Annabelle Selldorf lecture

Annabelle Selldorf's attention to spatial clarity and organizational rhythm allow her to work nimbly within a wide range of architectural typologies.

July 20, 2016

Recorded on February 3, 2016.

The Current Work series invites significant international figures who powerfully influence contemporary architectural practice and shape the future of the built environment to present their work and ideas to a public audience.

Annabelle Selldorf founded Selldorf Architects in 1988. She has worked at the intimate scale of residential design, in the public realm for cultural institutions, and at the infrastructural scale of a municipal recycling facility. Selldorf’s sensitivity to both program and material, as well as to spatial clarity and organizational rhythm, allow her to work nimbly within this wide range of architectural typologies.

She organizes her lecture around two projects­, the Sims Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn and the David Zwirner 20th Street gallery space in Chelsea. These projects exemplify Selldorf’s working philosophy of “paying attention to absolutely everything all the time” while also staying cognizant of the larger vision. She expands on her work with other clients and discusses her personal appreciation for art and artists, her family’s history within furniture design, and her relationship to her native city of Cologne, Germany.

In this lecture, Selldorf discusses the following projects:

The lecture is followed by a discussion with Billie Tsien, a co-founding principal of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners and President of The Architectural League of New York.