POSTPONED – Cocktails & Conversation: Peter Eisenman and Robert A.M. Stern

*This event has been postponed. A future date will be provided shortly.*

Cocktails & Conversation is a series of dialogues about design that joins an architect with a critic, journalist, curator, or architectural historian to discuss current architecture design issues. Each program includes a custom-crafted cocktail—one inspired by the architect’s work and created especially for this event.

Speaker:
Peter Eisenman, FAIA, Int. FRIBA, Founder, Eisenman Architects

Interviewer:
Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA, Founder, Robert A.M. Stern Architects

Peter Eisenman is an internationally recognized architect and educator whose award-winning, large-scale housing and urban design projects, innovative facilities for educational institutions, and inventive private houses attest to a career of excellence in design.

Prior to establishing a full-time architectural practice in 1980, Eisenman worked as an independent architect, educator, and theorist. In 1967, he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), an international think tank for architecture in New York, and served as its director until 1982.

Eisenman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among other awards, in 2001 he received the Medal of Honor from AIA New York and the Smithsonian Institution’s 2001 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale. Popular Science magazine named Eisenman one of the top five innovators of 2006 for the University of Phoenix Stadium for the Arizona Cardinals. In May 2010 Eisenman was honored with the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, awarded in Jerusaleum.

Currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at the Yale School of Architecture, Eisenman’s academic career also includes teaching at Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, and Ohio State. Previously he was the Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City. He is also an author, whose most recent books include Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990-2004 (Yale University Press, 2007) and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950-2000 (Rizzoli, 2008), which examines buildings by ten different architects.

Eisenman holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University, a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Columbia University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University (U.K). He holds honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago, the Pratt Institute in New York, and Syracuse University. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Architecture by the Università La Sapienza in Rome.

Robert A.M. Stern is a practicing architect, teacher, and writer. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and in 2017 received the Topaz Medallion, awarded jointly by the AIA and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in recognition of outstanding service to architectural education. Stern is the 2011 Driehaus Prize laureate and in 2008 received the tenth Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum. In 2007, he received both the Athena Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Board of Directors’ Honor from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2007 and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters since 2011. As founder and Senior Partner of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, he personally directs the design of each of the firm’s projects. Perhaps best known in New York for his acclaimed five-volume New York book series and a good number of apartment houses including the record-setting 15 Central Park West, Stern and his Partners have developed an extraordinarily broad portfolio embracing many building types across the country and around the world.

Stern served as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016, in which capacity he regularly brought Peter Eisenman to the school as teacher and critic. Stern and Eisenman have engaged in friendly debates about architecture since Stern organized the 1973 publication of “Five on Five” in the journal Architectural Forum in response to the exhibition Five Architects, which included Eisenman and other members of the New York Five. Stern was involved with Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies as a Visiting Fellow from 1974 to 1977 and as a Trustee from 1983 to 1985. Before returning to Yale, where he received his Master of Architecture degree in 1965, Stern was Professor of Architecture and Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Stern served from 1984 to 1988 as the first director of Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Enjoy the talks, then buy the book!
From 2012 through 2018, the AIANY Architecture Dialogue Committee’s Cocktails and Conversation series has hosted some of architecture’s most interesting and provocative practitioners to discuss what informs their designs. These conversations have been collected into a book intended to inspire and delight its readers. You can purchase a copy here.