The Architectural League carries out its mission by promoting excellence and innovation, and by fostering community and discussion in an independent forum for creative and intellectual work in architecture, urbanism, and related disciplines. They present the work and ideas of the world's most interesting and influential architects and designers to New York, national and international audiences, through lectures, exhibitions, publications, and the worldwide web.
Current Work: West 8 Adriaan Geuze
Tuesday, November 18, 7:00 p.m.
The Great Hall, The Cooper Union 7 East 7th Street, New York
Founded in 1987 by principal Adriaan Geuze, West 8 uses “ecology, infrastructure, weather conditions, cultural influences, historical gestures, building programs…in a playful and engaging manner to encourage the public to understand and take ownership of spaces.” Based in Rotterdam, West 8 is a multidisciplinary landscape and urban design practice with an international team of 75 architects, urban designers, landscape architects, and industrial engineers.
West 8 has won numerous design awards, such as the Dutch Maaskant Award in 1995 and the Rosa Barba First European Landscape prize in 2002. Geuze was presented with the Veronica Rudge Green Prize for Urban Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2002. In 2005, he was the curator for the 2nd International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam.
Current Work: Coop Himmelb(l)au Wolf D. Prix
Introduced and moderated by Thom Mayne
Thursday, November 20, 7:00 p.m.
The Great Hall, The Cooper Union 7 East 7th Street, New York
Wolf D. Prix co-founded Coop Himmelb(l)au in 1968 along with Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer, defining the practice as “not a color but an idea, of creating architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds.” Over the intervening years the Vienna based firm has successfully followed its original intent to create an architecture that “has no physical ground plan, but a psychic one” characterized by walls that “no longer exist” and spaces that “are pulsating balloons…”
Over the course of the past three decades, Coop Himmelb(l)au has received numerous international awards. These include: the Förderungspreis für Baukunst, Berlin (1982), the Award of the City of Vienna for Architecture (1988), the Erich Schelling Architektur Preis (1992), the P. A. Award (1989, 1990, and 1991), the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis (1999) as well as the European Steel Design Award (2001). In 2008 Coop Himmelb(l)au received the RIBA International Award for the Akron Art Museum and the RIBA European Award for the BMW Welt.
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