Material Evidence

Toshiko Mori

Director of Architecture, Harvard Design School
Toshiko Mori Architect

Thursday, April 21, 2005
7:00 P.M. - Lawrence J. Plym Auditorium
Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

Phillip Swager Associates Lecture

Toshiko Mori established her firm, Toshiko Mori Architect, in New York City in 1981. With a background in fine arts, Mori has a unique conceptual and aesthetic approach to each project, complemented by her research based process to design. Since 1983, she has taught at Cooper Union and now, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she has been tenured since 1995 and Department Chair since 2002. She has edited a volume on material and fabrication research, Immaterial/Ultramaterial, which points to a recent direction and interest with materiality in architecture, and is currently preparing her next publication Textile Tectonic to be published in the fall of 2005.

Biography

Toshiko Mori started her education as an artist, in the field of painting and sculpture at Cooper Union but eventually transferred to the School of Architecture where she earned a B.Arch degree in 1976. Throughout her career, her beginning as an artist has marked her working processes as an architect, considering every project as if it were a site-specific installation.

After graduation she worked in the office of Edward Larrabee Barnes in New York City. While there she worked on IBM headquarters in New York and Tarrytown , the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Yale School of Organization and Management, among others while also being in charge of artist selection and installation of art work for all of the projects in the office. Since establishing her own practice in 1981, her small-scale furniture projects, graphic design and drawings have won numerous awards and have been published and exhibited extensively. A small Comme des Garcons boutique in 1981 had a wide impact on the profession, starting a series of conceptually based interiors for showrooms and stores in New York City . For those projects she won NYC/AIA awards in 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1998 and an I.A.L.D. award in 1989, Interiors Award in 1990 and I.D. Design award in 1999.

She has exhibited her work at Cooper Union, Hudson River Museum , Gallery 91, Montreal Museum of Decorative Art, Willoughby Sharpe Gallery, Urban Center for Architectural League of New York, Stephan Stux Gallery and Artist Space in 1999 showing the most recent material and fabrication research project titled "Woven Inhabitation".

Ms. Mori has been Professor of Practice of Architecture with tenure at the Harvard Design School since 1995. Previous to this appointment, she was an Associate Professor at Cooper Union for 14 years. She also held the Eero Saarinen Professorship at Yale University in 1992 and has been a visiting critic at both Yale University and Columbia University. In 2002, Ms. Mori became the Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Design School.

She has lectured at the SCI-Arc, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, Berlin Technical University, Washington University, Architectural League, Yale University, Cornell University, Portland Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the American Academy in Rome - co-sponsored by the Ordine degli Architetti, and the International Centre for Culture & Management, Salzburg, Austria.