bread spring 2014: Philip Ursprung + Tom Emerson

The civic association Kruh and the prestigious Faculty of Architecture at ETH Zurich are pleased to invite you to another lecture evening from the series “Swiss-Czech Inspirations”, which is co-financed by the Swiss-Czech Cooperation Program. This two-lecture evening will primarily focus on the connection between architecture and visual art, both on a theoretical level and in practice.

Thursday, April 3, 2014, at 7:30 PM
Cinema Světozor, Vodičkova 41, Prague 1
The lecture will be in English, translated into Czech, and is free for everyone.

The speakers will be theorist Philip Ursprung with a lecture titled Built Images: Herzog & de Meuron and London architect Tom Emerson with the title Never Modern.

Philip Ursprung is a professor of art history and architecture at ETH Zurich, and in his lecture titled Built Images: Herzog & de Meuron, he will demonstrate how the Swiss duo Herzog and de Meuron, among the most significant architects of our time, participate in the so-called “iconic turn” in architecture. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from Basel have been collaborating since 1978. For their exceptional buildings that connect architecture with visual art, they were awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 2001. They work with renowned artists such as Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, or Ai Weiwei (Beijing National Stadium, the so-called Bird's Nest, 2008, or Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2012). Philip Ursprung was invited in 2002 to prepare the exhibition Herzog & de Meuron: Archeology of the Mind and the catalog Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (2002) in collaboration with these architects. He is also the editor of the collection Caruso St John: Almost Everything (2008), in which he presents the work of the significant London architect Adam Caruso, who will also be speaking in Prague in October and who is associated with ETH Zurich.

Tom Emerson, in his lecture Never Modern, will show that reusing (re-use) is gradually becoming the main paradigm of 21st-century architecture in the West, replacing the modernist paradigm of building everything new. In 2001, Tom Emerson co-founded the studio 6a architects in London with Stephanie Macdonald, which has since become one of the most renowned architectural practices in Britain. 6a architects has realized several contemporary art galleries in London, focusing on reusing existing elements or what is at hand in their designs. It is not just about repurposing old buildings or their materials, but also about recycling stories that support the emergence of a new authorship approach. In 2012, 6a architects received the Schelling Medal for Architecture and the National RIBA Award. Under the title Never Modern, a book was published last year by Park Books, in which Irénée Scalbert addresses the role of narrative, history, and appropriation in the work of 6a architects.
Since 2010, Tom Emerson has served as a professor of architecture and design at ETH Zurich. Together with students, he creates models the size of pavilions, on which students experiment with the structural possibilities of materials as well as the spatial qualities of their designs. Tom Emerson is also the author of several articles on architecture, art, and literature.

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