The 2018–19 Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars will focus on the work of Farshid Moussavi, founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture, and best-selling novelist Mark Z. Danielewski.

Farshid Moussavi is founder and principal of Farshid Moussavi Architecture and Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was previously co-founder of the London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA). Moussavi has completed her first USA commission, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (2012), its installation at the 13th Architecture Biennale in Venice (2012), the Victoria Beckham Flagship Store in London (2014), and is currently working on a wide range of prestigious international projects including residential complexes in the La Défense district of Paris and in Montpellier, and an office complex in the City of London, UK. She trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, University College London and Dundee University. She has subsequently taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute and the Hoger Architectuure Instituut, and in the United States at Columbia, Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2006, she has been Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University. Mousaavi is the author of The Function of Ornament (2006), The Function of Form (2009) and The Function of Style (2015), based on her research and teaching at Harvard. All books have been translated into several languages.

Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel House of Leaves, National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and the novella The Fifty Year Sword, which was performed on Halloween three years in a row at REDCAT in Los Angeles. His books have been translated into multiple languages. In May 2015, Pantheon released The Familiar (Volume 1): One Rainy Day in May, the first installment of his 27-volume novel. In their review of TFv1, the New York Times declared Danielewski "America's foremost literary Magus . . . He transmutes the pages of base books into rare new forms and formats." The Familiar (Volume 5): Redwood, completed Season One when it was released on Halloween 2017.

Since 1998, the Knowlton School has hosted the Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars, a series of interactions between Knowlton students and seminal practitioners in architecture and related disciplines. Based on a significant amount of research, students lead a series of discussions that encourages visiting practitioners to position their work within a broader disciplinary context and to reveal their motivations and techniques. These interactions are recorded and transcribed, and become the basis of the Source Books in Architecture Series.

Mark Z. Danielewski will lecture in Knowlton Hall's Gui Auditorium at 5:30pm on Wednesday, January 23. Farshid Moussavi will lecture in Knowlton Hall's Gui Auditorium at 5:30pm on Wednesday, February 6. Both talks are free and open to the public.