Shefali Balwani and Robert Verrijt will lecture at the Transfer Dialogues on Friday the 5th October. This event will be held at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, at the Columbia University in New York,

The lecture series Two-On-Two brings two different practices from different countries together. It explores and compares their way of producing architecture in today’s globalised context. As part of a series devoted to crossovers between architecture debates, this event speculates on the potential realignments and reformulations in contemporary architectural practice.

Architecture BRIO will lecture alongside Tonohiro Hate from Tomohiro Hata and Associates, Kobe Japan. His practice thinks of architecture as a way to identify the “essence” of the environment surrounding us. It focusses on identifying and reading the unique topography of a project in order to create a unique architecture.

Both practices examine current architectural production, since they both keep an emerging attitude involving different front lines of operation. Their practices operate between the professional, teaching, publishing and speculating about architecture and its different facets. This will instigate a discussion on the conditions under which architecture is performed today in Mumbai, Kobe as well as globally. Instead of a lecture that shows the work of the offices, the practitioners explain in a scientific-self-biography the history of establishing their offices, their theoretical discourses, and their production. Therefore the lecture series tries to provoke a conversation about why and how we do what we do. It attempts to uncover the act of building up a practice as a conscientious plan, as a project itself.

An exhibition of the work of the practices will be on display at the Avery Hall stairway.

Responses are by David Benjamin and Juan Herreros.