Jonathan Hill – Bartlett International Lecture Series

This event is free and open to all. No booking is required, but please arrive early to guarantee your place.

The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future

Lecturer's Abstract

Jonathan identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic. 

Jonathan’s approach questions temporal and environmental issues through various themes:

• poetic, psychological and practical terms
• personal and national identity
• nature and culture
• weather and climate
• permanence and impermanence
• life and death

Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin intensifies the already blurred relationship between the unfinished and the ruined, and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture.

Biography

Jonathan Hill is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he is Programme Director of Architectural Design MPhil/PhD, and a tutor of Architecture MArch Unit 12 with Elizabeth Dow. 

Jonathan is the author of various publications, including: The Illegal Architect (1998), Actions of Architecture (2003), Immaterial Architecture (2006), Weather Architecture (2012), A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction (2016) and The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future (2019). He is also editor of Occupying Architecture (1998) and Architecture—the Subject is Matter (2001) and co-editor of Critical Architecture (2007).

Book launch

After the lecture Jonathan Hill’s book The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future will be available for sale, accompanied by a complimentary drink.

View the full schedule for The Bartlett International Lecture Series

Access

All our event spaces are accessible. For any additional support or information, please email or call 020 3108 7337.

Image: Denys Lasdun’s, ‘scrapheap’ of discarded models of the National Theatre, London, in his studio, 1970. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections.