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Architecture lectures set for October
Architect of proposed Martin House Visitors Center to speak on Wednesday
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
Toshiko Mori, architect of the proposed Darwin Martin House Visitors Center, will present an illustrated lecture on Wednesday at UB as part of the 2006 lecture series presented by the School of Architecture and Planning.
Her talk at 5:50 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall, South Campus, will address her current architectural projects, including the Newspaper Café in the Jindong New District Architecture Park in Jinhua, China; residences in Connecticut and New York; and the Syracuse Center for Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems.
The lecture will be followed by a reception for the architect.
Her talk will be on the same day that the Martin House Restoration Corp. will hold a private premiere of the "lost buildings" of the Martin House Complex: the pergola, conservatory, carriage house and greenhouse.
The series' second October lecture will be presented by eclectic, dystopian installation artist Andrea Zittel at 6 p.m. Oct. 6 in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Zittel's talk will accompany the opening of "Critical Space," the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work, which will be on view in the gallery through Jan. 7. Organized by New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the exhibition will travel through 2007.
Both lectures are free of charge and open to the public, but there will be an admission fee to the Zittel exhibition for those over the age of 13 of $10 for general admission and $8 for students and seniors.
Mori is chair and Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at Harvard University School of Design and the principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, New York. Her firm's work has been widely published and has received international awards and prizes, including the Cooper Union Inaugural John Heiduk Award and the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
An advisor to A+U Magazine, Mori has been a visiting faculty member at Columbia University and at Yale University, where she was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 1992. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she taught for more than a decade at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where she currently serves on the President's Council.
Zittel's art is unique, mind-twisting and eye-opening. After years of working in what she calls "the margins between design, art and craft," she now incorporates all three in her customized living chambers and objects that challenge notions of domestic and personal space.
Her fantastical artistic production includes a retrofit of her own apartment, living "without time" for a week in a Berlin basement, and creating such things as modular furniture units, a wardrobe of felt clothing, tiny trailer homes and a 44-ton concrete habitable floating fantasy island off the coast of Denmark. She teaches at the University of Southern California and is the 2005 recipient of the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
The Zittel exhibit at the Albright will include "Living Units" and "Comfort Units"—collapsing living stations—as well as the complete line of Zittel's handmade clothing series "Uniform" and new work from her desert studio A-Z West in Joshua Tree, Calif.