Speaker Peter Carl

Date 17.12.2015

Time 17:30

Location Exhibition Zone F, 1/F, CUHK School of Architecture

Wittgenstein compared an ancient city, a labyrinth of streets and buildings, to a language already prepared for speaking. Philo of Alexandria called the created world the greatest of cities, comparing the divine Logos to the architect’s plan. Such analogies emphasise a bewildering comprehensiveness that is nonetheless structured, as if each individual had a place, possibly in a programme of redemption.

The early modernist reduction of urban order to versions of aesthetic and technical systems promised redemption from the nineteenth-century metropolis, socially, politically, and as a matter of health and efficiency.

The suitability of this simplified city to economic motives has corresponded to the period of the greatest expansion of cities, and fragments of the metropolis are now carefully preserved and its order carefully studied, marked by sadness, as Kracauer said of a translation of the Bible.

Drawing upon the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, in which the human and non-human are treated as a continuum, the lecture will explore the conditions under which it could be said that the city ‘thinks’, that its order is or is not already prepared for a proper civic life.

Peter Carl received his MArch from Princeton in 1973, followed by a Prix de Rome until 1976, when he took up a post at the University of Kentucky until 1979.

He taught design and in the MPhil/PhD Programme at the University of Cambridge until 2009, following which he took up his present post as Director of the PhD Programme in Architecture at The CASS, London Metropolitan University.

He has lectured and taught internationally and writes on the history and meaning of the architectural and urban conditions for praxis.