Dean Hawkes: The poetics of the architectural environment in a Nordic context

The Royal Danish Academy are very pleased to invite everyone to the open public lecture  The poetics of the architectural environment in a Nordic context by the English architect and professor Dean Hawkes.

‘If we maintain that light defines the Nordic character … it is to imply that we understand ‘climate’ qualitatively.  Light is conjunctive with weather and in the North, weather plays a more important role than in the South’s more stable world … In the North we are bound to a world of forces, because we inhabit the realm of the night.’

This quotation from Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Nightlands: Nordic Architecture eloquently captures the fundamental relationship between natural light and the architecture of the Nordic countries.  

In this lecture an observer from a more southerly latitude offers an interpretation and appreciation of this relationship. This will refer to studies first presented in The Environmental Imagination and will consist of two parts.  The first from the essay, ‘The ‘other’ environmental tradition; Nordic masters’, will
review the works of a sequence of 20th century buildings by Nordic architects.  The second, ‘Sigurd Lewerentz: architecture of adaptive light’, will propose a specific interpretation of the late sacred buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz.

About Dean Hawkes
Dean Hawkes is an architect and teacher.  He is emeritus professor of architectural design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University and an emeritus fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge.   His research is in the field of environmental design in architecture.  His books include, The Environmental Tradition (1996), The Environmental Imagination (2008, 2nd edition 2019) and Architecture and Climate (2012).  His buildings have won four RIBA Architecture Awards and have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale. 

The lecture is a part of the PhD course Architecture & daylight: Defining and describing light and space in a Nordic context 

About the course
Among Nordic architects there is a tradition for strongly believing that the qualities of daylight in architecture have a special and highly estimated role. Both from a cultural point of view as well as an aesthetic approach the daylight is pinpointed as one of the essential parameters in architectural design together with a ‘sense’ of place, the inclusion of materiality and the focus on human scale. 

The course present various methodologies to explore, describe and communicate architectural daylight design and humans’ experience of daylit spaces. Daylight is a multifaceted topic that can be analysed through a diversity of disciplines. The course questions how daylight is described. Is it in relation to the geometrical architectural form? In relation to perception? In relation to the construction technology? In relation to a philosophical approach or a cultural meaning of light?  

These discussions will be unfolded through an interdisciplinary series of lectures by highly esteemed architects, architecture theorist and philosophers. Through these lectures a broad approach to describing daylight is presented.

Followed by reading of relevant texts and discussions between the lecturer and the students.

The aim of the course is to present a diversity of methodologies investigating daylight design in general and more specifically daylight design in a Nordic context.

For more info: 
Louise Grønlund
Anch@kglakademi.dk