17th February / Wouter Vanstiphout: A Clockwork Jerusalem / British School at Rome


Meeting Architecture Part II: Architecture and the Creative Process 
A programme of lectures and study-exhibitions
17 February 2015, 18:00: Part VIII

Wouter Vanstiphout:A Clockwork Jerusalem: Architecture, Politics, Riots and the belief in a better world

introduced by Pippo Ciorra

Dutch architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout (Crimson Architectural Historians) will discuss the relationship between architecture, creativity and politics: Architecture (and its sister discipline town planning) is essentially political; for centuries it has been used to create the infrastructure and the institutional icons for nation states, it has been deployed as a tool to force people into certain behavioural modes and it has been instrumental in creating the visions of future cities and landscapes, that are needed to mobilize massive amounts of state and corporate power. Architecture however struggles with this responsibility. Often it denies it, refuses to be confronted with it or has simply lost the ability to deal with it. Nowhere does this become so strongly apparent as in the debate as to whether architecture can somehow be blamed for the social unrest, the civic frustration and sometimes violent anger that we have witnessed over the past decades in cities that are going through massive urban transformation projects. Reaffirming the political dimension of architecture, and asking, demanding, that it takes responsibility for its political role is what this lecture is about. 

Wouter Vanstiphout is an architectural historian and a founding partner of Crimson Architectural Historians in Rotterdam. Vanstiphout is Professor of Design & Politics at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical university of Delft in the Netherlands. With FAT, Vanstiphout and Crimson curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2014. Currently he is preparing a book on the relationship between architecture, urban politics and social unrest, to be published in 2015.

British School at Rome Architecture Programme, curated by Marina Engel


Info:
The British School at Rome
via Gramsci 61, Rome
telephone +39 06 3264939, www.bsr.ac.uk

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