The NZIA’s 2015 Conference will be held at the Viaduct Events Centre, Auckland, from 10-13 February. The programme includes a line-up of presenters from Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Events include public lectures, social events, architecture tours, a Pecha Kucha and an industry exhibition. Early-bird registration is available until 12 December 2014. 

The 2015 NZIA Conference features international and local architects at the forefront of their profession. All have demonstrated a strong and sophisticated understanding of the contexts in which they practice, and the ways in which architecture can influence those contexts.

Key Speakers: 

Sou Fujimoto

Sou Fujimoto was born in Hokkaido in 1971, graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1994, and established his own office in Tokyo in 2000. In 2012 he was a member of Japan’s Gold Lion-winning team at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and his practice has recently won two significant international competitions – ‘Formosa’, a futuristic 300m tower in Taiwan and the Beton Hala Waterfront Centre in Belgrade. He is perhaps best known for his 2013 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park, London (he was the youngest architect to awarded this prestigious annual commission).

Sheila O’Donnell & John Tuomey

O’Donnell + Tuomey’s description in Architects Today as “the godfathers of contemporary Irish architecture” does little to remedy the gender imbalance prevalent in the architectural profession, but it does accurately reflect the firm’s influence on architecture both at home, in Éire, and further afield. For evidence of the professional esteem in which Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey are held by their peers, you need look no further than their receipt of the 2015 Royal Institute of British Architect’s Royal Gold Medal. 

Sam Jacob 

Sam Jacob was a founding director of London-based FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), a firm renowned for a body of work that traversed satirical installations, artistic objects, pop-collage interiors and splendidly eclectic buildings infused with cultural references. FAT disbanded after the completion of ‘A Clockwork Jerusalem’, Britain’s 2014 pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and Jacob formed his own studio, where he continues to design, write and curate.

Ana Vélez

After graduating in 1992 from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Ana Elvira Vélez began her professional work in Medellín, Colombia. She gained extensive experience in the design of collective housing and public space, for which she received several national and international awards. She is a consultant for the Housing Company of Antioquia VIVA, designing rural housing and urban habitats for the department and is one of the architects selected to develop an educational park for the Colombian municipality of Hispania.

Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard is a Tasmanian architect now living and working in Melbourne. He established Andrew Maynard Architects (AMA) in 2002, soon after winning the Asia Pacific Design Award for his mobile work station, The Design Pod. Maynard says AMA attempts to “strike a balance between built projects and bold, polemical design studies”. His highly crafted built work and socio-political ideas have attracted global recognition. 

Sarah Whiting

Architect, critic and academic Sarah Whiting has an indefatigable curiosity about how individuals constitute a ‘public’ and, more specifically, in the architectural and urban forms through which that public manifests itself and is formed. In her writing, teaching and practice, Whiting focuses on architecture’s public audience and how architecture can engage that collective subject. Whiting has been Dean of the School of Architecture at Rice University since 2010. Previously she taught at Princeton, Harvard, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida.

Vo Trong Nghia

Born in 1976 in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Binh, Vo Trong Nghia graduated from Hanoi Architecture University before studying architecture at the Nagoya Technology Institute at the University of Tokyo. At Nagoya, Nghia won the Furuichi Award of the Tokyo University for his MA thesis on the subjects of aerodynamics, wind and water – themes that would recur throughout his later works. A year later, he received the Dean of The University of Tokyo Award for his PhD research work.

Shelley Penn

Shelley Penn is a Melbourne-based architect whose work includes strategic advice to government and the private sector on architectural and urban design for public places across all scales, with her major focus being design evaluation and review. Her projects have been published and exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has received a number of awards. Penn was the Associate Victorian Government Architect for four years from 2006 and Design Director in the Office of the NSW Government Architect in 2000-01. 

Phil Harris & Adrian Welke

Phil Harris and Adrian Welke, joint recipients of the Australian Institute of Architects 2014 Gold Medal, founded Troppo in 1979, but their partnership began with the publication of Influences in Regional Architecture (1978), Australia’s first history of architecture outside of the urban arena. Their registered practice commenced in Darwin in 1980 with the aid of a Northern Territory Government history grant to research – and, eventually, define and publicize – the history of Tropical housing in Australia’s Top End.

The conference also includes a host of other events including exhibitions, a Pecha Kucha night as well as talks on unconventional practice, housing and the inverse perspectives of NZ architects working internationally and vice versa. Early-bird registration is available until 12 December 2014.

To find out more, to register and for a full programme of events, click here.