Architect Billie Tsien to Present Lecture on March 5 in Little Rock

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Billie Tsien will present a lecture titled “Heart/Hand” on Tuesday in Little Rock, as part of the Architecture and Design Network’s 2012-2013 Art of Architecture lecture series.

Billie Tsien will present a lecture titled “Heart/Hand” on Tuesday, March 5, at the Arkansas Arts Center, 501 E. Ninth St., in Little Rock. The lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the center’s Lecture Hall, following a 5:30 p.m. reception.

This lecture is part of the Architecture and Design Network’s 2012-2013 Art of Architecture lecture series.

Born in Ithaca. N.Y., Tsien received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Yale University and her Master of Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, in addition to practicing, teaching and lecturing, she serves on the advisory council for the Yale School of Architecture. In 2007, Tsien was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Tsien and her husband, Tod Williams, have been working together since 1977. Their firm, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which operates out of a small, unpretentious studio on Central Park South in New York City, has earned wide acclaim for its work.

In December, the American Institute of Architects awarded the firm its prestigious 2013 Architecture Firm Award in recognition of work that “reveals a contemporary sensibility and intelligence.” Given annually, the award is the highest honor the AIA bestows on a firm. It recognizes a practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years.

Their recently completed 93,000-square-foot museum in Philadelphia, designed for the Barnes Foundation, has drawn critical acclaim from many sources. In January, the AIA gave it a 2013 Honor Award for Architecture. The new facility replaces the original one in Merion, Penn., established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922. A challenge to its designers was to replicate the original 12,000-square-foot main gallery, replete with art as arranged by the late Barnes himself.

Among the significant structures in the firm’s compelling body of work are the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California-Berkeley, the David Rubinstein Atrium of New York’s Lincoln Center, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Neuroscience Institute at La Jolla, Calif., and the Cranbrook Natatorium in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

The 2012-13 Art of Architecture lecture series is sponsored by the Architecture and Design Network, a non-profit organization, with support from the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Arkansas Arts Center and the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact projects4pi@mac.com.