Scholars debate architecture in the post-Holocaust era in CU lectures

Daniel Libeskind, an influential architectural educator, theoretician and practitioner from Berlin, will deliver the 1998 Preston H. Thomas Lectures April 1 and 2 on campus. The subject of this year's lectures is "Re: Constructing Architecture and the City Between History, Hope and Hallucination."

In addition to the lectures, Libeskind will participate in a debate April 3 with McGill University Professor Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Cornell College of Architecture, Art and Planning Dean Anthony Vidler on the significance of the practice and theory of architecture in the post-Holocaust era.

The lectures and the debate, which are free and open to the public, begin at 5:30 p.m. in 200 Baker Lab. The lecture series is sponsored by the Department of Architecture.

Libeskind's international practice extends from building major cultural institutions including museums and concert halls to landscape and urban projects, to stage design, installations and exhibitions. His winning competition project for the extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum of 1989 is now near completion. He currently is designing and constructing the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, Germany, the extension of the Victoria Albert Museum in London, the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, and Philharmonic Hall in Bremen, Germany. An alumnus of Cooper Union, he taught and lectured at many universities worldwide. From 1978 to 1985, he was head of the Department of Architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

His work has been exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries around the world and has been the subject of numerous international publications, including Radix-Matrix: Works and Writings of Daniel Libeskind (Prestel, 1994/97).

Pérez-Gómez, who did postgraduate work at Cornell, is the Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture and the director of the Graduate Program in the History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal.

Pérez-Gómez won the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award in 1984 for Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983). He also wrote Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press, 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture, and Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (MIT Press, 1997), which explores the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design. He is co-editor of the new series CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, which explores the fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture and examines its potential.

Vidler, who is also the Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, is a specialist in the architecture of Enlightenment, an authority on the work of Claude Nicholas Ledoux and a critic of 20th century architecture and theory. He is an award-winning author and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture series has been given annually since 1976 with funds provided by Leonard and Ruth Thomas, in memory of their son, Preston, who was a third-year student of architecture when he was killed in an automobile accident.