Thursday, March 3, 2011, 6:30pm

As the recipient of the Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor Chair at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Ben van Berkel will present a lecture, ‘The New Understanding’.

Today, the discipline of architecture is wide open to the possibility of radical change. The narratives of gain and growth that explained, legitimized and propelled forward so much architecture in the past decades have been interrupted. The focus now is on articulating new conceptualizations of possibly all the vital considerations at the core of the field. Yet this is nothing new in itself; architecture thrives on newness. Without continuous material, cultural and ideological innovations, the profession loses its specificity and becomes simply a bland part of a generic building industry. With UNStudio we have long realized this, which is why we have pushed ourselves in many different directions, continuously addressing new challenges and questions. But at the same time this experimental attitude has also led us to consciously seek to build as much as we could. Disengagement from the dangers of the building industry within the globalized economy has never been our preferred option. Perhaps now, even more than at the height of the boom, this engagement is necessary to identify the topics that we need to understand in new ways. These topics are: knowledge, cultural versus economic values, speed and the future. How do we begin to understand these anew? How can we find a new balance between timeless values endogenous and exogenous to architecture?

UN Studio, Erasmus Bridge, 1990-1996, image via Wikipedia

Ben van Berkel studied architecture at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Architectural Association in London, receiving the AA Diploma with Honours in 1987. His first projects were built almost immediately after founding Van Berkel & Bos Architectuur Bureau. Among the buildings of this first period are Karbouw, the Remu electricity station, and Villa Wilbrink. Being elected to design the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam (1996) profoundly affected his understanding of the role of the architect today and constituted the foundation of his collaborative approach to practising, leading to the foundation of UNStudio in 1999.

In the interim a blue period resulted in the realization of projects such as The Moebius House, Het Valkhof Museum (1998), and the Prince Claus Bridge (2003). Recent projects, which reflect his longstanding interest in the integration of construction and architecture, are: the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and Arnhem Central. He has been visiting lecturer at Princeton and had taught at Columbia University, the Berlage Institute and UCLA. He is currently Professor of Conceptual Design and head of the architecture department at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). Ben van Berkel has co-authored a significant number of essays and monographs.

About the Kenzo Tange Chair
Since spring 1984, twenty-nine internationally recognized architects and urbanists have been appointed to the Kenzo Tange Visiting Professorship Chair at Harvard. In these twenty-seven years recipients have included Alvaro Siza, Enric Miralles, Peter Zumthor, Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima. In addition, several current faculty members, including Rafael Moneo, Farshid Moussavi, and Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron were also recipients of the Chair.

Harvard University
Graduate School of Design
Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall
48 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel.: 617-496-2414

www.gsd.harvard.edu