Jesús Vassallo, associate professor, Rice Architecture, presents the Noon Talk “Affordable Housing Lab” at 12:00 p.m. via Zoom as part of the Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lecture Series.
The Affordable Housing Laboratory is a joint venture between the Rice School of Architecture and the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The interdisciplinary team engages community partners in the city of Houston in order to assist them in the production of affordable housing solutions specifically tailored to their needs.
Jesús Vassallo is a Spanish architect and writer, and currently an associate professor at Rice University. His work focuses on the problem of realism in architecture through the production of design and scholarship. In addition to Epics in the Everyday, he is the author of Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Park Books, 2016). His articles have been published internationally in magazines such as El Croquis, AA Files, 2G, Log, Harvard Design Magazine, Domus, or Arquitectura Viva. Since 2011, he serves as editor of Circo magazine.
In 2004, Vassallo became a licensed architect in Spain, where he worked in the office of Mansilla + Tuñón Arquitectos as a project architect from 2006 to 2012. There he contributed to projects such as the Twin Houses or the International Convention Center for the City of Madrid, and international competitions such as the expansion of the Kusnthaus Zürich, the New National Museum of Afghanistan, the Museo del Novecento in Venice or the renovation of the Carreau de Halles in Paris. Vassallo recently opened his own design practice in Houston, where he has focused on a series of projects that study the relationship between architectural form and urban space through a focus on housing.
Vassallo studied architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Before Rice, he taught at IE University, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, Harvard University, and the Boston Architectural College.
Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lectures are part of an initiative to acknowledge, understand, and act on systemic racism in the built environment. Invited designers, scholars, and activists will speak on the relationship between race, architecture, and, by extension, related questions of social equity, environmental justice, and gender parity. The aim of the lecture series is to foreground these issues in the school’s curriculum while more broadly fostering solidarity and action in architecture.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Please be sure to register online for each lecture to receive the link to join. For more information on all lectures and to register to attend, visit arch.rice.edu/latest/events and ricedesignalliance.org.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
Rice Design Alliance’s Civic Forum is made possible through the generous support of the Humanities Research Center with additional support from the Texas Commission on the Arts. Funding also is provided by RDA Underwriters: Harvey |Harvey-Cleary, Tellepsen, W.S. Bellows Construction Corp., Hines, HKS, Inc., MLN Company, m Strategic Partners, TRIO Electric, and Walker Engineering, Inc. For RDA’s Houston Design Research Grant lunchtime lectures by awardees De Peter Yi (Faculty winner); Anna Fritz, Shree Kale, and Edward Liew (Student winners); and Sebastián López and Lene Sollie (Honorable Mention), please visit ricedesignalliance.org. The Houston Design Research Grant lunchtime lectures are made possible through the generous support of The Mitsui U.S.A. Foundation.