The Architecture is Art lecture series presents internationally renowned architects and cultural practitioners who discuss how their collaborative experiences, crossdisciplinary projects, and methods have both advanced thinking within their own field of expertise and enlarged possibilities for related disciplines. The program series engages new, diverse audiences of arts and culture enthusiasts, examining architecture through a lens that reaches beyond specific buildings, form, and structure to a conceptual, creative landscape that is fluid, ubiquitous, and connected to a complexity of issues and forms of expression.The series comprises three events, each featuring a twenty-minute lecture, followed by an engaging interview conducted by noted architectural commenter Reed Kroloff. Featured architects in the current series include Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from Atelier Bow-Wow who will appear on October 4, 2015, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture from Asymptote Architecture on October 28. The third event is on March 10, 2016, featuring New York City-based architecture firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

Lise Anne Couture serves as managing partner and principal at Asymptote Architecture. She is involved in all aspects of design oversight, working directly with all our clients, internal project teams, and specialist consultants, ensuring creative design vision through all phases. Couture has held numerous prestigious academic appointments. For more than ten years she has served on faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. In 2009, she held the Davenport Chair at Yale University as a visiting professor, and, in 2010, she was the Baird Visiting Professor at Cornell University's College of Architecture. Couture has been a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow and is a New York State Registered Architect and a member of the AIA.

Hani Rashid, design partner at Asymptote, founded the studio in Milan in 1989. Rashid has achieved international recognition for his own work and Asymptote's global renown. As associate professor of architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, he codeveloped the school's Advanced Digital Design Program in 1991 and cofounded the Paperless Design Studios in 1996. Rashid has held the Kenzo Tange Chair in Architecture at Harvard and served on the steering committee for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Today, he leads a research department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. In 2004, he was awarded the chair to the Cátedra Luis Barragán in Monterrey, Mexico, and, in that same year, he and Lise Anne Couture were awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts. He received an MArch from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1985.

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto was born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1965. He studied architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and received his undergraduate degree in 1987. Tsukamoto travelled to Paris to as a guest student at L'Ecole d'Architecture de Belleville (UP 8) from 1987 to 1988, and, in 1994, completed a doctoral program in engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 2000, Tsukamoto became associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and in both 2003 and 2007, served as Kenzo Tange Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Also, in 2007, and, again, in 2008, Tsukamoto was a visiting associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Reed Kroloff is the past director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum, and an independent architectural consultant and commentator. Kroloff was dean of the Tulane University School of Architecture from 2004 to 2007. He arrived at Tulane just before Hurricane Katrina and helped lead the school to recovery and prominence in the post-storm environment, including raising a record three- million dollars in gifts and research grants, retaining 97 percent of the school's students and 100 percent of its faculty after the storm, as well as playing a significant role in citywide planning and rebuilding efforts. The recipient of the American Academy's Rome Prize Fellowship, Kroloff previously served as the editor-in-chief of Architecture magazine. Under his direction, Architecture received more awards for editorial and design excellence than any magazine of its type, and quickly became the leading design publication in the nation.

Founded in 1966, the Chicago Architecture Foundation inspires people to discover why design matters.