In this talk, titled “Design the place for people to meet,” Manabu Chiba will explain his approach to design with an emphasis on realizing architecture as a facilitator for new place-to-place, person-to-person and people-to-place interactions. His work attempts to reveal the context of a site and create formal simplicity, in order to nurture relationships among people.

Manabu Chiba was born in 1960 in Tokyo and educated at University of Tokyo (BS Arch and MArch). He worked in the architectural offices Nihon Sekkei and Factor N, the campus planning office of the University of Tokyo and as an assistant to Tadao Ando. Between 2001 and 2013, he was an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, and Guest Professor at the ETH Zurich from 2009 to 2010. Since 2013 he has been Professor in the Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo.

Chiba Manabu Architects was established in 2001 and is based in Tokyo. The firm is engaged in an extensive variety of projects, from government offices to small residential houses. The Japan Guide Dog Center (2006) and Kogakuin University (2012) have been honored with several awards, and the Otaki Town Hall (2012) received the Awards of Merit of 2013 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards.

The lecture is presented in collaboration with The Japan Foundation, Toronto, with the Consulate General of Japan in Montreal and as part of an institutional collaboration between the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal and the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University, Ottawa.

This lecture is part of the series They want to speak with you.