Doors open and coffee served at 08:30 AM, event starts at 09:00 AM.

In collaboration with CAFx – Copenhagen Architecture Festival – we are honoured to have the Finnish architect Juhani Palasmaa give a public lecture at Oslo Architecture Triennale, after which he will be joined by Marina Bauer, architect and founding partner of architectural practice OPAFORM, for conversation.

Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 1936) is an architect, professor emeritus and writer. He did design work in 1983-2012 through his office Juhani Pallasmaa Architects in Helsinki, has been Rector of the Institute of Industrial Design, Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Helsinki University of Technology. He has had several visiting professorships, teached and lectured in numerous universities around the world, been member of nearly 50 competition juries and was member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury 2008-14.

Pallasmaa has published 850 essays and 70 books, including The Embodied Image, The Thinking Hand, The Architecture of Image: existential space in cinema and The Eyes of the Skin. He is honorary member of SAFA, AIA and RIBA, and has received six Honorary Doctorates, Professor Honores Causa of International Institute of Hermeneutics, and numerous Finnish and international awards.

Marina Bauer (b. 1977) is an architect and founding partner of the Bergen-based architectural firm OPAFORM.

OPAFORM participated in the last Biennale Architettura: “How will we live together”, with the exhibition Make a Space for My Body. The exhibition presented three anthropometrically scaled spaces that through materiality, spatial properties, and formal expression engaged in a direct dialogue with the historic exhibition space of La Biennale, incorporating the surrounding building envelope into the displayed project.

On Pallasmaa's lecture "From Space to Place: existential experience in architecture":

"Historians and theorists like Sigfried Giedion, as well as modernist architects, understood space as the central notion in architectural thinking. However, experiential space, situation and place are seminal experiences in all arts, as they all mediate our relationships with the world. Space is primarily a theoretical notion of physics, while the experience of space turns away from neutrality into the experiential and existential placeness. Place is rooted in experience and it is mentally more constitutive than space. Architecture is deeply engaged in the lived meanings of space as well as of time; we exist simultaneous in place and time, but this is a fundamentally different reality than the modern space-time concept in physics. We exist in "the flesh of the world”, to use a notion of Merleau-Ponty, and the task of. architecture is to relate us with this experiential flesh and dignify this relationship. This task implies a distinct relationality and mediation. ”We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to it”, this thinker suggests, and the argument applies specifically in the art of architecture. Architecture is a fundamentally relational art."