As a public art form, architecture is of necessity a discipline of circumstance and situation. Buildings are realized through a complex calculation involving clients, codes, consultants, budgets, builders, regulatory agencies, technical, material and site constraints and the complex logistics of construction itself. As creative subjects, architects react to these demands, inventing in response to occasion of the commission, specifying and particularizing a given set of abstract variables. The practice of architecture tends to be messy and inconsistent precisely because it works with an imperfect reality.The fall lecture series will present a cross section of architects working today—a generation educated from the late 1970s to the early 1990s who are today coming into their own with significant public and institutional building commissions. The series was assembled under three working hypotheses: 1. That in today’s information-driven, networked public realm, the compact, bounded form of the building retains a powerful social agency. 2. That there is a productive tension evident in the best of contemporary production between personal experimentation, or formal innovation, and the collective legibility necessary for an engaged public debate. 3. That the best contemporary public buildings anticipate—and actively engage—all of the multiple publics at play in contemporary society.Stan Allen, Dean of the School of Architecture, organized the Lecture Series and Special Events (with the exception of the Kenneth Frampton lecture organized by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and the Daniel Abramson lecture organized by Lucia Allais and sponsored by the Center for Architecture Urbanism and Infrastructure).