"If professional choice in recent decades has been reduced to either becoming a passive facilitator or a court jester with special permission to do weird things every now and then, perhaps the time has come to no longer respond to others' questions and expectations, but to pose them yourself. Perhaps the time has come to design not as solicited by client, site or available budget, but to design unsolicited architecture and find clients, sites and budgets for it." (Ole Bouman, "Unsolicited, or: The New Autonomy of Architecture" in Volume 14)

Ole Bouman will discuss his Office for Unsolicited Architecture, which "proposes an alternative: a new form of practice that pro-actively seeks out new territories for intervention, addresses pressing social needs and takes advantage of emerging opportunities for architecture."

Bouman is director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Prior to his appointment at NAI, Bouman was editor-in-chief of Volume and the director of Archis Foundation. Bouman is a writer, curator, and teacher across many fields. His publications include the encyclopedic manifesto The Invisible in Architecture (coauthor, 1994) and The Battle for Time (2003, in Dutch).

This program is presented as part of the League's 2007-08 thematic series Reimagining Risk. Admission is free for League members, 10 Dollars for non-members.