David Lieberman receives Visiting Professorship in Architectural Design

Architect, artist, poet, and filmmaker, David Lieberman identifies as an alchemist in asserting that architecture constructs mechanisms by which to transform experience in considering the body as an empathic instrument to apprehend and to understand space.

Projects include materials development with a focus on glass and engineered lumber, sustainable or responsible architecture, landscape, public art and memorial design, residences, and artists’ studios. Exhibitions range across disciplines with a feature film, sound and sculpture installations in museums, and keynote presentations at symposia, most recently on Persian Gardens in Tehran and digital fabrications in Monterrey. Work continues to investigate water as a lens to manipulate both light and sound as palpable materials of architectural containment and are simultaneously the principal forms of its occupation. Traditional spatial composition has relied upon the surfaces of resistance and reflection; space can be understood as the dissolve and in the blur of the visual and the aural at the limits of perception and tactility. In Austria, explorations will include the forests: the “Birkenwald” of Gustav Klimt and the Jurassic spruce, the wood of choice for the string instruments of Cremona and the sound boards of pianos as post cinematic expressions with respect for the craft of making.

Educated in architecture, sculpture, and industrial design at Cornell University in New York, California Institute of the Arts, California Institute of Technology, and the Architectural Association in London, England, David Lieberman has been a practicing architect since 1974. For over thirty years, he has been a guest lecturer, visiting critic, and studio professor at several universities in North America and Europe with long term appointments in Toronto and in Waterloo, retiring from the University of Toronto with Emeritus status in June of 2020. Teaching has included urban design, comprehensive building studios, and lecture seminars in drawing, global urbanisms, and in the culture of architecture, and advisor to Masters’ theses and PhD dissertations in architecture, landscape, urban design, engineering, art, and music.

Research has, of late, focused on listening to the sounds and desires of the City leading to the construction of a series of large scale instruments and scholarly publications on Iannis Xenakis. David Lieberman is not a musician but enjoys the pleasures of music and is constantly challenged by “the space between notes”.