Thom Mayne and Frédéric Flamand for the inaugural John Edwards Lecture

The Architecture Foundation presents Thom Mayne and Frédéric Flamand for the inaugural John Edwards Lecture The Architecture Foundation is pleased to announce the participants in the inaugural annual John Edwards Lecture are founder of Morphosis Architects, Pritzker Prize Winner and newly appointed Member of President Obama's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Thom Mayne, and Director of the National Ballet of Marseille and renowned choreographer Frédéric Flamand. The lecture takes place at 7.00pm, on Monday 7 December 2009 at Tate Modern. The John Edwards Lecture is a new annual dialogue, curated by The Architecture Foundation, which presents leading international architects in conversation with influential figures from other disciplines, from artists and filmmakers to writers and philosophers. Thom Mayne is an architectural provocateur, fearlessly devoted to the present and the future and the negotiation between concept and reality. His architecture appears as futuristic constructivism; its jagged forms are loaded with rigorous ecological and social considerations. As founder and design director of Morphosis, Mayne speaks for a practice dedicated to interdisciplinary research and design, and architecture as a collaborative enterprise. Morphosis’ work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and the Netherlands Architecture Institute and has been featured in the past four Venice Architectural Biennales. This year, their new building for Cooper Union in New York opened to widespread international acclaim; major projects for Shanghai, Dallas and Paris are currently underway. In 2003 Mayne completed a 2,400 square foot stage set for Frédéric Flamand’s production of Silent Collisions. Frédéric Flamand has staged dance performances in empty swimming pools, abandoned churches and steel mills: anywhere that allows him to investigate the point of intersection between the body and built form. This interest has led him into a number of fruitful and acclaimed collaborations with some of the most important figures in contemporary architecture, including Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Elizabeth Diller & Ricardo Scofidio. His choreography freely mixes the traditions of ballet with his own formative grounding in avant-garde theatre and contemporary dance. It never seeks a signature style, but rather allows the changing environments of his work’s setting to evolve an ever-translating physical language in constant dialogue with technology, the city, and other art forms. For his next collaboration in 2010, Flamand will work with Chinese artist and architect, Ai Weiwei. In 2003 Mayne and Flamand’s Silent Collisions inaugurated Body ↔ City, the first International Festival of Contemporary Dance at the Venice Biennale, programmed by Flamand as Artistic Director. Freely inspired by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, they collaboratively developed an approach to the city that emphasized urbanity as a place of exchanged words, desires and memories through the medium of the human body. Choreographed as a dynamic system of tensions, ruptures and conflicts, these were in turn framed and influenced by a moveable, jointed set design. The first John Edwards Lecture, a conversation between Mayne and Flamand, supported by the Estate of Francis Bacon, will investigate the rhythms of urban life, the structuring of space through the built environment and the body, and architecture as a form of urban choreography. The Architecture Foundation is a non-profit agency for contemporary architecture, urbanism and culture. We cultivate new talent and new ideas. Through our diverse programmes we facilitate international and interdisciplinary exchange, stimulate critical engagement amongst professionals, policy makers and a broad public, and shape the quality of the built environment. We are independent, agile, inclusive and influential. Central to our activities is the belief that architecture enriches lives. www.architecturefoundation.org.uk