What’s On
Amphion’s Lyre: How Poems Became Buildings
Architecture and poetry have always mirrored each other by analogy. While some pre-modern theorists applauded the capacity of poetry to ‘paint’ a picture of a building, others recognised that poets had to construct descriptions to describe constructions.
The Institutionalisation of ‘taste’ in Architecture: The British Construction of Chinoiserie in the 17th and 18th Centuries
This seminar will move beyond traditional frameworks of national identity and political history, exploring the unique role of personal encounters in constructing Chinoiserie architecture in 17th- and 18th-century Britain.
When is a Building Finished? Lessons from Late Medieval Architectural Culture
Since the Renaissance, architectural writers have often conceived the subject in terms of the design and the designer - prioritising them over the social context, the materiality of buildings, the methods of construction employed and their life in use, which usually involves physical alteration.
Carboniferous Creations: Victorian Gothic Revivalism and the Ecocritical Turn
In this lecture Alex will explore how we might interpret the modern Gothic Revival as a unique outcome not merely of industrialisation but of the carbon-based economy that drove it, suggesting an ecocritical historiography that foregrounds its environmental allusions and discontents.
Recent Events
Annual Lectures
2025
Tanvir Hasan, Tim Foxall, Níall McLaughin, Ingrid Schroder, Amin Taha, A Conversation About the Shape of Buildings to Come
2024
Paul Binski, Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages
2023
Tim Benton, Badovici’s Eclectic Modern: The Vézelay Houses
2022
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2021
Christine Stevenson, Telling Stories of the Great Fire of London
2020
Lynne Walker, Gender, Mythology and Architectural History: Narrating a Journey