Aspen Art Museum

Free and Open to All
Registration Required

Join architect Chad Oppenheim at the Aspen Art Museum as he takes guests on an immersive journey through his firm’s work and philosophy that aims to realign and reconnect us to the world around us. His award-winning firm, Oppenheim Architecture, is known for architecture that celebrates the natural world and the inherent power of each site. As he puts it, “for thousands of years, civilization has constructed its buildings on the land. We prefer to construct our buildings with the land, where architecture recedes and becomes a frame.” Oppenheim’s work encompasses all realms of design, ranging from large-scale urban architecture, hotels, resorts, and luxury homes to interiors and furnishings.

Bio

Chad Oppenheim founded Oppenheim Architecture in 1999 to design a new kind of sensory, site-specific architecture. Working across scale, typology, and geography, every Oppenheim project is a sensitive contextual response guided by the philosophy that design follows life and form follows feeling.

A graduate of Cornell University and a Fellow of the AIA, Oppenheim has served as lead designer for countless place-making assignments around the world. Working closely with clients to realize and amplify their vision, he is backed by strong technical and project teams in Miami and Basel who execute large and complex projects on any continent.

A traveler and cultural nomad from a young age, Oppenheim uncovers the power of a place to optimize how people live, play, or work in that particular environment. His monumental, timeless architecture enhances lives, realizes a site’s full potential, and protects and celebrates the natural environment. He shapes buildings and places to achieve the optimal balance between creativity and pragmatism, function and experience, construction and aesthetics.

Oppenheim has lectured widely and taught at various architecture schools, including Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and, most recently, Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He has published two books – Spirit of Place (2019), a monograph about the practice featuring seven award-winning projects, and Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains (2019), an academic investigation into the cultural associations of modernist design with villainy in cinema.

AAM education programs are made possible by the Questrom Education Fund. AAM talks and lectures are presented as part of the Questrom Lecture Series and made possible by the Questrom Education Fund.