Anthony Vidler, 2005 CCA Mellon Foundation Senior Fellow and Dean, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union, presents How to Invent Utopia: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Plato's Polis.

Anthony Vidler received his B.A. in Architecture and Fine Arts and his Diploma in Architecture from Cambridge University. He was a faculty member of the Princeton University School of Architecture from 1965 to 1993 and was appointed the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Architecture in 1990. From 1993 to 1997, Professor Vidler was Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of California in Los Angeles, with a joint appointment in the School of Architecture from 1997. He is a historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture, specializing in French architecture from the Enlightenment to the present. A recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Professor Vidler is the author of numerous works, including Claude-Nicolas Ledoux : Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime (1990), The Architectural Uncanny : Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), Antoine Grumbach (1996), Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), Architecture between Spectacle and Use (2008), and Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (2008).

The CCA Mellon Foundation Senior Fellowship Program was established in 2001 to encourage advanced research in architectural history and thought. With the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, distinguished scholars of international repute are appointed Mellon Senior Fellows and join the Visiting Scholars in residence at the CCA Study Centre for extended periods each year.

Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 17 May 2005