George Legendre

George Legendre is Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Legendre is a founding partner of IJP, a London-based practice exploring the natural intersection between space, mathematics, and computation. Legendre graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1994 and served as lecturer and Assistant Professor of Architecture there from 1995 to 2000. Prior to founding his practice, he was visiting Professor at ETH Zurich (2000), Princeton University (2003-05), and Unit Master of Diploma Unit 5 the AA School of Architecture in London (2002-08). To date IJP has won a competition to cover a central London Street with 1000m2 of glass (with Adams Kara Taylor), and completed Henderson Waves, a 1000-foot-long bridge located in Singapore (with RSP). IJP served as delivery architect for the Bat House, a high-tech, sustainable shelter recently completed in the London Wetlands Centre. In 2007, the influential trade weekly Building Design elected the 3-year-old firm as one of the top 5 practices in Britain led by principals under the age of 40. In 2011, IJP became the second foreign-based office (after BIG) to reach the final of the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program Award

The work of IJP has been profiled in more than 50 publications worldwide, including theory reviews (ARQ Cambridge University, JAE), science journals (The New Scientist, Spektrum der Wissenschaft), architecture and engineering trade publications (Ingenia Royal College of Engineering, Building Design, AD), international print media (The New York Times , The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Gastronomica) as well as US radio and television, (National Public Radio, CBS on Sunday).

IJP has won 13 awards and shortlists since its inception and was recently included in The New Arcadians: Emerging UK Architects (Merrell 2013) as the future vanguard of the profession in the United Kingdom.

A regularly published essayist, he has written IJP: The Book of Surfaces, as well as Bodyline: the End of our Meta-Mechanical Body, and the main critical essay in Mathematical Form: John Pickering and the Architecture of the Inversion Principle (all AA Publications 2003-06). He has guest-edited a special issue of AD Magazine on the Mathematics of Space (John Wiley and Sons, London, 22 July 2011). His latest research opus, Pasta by Design, was published by Thames and Hudson, London, on Sept. 12 2011 and translated into German the following year.

Research Area

• Parametric Design

Education

• Master Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1993 — 1994)