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
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.