TYPE OF ACTIVITY: Public lecture

We proudly announce a lecture by Spanish Architect Eva Prats, who is a jury member on the international student competition Drawing of the Year 2019.

About Eva Prats

Eva Prats is a Spanish architect who graduated from the School of Architecture of Barcelona in 1992. After a long collaboration at Enric Miralles’ office, Eva established Flores & Prats Architects together with Ricardo Flores in Barcelona in 1998.

The office has worked on reoccupations of old structures, as well as on neighbours’ participation in the design process of urban public spaces, and on social housing and its capacity to create community. Flores & Prats obtained among others the Grand Award in Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts of London for their Mills Museum in Mallorca, the City of Barcelona Prize and the Special Mention at the Spanish National Awards for the Sala Beckett International Drama Centre and the City of Palma Prize for the Cultural Centre Casal Balaguer. They have been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Awards 2005, 2015 and 2016, and exhibited at the last four editions of La Biennale di Venezia.

Eva Prats is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture of Barcelona, Professor of Architecture at RMIT Melbourne, Chair Professor at ETH Zurich, and has directed design workshops in universi­ties of the United States, South America, Europe and Australia.

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Forelæsningsrækken “Grundlæggende forelæsninger om arkitektur” kredser om det grundlæggende spørgsmål ”hvad er arkitektur”?
Hvor kommer arkitekturen fra, hvordan har den udviklet sig gennem tiden og hvordan manifesterer den sig som den nødvendige, men (forhåbentlig) også berigende og inspirerende fysiske ramme om menneskers hverdagsliv? Arkitektskolens professorer vil på skift forsøge at besvare disse spørgsmål, via forskellige blikke på arkitekturens udvikling og samfundsmæssige rolle.

Onsdag d. 13. november holder Anders Troelsen forelæsningen “Arkitekturoplevelse 1”. Om forelæsningen skriver han:

“Fænomenologien forsøger at gribe fænomenerne i deres umiddelbare fremtrædelse. Den har givet anledning til både markante arkitekturopfattelser og bestemte analytiske tilgange til byggeri og byrum. Forelæsningen vil redegøre for fænomenologiens grundprincipper og give nogle eksempelanalyser fra forskellige historiske perioder.

Criticism is a slightly paranoid activity. When questioned about their design intentions, you’ll find most architects cover their tracks, whilst some of their works go far beyond the awareness of every motive and move.

To elucidate and construct a coherent interpretation of a given building means to hack your way through the evidence – based on potentially deceptive clues. You return to the artefacts themselves, scrutinise them carefully, exercise your curiosity, explore your intuitions, surrender to them if needed, launch into hypotheses, confront them, make mistakes, follow secondary leads, and rebuild your narrative until it starts to makes sense. In this respect, a critic is a kind of private eye, a cultural detective who splits open some of the meanings and aims embedded, consciously or not, into the work he or she is considering. 

Search and research entertain closer acquaintances than their mere etymological link. I cherish their kinship. In this, I am not alone: recently, literature, linguistics, art history have produced numerous profound theoretical statements generated by exacting investigations into the material crafting of some chosen works.

By paying attention to the ambiguities placed by Edgar Allan Poe in his short story The Purloined Letter, Jean-Claude Milner has produced a stunning new interpretation of this canonical text. By looking afresh into what is actually represented in some famous Renaissance paintings, Daniel Arasse has created disturbing readings of their apparently exhausted iconography. 

This lecture will develop these ideas in architecture through two case studies of notable buildings: Jørn Utzon’s Bagsværd Church (1968-76) and OMA’s villa Dall’Ava (1984-1991). This detective exercise will “just” try to understand a little of their why, lifting the enigma of their architectural intentions to keep it alive in our present: a way to cultivate a playful reflection on theory.

Photo credit: Detail from a photo by Hans Werlemann, OMA.

Forelæsningsrækken “Grundlæggende forelæsninger om arkitektur” kredser om det grundlæggende spørgsmål ”hvad er arkitektur”?Hvor kommer arkitekturen fra, hvordan har den udviklet sig gennem tiden og hvordan manifesterer den sig som den nødvendige, men (forhåbentlig) også berigende og inspirerende fysiske ramme om menneskers hverdagsliv? Arkitektskolens professorer vil på skift forsøge at besvare disse spørgsmål, via forskellige blikke på arkitekturens udvikling og samfundsmæssige rolle.

