Integrating Nature into Cities

Registration closed but walk-ins welcome!

Marion Waller, Director of the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris and urban planner, is the author of Natural Artifacts. She’ll be in conversation with Andrew Todd, architect founder of studio Andrew Todd, and author of The Clearing. The talk will be followed by a book sale and signing session with authors.

About the guests:

Marion Waller is a curator and urbanist, formerly advising the Mayor of Paris on urban planning, architecture and green space. She studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and urban affairs at Sciences Po. She is the Director of the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, the principal locus of exhibition and debate about built and natural systems in Paris.

Andrew Todd is an architect, winner of the WAN Award for the best wooden building in the world for the Hardelot Elizabethan Theatre. Anchored by his own roots making plant-based buildings, and by the example of his forest manager father, he takes us on a journey which looks at trees and forests from a kaleidoscopic range of viewpoints: as solid matter for building shelter, as ongoing habitat for timeless tribes, as the seat of Western origin myths. The Clearing takes us to the contested, multi-layered forests of Old and New England, to the tropical rainforest (a scene of our civilisational endgame), to ultra-modern (yet animist) Japan, to harmonious and innovative wooden villages in Austria, and to the terraformed, zombie-forested Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic.

These programs are possible in part thanks to the Jean Bodfish Memorial Fund and the support of our partners: Villa Albertine, the French Consulate in Chicago, the Driehaus Museum and Hana Pietri Gallery.