2014

The Faculty of Architecture at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences will host a lecture series on Japanese architecture. The program will start April 8 with Junya Ishigami and will continue until June 24 with lectures by Shin Takamatsu & Takeshi Katagiri, recent Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban, Ryusuke Kojio, Sou Fujimoto, Hitoshi Abe and Hiroaki Kimura.

Critical Shifts is a one-day, student-organized symposium dedicated to exploring the ongoing transformations of critical practice in architecture. The event brings together a diverse group of practitioners in order to investigate how their work (which often combines the activities and approaches of curation, editing, writing, design, teaching, and research) can begin to trace a nuanced map of the fieldʼs current critical terrain.

The ‘Chronomanifestes’ exhibition by Bernard Tschumi, first presented at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, will be re-exhibited again in 2014 at the Turbulences – Frac Centre. The radical period of architecture (Superstudio, Archizoom in Italy, Archigram in the United Kingdom to take just two examples) indeed proves itself extraordinarily rich in concepts and critical manifestos that challenge the discipline of architecture to form hybrids with artistic production and to advocate a political position.

As part of the CA Group’s lecture series, “Architour,” principal of Ensamble Studio, Antón García-Abril & Débora Mesa, will give a lecture at 15:30 on March 29th at Tongji Architectual Design (Group) Co.,Ltd.(TJAD) auditorium in Shanghai. For 2013 through 2015, “Architour” has as its theme “New Force of Architecture – Leading Young Architects”: each year, the CA Group will select nine young, global leaders in architecture (four from Asia and five from the West) to lecture on topics that cross typologies and disciplines, from architectural design, urban planning to interior design. Sou Fujimoto, Hirata Akihisa, Christian Kerez and Thomas Heatherwick were the series’ first speakers.