Billie Tsien
“Begin Again”
Wednesday, October 28, 5:00 p.m. est
Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture
EMPAC Theater
Billie Tsien, AIA, is an architect and co-founder of Studio Tsien. Tsien was formerly founding partner with Tod Williams of the New York City-based studio Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners (TWBTA). The firm’s work exhibited a commitment to reflecting the values of non-profit, cultural, and academic institutions through an architecture that is serene and enduring. Prominent examples include academic building projects at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, Bennington College, and the University of California, Berkeley. Some of TWBTA’s public and institutional projects include the Phoenix Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Lefrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, the renovation of the David Geffen Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, the U.S. Embassy Complex in Mexico City, and the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. TWBTA collaborated with artists as part of their practice, including as exhibit designers for “Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà” representing the U.S. Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
The Obama Presidential Center is a campus and resource for collective civic engagement in Chicago’s South Side. Past Presidential libraries have often emphasized story-telling – enshrining past achievements – while the Obama Presidential Center will extend its reaches as a place for story-making. The Center is designed as a campus integrated with landscape, comprising a museum tower, forum building and library surrounding a public plaza. Each component is individually accessible on the plaza level, yet all are connected below-grade.
Originally housed in a Paul Cret gallery in an arboretum in Merion, Pennsylvania, the Barnes Foundation collection was re-located to a 93,000 SF, LEED Platinum building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia. Conceived as “a gallery in a garden and a garden in a gallery,” the new building honors the Merion facility and provides visitors with a personal and contemplative experience. Clad in a tapestry of fossilized limestone and crowned by a luminous light box, the two-story building, with an additional level below grade, is set in an inviting public garden designed with landscape architect Laurie Olin.
Tsien holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at Yale University and contributes to a range of cultural institutions such as the Architectural League of New York, the National Academy of Design, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she serves as president. Her work has been recognized with the Thomas Jefferson Medal Award in Architecture and the Architecture Firm Award of the American Institute of Architects, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. Tsien is steadfast in her mission to create a better world through architecture and to contribute to supporting a broader and more diverse cultural landscape.
We look forward to seeing you at this lecture.
