1960 born in Zagreb, Croatia; 1979-86 stu- dies in Architecture at the Architectural Faculty, University of Zagreb; 1990-2001 njiric+njiric arhitekti in Zagreb and Graz 2001 principal of njiric+ arhitekti in Zagreb; 1998-99 visiting professor at the TU Graz, Austria; 2000 visiting professor at the AF Ljubljana, Slovenia; 2000 visi- ting professor at the Facolta di Architet- tura, Ferrara, Italy; 2000-05 full-time professor and head of the Institute for Architectural Typologies and Housing at the TU Graz (successor of Guenther Domenig); 2005 guest professor at the Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark; 2006 guest professor at the Facolta d'Architettura di Trieste, Italy; 2007 full-time professor at the GAF Split; 2008 regular visiting professor at the ETSAM Madrid; 2010 visi- ting professor at the AF Ljubljana, Slovenia; 2012 visiting professor at the University of Toronto, Daniels School of Architecture (The Frank Gehry Chair rece- pient for 2012); HNJ was the visiting critic at the HAB Weimar, the ETSAB Barcelona, the TU Wien, the AA School of Architecture London, the ETH Zuerich, the Strathclyde University of Glasgow, Politecnico di Milano, the Southeast University of Nanjing and the William Lyon Somerville Visiting Lectureship at the University of Calgary.
Unit master of international workshops in Zagreb, Merano, Maribor, Gorizia, Barcelona, Brescia, Unije, Santiago de Chile, La Coruna, Aarhus, Trieste, Kriva Palanka, Rijeka, Calgary and Montevideo. HNJ held lectures in Zagreb(4), Rijeka, Vienna(2), London, Milano, Ljubljana(3), Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Piran, Copenhagen, Barcelona(3), Brescia, Lausanne, Sibenik, Stavanger, Maribor, Ferrara, Zurich(2), Weimar, Antwerpen, Frankfurt, Oslo, Nanjing, Split(2), Trondheim(2), Valencia, Budapest, Madrid(3), Dublin, Groznjan, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Hannover(2), Biel, Melbourne, Boston(2) (Harvard), Trieste(2), Venezia, La Coruna, Silves(2), Aarhus, Skopje, Liege, Karlsruhe, Duesseldorf, Bucarest, Delft, Calgary, Napoli, Muenchen, Hasselt, Gdansk, Lodz, Warsaw, Belgrade, Tallinn, Montevideo, Genova, Lisbon, Coimbra, Darmstadt, Sisak, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Toronto, Senigalia, Wroclaw and Dubrovnik.August 26, 2016 | Please join us at North York Central Library on Thursday, September 29, for a talk on world renowned architect Frank Gehry.
The talk begins at 7:00 p.m. and will be given by Larry Wayne Richards, Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto. Frank Gehry's roots are in Toronto. He was born here in 1929, and spent his formative years in Toronto's Jewish ghetto, before his family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1947. His grandmother bought fish for the Sabbath meal at Kensington Market. He played in Grange Park, not far from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which he would one day transform. He developed a love of working with his hands helping out in his grandfather's hardware store on Queen Street West, laying a foundation for his future: "That nurtured it: learning to work with pipe, to cut pipe, put the threads on it, to cut glass...I used to love opening those boxes of bolts and looking at them, and making stuff with them." The little boy who created cities out of scraps of wood grew up to design bold, unconventional, buildings that got people talking about architecture in a way they hadn't for many years.
Gehry was never interested in making more of the ubiquitous concrete boxes that dominate modern city sky lines. This statement by Gehry gets to the heart of his work: "I approach each building as a sculptural object." Gehry's audacious architectural designs are characterized by free flowing, sensuous curves, undulating lines, swooping sheets of metal that billow like sails on a boat. In an essay written to celebrate Gehry's winning the prestigous Pritzker Architecture Prize, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, "Delight breaks through constantly; there are no gloomy Gehry buildings. One cannot think of anything he has done that doesn’t make one smile." Take a look at these innovative buildings, designed by Gehry:(Architects: Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry) Photo by Dino Quinzani, Wikimedia Commons Frederick Weisman Museum of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota Photo by Mulad, Wikimedia Commons Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas Photo by Cygnusloop99, Wikimedia Commons
Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington Photo by Cacophony, Wikimedia Common Gehry's design for the EMP museum (which celebrates pop culture) was inspired by shattered electric guitars. Gehry bought some electric guitars, cut them up, and used the pieces to create an early model of the museum. Photo by MykReeve, Wikimedia Commons Renowned architect Philip Johnson traveled to Spain in 1998 at the age of 91 to see the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, just after it was finished. It brought him to tears. He later pronounced it to be "the greatest building of our time." Paul Goldberger, author of Why architecture matters, said the building was "truly a signal moment in the architectural culture." Here's a detail of the Guggenheim Museum: Photo by E. Goergen, Wikimedia Commons Art Gallery of Ontario after Frank Gehry's redesign Photo: John Joh, Wikimedia Commons Pick up a MAP pass to see Frank Gehry's stunning redesign of the Art Gallery of Ontario from the inside.
With a valid adult Toronto Public Library card, you can get a pass to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario for free from any library branch. The Sun Life Financial Museum + Arts Pass (MAP) lets you and your family explore the best of Toronto's arts and cultural treasures for free. Call your local branch for more details about how to get a pass. The library has copies of Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary about the architect directed by his longtime friend, Sydney Pollock: Here are some books you can borrow on Frank Gehry:Rachel Armstrong is a Co-Director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at The School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich, London. 2010 Senior TED Fellow, and Visiting Research Assistant at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. Rachel is a sustainability innovator who investigates a new approach to building materials called ‘living architecture.’
