Chilean architect, Sebastián Irarrázaval, will be one of the guests at this year's Cersaie, Sept. 25- 29 in Bologna, Italy. He will give a conference on Tuesday, Sept. 26 in the Architecture Gallery (Gallery 21/22) as part of the "building, dwelling, thinking" cultural program, which hosts members of the architecture world every year.

Sebastián Irarrázaval was born in Santiago de Chile in 1967. After graduating from the Catholic University of Chile, he was appointed professor in 1994, and since then has combined his professional work with teaching and research activities. He has held visiting professorships at several universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (MIT) and the University IUAV of Venice.

Irarrázaval’s projects reflect the new wave of contemporary Chilean and Latin American architecture; one of his iconic creations is the original Caterpillar House (or Casa Oruga), built for an art collector outside Santiago. Standing on a hillside in the Andes mountains, the house consists of five 40-foot containers, six 20-foot containers, and one 40-foot open-top container converted into a swimming pool. He has also represented Chile three times at the Venice Biennale. In 2012, he won the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture award. In 2014 and 2015, he was granted an award by the University IUAV of Venice as part of the WAVE workshops.

Irarrázaval is also involved in activities that promote collaboration between architecture and other artistic disciplines. He has designed a number of theatre stage sets and a few months ago collaborated with the Scottish rock band Travis on the sixth chapter of the Insigne Sesiones, a popular web series of live sessions combining music, architecture, and landscape.

For more information, visit www.cersie.it.