Françoise Astorg Bollack

Old Buildings - New Ideas: A Selective Architectural History of Additions, Adaptations, Reuse and Design Invention.

Some architectural transformations are modest, some are revolutionary.

Shining a light on the hidden side of the accepted narrative of architectural histories, this book talk by Françoise Astorg Bollack explores works that transform existing buildings to build a way forward, through adaptations, additions and visual shifts.

This lecture will present buildings and urban sites dating from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century that demonstrate the creative and survival possibilities of working with existing buildings. It will look at how formal inventions have shaped architecture and our environment over time and the formal role of time itself in a built world constantly in a state of becoming. As we face a climate emergency, this study seeks to tap into our deep cultural knowledge about the transformative use and re-use of buildings.

Françoise Astorg Bollack, RA, DESA is a practicing architect, architectural historian and educator. Françoise Bollack Architects, focuses on designing with existing buildings, and has received numerous awards, for work in the New York State Capitol and the transformation of a 19th-century school for the LGBT Community Center.

Publications include Old Buildings – New Forms: New Directions in Architectural Transformations, recipient of a Preservation Book Prize; Material Transfers – Metaphor, Craft and Place in Contemporary Architecture; Everyday Masterpieces – Memory and Modernity: A Study of an International Vernacular between the Two World Wars, (as co-author); ‘Reflection on the art of incompleteness’ in AREA, and ‘The design of memory – Rebuilding at the World Trade Center site in New York City’ in CONTORNI.

Françoise is an adjunct associate professor of historic preservation at the GSAPP holding the ‘Old Buildings – New Energy: History and Current Practices’ seminar. She was born in Paris and lives in New York.

This lecture will be hybrid. For those joining on zoom, please register in advance.

Organized as part of the Preservation Lecture Series, an initiative of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia GSAPP.