UH Calendar

ADAPTATION Lecture: Jason Long

Monday, February 26, 2024

6:00 pm -

“Optiomism”

Architecture today requires improbable optimism. Jason Long will discuss a series of projects that utilize voids, gardens, gates and crossings to create new potentials for an unpredictable future.

About Jason Long

Jason Long is a Partner at OMA who leads its New York office and diverse portfolio in the Americas. Since joining the firm in 2003, Jason has brought a research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of OMA’s projects internationally.

A number of projects under Jason’s direction take a creative approach to adaptive reuse and preservation, including POST Houston, the transformation of a former post office warehouse into a mixed-use hub; the conversion of a historic parking garage in New York City into a new synagogue; the renovation of the historic Fitzgerald Building at University of Toronto into the university’s administration center; the adaptive reuse of Jersey City’s historic Pathside Building into Centre Pompidou x Jersey City; and LANTERN, the reimagination of a former commercial bakery into a community arts hub in Detroit.

His diverse portfolio of residential projects includes Eagle+West, OMA’s first high rise towers in New York and The Avery in San Francisco. He is currently leading the design of 730 Stanyan, a 100% affordable housing building in historic Haight Ashbury, and The Perigon in Miami Beach. Jason also leads projects in Washington D.C. that provide an innovative approach to recreation, public health, and equitable development at varying scales: a streetscape design for Washington D.C.’s convention center, the 11th Street Bridge Park connecting disparate communities on either side of the Anacostia River, and a masterplan for the RFK Stadium Armory Campus.

About the Lecture Series

Adaptation implies a response to change. To adapt means to adjust, modify, and alter one’s response to changes in its various forms: slow, radical, planetary, and local. Adaptation suggests acknowledging new ways, ideas, technologies, and mindsets reacting and responding to possible futures, messy pasts, and complex contexts. Adaptation also refers to switching genres and media to serve better communication or to reach new audiences.

The processes of adaptation are often not as transparent as we would like them to be. They invite analyses, careful investigations, and debates on usefulness, functionality, reuse, ruin, and waste. Adaptation may sometimes mean finding ways to survive conditions that are not ideal and out of control, whereas to adapt may mean recalibrating one’s expectations to fit into new paradigms. As we confront inequities emerging from discrimination, gentrification, and climate change, among other global shifts, adaptation is everywhere.

Our lecture series cuts across geographies and disciplines to look at crises and inflection points, changing extraction and expert cultures, mutating legal, regulatory, and mapping systems, preservation and surgical interventions, and innovative and interdisciplinary construction practices.

Visit the Lecture Series Page