A Permeable Atlas: A Conversation With Pablo Castillo Luna

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation were pleased to present “A Permeable Atlas: A Conversation With Pablo Castillo Luna,” a conversation with Researcher-in-Residence Pablo Castillo Luna, marking the culmination of his residency at the MAK Center’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House and presenting his ongoing research project, “A Permeable Atlas.”

Over the course of his residency, Castillo Luna has developed a collection of drawings that explore the circulation of water through territories, buildings, and bodies. This atlas reimagines leakiness not as a failure but as an invitation to challenge our understanding of water as a resource to be hidden and controlled. “A Permeable Atlas: A Conversation With Pablo Castillo Luna” presented Castillo Luna’s research, framing permeability and water’s agency in architecture as central concerns in our current climatic instability, and examines how material, political, and environmental infrastructures intersect. The presentation was followed by a discussion with Anna Neimark and John May exploring water, governance, and architecture.

Participants

Pablo Castillo Luna is a Canary Islands-born architect and educator who teaches at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He holds an MArch from Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he graduated with distinction and received the Architecture Faculty Design Award. He received a diploma in architecture from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. His work has been exhibited at the Harvard Arts FIRST Festival (Cambridge, 2023) and the Center for Architecture (New York, 2022) and published in Pidgin, Paprika!, and L’Atelier. Prior to Cornell University, he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Wentworth Institute of Technology. As cofounder of à la sauvette, an architecture practice dedicated to design, research, and cultural production, Castillo Luna has led award-winning projects honored by the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2023) and the Future Architecture Platform (2020). à la sauvette’s work has been showcased at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2022), Driving the Human Festival in Berlin (2019), and The Movement Forum in London, Paris, and Lisbon (2019).

John May is co-founding principal with Zeina Koreitem of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based architecture and design studio. He is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Architecture Thesis Director at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Situated at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and the politics of environmentalism, May’s writings aim at a continual articulation of the conditions surrounding the contemporary design fields. His book, Signal. Image. Architecture (Columbia, 2019) contemplates the psychosocial effects of transmissible electronic images, and their consequences for architecture and urbanism. Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minnesota, 2019; co-edited with Zeynep Çelik Alexander) explores the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of contemporary design technologies. May’s essays and interviews have appeared in Log, Perspecta, Praxis, MIT Thresholds, Project, Quaderns, New Geographies, and Actar’s Verb: Crisis, among many others. Koreitem and May were named by Wallpaper* as one of the “USA 400: The People Shaping America’s Creative Landscape in 2024".

Anna Neimark co-founded First Office Architecture with collaborator Andrew Atwood to promote an exchange of ideas between the academy and the profession. Her research in techniques of representation, formal principles, and precedent analysis has been published widely, in journals such as AD, Log, Khorein, and Future Anterior, as well as the Treatise book Nine Essays (Chicago: Graham Foundation, 2015), co-authored with Atwood. First Office has engaged in projects with the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Chicago Biennial, Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles, and the Venice Biennale, and was awarded numerous honors for its creative endeavors, including the Young Architects New York League Prize, the Architect’s Newspaper Best of Young Architects award, and the nomination as a Finalist in the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. The collaborative recently completed several residential projects and developed a series of Accessory Dwelling Units for the City of LA’s ADU Pilot Program using prefabricated Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs). Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Neimark worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and New York, and at Johnstone Marklee in Los Angeles. She is a Design Faculty and the Visual Studies Coordinator at SCI-Arc.

About the Researcher-in-Residence Program

Presented by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation, the Researcher-in-Residence is a fully funded summer residency program based in R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles, also home to the MAK Center’s Study Center.

The Researcher-in-Residence program is open to professionals around the world researching or practicing in a discipline that relates to the built environment. Disciplines may include, but are not limited to architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, engineering, architectural history, sociology, writing, and/or visual art. Residency recipients are encouraged to participate in the activities of the MAK Center and engage with the larger art, architecture, and design communities of Los Angeles. Each residency culminates with a public talk or program related to the recipient’s research and interests, hosted at the MAK Center at the Schindler House.