Monday 20 March 2017, 6pm, Keynes Library (Book here)

We are delighted to announce our next speaker in the annual Thinkers in Architecture series:

Prof. Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL: Housing Biopolitics and Care 

This talk outlines how Spinoza’s seventeenth-century philosophy constitutes a humane and ethical ratio within a biopolitical discussion of the UK housing crisis.  For Spinoza, ratio constitutes different modes of environmental, corporeal and societal lives. Drawing from Foucault’s writings on technologies of the self, and Spinoza’s geometric essay The Ethics (1677), I explore how Spinoza’s ‘radical enlightenment’ thought has resonance with architects and professionals who challenge the inhumane ratios of inequality that currently form UK housing provision.  For those interested in the talk, you can also watch the film, Equal By Design (2016), in advance.  Co-authored with Beth Lord (Aberdeen), and in collaboration with Lone Star Productions, it is available here: www.equalbydesign.co.uk

Peg Rawes is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Programme Director of the Masters in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. Recent publications include: Equal By Design (2016); ‘Humane and inhumane ratios’ in The Architecture Lobby’s Aysmmetric Labors (2016); Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed., 2016); Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity (ed., 2013).