In this lecture, Colin Fournier presented a waterfront development project he is currently working on in Belgrade, along the banks of the Danube, as part of a team of consultants including Gehl architects and Studio Libeskind. The project is a major urban design scheme for a 6 km stretch of the river embankment that is now becoming available for development after the phasing out of the harbour activities and related warehousing. He will also be presenting some theoretical design work undertaken in the Bartlett on the theme of water-based urbanism.

Colin Fournier is of Franco-British origin and was educated at the Architectural Association in London where he received Diplomas in Architecture and in Town Planning. Since 1996, he is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL) where he is Director of the MArch course in Urban Design, as well as Director of one of the Architecture Diploma Units. He is an architect and planner in private practice. He was an associate member of Archigram Architects in the early seventies; he was subsequently the Planning Director of the Ralph M. Parsons Company in Pasadena, California, in which capacity he designed several new town projects in the Middle East, in particular the town of Yanbu on the West coast of Saudi Arabia, for a population of 200000 inhabitants and an annual construction budget of over two billion dollars; he worked in partnership with Bernard Tschumi on the design of the Parc de la Villette in Paris, one of the "Grands Projets" of President Francois Mitterand. He is, together with his partner Peter Cook, co-author of the Graz Kunsthaus, the new museum of modern art in the city of Graz, Austria, which was nominated for the Stirling prize in 2004 and has received considerable international acclaim. His academic research interests and professional activities are split equally between architecture and urbanism.