xTALK v1.0

xTALK is a new conversational series from UCLA xLAB, developed by Julia Muschler, Alex Ferreira, and Owen Flass with the support of Professor Hitoshi Abe. It grew out of a familiar experience at architecture school: guest lectures are often excellent, but the Q&A at the end, where real exchange can happen, tends to be short and rarely driven by students. xTALK reverses that arrangement. Guests open with brief presentations of their work, and the rest of the evening belongs to student questions. The goal is a relaxed setting where students can test ideas, ask the questions they actually care about, and begin to take part in the discourse of the field instead of only listening to it.

The first session featured two practitioners working at the edges of conventional architectural practice. Raffi Lehrer is a Los Angeles designer who founded Public Art Company in 2020, and his curatorial work moves between the art and design worlds. Nina Weithorn is a designer at Terremoto who came to landscape architecture through farming, food, and entrepreneurship. Both brought practices built on collaboration and on rethinking who a designer works with and for.

The questions, submitted in advance and asked in person, came from students with backgrounds in fabrication, interior design, graphic design, media studies, environmental science, and the music industry. They moved from the specifics of each guest’s practice and career path toward larger concerns: how design connects people to place, where the boundary between private and public landscape should sit, and whether architecture benefits from opening itself to other disciplines. Students followed up on the answers they got, and the guests were open about their own uncertainties. The conversation carried on afterward over dinner and drinks, fostering new relationships between students, guest lecturers, and faculty.