Kent School of Architecture has co-organised and will host a conference at the Canterbury campus this month that celebrates writing about buildings.
KSA, in collaboration with the international magazine The Architectural Review, brings together a wide range of people with one thing in common: they all write about buildings – from a bricklayer to a ‘barefoot carpenter’, building archaeologists, critics, urban geographers, art historians, and many more.
This is the first time that such a range of writers drawn from these fields has been brought together for the Writing Buildings conference hosted at the Canterbury campus in July.
The conference also features a special Sunday morning walk around Margate in conjunction with Turner Contemporary entitled ‘A Waste Land’, when passages of T S Eliot’s poem will be read out at various sites around the town. Nick Dermott, Thanet Council’s Conservation Architect, will also lead an architectural walk in Margate featuring the Dreamland cinema and the interior of the Arlington Tower.
The conference has drawn prominent speakers from all aspects of architecture. Iain Sinclair, visiting professor at the University’s School of English, is the opening speaker on Thursday 14 July at 19.00 in the Grimond Lecture Theatre 1.
Earlier in the day at 14.00, a special showing of Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark will be screened at the Curzon Cinema in Canterbury, followed by a panel session.
A special opening session at the conference focuses on writing about architecture in the digital age, and features a discussion panel with Oliver Wainwright (The Guardian), Shumi Bose (co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale), Rob Wilson (former editor of Uncube), Catherine Slessor, architectural critic and journalist, and chaired by Tom Wilkinson, history editor of the Architectural Review.
The conference will be closed by writer and film-maker, Jonathan Meades, on the evening of Saturday 16 July.