Architectural theorist Antoine Picon will speak on “Digital Architecture, Tectonics and Materiality” for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ Architecture Lecture Series at 7 p.m. Feb. 27 in Steinberg Auditorium.
Picon is professor of the history of architecture and technology and director of doctoral programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
He has published extensively on the history of relations among architecture, urbanism, science and technology, with particular focus on the changing nature of these relations during the transition from the “old regime” to the industrial era.
His books include French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988), Claude Perrault ou la Curiosité d’un Classique (1988), L’Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne (1992) and Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire et Utopie (2002).
In recent years, Picon has begun to explore the emergence of digital culture.
In addition to various articles, he has published a major essay on that theme, “La Ville Territoire des Cyborgs“ (1998) and is preparing a book on the subject.
In 2003, he edited Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors with Alessandra Ponte.
Subsequent Architecture Lecture Series speakers are listed below.
• Ben van Berkel, director of UN Studio in Amsterdam, will present the 2006 Fumihiko Maki Lecture March 6. He will speak on “Design Models, Figments and the Origin of the After Image.”
• Inaki Abalos, of Abalos & Herreros Architects in Madrid and jury chair for the 2006 Steedman International Design Competition, will speak on “Pavilions, Observatories and Recycled Landscapes” March 20.
• Rainer Mahlamäki, of Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects in Helsinki, will present a lecture titled “WAVES” March 27.
• William Valentine, architect, chairman and design principal for HOK in San Francisco, will speak on “The Consumer Gods Must Be Crazy” April 3.
• Marcelo Ferraz of Studio Brasil Arquitetura in São Paolo, Brazil — and the Ruth and Normal Moore Visiting Professor of Architecture at WUSTL — will speak on “Brasil Arquitetura Studio: Architectural Action” April 10.
• Robert McCarter, professor of architecture at the University of Florida, will speak “On Louis Kahn” April 17.
• Landscape architects Julie Bargmann and Chris Fannin of DIRT studio in Charlottesville, Va., will speak about their work 7:15 p.m. April 24.
All lectures are free and open to the public and will begin at 7 p.m. (unless otherwise noted) on Mondays in Steinberg Auditorium. Receptions will be held at 6:30 p.m. in Givens Hall.
For more information, call 935-6200 or go online to www.arch.wustl.edu.