work in architecture connects art, science, engineering and design and was featured by PBS in the Women in Science Profiles series. Davis’ designs were part of the MoMA’s exhibition Reconstruction: Blackness and Architecture in America. She is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective, a not-for-profit group of Black architects, scholars and artists supporting design work about the Black diaspora. Davis’ work has been recently recognized by the DigitalFUTURES Group in 2021 for the Black Flower Antenna and the New York Architectural Leagues’ 2022 Emerging Voices in Architecture program.
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