UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 08 NOVEMBER 2010
- Guest Speaker: Architect Francine Houben
- Director of Mecanoo Architecten Delft
- Thursday 11th November 2010 at 2pm
- Venue: The Lakeside Conference Centre
- Aston University
This lecture is the third in the Visiting Lecture Series, Design Built-In, held in association with Birmingham Institute of Art & Design at Birmingham City University and supported by The Birmingham Post.
The lecture will be given by Francine Houben – a Visiting Professor at Harvard – who is renowned as the Designer and Architect for the new Birmingham Central Library a £193m project in Birmingham’s Centenary Square.
Francine Houben is also the founding architect and director of Mecanoo architecten in Delft, a renowned and innovative international practice currently engaged in projects in the UK, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Albania, China, Taiwan, Korea and Malaysia.
Born in 1955, Francine Houben was educated at Delft University of Technology, Department of Architecture, graduating in 1984. Today, she is one of Europe’s most active and admired architects, responsible for projects such as the Faculty for Economics and Management in Utrecht (1995), the TU Delft Library (1998), Nieuw Terbregge in Rotterdam (2001), Chapel St Mary of the Angels in Rotterdam (2001), Montevideo in Rotterdam (2006) and FiftyTwoDegrees in Nijmegen (2007).
In 2006 Mecanoo won the competition to build the Palace of Justice in Córdoba, Spain, due for completion in 2011, and in 2007 won the competition for the National Kaohsiung Performance Art Center in Taiwan. The practice’s impressive Theatre and Congress Centre La Llotja in Lleida, Spain (2008) will open at the end of 2009.
Francine Houben’s work is based on both analysis and intuition. Her aim is to unlock the secret of a location. She interweaves social, technical, playful and humane aspects to find a unique solution to each situation, and combines the disciplines of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture with a sensitivity to light and beauty and an expressive use of materials. She says: “For me architecture is not a purely intellectual or conceptual game. In the end the result should touch all the senses.”
Francine Houben has held important Professorships in Holland and abroad, and in 2007 was appointed Visiting Professor, Harvard University. From 2002 to 2006 she was City Architect of the Dutch City Almere. In 2001 she published her seminal manifesto about architecture: ‘Composition, Contrast, Complexity’ and, as a highly influential director of the First International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in 2003, brought the theme of mobility to the forefront of international design consciousness.
She lectures all over the world and sits on many prestigious international design competition juries. In 2001 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects and, between 2003 and 2005 was a member of the International Design Committee in London. In 2007 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the American Institute of Architects, and in 2008 received the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award. 2008 also saw the publication of a monograph on the work of Francine Houben and Mecanoo: ‘Mecanoo’ by Francine Houben was published by Images Publishing in the Master Architect Series.