About the Event
Albert Pope, Gus Sessions Wortham Professor, Rice Architecture, presents the Faculty Talk “A Promethean Increment” on Monday, February 22 at 12:00 p.m. via Zoom as part of the Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series.
“A Promethean Increment” will describe recent research on design methodologies that bridge the gap between the smaller scale of architectural solutions and the larger scale at which our most pressing environmental and urban problems exist. Revisiting the indispensable role of typology, these methodologies attempt to describe an aggregate design process as an alternative to the preemptive logic of masterplanning.
Albert Pope is an architect in Houston, Texas and the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture at Rice University. He has lectured, exhibited and written extensively on the on the design logic of contemporary cities. He is the the winner of design awards from the national and local chapters of the American Institute of Architects and has received funding for design work from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Shell Center for Sustainability. He is the author of Ladders (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014) and a fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. He is the founding Director of Present Future, a design program and think tank at Rice University School of Architecture. He is currently engaged in climate driven urban redevelopment producing large scale planning projects for Houston and Detroit.
The Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series, “New Proximities,” is a collective reckoning of health as a social, political, and fundamentally spatial condition. The global pandemic has not only produced profound shifts in the built environment, but also revealed latent precarities embedded in forms of governance, labor, domesticity, and ecology. This lecture series asks: How does COVID-19 and its compounding crises render visible the uneven geographies in which we operate? How might we reformat existing systems beyond the confining world of pandemic space? Expanding scales and spaces of architectural agency, we will hear from critical voices in design, history, and theory to imagine new futures of care and proximity.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Please be sure to register online for each lecture to receive the link to join. For more information on all lectures and to register to attend, visit arch.rice.edu/latest/events and ricedesignalliance.org.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund, the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series for Students in Architecture, and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
