Professor Lesley Lokko has been invited to present the Valedictory Lecture for Part 3 Architecture (ARB/RIBA).
The Valedictory lecture traditionally closes the summer term of the Part 3 Architecture (ARB/RIBA) programme and is delivered by a guest speaker on a topic of their choice, relating to current societal, architectural or professional themes.
Abstract
In 1945, in what has been described as ‘the most extraordinary encounter in the history of 20th century literature’, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova met with Isaiah Berlin, then a young officer in the British Embassy in Moscow. Not much is known about the encounter between the 56-year-old poetess and the 36-year-old philosopher. The two sat down at nine in the evening and talked for twelve hours straight. After he left, she wrote a stanza in a poem she was working on, in which she described him as ‘a man not yet appeared…strayed from the future.’
Her description of the artist — in the widest possible sense of the word — as a ‘guest from the future’ was taken up by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer thirty years later, discussing the state of the arts and culture in South Africa in 1979, a terrible year politically, socially and culturally. In her keynote, she asked whether we might consider artists — again, in the widest possible sense of the word — as ‘guests from the future, prophets of the resolution of divided cultures.’
Drawing on the experience of teaching and leading schools of architecture on three continents and in very different cultural contexts over the past thirty years, this lecture reflects on the very special and yet profoundly complex role that architects play in making space and place in increasingly diverse and often divergent contexts. The past year has been one of the most challenging in living memory, but it is also one of the most significant in terms of its potential for change.
General Info