Alfredo Brillembourg – Winter Lecture Series 2016

Tonight our guest lecturer Alfredo Brillembourg, invited as part of the Winter Lecture Series 2016, inspired the audience with his lecture: Fragmented Cities.

What does it mean to be radical architect or designer today? Never before have cities mattered as much to the future of humanity. As David Harvey attests, we have sleepwalked unknowingly into a full-blown “crisis of planetary urbanization”, with acute social, political, and ecological dimensions.

Cities are fundamentally places of opportunity – after all, urban migrants continue to be drawn in their millions by the promise of security as well as upward mobility. But cities are too often sites of yawning inequality, where land, housing, infrastructure, and services are transformed into symptoms of exclusionary growth.

Faced with contemporary urbanization patterns, we are forced to question how cities and city-making have traditionally operated. More to the point, as architects and designers we are forced to rethink how we can operate within the city, learning from its emerging intelligence and shaping its outcomes to radical and tactical ends.

Alfredo Brillembourg received his Bachelor of Art and Architecture and his Master of Science in Architectural Design from Columbia University. In 1998, with Hubert Klumpner founded Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) in Caracas, Venezuela. Brillembourg has been a guest professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, where he co-founded the Sustainable Living Urban Model Laboratory (S.L.U.M. Lab) with Hubert Klumpner.

Since 2010, Brillembourg and Klumpner hold the chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. As co-principle of U-TT, Brillembourg has received, among other prizes, the 2012 Holcim Global Silver Award for innovative contributions to ecological and social design practices, and the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture Golden Lion.

In case you couldn’t join us, the video is now available online on IaaC YouTube Channel:

IaaC Lectures are free and open to the public.
Please find more information on IaaC website.