Call it a creative collaboration – the Tulane School of Architecture and the New Orleans Museum of Art are joining forces to bring renowned Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo to the Crescent City for a lecture today (Jan. 27) at 6 p.m. at the museum in City Park.

Moneo is “an internationally prominent architect and educator, a major figure in the field,” says Ken Schwartz, architecture dean and Favrot Professor.

“This is our first time to cosponsor an event with NOMA and its new director, Susan Taylor,” Schwartz says. “This is an opportunity for us to come together to explore our many overlapping interests.”
Schwartz’s architecture students have been spending a lot of time in recent months near the museum in City Park, building structures for the Grow Dat Youth Farm. The students designed the project in their classes, which they also did in developing a pavilion in the NOMA sculpture garden.

For Taylor, who became the museum’s director in fall 2010, the Moneo lecture is particularly meaningful, as she worked with the architect on his first building in North America, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College.

Moneo’s visit to New Orleans “is made even more significant by this initial collaboration between NOMA and the Tulane School of Architecture,” Taylor says. “We look forward to working together many times in the future.”
“What Is It We Demand of an Architect?” will be the subject of Moneo’s talk for the Tulane 2012 Eskew + Dumez + Ripple Lecture.

Moneo is the first Josep Lluis Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1996. His other prominent U.S. works include the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles and, in 2010, the Northwest Corner science building at Columbia University.