Robert Somol to Present 'No Need for Architecture' Lecture on Sept. 23

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Robert Somol will present his lecture, "No Need for Architecture," on Sept. 23 in Vol Walker Hall.

Robert Somol will present a lecture titled "No Need for Architecture" at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 23, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of the new Steven L. Anderson Design Center addition of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus, as part of this year's Fay Jones School of Architecture lecture series.

Somol, an internationally recognized design theorist, was appointed director of the School of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007. He currently serves as the interim dean for the college.

Previously, he was a professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. He has been a visiting professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, and taught design and theory at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1997-2005. He has served as the Max Fishman Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and the Cullinen Professor at Rice University, in addition to teaching at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

Somol is the editor of Autonomy and Ideology (Monacelli Press, 1997) and has served on the editorial boards of Any and Log. His writings, which have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired, focus on modernism and its modes of repetition, the emergence of the diagram in postwar architecture, landscape and interior urbanism, and the development of graphic or cartoon protocols within contemporary architectural practices. He is the co-designer of "off-use," an award-winning studio and residence in Los Angeles that extends his interest in combining the speculative discipline of modernism with the material excesses of mass culture: beinahe nichts meets la dolce vita.

As an architectural designer, writer and educator, Somol is a central figure in efforts to displace architecture's modes of criticality by a renewed engagement with the projective ambitions of the discipline. His collection of essays, Nothing to Declare, is forthcoming from ANY Books and the MIT Press, and he is a member of the Research Board of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

This is the Mort Karp Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects.

The public is invited to attend. Admission is free, with limited seating.

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