Martin Bressani
Biographical interview
SUMMARY
This interview with Martin Bressani covers his education, research, and teaching career. He described his early exposure to architecture through his uncle’s modernist house in Quebec City and Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture. At McGill in the 1970s, one of his early influences was Peter Collins and his book Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (1965). Bressani also absorbed Manfredo Tafuri’s Theories and History of Architecture (1968). Tafuri’s critique still remains impactful for him today. After several years of practice he attended further education at MIT where he studied under Stanford Anderson. His master’s thesis focused on Auguste Perret’s 25b Rue Franklin traced the organic analogy and rationalist discourse in 19th-century architecture. In the late 1980s, he began teaching at Carleton under Alberto Pérez-Gómez, in an atmosphere heavily influenced by Cooper Union, but resisted tendencies to abandon building altogether. Returning to McGill in the 1990s, he combined historical research with design studio teaching. In the 2000s, he balanced studio teaching and writing where he talked about affect, atmosphere, and fiction.
BIOGRAPHY
Martin Bressani is William Macdonald Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. He holds a professional architecture degree from McGill University, a Masters degree in the History and Theory of architecture from M.I.T, and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He has held visiting professorships at M.I.T, Cornell University, and Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2003. He is the author of a monograph on 19th-century French neo-gothic architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Ashgate, 2014).
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