People

Dr. Kazys Varnelis

Kazys Varnelis his a historian, writer and designer. He holds a PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University. He is Director of the Network Architecture Lab and co-founder of AUDC, entities that are both think tanks and practices, conducting research, producing publications, and exhibitions. With AUDC he has published Blue Monday: Absurd Realities and Natural Histories (2007) and exhibited at High Desert Test Sites and other venues. With the Network Architecture Lab, he has edited the Infrastructural City. Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and Networked Publics (both in 2008) and exhibited at the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania.

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. From 2006 to 2015 he ran the Network Architecture Lab and taught at Columbia University. He has also taught in the Environmental Design program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the Public Art Studies program at the University of Southern California, the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2004, he was awarded a 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. The result was the book Networked Publics.

He has published in journals such as A+U, Praxis, Log, Perspecta, Volume, and Cabinet and has served on the boards of numerous scholarly journals such as Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Kulturos Barai and served as media review editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

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 served on the national board of DOCOMOMO-US since 2004 to 2012.

Kazys’s research focuses on contemporary architecture, late modernism, architecture and capitalism, and the impact of recent changes in telecommunications and demographics on the contemporary city.

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