Assistant Professors of Architecture Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy will host an opening reception on Friday, October 11th for their exhibition, "Greetings from Gibraltar."

Greetings from Gibraltar foregrounds the Strait of Gibraltar both as a geographical unit that separates and links lands on either side, as well as a space in its own right with programs such as fishing, swimming, travelling, shipping, and conquering. Greetings from Gibraltar draws on the geographic as a design paradigm, a condition in which designers are being compelled to address and transform larger contexts and address issues, which had previously been confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or regional planning. The need to address such 'geographic' aspects has prompted designers to re-examine tools of representation as well forms of the architectural object.

The work was developed in the context of a 2013 University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Travel Studio to the Strait of Gibraltar. Over the four weeks of June 2013, the studio travelled from Madrid through Granada, Seville, Cadiz, Gibraltar/La Linea, Algeciras, Ceuta, Tangier, and Fez. The studio was initiated in analytic and cartographic investigations of individual port-cities case studies, subsequently complied to highlight relational geographies, flows, add exchanges across the Strait. The travel journey began with a passion for sensory and aesthetic knowledge anchored by seascapes. The result is a landscape that depicts space and time. The postcard-joiners construct a map of the Strait together with the series of architectural interventions proposed in that geography. It also creates a narrative, as if the viewer moved through the space, encountering a series of detail views as well as constructing a panorama and a map of the landscape.

The traveling studio students were: John Arnold, Peter Dumbadze, Lyla Feinsod, Phillip Gavrilovski, Monica Griffin, Andrew Ko, Yuan Liang, Yunzhi Ou, Jason Park, Austin Tsai, Adam Wagner, and Suo Ya.

The exhibition runs October 1-October 18 from 9:00am - 6:00pm in North Quad Space 2435. An opening reception will be held in the same location on Friday, October 11 at 7:00pm. Andrew Ko coordinated the exhibition. View the event details on the UM Events calendar.