TEHRAN – The Barcelona-based renowned Argentine architect Willy Muller is scheduled to deliver a lecture about urban paradigms in Tehran on February 3.

The lecture program titled “Urban Paradigms: Towards the Extreme Urbanism?” has been organized by the Contemporary Architects Association of Iran.

“During the first decade of the XXI century we have witnessed one of the most singular demographic events of the last centuries: for the first time in history there are more people inhabiting urban environments than the rural ones,” he wrote in the preface to his speech.

As a consequence, on the one side the exponential growth of many metropolitan populations is reaching levels of unprecedented social complexity, and on the other side the geographical environment in which societies are settled is ever more compromised, insecure and threatened,” he added.

He pointed out to Lagos, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo as cities that are starting to manage an unknown type of urban complexity and added, “We are facing limit situations of obsolescence and change of paradigms, where the classical models of success will not be sufficiently useful.”

Muller is the founder of the Willy Muller Architects, a Barcelona-based office dedicated to architecture and urbanism design. The office has been awarded with a series of international prizes for its works and architectural competitions.

It also has representative offices in Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Saint Petersburg and several other cities.

MMS/YAW