The distinguished Argentinean architect and educator Miguel Angel Roca will give a lecture sponsored by the Kansas State University College of Architecture, Planning and Design. His slide illustrated lecture entitled

Architecture: Recent Work

is scheduled to begin at 4:00 p.m. Friday, September 7, 2007, in the Forum Hall of the K-State Student Union. The event is open to the public without charge.

Professor Roca’s lecture will review the variety of projects he has designed over the last 25 years in his home city of Cordoba to provide context for an extended discussion of his more recent work. Through his many years of practice, Professor Roca has endeavored to create architecture which helped to weave together the fabric of the city and reinforce the unique qualities of each urban environment. His ideas are exemplified in the work he has done for the University City Campus of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba where he prepared the master plan and designed a number of buildings including the Claustrorum, the Faculty of Law, Psychology, and Odontology, as well as the Schools of Information Sciences, Arts, Social Work, Medical Science, and Economics. He hoped to give each of these buildings their own “special Identity” as a “celebration of sense of place.” He sought to relate each building to its larger context while giving each project an “objective self-sufficient autonomy.”

Professor Roca studied architecture and urban design at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba and at the University of Pennsylvania under Louis Kahn, for whom he worked. His architectural practice has earned him numerous international design awards and has been featured in eight monographs. He has authored a number of important theoretical articles on architecture and urbanism and has served as a professor or visiting professor at many prestigious universities in South America, Europe, and the United States. He has been a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba since 1975 and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism there from 1992 until 2002. While continuing his prolific architectural practice, Roca is currently also serving as Professor of Architecture at the National University of Buenos Aires.

Professor Roca has been named as the 2007-2008 Victor L. Regnier Visiting Faculty Chair in Architecture at Kansas State University. This program, funded by the Victor and Helen Regnier Family Foundation of Mission, Kansas, was established in 2003 through the extraordinary generosity of his children, Victor A. Regnier, Robert D. Regnier, and Catherine M. Regnier, who sought to enrich the educational experience of Kansas State University architecture students by exposing them to the finest architects from around the world.

During several visits to the Manhattan campus in the coming year, Professor Roca will be working with students in Professor Vladimir Krstic’s fifth-year studio on strategic urban and architectural interventions in downtown Kansas City. The studio will explore ideas for morphological transformation of the downtown area inaugurated through the recent design competition for the I-670 corridor. The studio will use work from the competition as a basis for an expanded dialogue on the consolidation of the downtown area.

Professor Roca will also give a presentation in Kansas City on September 12 at 6:30 p.m. in the Helzberg Room, Fifth Floor, Downtown Kansas City Public Library, 14 West 10th St, Kansas City, Missouri.  A reception for Professor Roca at 6 p.m. will precede the lecture.

Attendance at the lecture can be submitted as continuing education credit by design professionals by contacting CAPD@ksu.edu.

For more information, contact:
David Sachs, 785.532.1183
CAPD@ksu.edu, 785.532.1090