Curated by The Architecture Foundation, the annual John Edwards Lecture, this year entitled Original Form, addresses the relationship between architecture and related disciplines. The 2015 talk takes the form of a conversation between Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of the Chilean art and architecture studio, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, and the distinguished architectural historian, Joseph Rykwert. Discussion focuses on the development of formal strategies in art and architecture, free from reference to established models.
Supported by the Francis Bacon Estate.
Biographies
Pezo von Ellrichshausen is an art and architecture studio established in Concepcion, southern Chile, in 2002 by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen. They have been the curators of the Chilean Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale and teach regularly in Chile at the Universidad Catolica and in USA at the Illinois Institute of Technology. They have been visiting professors at The University of Texas (Austin, 2011-14) and at Cornell University (New York, 2009). Their work has been distinguished with the Mies Crown Hall Americas Emerge Prize by the IIT (Chicago, 2014), the Rice Design Alliance Prize (Houston, 2012), the V Iberoamerican Architecture Biennial Award (Montevideo, 2006) and the XV Chilean Architecture Biennial Award (Santiago, 2006). The work of the studio has been edited in monographic issues of A+U (Tokyo, 2013), 2G (Barcelona, 2012) and ARQ (Santiago, 2007) and exhibited at the International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 2010), at the Royal Academy of Arts (London, 2014) and as part of the Permanent Collection at the MoMA (New York, 2014).
Joseph Rykwert CBE (born 1926) is Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He was born in Warsaw and emigrated to England in 1939. Following his architectural studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architectural Association, he taught at Hammersmith School of Arts & Crafts and the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm before becoming Librarian and Tutor at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1967 he became Professor of Art at the newly-created University of Essex where he remained until 1981, when he was first Slade Professor in the Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge and later Reader in Architecture. Rykwert is the author of many influential works on architecture, including The Idea of a Town (1963), On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), The Dancing Column (1996) and The Seduction of Place (2000). Joseph Rykwert is the 2014 recipient of the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal.