ADAPTATION Lecture: Michael Hsu, FAIA, IIDA
Monday, February 19, 2024
6:00 pm -
Small Scale Urbanism
Michael Hsu Office of Architecture serves a broad audience, while specializing in materiality, detail and design. The studio approaches everyday architecture and high design projects with a wide range of perspectives. In addition to offering architecture and interior design, the firm integrates branding, art curation and landscape design services. This lecture will explore the firm’s approach across a range of projects and will touch on the future plans of the studio, including our newly developed R&D team, established to ensure that we continue to push design forward.
About Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu, FAIA, IIDA is the founder and principal of Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, a fully integrated architecture and interior design firm. MHOA was founded in 2005 and employs 85 team members across studios in Austin and Houston, as well as staff in Dallas, Denver, Nashville and Boston. MHOA is a nationally award-winning firm, including AN Interior’s Top Design firms of 2022.
Hsu graduated from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and has practiced in Austin since 1998. Hsu is a member of the UT School of Architecture’s Advisory Council and a past member of the Texas Society of Architects Board. He is a Past President of AIA Austin and was elevated to AIA’s College of Fellows in 2021.
About the Lecture Series
Adaptation implies a response to change. To adapt means to adjust, modify, and alter one’s response to changes in its various forms: slow, radical, planetary, and local. Adaptation suggests acknowledging new ways, ideas, technologies, and mindsets reacting and responding to possible futures, messy pasts, and complex contexts. Adaptation also refers to switching genres and media to serve better communication or to reach new audiences.
The processes of adaptation are often not as transparent as we would like them to be. They invite analyses, careful investigations, and debates on usefulness, functionality, reuse, ruin, and waste. Adaptation may sometimes mean finding ways to survive conditions that are not ideal and out of control, whereas to adapt may mean recalibrating one’s expectations to fit into new paradigms. As we confront inequities emerging from discrimination, gentrification, and climate change, among other global shifts, adaptation is everywhere.
Our lecture series cuts across geographies and disciplines to look at crises and inflection points, changing extraction and expert cultures, mutating legal, regulatory, and mapping systems, preservation and surgical interventions, and innovative and interdisciplinary construction practices.
- Location
- 4200 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77204