We are delighted to welcome architect and author Christopher Bardt to Los Angeles to discuss his recent book Material and Mind. Some of you may recognize this talk as one we planned in March 2020 - right when the pandemic hit. Our interest has remained high, and we’ve waited patiently for another opportunity to welcome Chris to our community. Hope you can join us!
Bardt’s research interests are focused on materials and the role they play in our self definition. For the past two decades he has developed pedagogy based on material engagement and resistance. He has been thinking about how materials guide us and how their properties generate insights. Materials resist us and make us aware of their resistance, a necessary condition of creativity. His new book Material and Mind was inspired in part by the mysterious connection between creativity and material engagement in the studio.
In Material and Mind, Christopher Bardt delves deeply into the interaction of mind and material world, mediated by language, image, and the process of making. He examines thought not as something “pure” and autonomous but as emerging from working with material, and he identifies this as the source of imagination and creative insight. This takes place as much in such disciplines as cognitive science, anthropology, and poetry as it does in the more obvious painting, sculpture, and design. In some fields, the medium of work is, in fact, the very medium of thinking—as fabric is for the tailor.
He is a founding principal of 3sixØ Architecture (with Kyna Leski) which was named in 2002 by Architectural Record as one of 10 leading vanguard firms worldwide. His professional experience includes furniture design, residential, commercial and institutional commissions and planning studies, ranging from small urban interventions to large-scale metropolitan development.
Bardt has been a member of the architecture faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1988. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University and at the National Academy of Design and Art, Slovakia, and the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Chris served on the Board of Governors of the RISD Museum and was President of the Narragansett Boat Club from 2013 to 2019. Bardt holds a Bachelor of Architecture from RISD and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University.
