The Architectural Lecture Series 2011/12 FUTURE FRONTIERS focuses on five crucial themes that will shape the architecture and urbanism of this century. Each evening two high-profile speakers will present their cutting-edge research into the subject to offer critical thinking for critical times. All lectures start at 7pm in Lecture Theatre One at the Royal College of Art, Jay Mews entrance, South Kensington, London SW7.

To reserve your free place email the names of attendees to boris.cesnik@rca.ac.uk or call 0207 590 4281. We look forward to welcoming you on the night.

Ricky Burdett and Joseph Rykwert

Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age programme. He was architectural adviser to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006 and Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and now advises the Olympic Legacy Park Company. Burdett is co-editor of Living in the Endless City.

Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and is widely regarded as the one of the most important architectural historians and critics of his generation. Rykwert is the author of many influential works of architectural criticism and history, which have been published over a sixty-year period, including The Idea of a Town (1963), On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), The Dancing Column (1996) and The Seduction of Place (2000).

Charles Jencks and Patrik Schumacher

Charles Jencks is a critic and landscape architect who is widely recognised as one of the fathers of Postmodernism. Jencks identified the demolition of the failed Pruitt Igoe housing project in Missouri on 15 July 1972 as the day the Modernism died. The author of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), What is Post-Modernism (1986) and The Story of Post-Modernism (2011), Jencks has published numerous other books.

Patrik Schumacher is company director of Zaha Hadid Architects, where he completed the Stirling Prize-winning MAXXI Centre of Contemporary Art in Rome. He is the leading figure of the nascent style of Parametricism and the author of The Autopoiesis of Architecture Volumes I and II. Schumacher is a tenured professor at Innsbruck University and co-director of the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association.

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Frédéric Migayrou and Anthony Vidler

Frédéric Migayrou is the director of the Bartlett School of Architecture and head of the architecture department at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For more than a decade, he has been collecting work by up-and-coming architects from around the world, principally for France's central affairs office, amassing one of the most important collections in the world. He was an adviser for the French Ministry of Culture and director of the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC).

Anthony Vidler is the Dean of the Irwin S Chanin School of Architecture  at the Cooper Union in New York. A prolific author, his books include The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (1987), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992),  Warped Space: Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), Histories of the Immediate Present: The Invention of Architectural Modernism (2008),  James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive (2010), and The Scenes of the Street and other Essays (2011).

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Peter Buchanan and Michael Sorkin

Peter Buchanan studied architecture at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1968. He has worked as an architect, urban designer and planner in various parts of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He is also a writer and critic, curator and consultant. Through the 1980s he was Deputy Editor of The Architectural Review, publishing prolifically in that journal and others. Since 1992 he has curated exhibitions, written the four volumes of Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works and Ten Shades of Green, and consulted on urban design and green issues.

Michael Sorkin is director of Sorkin Studio. He is Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. From 1993 to 2000 he was Professor and Director of the Institute for Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His books include Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Starting from Zero, and Indefensible Space. Forthcoming are Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Eutopia, All Over the Map, and Project New Orleans. Sorkin is also President of Terreform, a non-profit organisation engaged in urban research and advocacy.

Sir Peter Cook and Carlo Ratti

Sir Peter Cook has been Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Dean of Architecture at the Staedelschule, Frankfurt, Chair of Architecture at the Bartlett School of UCL and is Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Architecture. As member of Archigram he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the RIBA and was knighted in 2007. He now directs Crab Studio with Gavin Robotham.

Carlo Ratti is a civil engineer and architect who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the SENSEable City Laboratory, which aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. He is a regular contributor of articles on architecture to the magazines Domus and Casabella and the Italian newspapers Il Sole 24 Ore and La Stampa.