UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — New Zealand-born architect, author and scholar Mark Wigley will join the Stuckeman School and the Department of Architecture at Penn State remotely at 6 p.m. on Oct. 6 as part of the School’s Lecture and Exhibit Series. The event is free and open to the public and will be broadcast by WPSU at watch.psu.edu/stuckemanseries.

Wigley is a professor and dean emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he served as the dean from 2004 to 2014. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, he taught at Princeton University School of Architecture from 1987 to 1999, where he was also appointed the director of graduate studies.

In his talk, titlted “Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions,” Wigley will explore the remarkable career of Konrad Wachsmann, the legendary expert in the industrialization of building that inspired so many architects and remains urgently relevant today. Wigley argues that Wachsmann was really an “anti-architect” who steadily dissolved architecture into flows of information and ultimately into the electromagnetic waves of television. Wachsmann literally engineered clouds, producing beguiling, even hypnotic, structures and revolutionizing the teaching of architecture.

Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture and is the author of “Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998);” “White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995);” and “The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993).” He also co-edited “The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationalist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001).”

In 2005, Wigley co-founded “Volume” magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman as a collaborative project with Archis, a publisher and think-tank in Amsterdam; AMO, a design studio in Rotterdam; and C-lab, Columbia University's experimental urban and architecture think tank. 

Wigley curated the exhibition titled “Deconstructivist Architecture” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York with Philip Johnson in 1988, and others at The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam. 

Wigley has several awards to his name including the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism’s Resident Fellowship, International Committee of Architectural Critics Triennial Award for Architectural Criticism and a Graham Foundation Grant.

Wigley earned both his bachelor of architecture and doctorate from the University of Auckland.