This year, for the first time ever, the prestigious Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture Series will be an interactive teleconference between two of the leading architectural design programs in the United States: Cornell University's Department of Architecture, which manages the series, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The overall theme is "The '70s: The Formation of Contemporary Architectural Discourse."

This year's series was inaugurated at Harvard in October. The second in the series of six lecture-discussions will take place at Cornell Nov. 7 at 6:30 p.m. in 157 Sibley Hall. Prominent architectural theorist George Baird and art historian Deborah Fausch each will give 30-minute presentations on the theme from the perspective of "Europe and America: The Vicissitudes of Realism." Their talks will be followed by questions and discussion, the format used throughout the series, which is free and open to the public.

Baird is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of Architecture at Harvard School of Design and director of its M.Arch. I and II programs. His recent research, publications and studios have focused on the social and political aspects of the design of public space, in particular, the application of precepts from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the cultural theory of Walter Benjamin.

In April 1999, Baird delivered the Preston Thomas Lectures in Architecture on that topic at Cornell. He is also a partner in the Toronto-based architecture and urban design firm Baird Sampson Neuert Architects Inc. The firm recently completed a butterfly conservatory in Niagara Falls, Ontario, that is the largest in North America and is developing a master plan for part of the University of Toronto's campus.

Fausch is an assistant professor in the University of Illinois at Chicago's Department of Art History. She is interested in postwar architecture and urbanism, urban theory and history and contemporary architectural theory. She earned a Ph.D. in history, theory and criticism of architecture from the New School for Social Research in 1999 and an M.A., also in that subject area, from Princeton University in 1991.

She has written extensively about the work of Robert Venturi, most recently in "Reading the Popular Landscape: The Semiotics of Venturi and Scott Brown," in the forthcoming book Cities in the Making (California College of Arts and Crafts).

"It's a pretty provocative series," said Val Warke, associate professor of architecture at Cornell, who is a co-organizer of the lectures (with Baird and Michael Hays, Harvard). "Some of the most respected theorists and practitioners in the field of contemporary architecture will be presenting and debating the origins of many of the most significant issues in the field today. We expect standing room only at the February lectures with Rafael Moneo and Rem Koolhaas."

"The presentations should be pretty interesting for Cornell and Harvard architecture students and faculty, with projections of the lecturers, the slides they are showing, the panelists and the live audiences," said Richard Jaensen, manager of information technology at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning, who is coordinating the technical aspects of the series.

In addition to the Nov. 7 lecture-discussion with Baird and Fausch, the schedule and the speakers' affiliations are as follows:

• Nov. 28: "The Autonomy of the Discipline: The Instrumentality of Form," with Robert Somol, Somol X Pollari and University of California-Los Angeles, and Warke; at Harvard's Piper Auditorium, linked with Cornell.
• Feb. 6, 2001: "Five Architects and After: From Structure to Performativity," with Stan Allen, Columbia, and Rafael Moneo, Pritzger Architecture Prize laureate 1996; at Harvard's Piper Auditorium, linked with Cornell.
• Feb. 27, 2001: "Constructing New Pedagogies," with Robert Geddes, Princeton, Rem Koolhaas, Pritzger Architecture Prize laureate 2000, and Joan Ockman, Columbia; at Harvard's Piper Auditorium, linked with Cornell.
• March 13, 2001: "Transformation of Rhetoric, Genealogies of Deconstruction," with Lauren Kogod, Yale, and Jorge Silvetti, Harvard; at Cornell, 157 Sibley Hall, linked with Harvard.
• April 3, 2001: "Disrupting Modernism: Arthur Drexler and Exhibition Policy at MoMA," with Neil Levine, Harvard, and Felicity Scott, Rice; at Cornell, 157 Sibley, linked with Harvard.
• April 24, 2001: "Flesh and Word: The Rowe--Tafuri Question," with Michael Hays and Sarah Whiting, Harvard; at Cornell, 157 Sibley, linked with Harvard.

The series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, N.Y., in memory of their son, Preston. For more information, contact Ritsu Katsumata at 255-9936 or visit the Cornell architecture department web site:http://www.architecture.cornell.edu.