Events

11 May 2010

Communiqué - Lada Hršak: Local Stories

Lecture

In May and June Lada Hršak is leading an intensive design studio at The University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning. This lecture will present several of her designs and will illustrate how they have been conditioned and articulated by the local conditions of topography, landscape, culture, agriculture, economy, politics, memory, history and building techniques and materials.

Lada Hršak is a Croatian-Dutch architect based in Amsterdam. Since graduating from the postgraduate Berlage Institute in 1997 she has worked both as a practicing architect and an academic. Her work deals with issues of contemporary identity, place, scale and materiality. Starting with a conceptual approach she develops projects towards a specific typology and material. She collaborates regularly with a wide network of professionals in the worlds of architecture and culture, most frequently with Dutch architect Daniëlle Huls. Together they have designed several prize-winning competition entries such as Limes, a project addressing contemporary development strategies for locations at the extremes of the Roman Empire and a disappearing folly for the Atelier Malkovich. Her most important realized work, the Royal Dutch Embassy in Addas Ababa, was completed in collaboration with the architects Dick Van Gameren & Bjarne Mastenbroek. This was awarded the Aga Kahn Award for Architecture in 2008.

Her teaching work at schools and universities in Amsterdam, Zagreb, Leuven and Rotterdam has involved study tours to La Paz, Los Angeles, London and Sri Lanka. This exposure to different creative cultures, combined with her personal travel experience, have emphasised the importance of locality to her design philosophy.

Organisation:

School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland.