KNOXVILLE—Internationally acclaimed scholar and educator of architecture Billie Tsien will speak at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on April 8 as part of the College of Architecture and Design’s Church Lecture Series.

The lecture, free and open to the public, is sponsored by General Shale Brick and will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the McClung Museum Auditorium. It will be followed by a reception and an opportunity to meet Tsien.

Tsien has taught at Harvard and Yale universities and at Parsons The New School for Design, among other institutions. She is a director of the Public Art Fund, the Architectural League of New York and the American Academy of Rome, as well a member of the advisory council for the Yale School of Architecture. Tsien was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007, and she is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Tsien's firm, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, was recently recognized with the AIA's 2013 Architecture Firm Award. The award is the highest honor the AIA bestows on a firm. It recognizes a practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years.

Tsien received the 2013 AIA Honor Award for Architecture in January for her firm's 93,000-square-foot museum designed for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Other recognized work by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects includes the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago; the American Folk Art Museum in New York; the Cranbrook Natatorium in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California Berkeley; Skirkanich Hall at the University of Pennsylvania; the David Rubinstein Atrium of New York's Lincoln Center; and the Neuroscience Institute at La Jolla, Calif.

The Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Series was established by Anne Church in memory of Robert B. Church III, the UT School of Architecture's second dean and a preeminent modernist of mid-century architecture. The series addresses history, theory and practice in the design disciplines of today by bringing internationally and nationally prominent practitioners and scholars of the built environment and design arts.  Five to seven speakers come to the college each semester.

All lectures are webcast and archived for public viewing at http://utk.edu/go/qc.

Established in the early 1990s, the General Shale Lecture Series seeks to further the public's awareness and appreciation of architecture and design. The lecture provides opportunities for leaders of practice and industry to come to UT.

For more information about the Church Lecture Series, visit http://www.arch.utk.edu.

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CONTACT:

Kiki Roeder (865-974-6713, kroeder@utk.edu)