Francine Houben visits BAC to present "The Aesthetics of Mobility"

The BAC was pleased to host Francine Houben, the founding partner and the creative director of Mecanoo Architecten, who presented her past research and current thinking through her lecture, The Aesthetics of Mobility. This program was supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

Francine found this territory of thinking in the 1990's - the space of travel from within a train, a car, or on a bicycle - underdeveloped. She stepped into this void that Archigram and Alex Wall had begun to problematize - and she crossed political, cultural, and technical boundaries to create a new field of imagining. Her notion of mobility gives voice to one's own sense of these spaces and experiences.

Francine has written:

"Mobility is part of modern society; it is a daily pursuit, just like housing, work and recreation. Mobility is not just about traffic jams, asphalt, delays and tollgates, but also about people deriving a sensory experience from their everyday mobility. Every day, travelling along roads and railways, millions of people experience the changes of the city and countryside. For them, the train and the car are also ‘a room with a view'."

Francine has proposed that designers, politicians, engineers, traffic experts - think and give value to the landscape that we are pausing in, speeding through, and observing in different manners. As an architect she is interested in choreographing these spaces of mobility. Francine is known as one of the most prolific architects in Europe today. Her wide-ranging portfolio comprises an intimate chapel built on the foundations of a former 19th century chapel in Rotterdam (2001) to Europe's largest library in Birmingham (2013).

In 2013, Francine presented "Dutch Mountain: People, Place, and Purpose," a lecture on the design at the New Dudley Square Municipal Office Facility, as part of the BAC's Student Lecture Series.

Each year, the BAC welcomes speakers from around the world to share their expertise with our design community. The lecture series is one of the many ways that the BAC remains at the forefront of design education. The student government sponsored Fall 2014 Student Lecture Series will begin on October 8, 2014 and is free and open to the public.