Peter Trummer

This event will consist of a lecture and conversation between Peter Trummer and Ferda Kolatan, centered around Peter's new book: The City as a Technical Being: On the Mode of Existence in Architecture.

The city is our largest artifact on this planet. Throughout its history it has spawned many new kinds of buildings, including the theater, the opera house, the museum, the bazaar, the shopping mall, the high-rise tower, and most recently, buildings like the pencil tower or the village on the roof of a shopping mall. How does the city affect the mode of existence of all these successively new buildings?

This question typically has been answered in the discipline of architecture and urban design by looking to social and economic forces or a priori archetypes, understanding these as what gives rise to all new urban objects. This lecture attempts to reverse that convention, arguing for the inner qualities of the city itself that through which all its forms and functions come into existence.

Underscoring the argument that there is no direct or certain correlation between form and function leading to new urban building types, the book depicts the city throughout history as the site of fusion of the qualities of urban objects,  or buildings, which ultimately gives rise to new kinds of architecture.

Peter Trummer was born in Graz, Austria and received his Master's Degree at the Technical University in Graz by Günther Domenig and his Postgraduate Degree at the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam and has a PhD from the University of Fine Art, supervised by Sanford Winter. He is a Professor for Urban Design and currently the Dean of the faculty of architecture at the University of Innsbruck. He was Head of the Associative Design Program at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2004 to 2010 and Guest Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Trummer was project architect at Un-Studio from 1996-2000, and has since had his own practice. He lectures and is invited as a critic at the AA, the University for Applied Art in Vienna, the IAAC, the Berlage Institute, the School of Design in Philadelphia, Rice University, Harvard GSD, Princeton and at the Yale School of Architecture. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2006, 2012, 2021 and 2023.

Ferda Kolatan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the founding director of su11 in New York City. He received his Architectural Diploma with distinction from the RWTH Aachen in Germany and his Masters in Architecture from Columbia University, where he was awarded the LSL Memorial Prize and the Honor Award for Excellence in Design. Kolatan has lectured widely and taught design studios as well as theory and fabrication seminars at Columbia University, Cornell University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of British Columbia, California College of the Arts, Washington University, Pratt Institute, and the RWTH Aachen. He is also a co-author of the book Meander: Variegating Architecture (Bentley Press, 2010) and was selected as a Young Society Leader by the American Turkish Society in 2011.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.