15. January 2009

Re-commencing the current lecture series after New Year’s, architectural historian and theorist, Beatriz Colomina, will talk about the pavilions of modern architecture. Her lecture draws on her extensive scholarship, which focuses in particular on questions of architecture and media.

Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her books include, amongst other, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), which was awarded the 1995 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects; Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), which was awarded the 1993 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects and Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). Her latest book is Domesticity at War (Barcelona: ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007). She has also curated a number of exhibitions.

In her essay, Pavilions of the Future (in Your Black Horizon, Olafur Eliasson and David Adjaye, Walter Konig, Cologne, 2007), Colomina argues that historically, 'pavilions made dreams seem real, and reality seem dreamlike...the unique role of a pavilion (is) to fuse image and structure...The pavilion is the key instrument for negotiating the relationship between image and physical structure.'