Paul Goldberger in conversation with Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi on Thursday, July 31 at 5:00pm as part of our LongHouse Talks series. Copies of Weiss/Manfredi's most recent monograph, Drifting Symmetries will be available for purchase provided by our friends at BookHampton.
In an era when the dual challenges of climate change and social isolation loom large, Drifting Symmetries emerges as a pivotal exploration of architecture's role in shaping a sustainable and connected future. Weiss/Manfredi's groundbreaking work transcends the boundaries between landscape, infrastructure, and architecture by reinventing sites in response to environmental and social challenges. Presented in this comprehensive volume of projects and parallel research, their work demonstrates a multidisciplinary approach that invents new settings for public life by exploring the gradient between nature and architecture.
Paul Goldberger is an American author, architecture critic and lecturer — widely known as contributing editor at Vanity Fair, columnist for The New Yorker, and architectural critic for the New York Times, where he received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism. He was awarded New York City’s Preservation Achievement Award in recognition of the impact of his work on historic preservation. Goldberger served as Dean of Parsons The New School for Design, where he remains the Joseph Urban Professor of Design. The Chair of the board at Philip Johnson’s GlassHouse, he was a great friend and colleague to Jack Lenor Larsen and is the preeminent scholar on LongHouse.
WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism is a multidisciplinary design practice based in New York City. Founded by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, the firm is known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design. The firm is well known for the Seattle Art Museum’s celebrated Olympic Sculpture Park, the Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center and Overlook, and Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park. Current projects include the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India, the La Brea Tar Pits and museum in Los Angeles, the Tampa Museum of Art expansion, and Lincoln Center’s new outdoor theater in New York City. Most recently, the firm won the international competition for the addition and renovation to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, which attracted submissions from over 180 firms from thirty countries on six continents.
Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi are recipients of the 2024 Louis I. Kahn Award in Architecture, the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, and the Architectural League of New York’s "Emerging Voices" award. The firm has also been honored with the New York AIA Gold Medal and the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal, awarded to one individual or firm in the world each year. The firm's projects have been featured in exhibitions at the Venice Architectural Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the São Paulo Biennale of International Architecture and Design, the Shanghai Biennale, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum, the National Building Museum, Harvard University, the Landscape Architecture Biennale in Barcelona, the Design Centre in Essen, Germany, and the Guggenheim Museum. Weiss and Manfredi’s work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, the Seattle Art Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum. Princeton Architectural Press has published three monographs on their work including their most recent book, PUBLIC NATURES. Park Books published their fifth monograph DRIFTING SYMMETRIES in winter 2025.