Culture Watch: A big week for high-profile architecture talks

 
Three highly acclaimed architects will be giving talks in Los Angeles within the next week, at three separate venues. Steven Holl, architect of the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland, and a luminous addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., among a long list of other projects, will appear Wednesday evening at SCI-Arc to give the first Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture. Abraham, an Austrian émigré architect based for decades in New York, where he got to know Holl, was killed in a car crash last year just hours after delivering a lecture at SCI-Arc.

On Thursday, meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will welcome the Danish phenom Bjarke Ingels, whose firm Bjarke Ingels Group -- BIG for short -- has been piling up a number of substantial commissions of late, including a dramatically torquing 600-unit residential complex on West 57th Street in Manhattan. His talk is co-sponsored by the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the A+D Architecture and Design Museum.

And on Tuesday, March 8, the supremely talented Japanese architect Tadao Ando will appear at the Hammer Museum for a talk translated by Kulapat Yantrasast of local firm wHY Architecture.

SCI-Arc info: (213) 613-2200. LACMA: (323) 857-6010. Hammer: (310) 443-7000.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: Rendering of West 57th, a residential complex planned for Manhattan. Credit: BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

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[Daniel Edd Bland III]

Georgia Tech President, Bud Peterson, given a copy of "9/11: Blueprint for Truth" and asked to host debate on the Tech Campus between the founding Architect of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Richard Gage and anyone still supporting the "official" explanation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg94z_yEC0s