Nuance and Intimacy in the Architecture of the City

This event is dedicated to the legacy of the late Cooper Union Professor Diane Lewis (1951-2017), a distinguished architect and educator. For Lewis, the city was conceived as an architectural text. Reading the plan of the city as a physical and metaphysical condition allows the literary dimension to emerge in a progressive work of architecture. In Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in Civic Space (Skira 2022), colleagues have generated projects engaging with the city as a metahistorical text, provoking the ethical constructs that engage Lewis’ legacy with contemporary nuances. We will review some of Lewis's footsteps from New York to Rome, Berlin, Edinburgh, and London.

Copies of Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in Civic Space will be available to purchase at a special price of £30 (RRP £35)

Speakers include:

Yael Hameiri Sainsaux is an architect and writer, teaching design, history, and theory in New York and Europe. Exhibited internationally, including at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Yael curated 'Conceiving the Plan' for the Venice Biennale's Italian Pavilion (2021), The Cooper Union Houghton Gallery, and Mana Contemporary. A graduate of The Cooper Union, she holds an MPhil from The City University of New York, and her PhD dissertation explores the intersections between architectural conceptions and literary spaces.

Tim Macfarlane is a structural engineer based in London who taught at the AA from 1982 to 2000 in various technical support roles. In 1995 he ran a studio with Diane Lewis at the AA and he worked with her on projects in New York in the early 90's. He also participated in juries at Harvard where Diane was running a studio on Urbanism. From 1998 to 2012 Tim directed an office in New York and ran design studios in glass and facades at Yale, Harvard and IIT. 

Anna Kostreva is co-founder of Plural Studio. She is an architectural designer, artist, and writer based in Berlin, Germany, and Bristol, England. Anna is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Architecture, NYC, and the recipient of a 2009 Fulbright Grant for research on post-apartheid urbanism in Johannesburg, South Africa. She currently teaches architecture at The University of Bath, and she recently published her first architectural novel, Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows.

Holger Kleine is an architect and Professor of Design at Hochschule RheinMain. His research focus is public interiors. He is the author of The Drama of Space (Birkhäuser 2018), a pivotal study on the experience of space in time. Kleine studied at TU Berlin and the Cooper Union (B.Arch 1990). His projects include the German Embassy in Warsaw. Since 2020, he has been working on several sequences of architectural drawings, which have been widely exhibited.

Dr. Dorian Wiszniewski is a senior academic in theory and practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Edinburgh.  He is also Partner in Wiszniewski Thomson Architects, Edinburgh. Built and design projects have been published and exhibited internationally and received many awards. His academic output has been widely published internationally.  His research and practice concerns Ecosophic Urbanism, looking at architecture, politics, philosophy, environment, representation, place, and production.  

Catherine Ann Somerville Venart is an Associate Professor at Dalhousie University's Faculty of Architecture and Planning. A registered architect in Germany, with degrees in engineering, fine arts, and architecture (SCI-Arch), she founded iip (1997), an international interdisciplinary practice operating between academia and the profession. Catherine's research focuses on situating changes, for exposing the relational, dynamic, and hidden dimensions—social, economic, or environmental—embedded in both urban and rural, infrastructural, and architectural constructs and our entanglement with Earth Systems.

Peter Lynch is an architect and researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He headed the graduate architecture department at Cranbrook from 1996-2005 and has taught at Harvard GSD, Columbia University, RISD, CCNY, Parsons, Dalhousie University, Penn State, and KTH, where he was guest professor. His current research project, “Timescape Garden Garden,” an urban biodiversity reserve in Norrköping, is funded by Vinnova, Sweden's innovation agency. Skira will publish a monograph of his work in 2025.

Rosamund Diamond is an architect, writer, and assistant professor at the University of Nottingham. She taught at the AA and has been a visiting critic in Europe and the US. She is the London correspondent for werk bauen + wohnen Zurich. She is a founder of the Salon of Urban Architecture. Her essays include 'Eileen Gray and the Influence of Cubism' (2017), and 'Architecture from Drawing: A Brief Enquiry into Three Types' (2023).

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.

Image: Diane Lewis, Competition for student housing, Cooper Union, New York, 1989, published in AA Files 20, p.44