THE ARTIST

Sergio Duran was born in Paris, France where he studied Fine Arts at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1985 he graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Santa Monica, after which he worked at the office of Ricardo Legorreta in Los Angeles, California. In 1986 he left for Japan on a Japanese government grant. In 1989 he received a Masters in Architecture from the University of Tokyo Department of Engineering where he continued as a Ph.D. candidate for another six years. During this time he assisted Fumihiko Maki in design projects and competition entries, after which he was employed as an architect in the office of Yoshio Taniguchi and later at Arata Isozaki & Associates.

In 1992 and 1993 consecutively, Duran was awarded as a finalist in the Japan Art Scholarship Competition and exhibited both times at the Spiral Garden Exhibition Hall. As an organizer Duran personally lead multi-national teams consisting of people from the United States, Austria, Australia, Colombia, Hungary, Spain, Canada and Japan. Duran would gather groups (consisting of often more than 20 professionals such as musicians, computer programmers, mathematicians, artists and architects) for a series of meetings and sessions to organize the making of each piece. These took the form of sculpture, music, dance, theater or architecture. Not unlike a typical architectural construction process, these projects involved collaboration and coordination.