Anna Puigjaner
This year's Athena Lecture took place on Tuesday, 7th of March 2023 and was given by architect and researcher Anna Puigjaner, Professor of Architecture and Care at the D-ARCH of ETH Zurich. In her lecture “Towards a Diffuse House” she critically examined how gender biases are empowered through the built environment, in particular through the relation between domesticity and care, turning visible the capacity that dismantling this relation might have.The Athena Lecture introduced the Party Talks "Get your act together!", which took place the day afterwards.
Prof. Dr. Anna Puigjaner has this year been appointed as Professor of Architecture and Care at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. She combines historical research, editorial practices and fieldwork throughout the world, where she explores new ways of living communally in an inclusive and comprehensive way. As a co-founder of MAIO, an architectural office operating since 2012 and based in Barcelona, she works on new models of collective housing.
MAIO collaborates with artists and practitioners from outside the field, coping with the changing complexity of everyday life within flexible spatial systems, that allow variation and change over time. Recent projects are “40 Social Housing” – a 40-unit innovative housing block in Sant Feliu de Llobregat in Barcelona – and a series of exhibition designs for the Milan Furniture Fair and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Furthermore, MAIO’s participation at Venice Biennial 2016 in the Spanish Pavilion was awarded with the Golden Lion.
In her PHD research on “Kitchenless Cities” she questions individualized types of domesticity and proposes models for domestic collectivity. Her research has been published in different forms including in “The Quantified Home” (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014) and “Together! The New Architecture of the Collective” (Ruby Press, 2017).
Anna Puigjaner has previously been an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University in New York and has thought at the Royal College of Art in London and the Barcelona School of Architecture. In 2016 she received Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize and was nominated finalist of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Initiative. Between 2011-2016 she was an editor of the magazine “Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme”.
ATHENA Lecture Series
Anna Puigjaner on "Towards a Diffuse House"
7 March 2023, gta Foyer HIL, ETH Hönggerberg, 19–20.30h
Introduction / Q&A:
Jennifer Duyne Barenstein & Parity Group
The lecture was be followed by an apéro.
The Athena Lecture was held in English. The event was part of the Parity Talks "Get Your Act Together!" The full programme is published here.
Click here for the video of the talk.