Renowned architect Peter Eisenman, who has designed notable buildings in the United States and Europe, will speak at Cornell University Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. in Kennedy Hall's David L. Call Alumni Auditorium. The first in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) 2005-06 Dean's Lecture Series, the talk is free and open to the public, with admission on a first-come, first-served basis.

Eisenman '54, a graduate of Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning, is the architect of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The memorial, a 19,000-meter site with 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern that is both isolating and claustrophobic to viewers, was praised by Nicholas Ouroussoff in The New York Times for its ability "to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality."

One of a handful of architects selected to propose design ideas for the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, Eisenman currently is designing a 68,000-seat multipurpose stadium for the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix. Another current project is the City of Culture of Galicia, a 750,000-square-foot cultural complex in the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Eisenman is the principal architect at Eisenman Architects in New York City. His Wexner Center for the Visual Arts and Fine Arts Library at Ohio State University, completed in 1989, received a 1993 National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. Other lauded projects include the Columbus (Ohio) Convention Center and the Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati. He has competed and won prizes at the International Architectural Biennale in Venice.

Known for his theoretical approach, he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, an international think tank for architecture, and served as its director until 1982. He co-authored "Chora L Works" (Monacelli Press, 1997) with Jacques Derrida and is the author of numerous essays published in architecture magazines and journals worldwide.

He holds a master's of architecture degree from Columbia University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Cambridge. He is a chaired visiting professor at Yale University School of Architecture. In 2001 he received the Medal of Honor from the New York City American Institute of Architects and the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture.

Eisenman was honored at Cornell in June 2004 at his 50th reunion by the showing of a video about his life and work, "Being Eisenman," made by Phil Handler '62, B.Arch. '64, M.Arch. '65, and Maddy Handler '65, and accessible at this Web site: http://ifup.cit.cornell.edu/eisenman/. He also was profiled in the July-August 2005 issue of Cornell Alumni Magazine. Access the article on this Web page: http://cornell-magazine.cornell.edu/Currentissue/features/Feature2.html.