International Lecture Series: Andrés Jaque

The lecture 'The Design of Transscalarity' by Andrés Jaque from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) is part of the ‘International Lecture Series’ at the Royal Danish Academy where prominent international architects are invited to present their views on significant topics in architecture.

Since 2003, The Office for Political Innovations has explored through/as architecture what it means for the world to have entered an ecological paradigm. Ecology is not about individual objects, but instead about how entities are constituted as collective. How they infiltrate and are infiltrated by each other.

The crucial aspect of how architectural design operates ecologically is how it relates to scale. The agency of buildings unfolds as they transition across scales. This transitioning is full of divides, conflicts, controversies, alliances, collaborations, and bodiments; all of which can only be managed through politics. Every ecology is a political ecology.

Navigating OFFPOLINN's projects including Reggio School, Rambla Climate-House, Thyssen-Bornemisza Ocean Space, Babyn Yar Museum of Memory and Oblivion among others, this lecture will show that the design of transscalarity makes architecture be a cosmopolitical endeavor.   

About Andrés Jaque 
Andrés Jaque is Dean and Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and founder of Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN), based in New York and Madrid.

As an architect, researcher and curator, his practice explores architecture as an entanglement of bodies, technologies, and environment. His work approaches materiality as relational, trans-scalar, and intrinsically political.

Professor Jaque is the recipient of the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2016), the Silver Lion 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014) and the Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize (2001–2006), among other recognitions. Recent publications include Superpowers of Scale (2020) and More-Than-Human (2021).