Beatrice Galilee is a curator, critic and cultural consultant specializing in the field of contemporary architecture and design. Beatrice is internationally recognised for her worldwide experience in curating, designing and conceiving original and dynamic city-wide biennales, museum exhibitions, installations, conferences, events and publications, bringing together the world’s most important institutions with cutting edge practitioners. Her research and writing has been published in journals, newspapers and magazines.
She is the founder and executive director of The World Around, a New York-based conference and platform for cultural discourse whose critically acclaimed first event took place in January 2020. Between 2014-2019, Beatrice was the first curator of contemporary architecture and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she organised exhibitions and installations on the Met Rooftop, and public programs of contemporary architecture, art, photography, film and design , launched the acclaimed public program for architecture, In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, as well as acquisitions and collections research. Beatrice was Chief Curator of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Close, Closer an exhibition that examined the plurality and diversity of contemporary architectural practice; co-curator of 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, Design is Design is Not Design; co-curator of 2009 Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, City Mobilization. She curated the 2019 Designs of the Year exhibition at London’s Design Museum, and the experimental performance design projects Hacked and Afrofutureat Milan Design Weeks 2011 and 2012. Between 2010-2012 she launched and co-directed The Gopher Hole, an experimental exhibition and project space in London
From 2006-2009 Beatrice was Architecture Editor for Icon Magazine, one of Europe’s leading publications in architecture and design. Beatrice’s writing has been published in a number of international magazines and books as well as daily newspapers, including e-Flux, Domus, Abitare, MARK, Tank, Pin-Up, Above, Building Design, Architectural Review, Architecture Today, RIBA Journal, Architect’s Journal, Art Review, DAMn, Frame, Wallpaper, Another Magazine, and the Serpentine Pavilion catalogue. She is working on her first book for Phaidon which will be published in 2021.
As an expert in her field, Beatrice has been invited to sit on a number of major international juries and is a regular speaker at events, symposia and conferences on the topic of contemporary critical design and architecture. Beatrice is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, with a Masters in Architectural History from Bartlett UCL and a degree in Architecture from Bath University.
About the lecture / October/06/2020 19:30 Central European Time /
Justin Garrett Moore is an urban designer and the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission. He has extensive experience in urban design and city planning—from large-scale urban systems, policies, and projects to grassroots and community-focused planning, design, and arts initiatives. At the Public Design Commission, his work is focused on prioritizing the quality and excellence of the public realm, and fostering accessibility, diversity, and inclusion in the City’s public buildings, spaces, and art.
As the former Senior Urban Designer for the NYC Department of City Planning for over a decade, Justin was responsible for conducting complex urban design plans and studies of the physical design and utilization of sites including infrastructure, public spaces, land use patterns, and neighborhood character. His projects included the Greenpoint and Williamsburg Waterfront, Hunter’s Point South, and the Brooklyn Cultural District. He received degrees in both architecture and urban design from Columbia University where he is now an Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
He is the co-founder of Urban Patch, a social enterprise focused on community improvement and development, and a member of the urbanist collective BlackSpace. His professional affiliations include the American Planning Association, the Urban Design Forum, the Van Alen Institute, and Next City’s Vanguard. He also serves as a member of the American Planning Association’s AICP Commission, on the boards of ioby.org and Made in Brownsville, and on advisory boards for the Van Alen Institute, MoMA, and Dumbarton Oaks.
About the lecture / October/07/2020 19:30 CET
Difference and Design
Platon is an architect, researcher and educator. He is currently Director of Projective Cities: MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also Diploma Unit 7 Studio Master developing a project on the North Sea together with Hamed Khosravi. Prior, he has been a Tutor/Visiting Lecturer at the School of Architecture/RCA (MA Architecture, MA City Design), and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, University of Westminster. He has also taught at the Berlage Institute/Rotterdam, the MArch Urban Design/Bartlett-UCL, the University of Cyprus, and Syracuse University, London Program.
Since 2009, Platon, Alexandra Vougia and Theodossis Issaias work together as Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective. They have developed projects in a wide range of scales, from intimate objects, to architecture, urban design and planning. Their work has received multiple awards in Greece and internationally, most recently the 3rd prize for the redesign of Lycabettus Hill Theatre Public Space in Athens. For the past five years, they have been developing an incremental housing project based on alternative cooperative models in Da Nang, Vietnam.
