Dundee conference welcomes world-class architects to discover the city

Published On Tue 19 Nov 2019 by Dominic Glasgow

The best way to understand society is to look at the cities it has created, say organisers of a major architecture conference taking place in Dundee this week.

The University of Dundee will host the 16th annual conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA).

The three-day event, Architecture and Collective Life, will see more than 200 delegates from around the globe descend upon the city to discuss the social ties that bind people and environments into settlements, and settlements into civilisations.

World-class keynote speakers including University of Pennsylvania Distinguished Senior Research Fellow, Joan Ockman and Dutch architect Professor Reinier de Graaf, a partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), who will explore notions of a global village and modern feudalism.

Spanning more than seven academic disciplines and dozens of architectural practices, this year’s international conference will take place in the University’s iconic 1970s brutalist Matthew Building, itself a monument to architecture.

Dr Lorens Holm, one of the organisers of the conference, said, “At a time when politics is becoming increasingly divisive and collective action on world problems of climate, population, health, and equality is becoming more urgently necessary, this conference will endeavour to unpack the relation between the environments we build in order to live well in them and the forms of society that inhabit them.

“We regard it as an honour to both the University and City to have been selected to host the annual conference of such a distinguished organisation as the AHRA. We are equally proud to announce that one of the outcomes of this conference will be the publication of an edited book of the most significant research papers from the conference (Routledge) and a special edition of the academic journal Architecture & Culture.”

Architecture and Collective Life takes place between Thursday 21 and Saturday 23 November and will include highly anticipated tours of Dundee’s industrial docklands as well as its architectural heritage, including the recent V&A Dundee on the city’s waterfront, designed by the award-winning architect Kengo Kuma.

For media enquiries contact:
Dominic Glasgow
Media Relations Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
Tel: +44 (0)1382 385131
Email: d.w.glasgow@dundee.ac.uk