Christina Seilern

Studio Seilern Architects was set-up in 2006 by Christina Seilern. Her work regularly explores the theme of structural lightness. She explains that “light is to architecture as pulse is to music; the witness of time, the metaphor of life. The artistic life of the building is expressed through the way it produces and modulates its light.” The projects presented here explore this concept in different ways.

Her diverse portfolio features celebrated projects such as Gota House in Zimbabwe, Ansdell Street in Kensington, the Andermatt Concert Hall in Switzerland, Restaurant Gütsch and the G.W. Annenberg Performing Arts Centre for Wellington College in England. The later of these projects were submitted for the last WAN Female Frontier Awards in 2021, where Christina was a finalist. Illustrated here are three new projects that all reached completion in 2021. The ambitious Gouna Conference and Culture Centre in Egypt will bring a new performing arts centre to the Red Sea region. Gouna Festival Plaza, the first phase of the project, opened this year and has been used for a range of cultural and sporting events, including the Gouna Film Festival. The reimagining and refurbishment of Bokšto 6, an historic city block in Vilnius, is now complete after a design and construction process that has taken over ten years. And finally, Paros House is a private island villa in the Aegean, a sensitive hybrid of modernist design and traditional materiality. The ambition of the studio is unchallenged by location, with many projects being delivered within geographical, natural and political climates extremely different to those found at its home in London. Christina prides herself on the successful production of exciting new spaces and buildings in extraordinary locations that are sensitively sustainable, whilst fusing significant contributions to the cultural and economic diversity of their place.