PennDesign’s Annette Fierro will lecture at the LSU College of Art & Design as part of the Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture Series at 5 p.m. on Monday, January 25, 2016, in the LSU Design Building Auditorium (room 103).

Fierro is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennDesign. In her teaching and research, Fierro addresses issues of technology within contemporary international architecture and urban culture.

Fierro’s current research traces the network of legacies instigated by the radical technological speculation of 1960s London. This work encompasses environmental and technological utopias as they were embraced in different eras to the present. It speculates on, among other topics, the effect of the World War II on the technological iconography of the city, the influence of experimental theatre of the 1960s on the evolution of urban space and morphology, and in general, the rise of “high-tech” within a pre-existing condition that favored its development.

Fierro recently authored The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle/Paris 1981-1998 (MIT Press, 2003), which focused on issues of transparency and technologies of François Mitterrand’s “Grands Projets.” This work addresses the material and technological symbolism instigated and imposed on the city in the brief socialist moment of Mitterrand’s presidency, during which the civic infrastructure of Paris was considerably augmented. On this topic, she has lectured at Cornell University, Columbia University, and at UPenn, for the Institute of French Culture and Technology.

Fierro is a registered architect in the state of New York, where she was formerly in practice with Smith-Miller and Hawkinson Architects. Her design work as project architect has appeared in various architectural journals, including Assemblage, Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, and Lotus.