Amanda Levete will discuss AL_A’s latest projects, with a particular focus on two recently completed museums: the Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Quarter in London and the Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology – MAAT – in Lisbon.
She will look at how these cultural projects were conceived as urban projects and the importance of public space in our museums as well as the exceptional craftsmanship and intense collaborations that made both a reality. The lecture will explore the thinking that underpins AL_A’s work across scales, from the Ceramic Table to Central Embassy in Bangkok.
She will also address the need to advance the debate and why both narrative and emotion in architecture remain as vital as ever. Amanda Levete CBE is a RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect and founder and principal of AL_A, an international award-winning design and architecture studio.
Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has refined an intuitive and strategic approach to design. Collaborating with ambitious and visionary clients, we develop designs that are conceptualised as urban projects not just buildings and projects that express the identity of an institution, a city or a nation. Recently completed projects include the Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Quarter (2017) in London, the V&A’s largest building project in over 100 years; MAAT (2016), a Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, commissioned by EDP, one of the world’s foremost energy companies; Central Embassy (2017), a 1.5 million sq ft luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok on the former grounds of the British Embassy; a 13-hectare media campus masterplan and a 37,700m2 headquarters building for Sky (2016) in London; and MPavilion 2015 in Melbourne.
Ongoing commissions around the world include the transformation of the flagship Galleries Lafayette department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris; a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s in Southampton; two new buildings for Wadham College at the University of Oxford; The Courtyard, a series of community mixed-use developments on 39 sites across Moscow; and the Monte St Angelo subway station in Naples. For over a decade, Levete was a trustee of both leading social innovation centre the Young Foundation and the influential arts organisation Artangel.
She is a regular radio and TV broadcaster, writes for a number of publications including the New Statesman and Prospect and lectures throughout the world. She is a Visiting Professor and MArch tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In 2017 Levete was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday honours list and made a CBE for services to architecture. Levete trained at the Architectural Association and worked for Richard Rogers before joining Future Systems as a partner in 1989, where she realised ground-breaking buildings including the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground and Selfridges department store in Birmingham.
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