Presented by the AIA St. Louis Scholarship Trust Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.

Speaker: Angela Pang, an assistant professor in practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the founder of PangArchitect. 

Nature provides clues on how to build. When we make buildings, we must address forces of nature – material, gravity, seismic, and wind. Nature’s rules are the most honest framework of all.  This interest is the basis of PangArchitect’s research and built works. Rational Form Making – an ongoing research project that started over a decade ago – is to construct through understanding the purest set of objectivities based on nature’s willfulness. This lineage of thought can be traced back to the simple chain model that Robert Hooke made to discover the catenary curve (1675). Architects and engineers from Antoni Gaudí’s hanging model for Sagrada Familia (1889), Félix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloids (1957), Heinz Isler’s new shell forms (1959), and Frei Otto’s soap surface efficiency (1961) demonstrate shared goals to find new forms through play, mathematics, and nature. Our research project, Rational Form Making, is based on the same ethical critique – to find logic and optimization in architectural formal and spatial wonders and discoveries.

Credits: 1.00 LU

Arrival Instructions:

Please park in the East End Garage, accessible from Forsyth Boulevard west of Skinker—turn at the light for Wrighton Way. Parking validation will be available. Once you park in a visitor spot, please follow wayfinding signage inside the garage for the Sam Fox complex. If you take the stairs, you'll emerge directly in front of Weil Hall. Kuehner Court is on the second floor, accessible by stairs or elevator. If you take the elevator from the garage, you'll emerge in Sumers Hall. Look for signage to Weil Hall, which is the next building over.

Free to attend

Food and Drinks will be provided

REGISTER USING THE BUTTON ABOVE