Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture

*This event is occurring as a live webinar. Registrants will be emailed a link to access the program; please continue to register.*

Join us for a book talk with Françoise Astorg Bollack, author of Material Transfers Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture. In the book, architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Bollack presents projects that use traditional materials to build contemporary forms or use modern materials to build traditional forms, blurring the boundary between tradition and modernity in architecture.

Bollack rejects the modernist taboo against imitation and precedent, tracing the history of adaptive and imitative design from the Renaissance to the Greek and Gothic revivals and the nineteenth-century modular, cast-iron facades that Philip Johnson considered “the basis for modern design.”

The book examines eighteen contemporary projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, encompassing a broad range of building types: residential, hospitality, commercial and retail, and cultural spaces. All share an intriguing, even radical, approach to reinterpreting traditional forms and materials. Humble thatch moves beyond the farmhouse roof to clad the walls of a Danish environmental center; a photographic image of a Parisian facade becomes a scrim on the facade of a new building; the ghost of an ancient Italian basilica is outlined in wire mesh.

Speaker:
Françoise Astorg Bollack, Principal, Francoise Bollack Architects

Françoise Astorg Bollack is the principal of Françoise Bollack Architects, a firm that specializes in preservation and reinvention of historic structures, and an associate professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation where she teaches a seminar on contemporary design and old buildings. Author of the award-winning Old Buildings New Forms (The Monacelli Press, 2013), she has lectured widely to architectural and preservation groups including the New York and Boston chapters of the AIA, the Historic Districts Council and Village Preservation in New York, and the architecture and preservation programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Mary Washington University, and Tulane University.

Buy the book:
Purchase a copy of Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture here and use the code FALL20 at checkout to receive 20% off your book.