Credit photographsPhoto by Iwan Baan, Courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation are pleased to present “Sixth Street Viaduct as Next Generation Infrastructure” with Researcher-in-Residence Linda C. Samuels, marking the culmination of her residency.
Samuels’s research project utilizes a combination of data-based analysis and empirical, qualitative explorations, intentionally combining quantitative information with lived experience. Revisiting the project four years after the bridge first opened, and just months before the unveiling of the park below, her analysis asks how the project lives up to its promise as next generation infrastructure. On August 13th, she will share observations from her month in residency at the MAK Center, and the beginning of a set of multi-dimensional and humanistic mappings that assess the Sixth Street Viaduct as a mobility conduit, public space, and prototype for next generation infrastructure.
LINDA C. SAMUELS
Linda C. Samuels is Professor and Chair of urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis and the inaugural Director of Sustainable Design and Environmental Justice. Samuels’s research focuses on infrastructural opportunism—leveraging investment in large-scale systems to create more socially and environmentally productive public works. She teaches inter-disciplinary urban design studios and seminars on Infrastructural Urbanism, urban history and theory, and alternative sustainability metrics. In 2023, she completed an Infrastructure Equity Scorecard Pilot Project for the City of Los Angeles and a produce rescue and distribution mapping project for LA-based nonprofit, Food Forward. Samuels was co-PI on Mobility For All By All, an interdisciplinary project aiming to increase the benefits of St. Louis’s MetroLink expansion for local residents living along the alignment. Previously, Samuels was the director of the Sustainable City Project at the University of Arizona and a Senior Research Associate at UCLA’s cityLAB where she co-developed and co-ran the WPA 2.0 (Working Public Architecture) design competition. Her book, Infrastructural Optimism, is available now from Routledge.
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 a R.M. Schindler’s house in Los Angeles.
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. Each residency culminates with a public talk or program related to the recipient’s research and interests.