On Monday 8 May, the ESARQ - School of Architecture at UIC Barcelona will cap the Foros 2017 lecture series The Agency of Architecture with a lecture by controversial German architect and urban planner Arno Brandlhuber. His talk, "Legislating Architecture", which will be open to the public and is due to take place in Palau Abadal, the main seat of the bank Mediolanum (corner of Capità Arenas and Diagonal) at 7 p.m., takes its name from a film that Brandlhuber himself directed, alongside Christopher Roth, and presented at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale and which illustrates some of his current lines of research which are the focus of his lecture. More specifically, the Berlin-based architect will explore the way architecture is shaped by societal regulatory systems and law, deepening into the structure and relations of property and land ownership, seeing legislation more as a pro-active instrument for design rather than an obstacle.

In 2012, Arno Brandlhuber purchased a former East German lingerie factory in the idyllic German village of Krampnitz and, in 2014, turned it into the so-called Anti-Villa. A concrete building riddled with large holes that, beyond being a singular exercise in form, stands as a manifesto of what the pattern of thought should be for a new, 21st-century architecture. Opposed to the trend of demolishing the old to build something new, Brandlhuber advocates preserving existing formats and digging into them to give them a second life. In other words, creating affordable architecture with unconventional methods. An approach to architecture that has earned him the moniker of enfant terrible from critics in Berlin and which is patent in other projects around the city, such as Haus Brunnenstrasse 9, a building in the central Mitte district to which, in 2009, he added a semi-transparent façade and a delicate exterior staircase in the courtyard, making it a place of architectural pilgrimage, as well as the lauded König art gallery in Kreuzberg. The site it occupies was once the parish house of the Catholic St Agnes Church, which Brandlhuber brought back to life in 2015, lending the old concrete a new dimension.

Arno Brandlhuber (Berlin, 1964) studied Architecture and Urbanism at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. He founded the Brandlhuber studio in 2006 and since 2009 has run Brandlhuber + Emde, Burlon, a Berlin-based collaborative practice, alongside Markus Emde and Thomas Burlon. Brandlhuber teaches at several universities and schools. Since 2003, he has been chair for Architecture and Urban Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, and directs the nomadic Master's programme a42.org. He has also guest lectured at centres such as: Technische Universität Wien, ETH Zurich and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In addition to architecture and teaching, he also conducts research on spatial production in the Republic of Berlin, the focus of several exhibitions and the recently published book The Dialogic City: Berlin wird Berlin. He also explores how, in architecture, legislation is a determining factor in both construction and architectural/theoretical discourse. His work was featured in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 13th and 15th Architecture Biennales.

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