Platon studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTh) and holds an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft. His thesis Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common investigated the recent history of planning in Athens and the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development. His published work includes ‘Displaced, in place and in Transit: refugee population in Greece and the formation of planning protocols and domestic machines’, Transient Spaces: Building Shelter in Crisis Contexts (NY, 2019), ‘Designing the Informal-The Case of Athens’, in Athens: From Informal to Paradigm (Athens, Futura, 2019), ‘From the Flat to the City: The construction of Modern Greek Subjectivity’ Joelho, issue 8 (2017), ‘Domestic, Production and Debt: For a Theory of the Informal’ in T. Stoppani et al (eds) This Thing Called Theory (London, 2016), ‘Mechanism of Suspension: Infrastructure and Legislation for Free Camping’ in Y. Aesopos Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece (Domes Editions, 2015) with T. Issaias and A. Vougia; ‘On Conflict, Generic and the Informal: The Greek Case’, in Very, Vary Veri, Harvard GSD, 2 (2015); ‘The Absence of Plan as a Project: Notes on the Planning development of Modern Athens, 1830-2010’. in P.V. Aureli (ed.) The City as a Project (Ruby Press, 2013); ‘From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia’, DOMUS, issue 962, October (2012) with P.V. Aureli and M.S. Giudici; and ‘Labour, City, Architecture: Athens as a case study’ in P. Dragonas, A. Skiada, Made In Athens (YPEKA, 2012) with P.V. Aureli and M.S. Giudici.
In 2018, he co-curated the exhibition Islands of Exile: The Case of Leros in Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy, which presented the findings of a four-year-long interdisciplinary project on the island of Leros, Greece and int history as a place of displacement, detention, and control. Together with Hamed Khosravi, they have co-authored ‘Territory as a Project’, the preface for the catalogue of the Polish National Pavilion of the 17th Venice Biennale, and they are currently finalising an exhibition, a publication and a conference for the work of the painter and founding partner of OMA, Zoe Zenghelis.
About the lecture / October/01/2020 18:30 CET
Territories, Equipments, and Bodies: Architecture of Collective Living
Architecture, design and art practices are defined by different political, economic, social, and cultural contexts and frameworks. Different social groups and their interests, different conceptions of social, familial and gender relations and the violence related to them, management and decision-making protocols, public and private development strategies define the diagrammatic and formal relations of how we live together. All these points define a network of diagrammatic relations that emerge in a series of conflicts and their interrelated scales through which territories, equipments, objects and bodies are conceptualised: the scale of architecture, its specificity and type, the urban scale, its configuration, limits, and centralities but also the political and socio-economic realities that organise it, labour and capital, the national scale and the establishment of a citizenry, and the regional scale and its economic and geopolitical realities.
The spatial organization of how we live together is reflected on a series of informal and formal relations between subjects, between spaces, between structural and non-structural elements, between objects, and protocols of use and occupation.
The Architecture of Collective Living therefore opens up a discussion of how the urban can be understood through specific architecture and its design, and how its effect as an urban armature is not only of spatial importance, but equally organised by larger political and social discourses.
The Architecture of Collective Living expands from the molecular to the territorial and the planetary.
How can we respond to changing political, cultural, economic, and urban contexts and how to propose new effective design ideas and models. What is the agency of architecture? How do we develop a pedagogical model that allows for a more effective relation between academic institutions and practice? How can architectural and urban design practice intervene in contexts where vulnerable and often in-transit population are living? How can the categories of permanence, transition, or ‘integration’ be rethought in relation to new models of social and spatial organisations that challenge conventional domestic diagrams?
The lecture will present key elements from Platon’s research work at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture, and past, present, and ongoing projects of Fatura Collaborative, Research and Design Practice.
Elian Stefa (1985), is an Albanian-Canadian architect, curator, and multidisciplinary artist based in Tirana, Albania. He currently directs GALERiA e BREGDETiT, an independent art space in Radhimë, in the south of Albania. After completing his studies in Landscape Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, his dissertation project “Concrete Mushrooms” was published as a book by DPR-Barcelona, and the eponymous documentary film was screened at several international film festivals and competitions including, also winning 1st prize in the film category of Arup’s “Drivers of Change” Prize in 2011. The project went on to participate at the Albanian pavilion of the 13th Architecture Biennale in Venice, 2012.
