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The UMass Amherst Department of Architecture lecture series moves online this fall. Writer, photographer, professor, and Chicago Sun-Times editorial board member Lee Bey joins us for the annual David Dillon Memorial Lecture on September 9.  Renouned architect and educator Billie Tsien of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects will speak in the Lois E. Toko Lecture on September 16.  Scholar Alberto Pérez-Gómez joins us on October 21 for the Five College Architecture Theory Lecture. Farshid Moussavi, principal architect of FMA and Harvard GSD professor, will speak and join in conversation with UMass Architecture Assistant Professor Pari Riahi on November 4 in an event co-sponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning.  All lectures will be held via Zoom at 4:00pm EST and are free and open to the public. Please visit individual event pages for more information and a link to register.

Our Five College Virtual Architecture Symposium Exactitude will be held on October 2 and 3. Exactitude conveners Pari Riahi (UMass), Michael Davis (Mount Holyoke College), and Laure Katsaros (Amherst College) will bring together academics and practitioners to engage in critical conversations about contemporary architecture. Distancing itself from the often repeated themes of the past 20 years – sustainability, performance, formal innovation – this symposium pursues a longer narrative arc, one that places architecture back in its creative position through engagement with two themes evoked by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the New Millennium: Exactitude (as a first symposium in 2020) and Multiplicity (planned as a sequel in 2022). By opening up the field and asking questions that are mindful of the ongoing dilemmas in architecture today, these prompts are an invitation to re-engage a discipline adrift between technophobia and technophilia, confronted with escalating demands for precision, production and consumption, and mired in issues of agency and authorship while simultaneously mandated to meet countless ethical and aesthetic needs. The structure of the symposia – made up of a constellation of voices including those of theorists, historians, editors, architects, and writers – reflects a genuine desire to spark dialogue and exchange. Read more here.

With thanks to the Department of Architecture, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Five College Consortium, Five College Architectural Studies, and the Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning for their support of our programs.