kruh spring 2022: Éric Lapierre and Ahmed Belkhodja

At the June lecture, French architect and educator Éric Lapierre from the office of Experience will be joined by his guest Ahmed Belkhodja, founder of the Portuguese studio fala. The evening will present the unconventional approaches and works of these two studios.

Éric Lapierre is a French architect, theorist, curator, writer, and founder of the Paris studio Experience. In addition to his architectural practice, he also lectures at the French ÉPFL, École d’architecture de la ville & des territoires Paris-Est, and is a visiting professor at Harvard. His work focuses on theoretical issues that he believes are the only way to keep architecture alive as a means of high culture under the ordinary conditions of the present. Since 2000, he has regularly published texts on architecture. He has published, for example, a guide to Parisian architecture (1900–2008) and the book Architecture of the Real (Le Moniteur, Paris, 2003). In 2019, he was one of the curators of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. His notable buildings include the Le Point du Jour art center in Cherbourg and the Chris Marker student residence in Paris. At the invitation of the KRUH association, he spoke to a Prague audience in 2017.

Ahmed Belkhodja is a Swiss architect and co-founder of the Portuguese studio fala. He studied at EPF Lausanne, CTH Göteborg, ETH Zurich, and ETH’s Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. Besides his academic education, he worked with Harry Gugger Studio in Basel, Obra Architects in New York, and Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo. In 2013, immediately after completing his studies, he co-founded the studio fala in Porto along with Ana Luisa Soares and Filipe Magalhães. The work of the studio fala, inspired by the heritage of postmodernism, is characterized by original contextuality and a playful form and color, which they create with surprising ease. Ahmed has taught at several institutions in Europe, including IUAV in Venice and the Royal College of Art in London.