Onsdag d. 13. november holder Walter Unterrainer forelæsningen “Proportion, scale and rythm in architecture”. Om forelæsningen skriver han:

“Proportion, scale and rhythm are fundamental and interconnected aspects of architecture. The lecture elaborates a variety of theories from ancient Greece till our days, looks into architecture of Japan and Angkor and reveals different sources of these theories in nature, human proportion, building materials, structural principles as well as other art forms like music. Iconic architectures and interiors of Athens, Brunelleschi, Palladio, Le Corbusier, Aalto, Terragni, Eames and others illustrate how these theories were applied to architectural practice.”

Literaturliste til videre inspiration om dette emne:
Architecture – Form, Space and Order
by Francis D. Ching

Forelæsningsrækken “Grundlæggende forelæsninger om arkitektur” kredser om det grundlæggende spørgsmål ”hvad er arkitektur”?
Hvor kommer arkitekturen fra, hvordan har den udviklet sig gennem tiden og hvordan manifesterer den sig som den nødvendige, men (forhåbentlig) også berigende og inspirerende fysiske ramme om menneskers hverdagsliv? Arkitektskolens professorer vil på skift forsøge at besvare disse spørgsmål, via forskellige blikke på arkitekturens udvikling og samfundsmæssige rolle.

Onsdag d. 20. november holder Niels Albertsen forelæsningen “Hvad er (bør) arkitektur (være)?”. Om forelæsningen skriver han:

“Der gives mange forskellige svar på, hvad arkitektur er, hvis man spørger arkitekturteoretikerne. Det viser sig også, at der i svarene på er-spørgsmålet sædvanligvis gemmer sig et svar på spørgsmålet om, hvad arkitektur bør være, hvilket der er strid og uenighed om. Arkitekturbegrebet er et omstridt begreb, og det er der gode grunde til. Forelæsningen diskuterer hvorfor.”

The lecture series The Ordinary Daylight aims to draw attention to the quality of daylight – rather than the amount of light required by building codes and regulations that sometimes can overwhelmingly hijack conversations about natural daylight in contemporary buildings today. The lecture series does this through focusing on architects who work consciously and qualitatively with the effects of daylight in architecture. Each lecture being an opportunity to share work and ideas, providing an insight into approach and methodology while collectively providing an outline of various ways to explore and engage with daylight.

On Wednesday, November 20th Dean Hawkes will do a lecture in the series. The lecture is called “Reflections on Light”, and Dean Hawkes is emeritus professor of architectural design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University and an emeritus fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge His research is in the field of environmental design in architecture. His books include, The Environmental Tradition (1996), The Environmental Imagination (2008, 2nd edition 2019) and Architecture and Climate (2012). His buildings have won four RIBA Architecture Awards and have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale.

Dean Hawkes describes his lectures like this:

“I only wish that the first really worthwhile discovery of science would be that it recognised that the unmeasureable is what they’re really fighting to understand, and that the measureable is only the servant of the unmeasureable, that everything that man makes must be fundamentally unmeasureable.

Louis I. Kahn

Light in architecture is a matter of both science and art.  The key question, as posed by Louis Kahn, is how these two discourses may be brought together.  This lecture draws upon fifty years of work in research and practice to suggest how the measureable of building science serves the unmeasureable of architecture.  This is illustrated by studies of a sequence of designs for houses built in England in the late 20th century.”

Previous lecturers in the series include among others Stephen Bates, co-founder of Sergison Bates architects (UK); Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, founding partners of Pezo von Ellrichshausen (CHL); Johan Celsing; founding partner of Celsing architecture studio (SWE) and Hiroshi Sambuichi (JPN).

The lectures are a collaboration between the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Aarhus School of Architecture and kindly supported by VELUX Denmark. Lectures will be held at both schools and will be open to the public, so students, faculty, practice, as well as other interested parties, will be able to take advantage of the knowledge and experiences presented.

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