This series of dialogues about design joins an architect with a critic, journalist, curator, or architectural historian to discuss current architecture design issues. Friday night is not “Friday Night” without the appropriate beverage. We’ll provide a custom-crafted cocktail—one inspired by the architect’s work and created especially for this event. Join us in growing the tradition of Delight Night in New York’s Weekend Cultural Scene—Blight Night it is not.
Speakers:
Steven Holl, FAIA, Founder and Principal, Steven Holl Architects
Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Steven Holl, FAIA, considered one of America’s most important architects, is recognized for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity and to utilize the unique qualities of each project to create a concept-driven design. He specializes in seamlessly integrating new projects into contexts with particular cultural and historic importance. Holl has been recognized with architecture’s most prestigious awards and prizes. Recently, he received the 2014 Praemium Imperiale, the 2012 AIA Gold Medal, the RIBA 2010 Jencks Award, and the first ever Arts Award of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards (2009). In 2012, Holl received the Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus Award from the University of Washington, and has received honorary degrees from Seattle University and Moholy-Nagy University in Budapest. In 2003 he was named Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). In 2002 the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institute, awarded him their prestigious National Design Award in Architecture. In 2001 France bestowed the Grande Médaille d’Or upon him, for Best Architect of the Academy of Architecture; and in the same year Time Magazine declared him “America’s Best Architect” for his ‘buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye’. Holl is a tenured Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. He has lectured and exhibited widely and has published numerous texts including Anchoring (1989), Intertwining (1996), Parallax (2000), Idea and Phenomena (2002), Luminosity/Porosity (2006), House: black swan theory (2007), Architecture Spoken (2007), Urbanisms: Working with Doubt (2009), Hamsun Holl Hamarøy (2010), Horizontal Skyscraper (2011), Color Light Time (2012), and Scale (2012). Most recently published is Urban Hopes (2013).
Barry Bergdoll‘s broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society. In exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and at the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator from 2007 to 2013, Bergdoll has offered a series of exhibitions intended to offer more inclusive visions of subjects from Mies van der Rohe (and his relationship to garden reform and landscape), the Bauhaus, Henri Labrouste, Le Corbusier, Latin American post-war architecture, and most recently Frank Lloyd Wright. Bergdoll’s interests also include the intersections of architecture and new technologies of representations in the modern period, especially photography and film. He has worked on several film productions about architecture, in addition to curating numerous architecture exhibitions. He has written extensively on the history and problematics of exhibiting architecture, and the history of museological practices in relationship to architecture.
