Conversations in Context invited leaders from creative fields to reflect on the site’s past, present, and future, and to contribute their perspectives on the Glass House and its significance to contemporary debates.

Kenneth Frampton was born in the United Kingdom in 1930 and trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. After practicing for a number of years in the United Kingdom and in Israel, he served as the editor of the British magazine Architectural Design.  He has taught a number of leading institutions including the Royal College of Art, the ETH Zurich, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, and the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands. He is currently the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University, New York.  He is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), and an updated fourth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History (2007).

Mark Wigley, Dean of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation was raised and educated in New Zealand, moving to the United States in 1986 to teach at Princeton University. In 1988, Wigley co-curated the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture with Philip Johnson, featuring Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and Coop Himmelb(l)au. In 2005, Wigley founded Volume Magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman, which serves as an experimental think tank focusing on the process of spatial and cultural reflexivity. Wigley has written on the theory and practice of architecture, and is the author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995), and Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998). He co-edited The Activist Drawing: Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001).  In 2002, Wigley published the essay “Resisting the City” in V2_’s TransUrbanism.

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