WEISS/MANFREDI, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, Long Island. The park’s recently completed second phase offers New Yorkers an “urban wilderness” that re-introduces wetlands and the water’s edge. Photo: David Lloyd / SWA
Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture: Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi
Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, cofounders of Weiss/Manfredi, will deliver the Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture titled “Drifting Symmetries.”
Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism is at the forefront of architectural design practices that are redefining relationships between architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and urban ecologies.
Weiss/Manfredi’s work is noted for clarity of vision, bold forms, cinematic movement, and material innovation. At the core of their work is the commitment to urban resiliency and public space, as exemplified by projects such as the Olympic Sculpture Park, recognized by Time Magazine as one of the “top ten architectural marvels,” the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, and Hunter’s Point Waterfront Park. All of them demonstrate progressive ecological, architectural, and infrastructural frameworks to revitalize urban space. Educational projects such as Tata Innovation Center at Cornell NYC Tech, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, Barnard College Diana Center, and Kent State Center for Architecture and Environmental Design bring public life to places of academic exchange. Through dynamic sequencing of specialized enclosures and flexible spaces, programmed rooms and generous atria, these designs aim to cultivate productive places for research and collaboration. The firm’s current projects include the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, Longwood Gardens, a mixed-use building at MIT, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, Tampa Museum of Art, and a master plan for the Artis—Naples Cultural Campus in Florida. Most recently, the firm won an international competition to reimagine the master plan for the world-renowned La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
In addition to shaping public spaces, Weiss/Manfredi participates in architectural discourse through exhibitions, teaching, and publications. The firm’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the National Building Museum, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Louvre, the São Paulo Biennale of Architecture and Design, and the Design Center in Essen, Germany. Weiss and Manfredi’s drawings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. Three monographs on the firm’s work have been published by Princeton Architectural Press: Weiss/Manfredi: Surface/Subsurface, Site Specific: The Work of Weiss/Manfredi Architects, and Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures.
One AIA continuing education credit available.
Upcoming Public Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series