Founding principal of 3SIX0 Architecture to visit Penn State

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Christopher Bardt, founding principal of 3SIX0 Architecture and a professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), will speak at 6 p.m. on March 23 in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space on the University Park campus as part of the Stuckeman School’s Lecture and Exhibit Series.

Titled “Material and Mind,” Bardt’s lecture will focus on how materials guide the imagination and how their properties generate insights. The talk is cohosted by the Department of Architecture and will also be live-streamed by WPSU.

Bardt’s professional experience includes furniture design, residential, commercial and institutional commissions, and planning studies, ranging from small urban interventions to large-scale metropolitan development. In 2002, “Architecture Record” named 3SIX0 one of 10 leading vanguard firms worldwide. His research, drawings and artifacts based on the geometry of sunlight, materials, materiality and tectonics as critical to architectural making and thinking has been widely published and exhibited worldwide.

Bardt’s first book, titled “Material and Mind,” was published by MIT Press in 2019 and offers a cross-disciplinary investigation of how our engagement with materials and physical surroundings are formative of thought and imagination. He is currently working on a new book, “The Feeling of Space,” that aims to recover the physicality of space from its default isomorphic and Cartesian conceptualization.

Bardt joined the RISD faculty in 1988 where he teaches upper-level studios, the history and theory of projective geometry, architectural history and foundation courses. He has also led the development of the program’s drawing curriculum, which fuses digital and hand-drawn approaches to architectural drawing.

Bardt has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, the National Academy of Design and Art, and the China Academy of Art, and he has served on RISD Museum Board of Governors. In 2017, he was honored by RISD with a lifetime achievement award for his design work and inducted into the Rhode Island Design Hall of Fame.

Bardt holds a bachelor of architecture from RISD and a master of architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.