Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi's lecture pushes back against notions of architecture and infrastructure design being rigid and inflexible. Their talk will explore alternative strategies within these disciplines that structure more lateral, resilient and pliable systems capable of hosting unpredictable uses and activities, absorbing cycles of flooding, pandemics, and generating cultural value.

“The sensibilities of the project of architecture and infrastructure are latent with reciprocities yet to be imagined,” they write. “By bending the loose ends of architecture, landscape and engineering together, we imagine an alchemy that generates a more bountiful and inhabitable interpretation of its potential.”

This is a hybrid event featuring the two speakers in person, and will be moderated by Dean Juan Du.

Marion Weiss is cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism based in New York City and the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, Weiss was honoured by Architectural Record with the Women in Architecture Design Leader Award. Her multidisciplinary firm operates at the nexus of architecture, art, landscape and urban design. Her firm’s Olympic Sculpture Park exemplifies this cross-disciplinary design approach; the project has been recognized internationally through museum exhibitions and design awards. Time Magazine identified the park as one of the top 10 projects in the world; Barcelona’s World Architecture Festival selected it as the winning project in the Nature Category; I.D. magazine awarded it the highest Environment Design Award; and it was the first project in North America to win Harvard University’s Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design.

Weiss received her Master of Architecture from Yale University and her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia. At Yale, she won the American Institute of Architects Scholastic Award and the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Traveling Fellowship. She has taught design studios at Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and since 1991 has been a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn School of Design where she is currently the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture. Weiss is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a National Academy of Design inductee.

Michael Manfredi is cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism based in New York City and is currently a Senior Design Critic at Harvard University. His multidisciplinary firm is at the forefront of architectural design practices that are redefining the relationships between landscape, architecture, infrastructure and art.

Manfredi was born in Trieste, Italy, and grew up in Rome. He completed his undergraduate education in the United States and received his Master of Architecture at Cornell University where he studied with Colin Rowe. He won the Paris Prize, was a Cornell Fellow, and was awarded an Eidlitz Fellowship. He has taught design studios at Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Cornell University, and, most recently, at Harvard University. He is a founding board member of the Van Alen Institute, is currently a board member for the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and been a member of the Advisory Council of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and was recently inducted into the National Academy of Design.

WEISS/MANFREDI is a recipient of the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture, and has been named one of North America’s “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York. The firm has also been honoured with the New York AIA Gold Medal and the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal, awarded to one individual or firm in the world each year.

The firm’s projects have been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale of International Architecture and Design, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Building Museum, Harvard University, the International Landscape Architecture Biennale in Barcelona, and the Design Centre in Essen, Germany. Princeton Architectural Press has published three monographs on their work including their most recent book, PUBLIC NATURES: Evolutionary Infrastructures.