Back to School With... Marina Otero Verzier - session #1 with Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli

THE DESIGN OF DATA STORAGE

In this first event Marina Otero, the series’ curator, delivered the first public presentation on her project Future Storage: Architectures To Host The Metaverse, a research on worldwide data center design that received Harvard's Wheelwright Prize. It was followed by an online keynote lecture by architect Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli who has been working intensively on data infrastructures, and teaches a studio on data centers at the Royal College of Arts in London. 18 October 2022, 19:00 - 21:00.

About the Speakers

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam and Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. From 2015-2022 she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), the Dutch institute for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture. At HNI she led initiatives such as “Automated Landscapes”, focusing on the emerging architectures of automated labour, and “BURN-OUT: Exhaustion on a planetary scale”, instigating forms of care for multispecies, collective bodies. Otero has been a co-curator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021, curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and chief curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She has co-edited Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021) More-than-Human (2020), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016-20), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others. Recently she won the prestigious GSD Wheelwright Prize with her proposal “Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse,” examining new architecture paradigms for storing data and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli is an architect and curator whose work encompasses technology, politics, design, and environmental practices. Formerly a partner at OMA, he founded the interdisciplinary agency 2050+ in Milan to deploy space as a medium rather than a goal. Ippolito teaches at the Royal College of Arts in London Data Matter, a research and design studio exploring the entangled relationship between data and the material world. His work has been shown internationally in various institutions, festivals, and exhibitions.