ID. Bilkent University Department of Architecture is proud to host renowned architect Juhani Pallasmaa and Huang Sheng-Yuan from Fieldoffice, for lectures on their unique outlooks on architecture and theory.
Juhani Pallasmaa Lecture:
Architecture as Experience – embodied and existential meaning in architecture
Architectural theory, education and practice have regarded architecture as formal, visually aestheticized material structures and spaces. Yet, already in 1934 John Dewey argued that art and architecture are constituted in human experience, not in the physical object. The phenomenological view is now shifting our emphasis to the experience and the complex interactions of perception, memory, imagination, emotion and empathic identification. At the same time, the interest is turning from form and geometry to formless and immaterial ”quasi-things”, such as atmosphere, feeling, resonance and attunement. The emphasis on experience is also questioning the hegemony of the focused vision and pointing at the central significance of the embracing and omni-directional senses. The experiences of the world and architecture are fundamentally tactile, embodied and existential. Our most important architectural sense may well prove to be the existential sense of being and self.
Huang Sheng-Yuan Lecture:
Living with Sky, Water and Mountain: A Path towards Freedom
Youth can always be found in the landscape. Over 25 years, Fieldoffice Architects has rooted in Yilan. For making architecture patiently and slowly, they have tried to learn from the rivers, mountains, sea and folks, with their deep reflections on natural and cultural landscape.
Recently, they have few opportunities to work outside Yilan and experience the differences between places in northern Taiwan, as well as happily struggle against the bureaucracy.
With their belief in making friends with time, they found them in Japan, Europe and East Asia. While celebrating their life with friendship, they should never forget their promise – Nature, equality and being together in their journey toward freedom.
Juhani Pallasmaa, Professor emeritus, Architect, SAFA, Hon.FAIA, Int.FRIBA
The internationally acclaimed architect, educator, and writer Juhani Pallasmaa has authored sixty books, many of them relating to the multisensory and existential dimensions of experiencing art and architecture. He is the former Rector of the Institute of Design, Helsinki, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology, and Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki. He has had Visiting Professor positions in a number of US universities, and lectured and conducted workshops in numerous universities in Europe, North, Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Huang Sheng-Yuan, born in Taipei in 1963, holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Tunghai University in Taiwan, and a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University in the United States. In the early days he worked in Eric Owen Moss Architects as a Project Associate, and before returning to Taiwan, he taught at North Carolina State University.
He firmly believes in the root of architecture that lies deeply within life itself, and life’s truest form is not one of static and tangible qualities, but of dynamic and ephemeral, constantly in change. As a result, such an acute perception itself has led a direction that is rather ambiguous and whimsical in nature, making Huang and his later established Fieldoffice’s works one of a kind in the architecture realm.