She is currently collaborating with international scientists and architects to explore cutting-edge, sustainable technologies by developing “metabolic materials” in an experimental setting to develop buildings materials that share some of the properties of living systems. On Twitter she is @livingarchitect. (“Soft Cities,” “A Short Story of a Short Story,” “Biolime: Mock Rock,” “Combined Advanced Technologies & Flexible Urban Infrastructures: Mapping the Landscape for Agile Design“). Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and evolutionary biology. He graduated in 2007 from McGill University with a B.Sc., where he studied the Pliocene evolutionary biology and neotropical ecology of the Panamanian Isthmus. Since receiving his MLA from the University of Virginia in 2012, his research in architecture has focused on the aesthetics of scientific representation, madness and public parks, digital fabrication and construction waste, and most recently the design of taxonomies for the mapping and historical analysis of urban soil in Hong Kong.
(“Stratophysical Approximations: a Conversation with Seth Denizen on the Urban Soils of the Anthropocene.“) Sara Hendren is an artist whose work engages cultural ideas about disability, the normative body, “universal” design, medical ethics, and the future of prosthetics and adaptive technologies. She has shown work at the CUNY Graduate Center, Outpost for Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the 18th Street Art Center (Santa Monica), among others. She’s a recent Awesome Foundation Fellow, and she’s currently in the Advanced Studies Program in Art, Design, and the Public Domain at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She runs the Abler web site. (“Towards an Ethics of Estrangement“) Sukjong Hong is a designer and researcher with a masters’ degree in urban planning and a bachelors in architecture. She organizes with a number of community groups in New York City on militarism, displacement and housing rights. She can be found on Twitter @hongriver. (“Necessary Monsters in Cold War Asia and the Diaspora – An Illustrated Index of Political Outcasts and Outsiders“)
Mitchell Joachim, PhD, is the founding Co-President of Terreform ONE. He is an Associate Professor at NYU and EGS in Switzerland. Previously he was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto and faculty at Pratt, Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, and Parsons. He was formerly an architect at Gehry Partners, and Pei Cobb Freed. He is a 2011 TED Senior Fellow and has been awarded fellowships with Moshe Safdie and Martin Society for Sustainability, MIT. He won the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity, History Channel and Infiniti Award for City of the Future, and Time Magazine Best Invention of 2007 with MIT Smart Cities Car. His project, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was chosen by Wired magazine for “The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To”. Rolling Stone magazine honored Mitchell in “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. Popular Science magazine has featured his work as a visionary for “The Future of the Environment” in 2010.
Mitchell was the Winner of the Victor Papanek Social Design Award sponsored by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Dwell magazine featured Mitchell as one of “The NOW 99” in 2012. He earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, M.Arch. Columbia University. (“In Vitro Meat Habitat“). Tobias Klein works as an experimental designer, critic and educator in London. He has worked with Coop Himmelb(l)au, MarcosandMarjan and Nigel Coates as well as several other practices in London. At the Architectural Association, he is the Unit Master of Dip1 and is running the Mediastudies course – Ecclesial Anatomies. He is a visiting Professor at the University of Innsbruck in the studio 3 – experimental Architecture. Internationally exhibited, his work has been displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Show (2007, 2009, 2010), the 12th international Architectural biennale (2010), the Aram Gallery (2010) and the V&A (2010).
He has been widely published in books such as AD Neoplasmatic Design (edited by Marcos Cruz), Digital Architecture Now (by Neil Spiller), Drawing (by Sir Peter Cook) as well as Architectural Review, Architectural Journal, BD and the AD issue ‘Exuberance’ edited by Marjan Colletti. (“Internal Prosthetics for Cloud Computing“) Tim Maly runs Quiet Babylon. He’s into cyborgs and architects. He is @doingitwrong on Twitter. (“24 Hour Smarty People“) Neil Spiller is Head of the School of Architecture and Construction at the University of Greenwich, London, and Founding Director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Group (AVATAR). He is an internationally recognized editor and the author of numerous books including Visionary Architecture (2006), Future City (2006) and Digital Architecture Now (2008). He is a visionary architect whose work has been exhibited, published and lectured on around the world. (“The Geomorphology of Cyborgian Geography“)
Etienne Turpin is a writer, teacher, and curator who works with designers and architects to address issues of climate change and political economic inequality through design research, theoretical inquiry, and hybrid forms of tendentious practice. He is currently editing Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science, and Philosophy (MAP Office/MAP Books Publishers, forthcoming 2013). He is a founding editor of the independent not-for-profit journal Scapegoat: Architecture | . (“Stratophysical Approximations: a Conversation with Seth Denizen on the Urban Soils of the Anthropocene.”) Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His texts On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum Books) and Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (Zer0 books) are both forthcoming. He is founder and editor (along with Timothy Morton) of Thinking Nature and is an editor of Helvete: The Journal of Black Metal Theory.
He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought. (“I Want to Live Inside This Monster: Haunted Houses and Ecological Design“) Liam Young currently lives and works in London as an independent urbanist, designer and futurist. Liam was named by Blueprint magazine as one of 25 people who will change architecture and design in 2010. He is a founder of the futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose projects explore the consequences of fantastic, perverse and speculative architectures and urbanisms. Probing the urban and ecological consequences of emerging technologies Liam also curates events and exhibitions including the annual Thrilling Wonder Stories program and runs the nomadic teaching studio the ‘Unknown Fields Division’ at various universities throughout Europe and Asia. Each year the division travels to extraordinary landscapes to explore the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness. (“Internal Prosthetics for Cloud Computing“)