*** Notice: For the protection of property rights, this catalog is available for online browsing only. Please drop us a line if you would like to receive a copiable version of this catalog. Thank You!
Martha Schwartz first came to prominence with her Boston bagel garden - a radical manifesto for a more artful approach to landscape design. Her recent projects include Dublin Docklands Grand Canal Square in Dublin, Mesa Arts Centre in Arizona and Jacob Javits Convention Center Plaza, New York. In this talk, she describes her project Fengming Mountain Park in the Chinese city Chongqing for a major Chinese developer. The project is a rectangular section cut through a large construction site designed to showcase the sales centre for a series of forthcoming residential towers. Building on the idea of zigzagging movement of water down a mountain, she has created a processional route across the site, marked by a series of monumental orange cut-steel structures - like origami mountains on legs - that glow at night. This is a truly exciting time to be working in China, she says, with construction taking place on an epic scale and developers just beginning to appreciate landscape architecture as art-form.
Brian Henderson spent the greater part of his career as a partner with YRM. The firm, founded by F.R.S. Yorke, Eugene Rosenberg and Cyril Mardall, was responsible for many institutional buildings of the post war period: schools and universities, power stations and airports. Henderson talks about his early experience working for Basil Spence on the Festival of Britain; his major buildings for YRM, including the Sizewell B nuclear power station in Suffolk; and the more unusual projects he was involved with, such as the Michelin Building for Paul Hamlyn and Terence Conrad, and YRM's own offices in Britten Street.
James Gowan, best known for the Leicester University Engineering Building, which he designed along with James Stirling, talks here about his life and work. Now in his 80s, Gowan recalls his training at the Glasgow school of art, his early career in London where he met Geoffrey and Philip Powell, his collaboration with Stirling, and the tensions that forced him to go his own way, just as the pair were coming to prominence. Gowan's interest in social housing began with Ham Common - the project which launched his partnership with Stirling - and continued with schemes at Creek Road and Trafalgar Road in Greenwich, London. Other buildings include the Schreiber House in Hampstead, London and the latest addition to his Humanitas Hospital, Milan. Still influenced by his Beaux Arts training, Gowan believes he is an architect in the gothic, as opposed to the classical, tradition.
Michael Webb, one of the six members of 1960s collective Archigram, tells the story behind the group behind the visionary designs for Walking City, Plug-in City and a floating city hung from hydrogen balloons built from pins and Evo-stick in Webb's north London garden.
American architect Steven Holl trained at the University of Washington and the Architectural Association, London. He set up his own practice Steven Holl Architects in New York City in 1976. His work includes the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland (1998), Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002) and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City (a collaboration with the artist Vito Acconci, 1993). His recent projects reflect an interest in a phenomenological approach to architecture. In this talk he discusses three buildings: The Bloch addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (2007), his much-praised mixed-use Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing China (2009), and the Horizontal Skyscraper, officially titled the Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China (2009).
This talk by the co-founders of the DEGW, the leading workplace consultancy, was given to members of the NLA in London on 26 May 2010 and looks at five decades of change in the working environment. Francis Duffy co-founded DEGW in 1973 to enable clients to make more efficient, more effective, and more expressive use of workspace. Frank believes in research in the context of practice. He was a Visiting Professor at MIT in the early 2000s. His book, Work and The City, was published in June 2008. John Worthington is a pioneer in methods of adapting urban and space planning techniques to meet the needs of the emerging knowledge economy. He is a visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield and Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg.
Michael Sorkin is the founder of Sorkin Studio based in New York City. His recent projects include the planning and design of an environmentally sensitive 5000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia, masterplans for sites in Hamburg and Leipzig as well as a plan for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. Architecture critic for the Village Voice for ten years, he is currently a contributing editor to Architectural Record and author of numerous books including Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse and Indefensible Space.
In this talk he discusses his latest book Twenty Minutes in Manhattan -- a personal reflection on fifteen years of social and physical change in his home city ¡V how cities might change in the future and his speculative environmental design work through his non-profit Terreform.
Argentinian-born Cesar Pelli is best known as the architect of the world's tallest building, Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. The many skyscrapers he has designed also include One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, London and the Museum of Modern Art Tower in New York. In this overview of his life and career, Pelli describes gambling everything he owned to pay for his wife's airfare when he won a scholarship to the United States, working for Eero Saarinen and Victor Gruen, inventor of the shopping mall, and why architecture keeps you young at heart.
Peter Eisenman, architect, urban planner and author, is principle of Eisenman Architects. In 2005, he completed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin and is currently building the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. As well known for his theoretical work as his built projects, he was a member of the New York Five and exponent of Deconstructivism. He is the Louis I. Kahn visiting professor of architecture at Yale. In this talk, Eisenman explores his current preoccupations. He discusses the impact of the current media culture on architecture and architects; society's declining engagement with the built environment as a result of new communication technologies such as texting and Twitter; the significance of Barack Obama's appointment as America's 44th President; and the importance of writing in the practice of architecture.
Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi are best known for their 1972 study of American vernacular, Learning from Las Vegas, in which they called on architects to learn lessons from the aesthetics of the everyday. Wrongly attributed with inventing post-modernism they fell out of favour, but are now being rediscovered by a new generation. In this talk, Denise Scott Brown, with contributions from Robert Venturi, discusses the continuing relevance of Learning from Las Vegas and how their ideas have developed in the years since. What are the implications of neon's replacement by LEDs, how has the rise of environmental awareness challenged the automobile city and how can city physics be applied to the design of buildings such as laboratories?