Next Monday 3 April, the UIC Barcelona ESARQ-School of Architecture will play host to a lecture by Israeli architect and urban planner Rafi Segal as part of Foros 2017: The Agency of Architecture. In his presentation, which will be open to the public and take place at 7 p.m. in the Aula Magna at UIC Barcelona, Segal, an architect and professor at MIT, will, by explaining some of his latest projects, discuss the guidelines of a discourse that analyses the cultural and socio-political aspects of urban architecture and thanks to which he is considered one of most relevant voices in 21st-century architecture.

In 2003, Rafi Segal, alongside fellow Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, won a competition organised by the Israeli Association of United Architects to prepare their country's presentation at the International Union of Architect's congress in Berlin. Their proposal, an exhibit and catalogue that mapped and measured the impact of Israeli settlements in the conflict with Palestine, and which focused on the often overlooked geopolitical implications of architecture and urbanism, was censured by the Israeli government. Since then, Segal has worked in the United States, where he combines teaching with professional work in an architecture studio engaged in both research and design. His work includes Villa 003, part of the ORDOS 100 project; the Kitgum Peace Museum and Archive in Uganda; the Ashdod Museum of Art; and the winning design for the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, a decision that was reversed a few months later amid controversial circumstances.

His ongoing projects include the design of a new communal neighbourhood for Kibbutz Hatzor in southern Israel. The guiding principles of this project respond to the social and economic changes experienced by the kibbutz in recent years, namely the switch from a collective lifestyle to a more private one centred around the family household. Segal proposes a neighbourhood model that combines individual and shared property: private single-family homes within the agrarian landscape supported by the kibbutz's cooperative structure. It strives to strike a compromise between two distinct ways of living: the socialist idealism of the early settlements and the privatised lifestyle of isolated suburban houses, dominating residential developments outside of Israel's metropolitan centres.

Rafi Segal (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1967) studied Architecture and Urbanism at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and holds a PhD from Princeton University. He has worked as a lecturer at universities such as Harvard's Graduate School of Design and is currently a professor at MIT. He has exhibited and curated exhibitions at galleries including Storefront for Art and Architecture and MOMA in New York, the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Hong Kong Urbanism Biennale. His writings and exhibitions have provided a critical contribution to the role of architecture in the peripheries of our cities.

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