Architect, Professor Fuensanta Nieto to Present 'Time Dialogues' Lecture April 8

Roland Halbe

The Castillo De La Luz Museum, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

Fuensanta Nieto will present a lecture at 4 p.m., Friday, April 8, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, room 250 of Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. The lecture will also be available to watch live via Zoom.

Nieto is a founding partner of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, with offices in Madrid and Berlin. She is also a professor at the European University of Madrid.

The Fay Jones School's spring lecture series is presented in collaboration with Places Journal, an internationally respected online journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism.

Registration for the online version of the lecture is available on Zoom.

In her lecture, "Time Dialogues," Nieto will present the ideas, projects and works of her firm as a dialogue between art, city and landscape.

The firm's works are conceived independently, at different times. They are the result of varying conditions, places and programs. At first glance, one is undoubtedly more attentive to what sets them apart than to what may unite them. Only when grouped together, like pieces of an imaginary puzzle, do they seem to reveal what unconsciously connects them: fragmentary processes that suggest perhaps fictitious, but not unreal, orders.

And yet, precisely because architecture is always the result of an interpretation of multiple and apparently unconnected circumstances that end up resembling one another, the projects are reflections of one another, like an unforeseen result of an endless play of mirrors.

Nieto graduated from the Technical University of Madrid and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University in New York.

From 1986 to 1991, she was the editor of the architectural journal Arquitectura, published by the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid. She lectures on architecture and participates in juries and symposia at various institutions around the world.

Along with being widely published in international magazines and books, the firm's work has been exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia in 2000, 2002, 2006 and 2012; at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2006; at the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, in 2008; and at the MAST Foundation in Bologna, Italy, in 2014.

The firm is the recipient of the 2007 National Prize for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, the 2010 Nike Prize (from Bund Deutscher Architekten), the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2010, the Piranesi Prix de Rome in 2011, the European Museum of the Year Award in 2012, the Hannes Meyer Prize in 2012, AIA Honorary Fellowship in 2015, the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2015 and the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2017.

The firm's major works include the Madinat al-Zahra Museum in Córdoba, Spain; the Moritzburg Museum in Halle, Germany; the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián, Spain; the Zaragoza Congress Centre in Zaragoza, Spain; the Martin Chirino Foundation in Las Palmas, Spain; the Joanneum Museum extension in Graz, Austria; the Contemporary Art Centre in Córdoba, Spain; and the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, Estonia.

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos is currently working on projects in several countries. Among these are the extension of the Archaeological Museum in Munich, Germany; the extension of the Sorolla Museum in Madrid; the Montblanc Haus in Hamburg, Germany; the Archive of the Avant-garde in Dresden, Germany; the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Girona, Spain; and the Cité du Théâtre in Paris.

Four monographs have been published on the firm's work: Nieto Sobejano: Memory and Invention (Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany, 2013), Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano: Architetture (Mondadori Electa Spa, Milan, 2014), Nieto Sobejano: Arquitectura 2004-2017 (TC Cuadernos 131/132, Valencia, Spain, 2017) and Arvo Pärt Centre & Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos: A Common Denominator (ArchiTangle GmbH, Berlin, 2020).

This is the Ernie Jacks Lecture, sponsored by Marlon Blackwell Architects.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This lecture is open to the public. Admission is free, with limited seating. For details on watching the lecture online, please visit the Fay Jones School's lecture page. To register for the entire online lecture series, complete this form on Zoom.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.