Caring for Architecture: The structural logic of architecture as a creative thinking practice

Architect and lecturer Petra Čeferin and Fran Ford, senior publisher at Routledge, will discuss the necessity to insist on architecture as a creative thinking practice and the very real implications this has for society today.

Further, the premise “architecture, which is good for society is good architecture” should be turned around to read as follows: “only architecture which is good is good for society”.

Opening with a lecture, Čeferin will take three complementary theses as a starting point. The first of these maintains that caring for the environment and caring for a better society necessarily involves caring for architecture. Second, that caring for and about architecture should always involve architecture’s effort to act in such a way that it takes good care also of the environment and society in general. And thirdly, architecture is empowered to take good care of the environment and society only if and when it is practiced and understood as a creative thinking practice.

The problem, however, is that such practice of architecture today is far from self-evident or even the norm. For architecture finds itself predominantly delimited by four ways of understanding and practicing architecture, which for architecture are as destructive as the instrumental attitude and approach applied today are destructive for both the environment and society as a whole.

The lecture, based on Čeferin’s book The Resistant Object of Architecture. A Lacanian Perspective, will show that the four predominant interpretations/positions of architecture constitute the four most common ways of reducing architecture to instrumental thinking. Moving constructively, affirmatively forward the lecture formulates a fifth way, which insists on understanding and practicing architecture as creative thinking.

Petra Čeferin is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she teaches theory and history.