24 March: Undisciplined Desire: Architects in the City

Dana Cuff is a professor, author, and scholar in architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles where she is also the founding director of cityLAB, a think tank that explores design innovations in the emerging metropolis (www.cityLAB.aud.ucla.edu). Since receiving her Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, Cuff has published and lectured widely about modern American urbanism, the architectural profession, affordable housing, and spatially embedded computing. Two books have been particularly important: Architecture: the Story of Practice which remains an influential text about the culture of the design profession, and The Provisional City, a study of residential architecture’s role in transforming postwar Los Angeles. In 2013, Cuff received a major, multi- year award from the Mellon Foundation for the Urban Humanities Initiative, bringing design and the humanities together at UCLA.