Vendégelőadás / Dr June Jordaan / October 8, 17:00 CET

Smooth and Striated: Landscapes and Architecture in the Global South

Guest lecture of

Dr June Jordaan
Programme Coordinator + Senior Lecturer
Department of Architectural Technology and Interior Design / Cape Peninsula University of Technology

October 8, 17:00, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Library, K 293.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s question ‘Do we know the space of pain?’ questions our conceptualizations of place and space, and implies that there are states of intensities that lie beyond concrete spatial relations. These intensities certainly merit architectural contemplation, and can be accessed through ‘nomadic voyages’, as set forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari conceptualised the terms smooth and striated space. Smooth space denoting space that is open, continuous, and heterogeneous and striated space denoting space that is structured, homogenous, organized, and segmented. In this lecture I will be applying these concepts to Southern Africa to explicate the evolution of its architectural and urban environments. I will start with a discussion on landscape and the nomadic human habitation of this land. Thereafter I will discuss various levels of striation that has been applied both on an architectural and urban scales. Firstly, through colonialisation, thereafter through political spatial segregation during apartheid, then through post-apartheid interventions. Through this narrative I hope to make the case for spatial practices that are reconcile and integrate and ultimately return us to a smoother conceptualisation of space making, both through architecture and urban design.

organized by the Department of Urban Planning and Design / Valentina Fesenko, Arpad Szabo DLA

Everyone is welcome!