Date: 18.02.2016
Time: 19:15
Venue: Thomas Davis Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei was founded as Büro Lederer by Arno Lederer in 1979, with fellow Director Jórunn Ragnarsdóttir joining the practice in 1982, with Marc Oei joining in 1988 and Katja Putter in 1998.
The practice was a finalist in the Mies van der Rohe European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture 2015 for the realisation of their competition winning scheme for the Art Museum in Ravensburg. Regular participation in competitions is essential to the work of the practice, other competition projects won in recent years are the Historical Museum in Frankfurt, the Office and Business House Kaiserkarree in Karlsruhe, the Diocesan Curia and archive in Rottenburg and the Hospitalhof in Stuttgart. About their work they state the following:
We can look back on four thousand years of building culture. In this tradition mankind creates spaces where he finds his physical and psychological needs reflected, meaningful spaces that act as ambassadors of a cultural inheritance, spaces that define localities and captivate us with their spatial and tactile qualities. Why, then, should we create rooms to be as transparent as possible, rooms that tell us, as soon as we enter them, that we are outside again!
Creating a locality is absolutely crucial to our projects. To do that, architecture does not have to be reinvented by force. Instead, we try to learn from the long tradition of building without falling into historicism.
For us it is all about defining localities and creating rooms with a winning spatial and tactile capacity. To make this possible we analyze and question the qualities of existing buildings and transport them into a modern formal language; the well-known then appears in a new light.
Arno Lederer was born in Stuttgart in 1947, studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart and Vienna University of Technology between 1968 and 1976, and founded Büro Lederer in 1979. He has served various professorships at the University of Stuttgart and University of Karlsruhe, and is currently Commissioner of the Zurich Building Council.
This talk is part of the Making: Culture series, a series of AAI talks kindly supported by the German Embassy Dublin
photo credit: Roland Halbe