Biblioteca dell’Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, USI.
TERRITORY AS PALIMPSESTE
THE LEGACY OF ANDRÉ CORBOZ
Opening, Monday 25 September 6.30 p.m.
Inaugural lecture and aperitive
Join us at the Archizoom gallery for the opening of the exhibition Territory as Palimpseste. The Legacy of André Corboz, which runs from 26 September to 5 December 2023. To mark the occasion, we’ll be welcoming curators André Bideau and Sonja Hildebrand for an introductory talk on the exhibition, followed by an aperitif.
From the 1970s the Genevan thinker André Corboz challenged notions of landscape, city and heritage in the polycentric, urbanised territory of Switzerland, which was undergoing spectacular spatial change. The exhibition provides an overview of his work and reaffirms the relevance of his activities as a cultural critic, writer and teacher.
BIOGRAPHIES
André Bideau is an architecture theoretician, historian and critic. He holds a M.Arch from ETH Zurich and a PhD from Zurich University. Since 2014 he teaches history and theory of architecture at Accademia di architettura Mendrisio. He is also co-director of the MAS program in the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich. In 2017 he was a co-founder of Zentrum Architektur Zürich where he serves on the advisory board and has curated several exhibitions. Bideau’s research and teaching address intersections of architecture production, urbanization and urban governance under the socio-economic dynamics of postmodernism and Post-Fordism. He has lectured and published extensively on this subject, in particular on the work of O.M.Ungers in Frankfurt. Working with the holdings of the library at Accademia di architettura Mendrisio (Fondo Corboz) since 2020, Bideau is lead researcher and co-curator of the André Corboz exhibition project.
Sonja Hildebrand is full professor of the history of modern and contemporary architecture at the Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). Since 2020, she has served USI as Prorector for Research in the Humanities and Equal Opportunities. After studying at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and Freie Universität Berlin, she earned her doctorate in art history at Technische Universität München in 1997, where she habilitated in 2008. Before joining the Università della Svizzera italiana in 2011, she researched and taught at the Technical University of Munich, the University of Bamberg, ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. In 2010, she was a substitute professor at the Institute gta at ETH Zurich. She curated exhibitions at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the ETH Zürich and the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio. Research projects and publications deal with topics in the history and theory of architecture and urbanisation from the 19th to the 21st centuries.