Since then Stefa has worked on a variety of curatorial and research projects, often focusing on exploring ambiguous territories, and the interrogation of vernacular artefacts in a fast changing landscape. Notable projects include working as Associate Curator and General Coordinator of ‘Adhocracy’, exhibited at the 1st Istanbul Design Biennial, the New Museum NYC, and LimeWharf London; and exhibitions at La Triennale di Milano, the EXD’11 Lisbon Biennale, Stazione Futuro at OGR Torino, the Helsinki Museum of Cultures, Strelka Institute, and the Harvard GSD. Stefa has also been teaching at the Polytechnic University of Tirana, and the Albanian University in Tirana between 2013 and 2017, while also lecturing at numerous other institutions in Albania and Europe during this time period.
His current long term project is the demilitarisation, preservation and partial transformation of Sazan, the only island of Albania, which throughout history has had an exclusively militaristic nature. The island lays now completely abandoned, providing a mummified testament to the paranoia and isolation of the totalitarian regime. The project is part of the Future Architecture Platform since 2019.
About the lecture / October/02/2020 19:30 CET
The importance of fiction in moulding reality: Cyberpunk & Solarpunk
Eliza Hoxha is an architect, graduated at University of Prishtina, Kosovo. In 2006 she finished her postgraduate studies at Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium with focus on Architecture of Human Settlements. Currently she is a PhD candidate at Technical University of Graz in Austria. She is an author of the book “City and Love” an urban diary about the city of Prishtina published in Albanian 2013 and in English 2019. Kosovar Women Network awarded her in 2013 for promoting women’s right in Kosovo. At the same year she was awarded from National AmericanAlbanian Council /USAID – Hope Fellowship Program as volunteer of the year. She was also awarded by the Association of Kosovar Architects for her writings with a price for “educative architecture – promotion of architecture” in April 2011. Another award came to her as an Ambassador for Environment in Kosovo from BELLS (Balkan Environmental Local Leadership Standards) Movement at September 2010. Between, July 2011 until 2015 she was a President of the Executive Board of the National Gallery of Kosovo. Since 2013, she is a member of ECP-European Culture Parliament.
Eliza is a dedicated and active citizen of Kosovo who gives a part of her time on voluntary basis in many awareness campaigns for different social and environmental issues and concerns in Kosovo. At the same time she uses art, music and other artistic platforms of expression as a way of mobilizing people around an important cause and/or being a voice of marginalized groups in Kosovo such as children with Down syndrome, missing person’s families, sexually abused women, etc. Exhibition for missing persons from the last war in Kosovo, sexually abused women and others are just some of them to mention. Since April 2016, two of her works/photos are a part of the collection of National Museum of Women in Arts in Washington DC, USA. In 2018 she represented Kosovo Pavilion at 16th Architecture Venice Biennale
She was also an author and moderator of the first TV PROGRAM in Kosovo for architecture named “CELESI” at RTV21
Eliza Hoxha works at the University of Prishtina / Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture / Department of Urbanism and Spatial Planning since 2003
From the last elections in Kosovo in October 2019 she is also a Member of the Kosovo Parliament.
About the lecture / September/22/2020 18:30 CET
Eliza will be presenting her study on Grand Hotel and will be part of the “Prishtina Public Archipelago” panel together with fellow architects Donika Luzhnica, Arber Sadiki, Nol Binakaj, Bekim Ramku as well as with the Prishtina Mayor Shpend Ahmeti.
Donika Luzhnica, born in 1991 in Suhareka, is an architect based in Zurich and Prishtina. She is currently holding a position as a design architect at CH Architekten in Zurich. In 2018 she obtained the Master Degree from the Technical University in Graz and her Master’s Thesis – “Gërmia center for contemporary creation. Reimagine the relationship between the city, its past and art”- was nominated at GAD Awards and won the third Prize.
During her studies, she has been working as a research and student assistant at the KOEN Insitute at TU Graz and has as well collected experiences working with various practices, LOVE Architecture and Pittino & Ortner amongst other, for many project related collaborations.
In 2016, together with three other colleagues, she has won the first prize in a realisation competition “Revitalisation of steps in Arberia Quarter and construction of a new pedestrian bridge” and co-founded ARS Atelie – an interdisciplinary architectural practice based in Prishtina later that same year.
In 2018 she has been part of the design team of the Kosovo Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennale in Venice.
Her work focuses on typology research and design.
