Join us on Tuesday, March 3 for the launch of the new book Writings on Architecture and the City by former Dean of the Daniels Faculty, founding principal of Baird Sampson Neuert Architects and Professor Emeritus George Baird. The volume comprises 24 texts written over the span of his career in architecture and architectural education.

The evening will kick off with a few words from George Baird, followed by a roundtable discussion about the book and George's prolific career. The panelists will include Dean Richard Sommer, Professor Robert Levit, Professor Laura Miller and Roberto Damiani, lecturer and co-founder of architecture firm Damiani Ngo Phiffer. The discussion will be followed by a reception in the front lobby.

Baird has received the Gold Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (2010) and the Topaz Medallion of the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (2012).

Baird's publications include (with Charles Jencks) Meaning in Architecture (1969), Alvar Aalto (1969), The Space of Appearance (1995) and Public Space; Cultural/Political Theory; Street Photography (2011).

His most recent book, Writings on Architecture and the City, begins in 1967 with “La dimensione amoureuse in Architecture” a “small classic” which was a seminal text in the formulation of what we now know as “architectural theory”, and continuing across the span of that career, the volume also includes such notable essays as “les extremes qui se touche”, a 1978 text on the work of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture that Pier Vittorio Aureli has called “prescient”, and “Criticality and Its Discontents” of 1974. Other texts included range widely across contemporary architecture and urbanism, offering accounts of numerous architects, buildings, critics, historians and architectural and urban ideas. In his introduction to the volume Francesco Garofalo remarks: “the reader will discover in this collection ... a rare author who is optimistic at the same time that he is radical and critical about the chances of architecture in the contemporary world”.

“Baird’s writings remain some of the only writings capable of intelligently bridging the gap between architecture and social politics.” 

-Sarah Whiting, Dean, School of Architecture, Rice University

“If I were to summarize George Baird’s qualities ... in one phrase, it would be “the philosophical architect”  

-Charles Jencks