19th Annual Arthur M. Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture on Museum Design

New Needs, New Spaces: Institution Building through Museum Architecture

The 19th Annual Arthur M. Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture on Museum Design will be a discussion on the current state and future direction of museum design. As shifting social, cultural, and environmental conditions emerge, museums must address new needs via new kinds of spaces. This year’s program brings multiple vantage points into dialogue — a museum director, a museum scholar, and a museum architect — to reflect on how architecture can be strategically wielded to advance institutional transformation and strengthen the communities' museums serve.  

The Arthur M. Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture on Museum Design is a signature AIA New York event organized each year by the AIANY Cultural Facilities Committee. The series was established in 2006 to honor the work and memory of our founding Committee chair, Arthur Rosenblatt. Among his many accomplishments, Rosenblatt was the Vice President for Architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 19 years during its period of great expansion, the founding Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a highly regarded museum design consultant. He was an enthusiastic promoter of the architecture profession through the American Institute of Architects, and passionate about the role of art in our everyday lives. To honor Arthur Rosenblatt’s legacy, AIANY presents an annual lecture focusing on museum design from the perspective of architects and other visionaries.

Speakers:
Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli, CEO, Jhaelen Capital Projects
Maria Nicanor, Director, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Nader Tehrani, Founding Principal, NADAAA

About the Speakers:
Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli is an educator and advisor to museums and mission-driven organizations, helping them wield architecture as a medium for transformation and impact. He teaches the history and future of the art museum at Harvard University, and his interdisciplinary strategy firm, Jhaelen Capital Projects, is shaping ambitious capital programs that position institutions at the forefront of today’s most critical social and environmental challenges. Previously, Hernandez-Eli served as Vice President of Capital Projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he commissioned a new generation of architects and led a $2 billion program that will reconfigure a quarter of the museum’s 2-million-square-foot campus, the most significant transformation since Arthur Rosenblatt completed the Roche–Dinkeloo master plan. Earlier, he directed design and construction across New York City’s five boroughs at the NYC Economic Development Corporation and was an Associate Principal at Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Maria Nicanor is the director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. An architecture and design curator and historian, she focuses on public access to culture and rethinking museums’ roles by testing new storytelling formats that connect institutions with civic life. Previously, she served as executive director of the Rice Design Alliance at Rice University; inaugural director of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid; and curator in the Design, Architecture and Digital Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Earlier in her career she held multiple roles at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, including associate curator of architecture and urbanism and co-curator of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and later worked on the international competition for the Guggenheim Museum Helsinki.

For his “contributions to architecture as an art”, Nader Tehrani is the recipient of The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States. With 19 Progressive Architecture Awards, he is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Design, and recipient of the Design Visionary Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Tehrani is the Founding Principal of NADAAA, an interdisciplinary practice with works across scales from infrastructure to urbanism, architecture, and installations. The former Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT (2010-14), Tehrani was also Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union (2015-22). Widely exhibited at MOMA, LA MOCA and the Venice Biennale, NADAAA’s work is also in the permanent collections of the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.