This talk will describe frontiers of intellectual inquiry in three distinct but related fields: the history of construction, historic preservation, and architectural design. A twenty-year effort to interpret and explain the structural safety of traditional masonry construction is now leading to new possibilities in architectural design.

John Ochsendorf is the director of the American Academy in Rome and the Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Engineering at MIT. He is the author of Guastavino Vaulting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) and was lead curator for a major traveling exhibition on Guastavino vaults from 2012 to 2014. In addition to the Rome Prize (2008), his work has been supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to Spain (1999) and a MacArthur Fellowship (2008). He has collaborated with leading architects around the world and his firm Ochsendorf DeJong and Block (ODB) presented two major projects at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016. Ochsendorf studied at Cornell (BS), Princeton (MS), and Cambridge (PhD) and has been teaching at MIT since 2002.

The shoptalk will be held in English. You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.