I'm excited to announce that I'll be lecturing at the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, in only two days' time, kicking off their Spring 2009 lecture series.
I've clearly got some very large shoes to fill with this series, however, as I've been lined up with everyone from Beatriz Colomina to Cynthia Davidson. Stan Allen, Juan Herreros, Richard Ingersoll, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Michael Weinstock, Peter Trummer – it looks like a fantastic series.
For my own part, I think I've got a great talk planned – called "Cities Gone Wild" – expanding from the lecture I gave back in November, sponsored by the Complex Terrain Laboratory, at University College, London.
This talk begins at 5pm on Wednesday, January 7; it's free and open to the public; and it will take place in Anderson Hall.
I don't know how many readers BLDGBLOG has in Houston – or, for that matter, at Rice – but I'd love to see some of you there. And please introduce yourselves, too, as I love meeting new people.
Also, at the end of my talk I hope to address the more general subject of blogging, if for no other reason than I can guarantee that there are students enrolled at Rice right now – and people living in Houston – who have something interesting to say and simply need a new platform from which to say it. I'd be happy to talk about establishing a blog and so on, as that's not a topic I've much addressed throughout all of these talks.
Finally, I'll be doing thesis reviews at the architecture department all day on Thursday and Friday, so if you happen to be enrolled in the courses I'll be visiting, then cool. I look forward to meeting you!
And come out to the talk – it should be fun.
thought this article on brasilia may be of interest, in case you haven't seen it already.
it has the best observations on brasil by a foreigner, that i've ever read.
Congratulations. That's awesome. I also think it's brave of Rice to have a lecture series that is almost all historians and writers (and bloggers!). It makes me think that all the anti-history and theory rhetoric is either exhausted or now ho-hum.
Sure, I'll come. Rice is just across the street from where I'm sitting now.
if you've never been to houston, make sure to get a houston tour from someone who knows the city. it will blow your mind!
how'd the lecture go, i'm excited to see who my school has lined up for the spring semester!
Thank you for all of the wonderful comments at the thesis reviews. You added a very fresh perspective to the typical final jury composition of architects.
Thanks, Matthew. I had a lot of fun and was really impressed by the projects. I hope I was at least moderately helpful.
Also, I hope to post at least one – and possibly two or three – projects from the reviews here on BLDGBLOG, so we can keep the conversations going, perhaps.
And thanks to everyone else who came out for the talk!
The landscape you see in back of the poster announcements is Hermann Park, Brays Bayou, and The Spires, a tower orbiting the Medical Center… which hasn't quite come into its own, yet, in the sense that it's still thinking of itself as a mind-boggling complex of closely interconnected buildings instead of deliberately acting like a new type of continuous super-organism for the treatment of organisms. But for a variety of Houstonish reasons, it's wiggling into that role anyhow.