The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and BBC World Service will host three of the world's greatest architects, speaking at the RIBA in 2013 as part of Dream Builders.
Santiago Calatrava, Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster will be in conversation with the BBC's Razia Iqbal about their design philosophy, life and career. The events offer a rare opportunity for the audience to put their own questions to the interviewees.
Spring 2013 Dream Builders Program
Santiago Calatrava
Tuesday 29 January, 19.00
Santiago Calatrava is an architect, artist and engineer. He has carved a career in building that fuses architecture, sculpture and engineering. His international reputation for building was first established through his dazzling bridges, which have come to define many cities around the world. In Venice he controversially created the first bridge for 70 years and only the fourth ever to have spanned the Grand Canal. From the Alamillo Bridge and Cartuja Viaduct in Seville, to the Lyon Saint-Exupery TGV station, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin and the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, in his home city of Valencia, Spain - his uncompromising, ambitious and exciting architecture has uplifted many and left others outraged.
Daniel Libeskind
Tuesday 12 March, 19.00
Daniel Libeskind is an architect with a global reputation for taking architecture to 'places we have never been'. His acclaimed Jewish Museum, Berlin (1999) and the Imperial War Museum, Manchester (2001) are two such examples of a 'radical' architecture which is crafted with what he refers to as 'perceptible human energy'. His diverse projects around the world - including the masterplan for Grand Zero, the Denver Art Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Military History Museum in Dresden - have frequently courted controversy in their risk-taking, but also high praise. In 2001, Libeskind became the first architect to win the Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded for work promoting international understanding and peace and in 2004 he was appointed as the first Cultural Ambassador for Architecture by the U.S. Department of State.
Norman Foster
Tuesday 09 April, 19.00
Norman Foster is one of the most prominent living architects in the world today. His work and the practice he created in 1967, has perhaps more than any other shaped the modern concept of the 'global architect' with project offices in more than twenty countries and over 600 awards worldwide. He was a pioneer of buildings that fused advanced engineering with technological finesse and has employed this approach over the past four decades on everything from one off private houses to entire city masterplans. Key projects include the HSBC bank in Hong Kong, the Reichstag in Berlin, the British Museum Courtyard, Swiss re (Gherkin) Tower and Milennium Bridge in London and more recently the Millau Viaduct in France, the carbon neutral city of Masdar in the UAE and Beijing Airport - the largest single building on the planet.
He became the 21st Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate in 1999 and was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Award for Architecture in 2002. In 1990 he was granted a Knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours, and in 1999 was honoured with a Life Peerage, becoming Lord Foster of Thames Bank.