Symposium with William Katavalos, Linda Weintraub and Mark Sloan
Reception to follow in the Halsey Institute galleries

Entitled Bio-Logical Architecture: Past, Present, and Future, the symposium will bring Linda Weintraub, an eco-art-architecture writer, and William Katavolos, an architect and designer, together with the Halsey Institute’s curator Mark Sloan to discuss eco-bio-architecture. They will examine how ZanFagna’s vision of the possibilities within architecture are not only achievable, but within our grasp. A reception will follow at the Pulse Dome Project exhibition in the Halsey Institute galleries.

The symposium and reception in the Halsey Institute are free and open to the public. This event is co-sponsored with the College of Charleston’s First Year Experience Program and Clemson University’s School of Architecture.

About the presenters:

Mark Sloan | Pulse Dome Project: Art & Design by Don ZanFagna

Mark Sloan will discuss the Pulse Dome Project: Art & Design by Don ZanFagna exhibition. Sloan will provide an overview of the artist’s life and work with a focus on the ideas underlying the Pulse Dome Project.

Mark Sloan has been the director and senior curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art since 1994. He has a particular interest in visionary art and artists.

Linda Weintraub | It Breathes. It Eats. It Digests. It Grows: Pioneering Architecture in the 1970s and 2010s

Weintraub will examine bionics architecture in which physiological functions of living organisms provide models of sustainable strategies with proven success. Bionic architecture applies the efficient energy flow patterns and material cycling of resilient organisms to the built environment. Bionics architecture is bio-degradable / bio-energetic / bio-dynamic / bio-geochemical / bio-dynamic.

Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. Her recent writing explores the vanguard intersection between art and environmentalism. She served as the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Art at Oberlin College, and as the director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute located on the Bard College campus where she originated fifty exhibitions and published over twenty catalogues. Weintraub received her MFA degree from Rutgers University. She maintains a homestead on an eleven-acre property in upstate New York where she actively applies the principles of Permaculture to food production, land management, and energy generation. She is living in the eighth home that she and her husband designed and built. It is a super-efficient industrial Galvalum structure.

William Katavolos | Liquid Architecture: History and Concepts from Idea to Fruition

Katavalos will be presenting the history of the idea behind water as a building material and the concept of liquid architecture as a viable solution to our current architectural dilemma.

William Katavolos has been a professor of architecture at the Architecture School at Pratt Institute since the 1960s. He is the co-director of the Center of Experimental Structures where liquid architecture has been widely explored and developed. His early furniture designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Katavolos’ manifesto Organics, published in Holland in 1961 became the basis for chemical architecture. His theory of the fundamental structure of nature is being prepared now for publication. He splits his time between Key West and New York.