In his lecture, Aaron Betsky will explain to what extent Frank Lloyd Wright took up pragmatic and experimental tendencies in American architecture. Wright dissolved traditional American house types by designing buildings that extend their architectural space into the American landscape, sacred spaces providing shelter within its expanse, and spirals that connect human and natural structures.This tradition continues today in the work of some of the best practitioners, who are mining both history and existing structures to find new forms of sociality and new narratives. Aiming to be the best experimental architecture program in the United States of America, the School of Architecture at Taliesin seeks to embody and carry further these forms of work.

Aaron Betsky is president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, which offers an immersive architectural education at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West. Grown up in the Netherlands, he studied architecture at Yale, worked for Frank Gehry and Hodgetts & Fung and taught at many schools, including the University of Cincinnati and the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture. He was curator of architecture, design, and digital projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Cincinnati Art Museum. In 2008, he was the director of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennial. Aaron Betsky is author of numerous books and essays on architecture and design of the 19th, 20th and 21st century.