The talk, part of the School of Architecture's popular Monday Night Lecture Series, is free and open to the public. A reception will be held prior to the presentation at 6:30 p.m. in Givens Hall.

Pallasmaa, the Raymond E. Maritz Visiting Professor of Architecture, first came to campus in 1999 and spent much of 2001-02 leading a pair of graduate-level design studios, the first based on a new architectural information center in Helsinki, the second for a hypothetical redevelopment project in East St. Louis.

His own Helsinki-based practice has completed notable projects around the world, including the SIIDA Museum in Inari, Finland, an ethnographic museum and exhibition space for the Sami peoples of Northern Scandinavia; and renovations of the Finnish Institute in Paris and the Rovaniemi Art Museum in Finland.

Other major projects include collaborating on the design of the International Moscow Bank, which received the Russian Federation Architecture Award in 1996, that country's most prestigious architectural honor.

"Over the last 40 years, Juhani Pallasmaa has produced a body of work and thought that has led him to occupy significant leading roles in both Finnish and international architectural culture," said Peter MacKeith, associate dean of architecture, who is currently editing Pallasmaa's forthcoming book, Encounters: Architectural Essays 1977-2000.

"As a teacher, as a critic and as a practitioner, he is engaged in all scales of the designed environment, and emphasizes consistently throughout those scales the importance of identity, experience and tactility. The School of Architecture is fortunate to have a person of such stature and such integrity as a mentor and a friend for its students and even for its faculty."

Pallasmaa has written extensively on such topics as the philosophy of architecture, architectural criticism and the phenomenology of art. Books include The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (2001); Alvar Aalto: Villa Mairea 1938-39 (1998); The Eyes of the Skin (1998); and Animal Architecture (1995).

With fellow visiting professor Jouni Kaipia, he recently edited the seminar document "Primary Images," which explores such fundamental architectural concepts as floor, wall, roof and door as expressed in buildings, paintings, cinema and literature. (Essays are by Pallasmaa, Kaipia and William H. Gass, the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in Humanities in Arts & Sciences.)

As professor and then dean of the Department of Architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology (1991-97), Pallasmaa helped raise that program to international stature, and he also has taught as the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University and as the Thomas Jefferson Professor at the University of Virginia.

He previously served as Finland's State Artist Professor (1983-88) and director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture (1978-1983).

Pallasmaa is an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He has received the Finnish State Architecture Award (1992); the Helsinki City Culture Award (1993); the Fritz Schumacher Prize (Germany, 1997) and the Jean Tschumi Prize for Architectural Criticism, International Union of Architects (1999), among other honors.