*Please note: Guests attending this lecture should use the Walker Hall parking lot, located east of the Kemper Art Museum.
Heinrich Wolff, founding principal of Wolff Architects, will deliver a public lecture titled Epistemological adventure to kick off the Informal Cities Workshop.
Wolff is an architect working in practice with his wife, Ilze, as Wolff Architects in Cape Town, South Africa. They are in pursuit of an architecture of consequence through the mediums of design, research, and activism. Wolff’s work has been exhibited internationally, with the most important shows being the Venice Biennale (2006 and 2010), the Sao Paulo Biennale (2005 and 2007), the Chicago Architecture Biennale (2015), and the Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale (2015).
In 2011, Wolff was selected as the Designer of the Future by the Wouter Mikmak Foundation (Netherlands). In 2007, he won the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Architecture. With his previous practice, he received the Lubetkin Award in 2006 from the RIBA. He has won several other international and South African awards for excellence in design.
Wolff has been a professor of architecture at ETH Zürich, IUAV in Venice, and University of Cape Town and has taught at Washington University.
The workshop aims to demonstrate to students the impact that architects can have on the future of the city, particularly in the context of rapid growth and poverty. Led by Wolff and professor John Hoal, the workshop is structured to reveal the challenges that exist in rapid urbanization but will focus on finding strategies of design that could make for substantially better cities. These strategies will have universal relevance, making city infrastructure that supports the needs and expressions of individuals.
