Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, this will be Sophia Psarra's inaugural lecture.
Taking inspiration from a clay tablet found at a Bronze Age palace complex in the Peloponnese in 1957, this lecture will discuss architecture’s long-term relationship with language and numbers. It will explore the values of language as an analogy for understanding architecture, and the strength of numbers in making architecture ‘speak’ of social relationships, inequalities, politics and power.
The lecture will propose that the informed synthesis of ‘winged words’ and ‘weighty numbers’ holds the key to what architecture can fundamentally offer as a creative discipline to deal with some of our most pressing architectural and urban questions. It will argue that our ability to synthesise, ethically and creatively, the wisely guided and the unguided evolutionary processes of our buildings and cities is indispensible to addressing key systemic issues. How we employ intersecting definitions of the imagination, authorship and agency can give renewed impetus to such global challenges as climate change, social inequalities and spatial justice, whose well-worn terminology often seems to have lost the power to move.
General Info