Architects Fernanda Oppermann and Jose Herrasti to Present Lecture March 28

Illustration by Jeni Emery

An illustration showing North Shore Park Pavilion in North Shore, California.

Fernanda Oppermann and Jose Herrasti will present a lecture at 4 p.m., Monday, March 28, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, room 250 of Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. The lecture will also be available to watch live via Zoom.

Oppermann and Herrasti lead Mutuo, a Los Angeles-based architectural design studio with a diverse cultural background. They are also 2022 John G. Williams Distinguished Visitors in Architecture.

The Fay Jones School's spring lecture series is presented in collaboration with Places Journal, an internationally respected online journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism.

Registration for the online lecture is available on Zoom.

In their lecture, "It Is As Much About Empathy As It Is About Space," Oppermann and Herrasti will offer a journey into Mutuo's practice in architecture. They will discuss everything from Mutuo's contribution to bring visibility and voice to the rural community of North Shore in the Coachella Valley in California, to new "affordable-by-design" housing typologies, to the journey to find flexibility in the strict and complex systems that conform the current housing system — a topic that will be explored in the upcoming "Architecture at Home" exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

At Mutuo, they believe in expanding the traditional roles of the architecture profession into a more dynamic presence with greater influence on creating built environments and solving complex urban challenges. They believe that architecture is the physical manifestation of people's unique stories, as well as the opportunity to embrace a multitude of different perspectives into one cohesive vision.

Herrasti, AIA, is currently the president of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and he is the past chair of the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles Chapter Political Outreach Committee.

Oppermann, AIA, received the 2021 Female Frontier Award for Social Change by World Architecture News, and she was featured in "Built By Women Los Angeles 2020," organized by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.

Mutuo received the 2018 AIA Los Angeles Next LA Honor Award for Boyle Tower, the 2019 AIA Los Angeles Presidential Emerging Practice Award, the 2020 International Architecture Award for Boyle Tower, the 2020 AIA Los Angeles Cityscapes Citation Award for North Shore, an Honorable Mention in the Experimental category of Fast Company's 2021 Innovation by Design Awards for Boyle Tower, the 2021 American Architecture Award for Wonderland and the 2021 AIA California Residential Merit Award for Wonderland.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This lecture is free and open to the public. For details on watching the lecture, please visit the Fay Jones School's lecture page. To register for the entire online lecture series, complete this form on Zoom.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.