Madelon Vriesendorp

Madelon Vriesendorp, co-founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), will deliver this year’s Kenneth Frampton endowed lecture, in conversation with Dean Andrés Jaque and Bart-Jan Polman.

This lecture will be hosted in Wood Auditorium at Columbia GSAPP and live-streamed on GSAPP’s YouTube channel.

Madelon Vriesendorp, Hon FRIBA Hon AA Dip, studied at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and Central St. Martins School of Art in London in the 1960s. At the same time, she started exhibiting her work at the Workshop, the Serpentine Gallery, and other institutions. ​

In 1972 she moved to Ithaca, NY and then New York City. While in New York, Vriesendorp co-founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with Rem Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. At the time, paintings she produced were used for book and magazine covers, most notably her work “Flagrant Delit,” which was used on the cover of Delirious New York by Koolhaas (first published in 1978). In 1976, Vriesendorp returned to London to work on numerous OMA competitions.

During the 1970s and 1980s Vriesendorp’s work was exhibited widely, including at the Guggenheim, New York and Max Protetch galleries, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and at Gallery Ma, Tokyo. Together with Teri Wehn-Damisch she storyboarded her artwork “Flagrant Delit” into an animated film for french television, which has been screened at the Annecy Film Festival, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and MoMA. From the mid 1980s until today Vriesendorp teaches art and design at institutions including the Architectural Association and the Edinburgh School of Art.

Vriesendorp’s work has been acquired by collectors including the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, MoMA, New York, The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Frankfurt Architectural Museum. Her art projects and writings have appeared in a range of publications, including Build, Design Quarterly, Domus, Abitare, Casabella, Architecture Aujourd’hui.

The Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture Series is a premier annual lecture given at Columbia GSAPP by a distinguished architect scholar honoring Ware Professor Emeritus Kenneth Frampton for his lifetime of teaching and research. The Kenneth Frampton Lecture was established in 2010 by a generous group of Columbia GSAPP alumni and friends.

This event content is equivalent to 1.5 AIA/CES total learning credit. Please contact events@arch.columbia.edu for more information.