About the lecture / September/22/2020 18:30 CET
This lecture examines and argues the reuse of the former department store Germia, and its transformation into a center of contemporary creation, using architecture as an instrument to resolve a specific urban vision and reimagine the relationship between the city, its past and art. The focus lies in the typological transformative reuse as well as in reactivation of an important architectural socialist modernist heritage in a specific context. Through contextual analysis as well as typology research, this work, in addition, tries to answer the question of how to deal with the yugoslav modernist legacy in Prishtina, what do these landmarks represent and based on an example explore their reuse potential as well as give an answer to the unfinished utopia.
Donika will be presenting her study on the Germia and will be part of the “Prishtina Public Archipelago” panel together with fellow architects Eliza Hoxha, Arber Sadiki, Nol Binakaj, Bekim Ramku as well as with the Prishtina Mayor Shpend Ahmeti
Malkit Shoshan is the founding director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), an Amsterdam- and New York-based think-tank that develops projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and human rights.
She is the author and mapmaker of the award-winning book “Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine” (Uitgeverij 010, 2010), and co-author of the book “Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise” (Damiani Editore, 2014). Her additional publications include “Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism” (NAiM, 2012), “Drone – Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series” (dpr-barcelona, 2016-2018), the journal “Spaces of Conflict” for Footprint, TU Delft Architecture Theory Journal (JAP SAM Books, 2017), “Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations” (The International Peace Institute, NYC, 2018), and “UN Peace Missions in Urban Environments. The Legacy of UNMIL” (FAST, CIC-NYU, 2019).
In 2016, Shoshan was the curator of the Dutch Pavilion for The Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition “BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions.” Her recent exhibitions include “Love in a Mist. The Politics of Fertility” (Druker Gallery, Harvard GSD, 2019), and “Border Ecologies” (Harvard GSD, 2017), and the exhibition “Watermelons, Sardines, Crabs, Sand and other Sediments” for the upcoming 2021 Venice Biennale.
She is the Area Head of the Master in Design Studies in Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she taught the courses: “Architecture of Peace,” “Spaces of Solidarity,” “Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization,” “Forms of Assembly,” and “Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices.”
Her research and design work has been published in newspapers and journals including the New York Times, The Guardian, NRC, Haaretz, Volume, Surface, Frame, Metropolis, and exhibited in venues including the UN Headquarter in NYC (2016), Venice Architecture Biennale (2002, 2008, 2016), Experimenta (2011), Het Nieuwe Instituut (2014), The Istanbul Design Biennale (2014), The Israel Digital Art Center (2012), and The Netherlands Architecture Institute (2007).
About the lecture / October/01/2020 19:30 CET
Notes on Forms of Assembly and Solidarity
The city, and the built environment at large, is an entanglement of complex socioeconomic, cultural, and political systems. In its public spaces, we come together, inform and form one another. These spaces of physical and social encounters are critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society.
Confronted by a global pandemic, we become confined within a minimal space. Our bodies are physically locked inside the domestic environment, and when outside, they are masked and at six feet apart. Intellectually, our virtual and online exchanges, which are seemingly open, remain highly edited and surveilled. We communicate with a world of similarity, gated in social and professional networks. Not only the pandemic imperils our public spaces, and, by extension, our freedom, and rights. We live in times of changing climate and environmental destruction that have immense consequences on humans and other species’ lives and habitat. These growing stresses threaten to solidify policies, culture, and spaces of isolation, exclusions, and violence. Walls and detainment camps are forming vast landscapes along national political borders. At this time of public health crisis, precarious public life, and environmental catastrophe, we need to come together, assemble, in solidarity more than ever before and imagine our way out of isolationism, and perpetual systemic violence.
This lecture will explore how art and design tools can become agents of change that help us by engagement to empower the public imagination, conceive, enact, and mobilize forms of assembly – spaces of unedited and uncontrolled open exchange, and places of solidarity and care.
Doreen is an architect based in Kampala, Uganda. Her practice, Adengo Architecture, is grounded in research and multidisciplinary collaboration.
After completing her undergraduate and graduate studies at the Catholic University and Yale, respectively, Doreen worked for design firms in London, Washington DC, and New York. She has taught at The New School and Pratt Institute in New York and at Uganda Marty’s University, and until recently served as a visiting critic at University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture.
Much of Doreen’s work is focused on communicating the value of professional design services in African cities. In a context where non-designers often build their own homes, schools, and other structures, she believes that it’s critical to make the case that architects and urban planners can improve people’s everyday lives, helping neighborhoods and cities develop cohesively and sustainably.
