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 19 at 5:30pm • Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Panel: Mary Weatherford and Katharina Grosse
Artists Katharina Grosse and Mary Weatherford, whose works are featured in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, both engage forms of nonfigurative painting that have a strong sensorial presence. A discussion moderated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, will explore how their polyphonic structures invite careful seeing to suggest alternative worlds.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series
About the Artists
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1961. She has held professorships at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18) and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–9) and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include The Sprayed Dear at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 2026), Wunderbild at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (until September 2025), Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou – Metz (2024–25); Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle; Albertina, Vienna (2023–24); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022), toured to Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024). In June 2025, she realized a temporary in-situ work for Art Basel on the fair’s forecourt and the adjacent architectural structures. Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe (Muzeul de Artă Recentă / Museum of Recent Art), Bucharest; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Azman, Jakarta; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Photo Credit: Franz Grünewald
Mary Weatherford was born in Ojai, California. She earned a BA from Princeton University in 1984, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, and graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2006. Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Weatherford is noted for her masterful use of overlapping fields of color, and as her work has advanced the increasingly complex and luminous interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring have produced a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Antony Hoffman