Eugene J. Mackey Jr. Lecture: K. Michael Hays

Sam Fox School
Washington University in St. Louis

Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Fondazione Aldo Rossi

This endowed lecture at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) honors Eugene J. Mackey Jr., a distinguished architect who practiced in partnership with Joseph Murphy, former dean of the School of Architecture. Among other projects, Mackey and Murphy designed WUSTL’s John M. Olin Library and collaborated with R. Buckminster Fuller on the design of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Climatron.

The Eugene J. Mackey Jr. Lecture brings significant patrons of architecture to the WUSTL campus. Past lecturers have included Gerald Edelman, Thomas Krens, Jorma Ollila, Emily Pulitzer, Richard Jackson, Eric J. Cesal, Alan Webber, and Stanislaus von Moos.

K. Michael Hays is the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture Theory at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His publications include Architecture Theory since 1968 and Architecture’s Desire.

Hays’ recent work investigates a shift, beginning in the 1970s, from an understanding of architecture as an autonomous aesthetic practice to an understanding of architecture as particular mode of being in the world. His lecture, titled Does Architecture Exist? Speculations on the Shift from Aesthetic Practice to Being in the World, will offer an interpretive model that claims architecture may have an essence as well as an existence.