Stan Allen: Buildings and Books
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Peter Eisenman Lecture Series endowed by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown
Abstract
Architect Stan Allen's talk will highlight the interplay between ideas and construction, designing and writing, teaching and practice, and buildings and books. For his generation, a large part of Allen's legacy views architectural practice as an intellectual activity carried out simultaneously through drawing, building, teaching, and writing. Allen's career as an architect, educator, and writer has developed in parallel over many years, and his lecture will trace out this interplay in a presentation of his work spanning three decades.
Bio
Stan Allen is an architect and George Dutton '27 Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Dean of the School of Architecture from 2002 to 2012. He currently teaches at The Cooper Union and the Harvard GSD. In 1991, he established an independent practice as an architect, and since that time, he has pursued parallel careers as an educator and writer. His practice, SAA/Stan Allen Architect, has realized buildings and urban projects in the US, South America, and Asia. In 2016, he was one of 12 architects chosen to represent the US in the American Pavilion at the XV Venice Biennale.
Allen's architectural work is published in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, and his essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. Allen's edited volume Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain was published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2011, and his most recent book, Situated Objects, was published by Park Books in 2021.
In 2009, he received the John Q. Hejduk Award and an award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011, Allen was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows, and in 2012, he was inducted into the National Academy of Design. The retrospective exhibition Building with Writing took place at the Princeton School of Architecture in the spring of 2025 and will be on view at the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial from September 19, 2025, to February 28, 2026.
