The Department of Architecture welcomes Preston Scott Cohen and Carl Dworkin for their conversation about "Problems in the Search of Isomorphism." The lecture, in the form of a dialogue, will be a discussion of four built projects caught between divergent demands of sites and programs, and the theoretical and a computational means to produce unusual forms of synthesis.
Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. is an internationally acclaimed architecture and urban design firm led by Founding Principal Preston Scott Cohen, Associate Partner Carl Dworkin, and Managing Partner Yi Xiao.
The firm’s most renowned buildings are the Anhui Province Science Center, Hefei (2023); Taubman Building, University of Michigan (2017); Taiyuan Museum of Art (2013); Datong City Library (2021); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2011); the Goldman Sachs Canopy, New York, NY (2008), and numerous houses and theoretical projects.
Awards and honors include induction as Academician at the National Academy of Art, New York; Best Museum in the World, Time and Leisure; The Annual Design Review Award; Academy Award in Architecture, American Academy of Arts and Letters; Five Progressive Architecture Awards; and First Prizes in twelve international architectural competitions.
Cohen is author of Isomorphic Architecture, (forthcoming, 2025); Taiyuan Museum of Art, (ORO Editions, 2017); Lightfall, Genealogy of a Museum (Skira Rizzoli, 2016); The Return Of Nature, Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability, co-authored with Erika Naginski (Routledge 2014); Contested Symmetries (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001); and numerous theoretical and historical essays.
His work is held in numerous collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard.
Preston Scott Cohen is the Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture, Director of the Post-Professional Master in Architecture Degree Program, and served as Chair of the Department of Architecture (2008-13) at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), a position previously held by Rafael Moneo, Harry Cobb and Walter Gropius.
Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin is associate partner and project architect at Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., where he has been the project lead on numerous buildings.
He conducts research on geometric methods for the affordable construction of complex forms through extreme standardization and on the integration of parametric modeling into all phases of project delivery.
Carl is a part-time Lecturer at the Weitzman School of Design, currently teaching a studio in the MSD-AAD program. He is also a part-time design critic at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and has taught numerous courses at Northeastern.
Carl received his M. Arch from the GSD where he was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal and his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University where he received the Louis Sudler Prize for the Arts.
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