• Thursday 19th November 2015, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

This lecture is now available to view online

Renowned landscape architect James Corner will discuss current ideas about the design of vibrant urban public spaces, the importance of seeing cities as landscapes, and the capacity for landscape to create new forms of city-making. He will present his designs for New York’s High Line, Santa Monica’s Tongva Park and London’s South Park at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, among other innovative public realm projects around the world.

A new book, THE HIGH LINE, published by Phaidon, will be available for sale and signing by James after the talk.

James Corner is a leading-edge landscape architect and founder of James Corner Field Operations, based in New York City. He is also professor of landscape and urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. His work has been recognized with the National Design Award, the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the D&AD Black Pencil Award.

• Thursday 12th November 2015, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

The resurgence of the reputation of Georges Seurat (1859-91) in the twentieth century is usually tied to the increased interest shown in classicism by critics and vanguard artists, particularly in the 1920s. This lecture demonstrates that there was an alternative and unexpected version of Seurat on offer as filtered through the developing theory of Surrealism in that decade, but that was refined in the 1940s and 1950s. This was mainly the work of André Breton, even though Seurat’s work had its admirers throughout Surrealism. Breton’s 1946 interpretation of the artist, which was not published in his lifetime, is used as the main case study. Seurat emerges as a dialectician in that rare lecture, which serves also as a critique of the interpretation of the artist as a ‘classicist’ and, ultimately, as nothing less than a revised reading of the logic of the trajectory of modernism itself in the visual arts.

Gavin Parkinson is Senior Lecturer in European Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Reviews Editor of the Association of Art Historians’ flagship journal Art History and Series Editor of Ashgate Studies in Surrealism. He lectures and writes on European and American art and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books are Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction and Fantastic Art in France 1936-1969 (Yale University Press 2015); Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (Yale University Press 2008); and The Duchamp Book (Tate Publishing 2008). He is also the editor of the collection of essays Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (Liverpool University Press 2015). He has just completed a book on the Surrealist reception of late nineteenth-century art, titled Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin de Siècle Painting.

• Thursday 29^th October 2015, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.

– Frederic Jameson

The dominance of neoliberalism makes the possibility of alternative ways of organising society seem remote, however it needs to be remembered that – far from being historically enshrined inevitabilities – they are comparatively recent ideological inventions. The myths of the infallibility and inevitability of late capitalism are its greatest conceit. With reference to a wide variety of sources, this lecture will map out the cultural context of late capitalism and identify tactics and strategies of resistance, playfully suggesting that the future is far from certain, and that this is probably for the better.

Nic Clear is the Head of Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich where he teaches Unit 15, a postgraduate architecture unit that uses film and animation to generate, develop and represent architectural projects.

• Thursday 22nd October 2015, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

Above all, the Surrealist legacy is about bodies: their mutability, desire, viscera and, due to advancements in technology, their increasing transparency – all of which are also fundamental to the ongoing discourse concerning architectural space. The Surrealist body is an open concept, forever in metamorphosis. It has assimilated machines, flora and fauna, animals, alien geometries and fetishistic hungers. Simultaneously bloody and dry, deviant and pure, void and mass, the body, with its infinite potential for the uncanny coupled with humankind’s ability to hold up a disturbing mirror to ourselves, is the oil that lubricates Surrealism’s machinery – its prima materia.

Neil Spiller is Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London. Prior to this he was Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at Greenwich University. Before this he was Vice-Dean and Graduate Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Neil’s numerous books include Cyberreader: Critical Writings of the Digital Era (2002) and Visionary Architecture – Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (2006). Since 1998, he has been producing the epic COMMUNICATING VESSELS project. Neil is also known as the founding director of the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) Group, now based at the University of Greenwich.

• Thursday 15th October 2015, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

In 2016, the Royal Museum’s Greenwich will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Queen’s House with a programme of refurbishment and redisplays. Designed by Inigo Jones in 1616 for James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark, the House is the first classical building in the country and an acknowledged masterpiece of seventeenth-century architecture. The Queen’s House is the art gallery to the Museum’s outstanding fine art collection and since 1997 has been at the heart of a designated World Heritage Site. And yet the House is very little known outside architectural and art-history circles and attracts only 7% of the 2 million visitors that come to Greenwich annually. This talk will describe the on-going discussions and planning for the Queen’s House 2016 project. Given the dramatic changes to Greenwich over the centuries, it will also present the challenges – past and present – in interpreting the House as a royal villa, and will ultimately pose questions and make suggestions for its future.

Christine Riding has been the Head of Arts and Curator of the Queen’s House at the National Maritime Museum since 2011. She was the Lead Curator of the Museum’s Turner & the Sea exhibition (2013), as well as author and editor of two publications, Turner & the Sea (2013, Thames & Hudson) and Art & the War at Sea, 1914-45 (2015, Lund Humphries). Prior to Greenwich she was Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century British Art at Tate Britain, co-curating major exhibitions including William Blake (2000, Tate Britain), William Hogarth (2007, Tate Britain) and Gauguin (2010, Tate Modern), and has held curatorial positions at the Museum of London, Palace of Westminster and Wallace Collection. From 2007-2012, she was Deputy Editor of Art History (Journal of the Association of Art Historians) and is the current Chair of the Association of Art Historians. She is the Lead Curator of the Queen’s House 2016 project.

The Hawksmoor International Lecture Series 2015-16

Nat Chard  ::  Drawing uncertainty

• Thursday 8^th October 2015, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

Nat will discuss his research into how to draw conditions of uncertainty in architecture, the rich realm beyond the grasp of the traditional architectural program. The work is developed through a series of nine types of drawing instrument, some of which have multiple versions.

Nat is an architect and the Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, following professorships at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and the University of Manitoba where he was also graduate chair and Head of Architecture. Before that he taught at the Bartlett as well as North and East London Universities in addition to working in practice. With Perry Kulper from the University of Michigan he won’t the competition for Pamphlet Architecture 34 that includes some of the work discussed in this lecture.