Linda Pollari, Chair of the Interior Design Department at Woodbury University, holds an M. Arch. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin. She was previously a Senior Project Designer at Eva Maddox Associates, a Visiting Designer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Student Success Center at Chicago State University, one of Ms. Pollari's projects while with Eva Maddox Associates, won several awards including the Best of Competition, from IIDA and Interior Design Magazine; an Honor Award from the Chicago Chapter AIA; as well as an Award of Excellence for Restaurants from Identity Magazine.

Robert Somol, J.D., Ph.D, is a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, a member of the Editorial Board of ANY magazine and editor of Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America. Formerly an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he has served as a Visiting Professor in several architecure programs including those at Columbia University, Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and the Architectural Association. Somol lectures and publishes widely on issues of contemporary architecture, urbanism and theory.


Pollari and Somol maintain a collaborative office, PXS. Their work has appeared in such publications as Space, Art and Architecture; Space Design; Assemblage; A + U; Semiotexte: Architecture; and Newsline . The firm is currently engaged in its first "built" work in Los Angeles, a residential landscape and interior architecture project in Windsor Square.
 

volume5

As an alternative to unproductive divisions between design and theory, the projects of PXS attempt to extend a model of practice that broadly conceives design as the organization of information. To this end, each project locates and realigns a dominant disciplinary opposition (e.g. landscape and interiors, service and served, etc.) that emerges from a reframing of the specific program and contexts. Working across a diversity of media and scales, the office understands form or image as a provisional expression of material and conceptual forces and flows.