Open House Lecture: Frida Escobedo, “Split Subject”

Frida Escobedo is principal and founder of an architecture and design studio based in Mexico City. The projects produced at the studio operate within a theoretical framework that addresses time not as a historical calibration, but rather a social operation. This expanded temporal reading stems directly from Henri Bergson’s notion of ‘social time,’ and is articulated in conceptual works such as the El Eco Pavilion (2010), Split Subject (2013) and Civic Stage (2013). By these measures of practice and thought, social time unfolds across multiple subjects at multiple speeds and modes of duration.

The work developed at Frida Escobedo´s studio ranges from art installation and furniture design to residential and public buildings. The firm’s projects include ‘You know you cannot see so well as by reflection’, a summer Pavilion designed for the central courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the exhibition design for ‘Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today,’ curated by Pablo León de la Barra and organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York in collaboration with the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo; and ‘A very short space of time through very short times of space’, an art installation commissioned by Stanford University. Most recently, she was commissioned to design the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens.

Escobedo is the recipient of the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Forum award (2009), the 2014 BIAU Prize, the 2016 Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award, and the 2017 Architectural League Emerging Voices Award.

Frida Escobedo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (2015), Harvard Graduate School of Design (2016) and the Architectural Association of London (2016). In Fall 2017 she was the Howard A. Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at UC Berkeley. As of Spring 2019, she is a visiting professor at Rice University in Houston.

On February 2019, she was conferred an International Fellowship by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

This program is supported by the Rachel Dorothy Tanur Lectureship Fund.

Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].

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