Chapel, Café/Restaurant, and Footpaths at the Acropolis and National Pension Building

Chapel, café/restaurant, and footpaths at the Acropolis, Dimitri Pikionis
Athens, Greece, 1951–57

National Pension building, Alvar Aalto, Helsinki, Finland, 1949–52

Jointly organized by the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and the Department of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology as part of the Twelve Institutional and Public Buildings Revisited, 1928–1968 seminar series

Convened by Tom Avermaete, Salomon Frausto, and Max Risselada

Thomas Doxiadis is a principal of the Athens-based design practice doxiadis+, which was recently honored with a 2010 Architectural Review Award for Emerging Architecture. A graduate of degrees in architecture and landscape architecture from Harvard University, he has received a number of academic awards. His design work specializes in site planning and the integration of architecture and landscape architecture, having realized pioneering Greek projects based on natural processes. He has won prizes in national competitions, and has taught Landscape Architecture at the University of Patras and the University of Thessaly.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is an associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches design, history, and theory of architecture and directs the Masters of Environmental Design program. Her scholarly work deals with the genesis and meaning of architectural form in different national and historical contexts. She is the author of three books: Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture; Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics; and Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment, and a coeditor of Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.

In addition to these publications, Pelkonen has helped organize and curate two major traveling exhibitions, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future and Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment. She has published and lectured widely both in Europe and the United States and her scholarly work has been supported by the Getty, the Graham Foundation, the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research. Pelkonen's book on Saarinen won the Sir Banister Fletcher Award, granted by the authors club of Great Britain for the best book in art and architecture in 2006, and the Philip Johnson Award, granted by SAH for the best exhibition catalog for 2006, and she is now widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Saarinen scholars.