Adrian Lahoud - Bartlett International Lecture Series

Scale

Modernity is a story about how forms of calculation grew across the world allowing more things to be measured, exchanged, and circulated. It is a story about how certain value systems came to colonise and finally rule over others. It is also a story about changes in the kinds of things we can calculate - since they are not even 'things' anymore - calculation applies to attention, to knowledge, certainly to our very future, perhaps even to our souls.

Crucially, with every expansion in these systems of value and the circulations they allow, more aspects of human life become linked to seemingly distant and uncontrollable transformations, for example in our climate, our economies, and our cities. These systems are evidence of a new and special kind of power characterised by actions at a distance. We are summoned by events with no origin that are dispersed in time and in space - the so-called 'complexity' of modern life.

This presentation will argue that today this 'complexity' is the very medium for contemporary forms of power. In response we must rescue an important, if under theorised, architectural term and give it a new life. This term is scale, and it is the key that will allow us to recompose a new political relation to our present order of indirect violence.

Adrian Lahoud is an architect and teacher working on concepts of scale and their architectural, urban, and geopolitical consequences. Currently he is leading the MArch Urban Design at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and is an external advisor at Projective Cities at the Architectural Association, London. He is a member of the UCL Urban Laboratory Steering Committee. 

Additional information
The Bartlett International Lecture Series is free and open to members of the public on a first come, first seated basis. Places are limited so early arrival is recommended. Lectures will be followed by drinks organised by the Bartlett Architecture Student Society (BASS).

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Organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture. Supported by the Fletcher Priest Trust