CANCELED: Rafi Segal: Architecture As Dialogue

Glanzer-Curtis Family Lecture

Rafi Segal is an architect and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he directs the SMArchS Urbanism program. His work involves design and research at the scale of the building, the neighborhood, the settlement, and the region, and results in the design of urban systems as well as individual buildings, where both are embedded with civic value, contribute purposely to their larger urban context and express their essential place within it. Segal directs Future Urban Collectives, a new design-research lab at MIT that explores emerging notions of collectivity — relationships between digital platforms and physical communities —  asking how architecture and urbanism can support and scale cohabitation, coproduction, and coexistence.

The architecture work is shaped through dialogues of concept and form, sketch and drawing, object and city, user and designer, building and site, figure and ground, mass and void —  the architect's task is to find how each benefits the other, allowing the work to eventually stand on its own, to confront conventions and inspire change.  

Introduction by Lily Chi.