Book Lecture: Marcelo Spina, Constance Vale, & Robert McCarter

Marcelo Spina (partner, PATTERNS) and Constance Vale (assistant professor, Sam Fox School) will present the new book Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture and discuss it with Robert McCarter (Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox School).

Mute Icons is co-authored by Spina and Georgina Huljich; Vale co-authored the “History” section and edited the volume. Copies will be available for purchase in conjunction with the lecture.

Marcelo Spina, AIA, is an Argentinean-American architect and educator. Along with Georgina Huljich, he is a partner in Los Angeles-based PATTERNS, which he founded in 2002 as a speculative platform to explore an increasingly global design culture. His work reveals a rigorous and progressive approach to projects and buildings across scales, agendas, and geographies, insisting on the cultural and social relevance of architectural form, contemporary aesthetics, and emerging technologies. Spina has been a design faculty at SCI-Arc since 2001. He is the editor of Material Beyond Materials: Composite Tectonics and PATTERNS: Embedded, the studio’s first monograph, published in 2010 by Shanghai-based ACDCU.

Constance Vale is an assistant professor and chair of undergraduate architecture in the Sam Fox School. She is a licensed architect and director of the architecture practice Constance Vale Studio and the experimental research office The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors. She undertakes aesthetic and conceptual investigations in the territory between architecture, art, theater, and emerging technology.

Robert McCarter is a practicing architect, author, and the Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture in the Sam Fox School. McCarter has an extensive bibliography, having authored 23 books to date, and his forthcoming books include Louis I. Kahn (2nd revised and expanded edition, 2022), Wiel Arets Architects (2022), and Robert Ernest Architect (2023), among others. He has his own architectural practice in St. Louis, Robert McCarter, Architect.