Sandy Attia, co-founder of MoDusArchitects, will deliver the College of Architecture and Design's 2024 General Shale Lecture. MoDusArchitects is an Italian-based practice distinguished by a heterogeneous approach to the field of architecture that combines the founding partners’ two different cultural and formative backgrounds into one platform for bold architectural design and research.

Since the mid 1990s, General Shale has generously supported lectures, allowing us to bring Pritzker Prize-winners and stand-out design pioneers to further the public’s awareness and appreciation of architecture and design.

This lecture is funded by the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Fund.

Information about visitor parking is available online.

Lecture Abstract

As architects, once a building is complete, buildings grow into their own skin, taking on their own lives. This after-construction life of a building is both fascinating and terrifying with many unknowns and lessons to be learned. The lecture zooms in on a constellation of projects that share an underlying material-driven approach and that offer interesting insights into how the life of buildings are affected by the choices that we make as architects. Many of these projects employ a limited palette of materials be it brick, wood, or concrete whereby each project is not only an exploration of the structural limits and possibilities of the material in question, but also a celebration of its spatial and tactile qualities and so much more.