International Lecture Series: Gerard Reinmuth

Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole inviterer til åben forelæsning med professor Gerard Reinmuth fra University of Technology i Sydney: A Grand Unified Theory of Everything (to do with architecture). Forelæsningen er del af forelæsningsrækken: "International Lectures Series", hvor Arkitektskolen inviterer store internationale navne indenfor til en eftermiddag med fokus på væsentlige internationale temaer i arkitekturen.

Since the formation of TERROIR in 1999, Professor Gerard Reinmuth has continuously operated through the intertwining lives of practice and the academy. The tenor of this work has been a constant questioning about the role of the architect as we entered the 21st with its starchitects, financial crises and new forms of practice. This questioning has occurred through incredibly diverse experiences in both practice (strategies, urbanism, buildings, exhibitions, artworks, writings) and education (teaching studios, practice, running programs and managing research).

The culmination of these experiences has been a deep questioning of the role of the architect in society and how we might understand the agency and relevance of the profession in contemporary society, given form in Gerard’s current research on relationality as the fundamental core of the discipline. 

Taking the view that a focus on objects is a limiting factor in the progression of the discipline, Gerard suggests that we reposition the architect’s skillset as the reorganisation of relations in any one context or project, such that a built object (if it emerges at all) is understood as the after effect of the relational work which produced it.

About Gerard Reinmuth

Gerard Reinmuth is a Founding Director of TERROIR, an architectural practice which emerged from conversations around the potential for architecture to open up questions of cultural consequence.

In Denmark, TERROIR has undertaken research for the Urban Ministry, completed a youth housing project in Aarhus and has been shortlisted in competitions for major cultural sites including Statens Naturhistorisk Museum, Trelleborg and Mols Bjerge.  A new home for the World Maritime University in Malmo was completed in 2015, in collaboration with Kim Utzon Arkitekter.

He is Professor in Practice at the University of Technology (UTS) Sydney where from 2011 where he transformed the architectural practice program in the Masters through his research on the agency of the architect in contemporary society.

Gerard’s current role is split between his Directorship of TERROIR’s Sydney and Copenhagen offices and his Professorial role at UTS. This crossover of practice and research is centred on questions around the agency of the architect in making our cities and the future of the profession in a globalised interconnected world where the traditional conception of the architect are not always valid and have been replaced by new forms of architectural work.

These perspectives have culminated in Gerard’s current research on relationality as the fundamental core of the discipline. Taking the view that a focus on objects is a limiting factor in the progression of the discipline, Gerard suggests that we reposition the architect’s skillset as the reorganisation of relations in any one context or project, such that a built object (if it emerges at all) is understood as the after effect of the relational work which produced it.