Landmark Lecture: Material Transfers – Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture

The New York Landmarks Conservancy, in partnership with The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen of the City of New York cordially invites you to:

LANDMARK LECTURE
Material Transfers – Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture
With Françoise Astorg Bollack- Architect, Architectural Historian, and Preservationist

In a lecture, based on her book, Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture, architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Françoise Astorg 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. Ms. 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 to the 19th century modular cast-iron facades that Philip Johnson considered “the basis for modern design.”

Françoise Bollack will discuss some of 18 contemporary projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, featured in the book, 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, and the ghost of an ancient Italian basilica is outlined in wire mesh.