Forthcoming lecture@SAUL by Emilio Ambasz this Tuesday 27th March at 6pm in The School of Architecture University of Limerick.

World renowned architect and industrial designer, Emilio Ambasz, was born in 1943 in Argentina and studied architecture at Princeton University. He completed the undergraduate program in one year and earned a Master’s Degree in Architecture from the same institution the next year. He taught at Princeton University’s School ofArchitecture, was a visiting professor at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, and has lectured at many important American universities. He served as Curator of Design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1970-76), where he directed and installed numerous influential exhibits on architecture and industrial design, including ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’, and organised the very important symposium ‘The Universitas Project – Solutions for a Post-Technological Society’. He is currently on the Board of Trustees at The Museum of Modern Art New York.

Ambasz is a highly influential figure in the world of art and design. He designed among other things the ‘vertebra’ chair, which was introduced in 1976 and produced by Castelli – it was the first automatically adjustable office chair – he has designed many other products such as engines for Cummins Diesel and lights for ERCO. Ambasz’ large number of prestigious architectural projects include the Mycal Sanda Cultural Center in Japan, Casa de Retiro Espiritual, and the innovative design of the Lucille Halsell Conservatory at the San Antonio Botanical Center, Texas.
Of Emilio Ambasz Ettore Sottsass writes, “Like very few architects, Ambasz senses the emergence of a technological mythology, fully aware of all that it may bring with it. I also know that he is very knowledgeable and that with relentless precision and painstaking patience he pays attention, as do very few, to the possibilities of technology as an irreplaceable device for bringing about that rare existential event that is architecture.
All of this I know already, and all of this that I know is also known by others, as we also know that it is not here that the root of his great originality lies. The thing which is original with Emilio, and which is very rare, is that technology is for him an instrument for suggesting arch- itectural presences; that for him it is the architectural event, when it occurs, which serves as the magical instrument to bring about that still larger and even more complex event which is our spiritual existence.”