A Conversation about Conversations with Kenneth Frampton

Please note this event will start at 5pm. THERE IS A CHANCE CAMPUS ACCESS WILL BE LIMITED: If You do not have a Columbia ID, please look for event signs at the main campus gate at 116th Street and Broadway for entry starting at 4:30pm

The event will be followed by a reception and an opportunity to purchase Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik and other CBAC books.

Kenneth Frampton, Mario Gooden, Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Mary McLeod, and Daniel Talesnik (University of Bath) participate in a conversation about the book Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2023). The conversation will be moderated by Bart-Jan Polman.

Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik presents seven interviews with the architectural historian reflecting on the long arc of his rich and influential career in the discipline. Spanning Frampton’s early years as an architecture student at the Guildford School of Art to his nearly fifty years as a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, the interviews trace not only the development and implications of his work but also the cultural, political, and discursive terrain surrounding it. Here Frampton outlines the formation of his seminal ideas of “critical regionalism” and “tectonic culture,” and also ruminates on how he understands his own role as a writer on architecture. The book includes an essay by Mary McLeod, which takes stock of Frampton’s “criticality” and his enduring impact on architectural practice. As a whole, Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik is as much a portrait of a thinker as a record of the books, buildings, and ideas that have inspired such profound architectural thought.

This event will be held in Wood Auditorium at Columbia GSAPP and live-streamed on the Columbia GSAPP YouTube Channel.


SPEAKERS

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP, where he taught from 1972-2020. He was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic. In addition to Columbia, Frampton has taught at a number of leading institutions including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne, and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio. Kenneth Frampton is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015), and L’ Altro Movimento Moderno (2015). The expanded fifth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History was published in January 2020.

Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt is the Director of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City at Columbia GSAPP.

Mario Gooden ‘90 MArch is Professor of Professional Practice, Director of the MArch Program, Sequence Director for Advanced Architecture Studios, and Co-Director of the Global Africa Lab at Columbia GSAPP, an innovative research initiative that explores the spatial topologies of the African continent and its diaspora. Gooden is also the Director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design, a transdisciplinary practice dedicated to the design and exploration of architecture and its relationships to culture and knowledge. His practice merges architectural design with landscape, urbanism, history, cultural production and performance. Gooden graduated magna cum laude from Clemson University in 1987 with a B.S. in Design and received a Masters of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1990 and is a recipient of the McKim Prize.

Mary McLeod is a Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where she teaches architecture history and theory, and occasionally studio. She has also taught at Harvard University, University of Kentucky, University of Miami and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and ideology. McLeod is co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, and is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (Abrams, 2003). She also initiated and helped curate the exhibition Charlotte Perriand: Interior Equipment, held at the Urban Center in New York. Her articles have appeared in Assemblage, Oppositions, Art Journal, AA Files, JSAH, Casabella, Art Journal, Harvard Design Magazine, and Lotus as well as other journals and anthologies, such as The Sex of Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, Architecture of the Everyday, Architecture and Feminism, The Pragmatist Imagination, The State of Architecture, Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished, Architecture Theory since 1968, Oppositions Reader, Le Parole dell'Architettura, and Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship, NEH award, and grants from New York Council of the Arts and the Graham Foundation.

Daniel Talesnik is a Lecturer in Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath. He is an architect from the Universidad Católica de Chile and holds a MSc AAD and a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture from Columbia University, awarded with the dissertation “The Itinerant Red Bauhaus, or the Third Emigration.” At the Architekturmuseum der TUM, where he worked between 2017-2022, he curated “Access for All: São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures” (2019), and “Who’s Next? Homelessness, Architecture, and Cities” (2021-2022), and is the co-editor of both exhibition catalogues. He has published numerous essays and book chapters, and is a contributing author and editor of the book Santiago de Chile 1977-1990: arquitectura, ciudad y política (Ediciones ARQ, 2020).

This event content is equivalent to 1.5 AIA/CES total learning credit. Please contact events@arch.columbia.edu for more information.