Greg Lynn, professor of architecture and urban design at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, is among a select group of architects named to represent the United States at the 2016 Venice Biennale. His firm, Greg Lynn FORM, is one of 12 American architecture firms selected from more than 250 submissions to take part in an exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion. The exhibition, “The Architectural Imagination,” will present new, speculative architectural projects commissioned for specific sites in Detroit but with far-reaching application for cities around the world, according to curators.
Also selected to participate in the event are five UCLA alumni: Ellie Abrons, Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet, Jackilin Bloom and Adam Fure.
A faculty member at UCLA’s SUPRASTUDIO — a graduate degree program situated in a 13,000-square-foot hangar with huge industrial robots, cutting-edge fabrication and 3-D printing tools — Lynn has been an innovator in redefining the medium of design with digital technology as well as pioneering the fabrication and manufacture of complex functional and ergonomic forms using Computer Numerically Controlled machinery. The buildings, projects, publications, teachings and writings associated with his office have been influential in the acceptance and use of advanced materials and technologies for design and fabrication.
Lynn’s work is in the permanent collections of the most important design and architecture museums in the world, including the California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago. Because of his early studies in philosophy and architecture, he has been involved in combining the realities of design and construction with the speculative, theoretical and experimental potentials of writing and teaching. This unique and innovative approach to design has also established him as an influential figure across many disciplines and led to consultations and collaborations with companies like BMW, Swarovski, Alessi, Vitra, Disney and Imaginary Forces.
Previous to UCLA, Lynn was a professor of spatial conception and exploration at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and an Ordentlicher University Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Lynn graduated from Miami University of Ohio with bachelor degrees in both architecture and philosophy and went on to earn a master’s degree in architecture at Princeton University, He received an honorary doctorate degree from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. He received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award in 2003.
In 2001, Time Magazine named Lynn one of 100 of the most innovative people in the world for the 21st century. In 2005, Forbes Magazine named him one of the 10 most influential living architects. In 2008, he won the Golden Lion at the 11th International Venice Biennale of Architecture and, in 2010, he was awarded a fellowship from United States Artists.
