Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends:
We wanted to update you regarding where MIIM’s operation stands during the ongoing fires that are taking place across Los Angeles and Southern California.
First, your companies’ health and welfare, as well as that of our community and staff, is a top priority for us. Prior to the pandemic, MIIM has had a robust technology platform that allowed us to provide seamless service to all clients anywhere, anytime. The MIIM Team met this morning and will continue to meet online to go through project goals, deadlines, and priorities. We continue to meet with all teams to ensure the proper flow of operation and information in order to meet deadlines. Our priority is to ensure as little disruption to your projects, as we can accommodate the safety from these fires that are spreading because of the Santa Ana winds.
Employee safety and wellness is a top priority, and we have implemented a firm-wide response plan. We have protocols and safety measures for tragedies like these. Every employee has the support platform- BIM/communication - to resume work from home, until the state of emergency has been lifted.
We intend to attend meetings via video, or phone calls; should an in-person meeting be required please let us know - but for the safety of your own health, the welfare of our first responders and clearance to access roads, we ask you to also stay indoors. That said, we respect that each employee has their own comfort level and we will allow them to act accordingly.
In addition, we are so grateful to everyone. Thank you for your messages and calls to our office. The air is thick and the smoke from the fires is damaging to everyone's eyes, nose and throat. Climate change is real and we are living through it. We are sensitive to the uncertainty that everyone may be feeling and we are committed to getting through this period together.
With respect, safety and health!
Maryam + MIIM Team
Maryam to Lecture Thursday at Casablanca School of Architecture and Landscape /
Maryam Eskandari will lecture on Thursday afternoon as part of the “Les Premières Journées des Jeunes Chercheurs en Architecture et Paysage”. The lecture will take place at 12:15pm local time at the Casablanca School of Architecture and Landscape. For more information, or to register to attend virtually, go HERE.
Maryam Eskandari Discusses on Designing Beyond an Autonomous Architecture /
Maryam | MIIM Designs Take Part Experimental Landings Exhibit /
Maryam takes part in the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the Pratt Institute, School of Architecture Teachers Summit dedicated to Summit for Climate Agency: Teaching the Design Experiment in Brooklyn, New York Summer '22 for the TNC Dangermond Capstone Studio that she lead. The Curriculum for Climate Agency, saw calls for Architectural Education to step-away from pre-conceptions about climate and re-engage in active learning and science. The consistent takeaway voiced throughout the conference was that if architectural design wishes to establish an environmental agency within the 21st century it must depart from known narratives and operating conventions in favor of experimental approaches.
Experimental Landings is an exhibition that interrogates how designers assert agency through the representation, organization, and formation of land. Understood as an elastic and open-ended framework of consideration this collective exhibition of work will showcase how architecture and landscape experiments across “land” address new definitions of formal practice across several thematics : Artificial Earths, Seeding Resilience, Mapping Maintenance and Imaging Grounds. Maryam’s TNC Dangermond Capston Studio showcased half a dozen mappings and illustrations of the formation of land.
Exhibition curated by Jonathan A. Scelsa and David Erdman.
Earth Day 2024 /
Image of Point Conception © MIIM Designs
MIIM Designs has always been about ideas, and creating culture and community through those creative ideas. Each one of the built spaces and landscapes that we are trusted with, we use our creative tools to design and build a community to forge connections. This is always started by understanding the history of the land and the people who have fostered it.
Since the inception of MIIM Designs we’ve had the opportunity and the joy of collaborating with many partners - each one of our creative projects and collaborations have focused on inspiring people to create culture, design communities and bring everyone together through the notion of these creative spaces.
Most recently, MIIM Designs partnered with Material and Application (a Los Angeles based non-profit project space for critical and experimental architecture) and with Look Out FM (southern California’s home for radio art on a creative reading), under the theme of SONIC DUST, on one of Maryam’s reflections while working on a project in collaboration the Nature’s Conservancy in California. In honor of Earth’s Day, you can listen to Maryam read her reflection, “The Celestial Dust of the Chumash at Point Conception”, HERE.