Kazys Varnelis, PhD

Email: kazys.varnelis@ul.ie

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History of Theory

History of the Future

Kazys Varnelis is among the founding faculty at the University of Limerick’s School of Architecture, where he has taught since 2005. Since 2006, he has been the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. In addition to directing the Netlab and conducting research, he is on the architecture faculty at Columbia where he teaches studios and seminars in history, theory, and research.

Varnelis is a co-founder of the conceptual architecture/media group AUDC, which published Blue Monday: Absurd Realities and Natural Histories in 2007 and has exhibited widely in places such as High Desert Test Sites. He is editor of the Infrastructural City. Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, Networked Publics and The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews with Robert A. M. Stern, all published in 2008. He has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for which he produced the pamphlet Points of Interest in the Owens Valley. He produced the New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space with Joseph Grima as part of the Last Newspaper exhibit at the New Museum in fall of 2010.

Kazys’s teaching and research focuses on the impact of recent changes in telecommunications, economics, and demographics on architecture, the contemporary city, art, and culture. He is presently writing a book entitled Life After Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture.

Born in Chicago in 1967, he is the son of noted Lithuanian geometric abstractionist Kazys Varnelis [1917-2010] and grandson of Kazys Varnelis, the Samogitian folk artist [1867-1945]. He received his Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urban development from Cornell University in 1994, where he completed his dissertation on the role of the spectacle in the production of form and persona in the architecture of the 1970s.

From 1996 to 2003 he taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture where he was coordinator of the program in the History and Theory of Architecture and Cities. He has also held visiting appointments at the Art Center College of Design, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2004, he was awarded a prestigious year-long appointment as senior researcher at the Annenberg Center for Communications at the University of Southern California where he examined the impact of telecommunications and digital technology on urbanism and architecture and directed a team of thirteen scholars looking at how new and maturing networking technologies are reconfiguring the ways by which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.

He is on the boards of numerous scholarly journals such as Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, Urbanistika ir Architektūra, and Kulturos Barai.
As former President of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, he received the Educator of the Year Award from the Los Angeles Institute of the American Institute of Architects. He has served on the national board of DOCOMOMO-US since 2004.

He has lectured internationally at schools such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA, TU-Delft, the IUAV and at venues such as the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, the Architectural League, the Van Alen Institute, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Open Society Fund, and the Glass House.

He has published in journals such as A+U, Praxis, Log, Perspecta, Cabinet and is on the boards of numerous scholarly journals such as Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, Urbanistika ir Architektūra, and Kulturos Barai.

Books:

Editor, The Philip Johnson Tapes, Conversations with Robert A. M. Stern, (New York: Monacelli Press and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2008)

Editor, Networked Publics, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008)

Editor, The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2008)

Co-author [with Robert Sumrell] as AUDC,

Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realties and Natural Philosophies (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2007), [introduction by Reinhold Martin]

Points of Interest in the Owens River Valley, (Los Angeles: Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2004)

Former member, national board

NEA-funded competition winner for commissioned chapter, Networked. A Networked Book about Networked Art, 2009

Service Award, ACSA, 2007

Senior Fellowship, Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California, 2005 – 2006

[with Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design] American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles, Presidential Award for Educator of the Year, 2004

[with AUDC] Vectors Residency, Annenberg Center for Communications,

Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California, 2004

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts research grant for research into architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles, 2004

ACSA/JAE best article of the year, 1998

Martin J. McVoy Trust Fellowship, 1992

Cornell History of Architecture Travel Fellowship, 1990