A highlight of each Festival of Architecture is the annual lecture given in honour of outstanding New Zealand architect Ian Athfield.

This year’s lecturer is American architectural academic, critic and activist Billy Fleming, who will talk in in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Fleming is director of the University of Pennsylvania’s McHarg Center, an interdisciplinary think tank that seeks to reconcile environmentalism and social science, and landscape and architecture. His research interests include the use of nature-based strategies in climate adaptation planning along the American coast.

Fleming was a domestic policy adviser in the Obama Administration and is co-founder of Data Refuge, an international consortium of scientists, librarians, and programmers working to preserve environmental data threatened with erasure by the policies of the current United States government. He is also a widely published and respected writer on the key challenges of our time – climate change, disaster and resilience, and their intersection with science, politics and design.

About the Sir Ian Athfield Memorial Lecture

Sir Ian Athfield, who passed away in 2015, was a singular and much-loved figure in New Zealand architecture. The annual lecture, established in his honour and presented by a distinguished architect or commentator, is a free event, staged in several cities during the Festival of Architecture.

Sponsor

The Sir Ian Athfield Lecture Series is proudly sponsored by Resene.