Rice Design Alliance brings Swiss architects for lectures

Rice Design Alliance brings Swiss architects for lectures
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For its Spring
Lecture Series, the Rice Design Alliance is bringing to
Houston five Swiss architects who share an uncommon precision
of craftsmanship and deftness of material handling that
has come to emblemize the post-war Swiss architectural legacy.

The careers of
the five designers span from the 1950s to the present. The
works of each one exhibit strong design influences from
two directions — the cultivation of an intangible spatial
presence through a pure, abstract idiom of frames and glass
or masonry enclosing planes, and the less doctrinaire, more
relaxed material palette found in the rural vernacular of
the Swiss countryside.

One of the most
important architecture critics in the world today, Kurt
W. Forster, will give a historical overview of recent Swiss
architecture Jan. 29. Forster is the founding director of
the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities
in Santa Monica, Calif.

He also is the
former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture
and served as chair in the History of Art and Architecture
at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland,
from 1992 to 1999.

The next lecture
in the series is set for Feb. 5 and will feature Marianne
Burkhalter of Burkhalter and Sumi. She will lecture on the
exploration that she and her partner Christian Sumi have
taken into the nature of materials and construction.

In the last 15
years, they have built a series of remarkable buildings
in wood and stone in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Burkhalter and
Sumi have been in practice together since 1984 and their
most famous built work is the Hotel Zurichberg in Zurich.

The final lecture
in the spring series will be Feb. 12 and feature Livio Vacchini
and Silvia Gmur.

After earning
a degree in architecture at the Federal Polytechnic of Zurich
in 1958, Vacchini worked for five years (beginning in 1968)
with Luigi Snozzi and after that occasionally with Aurelio
Galfetti. Vacchini is an architect whose designs feature
an extreme coherence of theme and practice.

The most important
values of his work lie precisely in their intentional “untimeliness.”
Joined by Silvia Gmur in his own firm in 1995, Vacchini
has produced a number of public buildings and houses noted
for their robust elegance.

All the lectures
in this series will be held at 7:30 p.m. at Brown Auditorium
in The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet.

Advanced ticket
sales are available at the RDA office through series tickets.
Tickets are $30 for the general public, $20 for RDA and
MFAH members and $10 for students.

Upon availability,
single tickets will be on sale the night of the lectures:
$10 for general public, $7 for RDA and MFAH members and
$3 for students.

By highlighting
these works, RDA hopes to contribute to the general knowledge
and appreciation of this aspect of Switzerland’s often
overlooked cultural resources and establish a basis for
understanding the potency of regionally inflected modernism.

The series is
cosponsored by the Dallas Architectural Forum. For more
information on the RDA or the lecture series visit <www.rice.edu/projects/RDA/>.