This spring's L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture will feature guest speaker Annabelle Selldorf, founding principal of Selldorf Architects. In advance of the event hosted by the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center on April 23 at Cornell Tech's Verizon Executive Education Center, Selldorf reflected on her work in the city, in the art world, and why the job of an architect is to care.
Annabelle Selldorf.
Molly Sheridan: How does the career you've had compare with the architect you imagined yourself becoming when you were still in school?
Annabelle Selldorf: I started not knowing if I really wanted to be an architect. My father was an architect, and he worked very hard and never had any money. I didn't get into architecture school in Germany, not one, but two years in a row, so I filled my time with internships. Ultimately, I applied to go to architecture school at Pratt and, surprisingly, was accepted.
There were all these exercises in architecture school that we had to do, that had to do with abstraction, that had to do with understanding space. Gradually, I thought about architecture as something you have to inhabit in order to create it. But I didn't really have a plan. I wasn't ambitious. I once heard an interview with Norman Foster, who said that when he came out of the womb, he knew that he was going to be an architect. I had to literally rope it in one inch at a time.
I worked all through architecture school, so linking myself and my studies to practice was always very clear to me, but whether I would become an independent architect, I wasn't sure. I got my master's at Syracuse in Florence, Italy. Then I came back and went back to my old job and realized I didn't want to work for anybody else. I really wanted to think on my own. Somebody hired me to do a kitchen renovation, and that was almost as good as the Cappella Rucellai in Florence.
So it all happened very gradually, is what I'm saying, and it didn't happen in a premeditated way. I was very happy that I started with very small projects, because they were projects that I could understand and that I could get my arms around. And that's how the practice grew over a very long time.
Continue reading on the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning website.
