The Faculty of Architecture of EKA is happy to announce three open lectures by outstanding architects and thinkers for the autumn semester. The curators of the lecture series, architects Sille Pihlak and Johan Tali would like to point out that the open lecture series aspires to provide fresh points of view for students and professionals of other fields outside architecture as well. If architecture is the mirror of society, the best architecture lectures often tend to carry us onto other fields, in the case of upcoming lectures, the neoliberalist economic policy of Sweden in the 1980s or human digestion. All lectures start at 6 pm, are in English and have free entry.
Our Open Lecture Series kicks off next Thursday, on the 7th of November with architect and architecture researcher Helena Mattsson. In her lecture, she will discuss the contemporary architectural history of neoliberalization and revisit the archives of the emerging constellations of spatial practices and politics in the 1980s. Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm. She has written a great deal on welfare state policies, history and the economic aspects of consumer society – and how all of this infiltrates contemporary architecture.
Two weeks later, on the 28th of November, the lecture series will continue with London-based architect, urbanist and historian Ross Exo Adams. In his talk, Adams argues that the inevitability of urbanization is based in part on the way in which we have historically overlooked the emergence of the urban itself, treating it instead as a natural outcome of human co-existence. Adams asks provocatively: if not the urban, then what?
The last open lecture of this Autumn semester will take place on the 19th of December. The Greek architect, engineer and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti, who investigates the architecture of closed worlds, asks, what is the power of shit. In her lecture, Kallipoliti will explore a genealogy of contained microcosms with the ambition to replicate the earth in its totality. Beyond technical concerns, closed worlds distill architectural concerns related to habitation: first an integrated structure where humans, their physiology of ingestion and excretion, become combustion devices, tied to the system with umbilical cords; second, closed worlds are giant stomachs; they are inhabitable machines that digest resources and are sometimes disobedient; at times they digest, while at other times they vomit. All this will be without doubt making Lydia Kallipoliti’s lecture a fascinating exploration for fashion, product design, interior architecture and urban studies students.
The Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts has been curating the Open Lectures on Architecture series since 2012 – each year, numerous spatial thinkers, architects, urbanists, both emerging as well as established practitioners, introduce their work and field of research to the audience in Tallinn. All lectures are in English and open to all interested.
The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.
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