To this end, Doreen often collaborates with institutions and individuals from different fields to find new ways to communicate about design in Kampala. In 2018, Doreen served as a regional collaborator for the African Mobilities: This is not a refugee camp exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Munich. Her team explored the impact of Congolese migrants on the Kitenge trade in Kampala. As part of the process, Doreen coordinated the Kampala Exchange workshop at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala, bringing together architects, photographers, and social scientists to seek new approaches to architectural representation.
Doreen recently facilitated the African Modernism: Kampala workshop along with German architect Manuel Herz and Kenyan photographer James Muriuki, also at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala. The workshop, which explored the relationship between architecture and photography, led to an exhibition that included new photographs of modernist buildings in the Ugandan capital. Doreen co-curated the exhibition with Manuel Herz.
About the lecture / October/09/2020 18:30 CET
Kampala Markets as Public Space
Dr. Rezai is an engineer, a design visionary and an educator. One of the initiators of the concept of “fusion engineering”, he is the first and only engineer to receive the coveted title of “Designer of the Year” from the President of Singapore. He is very passionate about the process of advanced computational design, and a holistic approach to architecture + structure + environment. Dr Rezai’s high- profile contributions to industry discourse include his involvement on the 13th cycle Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s Master Jury in 2016, as a jury member for the Singapore President’s Design Award (2017 – 2018) and as Vice Chair (2019-2020). Dr Rezai is founding Director of Web Structures and Web Earth. His latest initiative, on Advanced Computational Design aims to redefine the collaborative nature of designers working with machines to overcome the compound challenges faced by the building industries, and the environments within which they are deployed.
Dr. Rezai lectures extensively, and has covered ongoing crit and consultation in various architectural schools including those at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Politecnico Di Milano.
Dr Rezai is a proponent of highrise and dense urban development, with emphasis on innovative structural systems for tall, supertall and mega tall structures.
About the lecture / October/08/2020 18:30 CET
JUSTICE, DESIGN AND PUBLICNESS
This talk will address key issues facing contemporary design professionals, including our evolving relationship with the environment, the purpose and hierarchy of design, and the multiplicity of clients; as well as pressing political and social agendas for the built environment.
Drawing on his nearly four decades of innovative design and engineering collaborations with some of the world’s best architects, designers and centres of research, Dr Hossein Rezai will share insights on the current status and potential future directions of design for the built environment, all the while seeking to apply lessons from the wisdom of the past.
In particular, Dr Rezai will share some provocations for the audience to reconsider our contemporary norms; seeking new ways to translate the current generation’s unprecedented access to data and information into true knowledge and insight, and asking how current parameters for assessing sustainable development might be expanded.
Alessio Rosati (1971) was born in Rome where he studied architecture.
After working for some of the main Italian cultural institutions, in 2010 started his collaboration with MAXXI, The National Musem of 21st Century Arts where he curated exhibitions and events, edited publications, headed the Research Department and is currently Head of Institutional Projects.
He is regularly invited as guest lecturer and critic by north American architecture schools such as Cornell, Pratt, and Waterloo.
About the lecture / September/25/2020 18:30 CET
You Have To Pay For The Public Life. Sometimes.
A story by Alessio Rosati featuring Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, Ralph Erskine, Herman Hertzberger, Enric Miralles, Charles W. Moore and Paolo Portoghesi.
In 2020 MAXXI, Italy’s national museum for contemporary arts celebrates the 10th anniversary of its opening to the public, a decade during which the cultural institution has tried to define its public role and, being the country’s first museum of contemporary architecture, to provide the public with tools and methods to know, analyze and understand the space in which we live.
Through a palimpsest of exhibitions and cultural activities MAXXI has recurrently addressed the theme of publicness, questioning its own role, in a time when the idea of public institution is undergoing a profound rethinking and the concept of public space is facing a radical transformation.
Today urban public space is indeed used more intensively than ever and is often organized specifically for consumption. For decades, this was perceived as a negative development and it has been said that such regimented spaces were not “open” places where people can spontaneously meet the “other” or where groups could can together. They were deemed as places unable to satisfy the definition of the public sphere provided by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas: a place for debate and democracy, for the exchange of opinions.
However, something is changing and the negative opinions of recent decades are being questioned. Fears and concerns about the disappearance of the public domain seem to be giving way to a more positive and sophisticated point of view, capable of creating the conditions in which the public can claim a space as their own.
You Have To Pay For The Public Life. Sometimes is the Italian version of the story, presented as a documentary with contributions by some of the key figures of contemporary architecture.
