Guest lecture: Alessandra Ponte

Alessandra Ponte is professeure agrégée, École d’architecture, Université de Montréal, since 2006 and Adjunct Professor, School of Design of Built Environment and Engineering, Queensland University of Technology (Australia), 2009-2012. She has taught history and theory of architecture and landscape at Pratt Institute (New York), Princeton University, Cornell University, the Instituto Universitario di Architettura (Venice), and ETH (Zurich).  

She has written articles and essays in numerous international publications. For the last three years she has been responsible for the conception and organization of the Phyllis Lambert Seminar, a series colloquia on contemporary architectural topics. She has recently organized the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975 (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, March- August 2009), and is currently completing a series of investigations about the North American landscapes and preparing a show and catalogue on François Dallegret (AA School, London, Fall 2011).

In her research, Alessandra Ponte is working on territories that have never been traditionally represented as landscapes; they have not been framed, beautified and represented neither as ‘nature’ nor as landscapes until they were appropriated by the energy producing industry and mediated as landscapes of energy. Supported by Marshall McLuhan’s work on the de-centralization force of eletricity, she reads the productive and specifically Canadian re-thinking of space in terms of media, leaving behind the obsolete and inadequate category of perspectivized landscape.

Ponte is visiting AHO in relation to the OCCAS seminar (Re)presenting landscapes of motion on September 29 at 12-14. The seminar is part of AHOs contribution to the Oslo Triennale 2010.