On Critical Care for a Broken Planet: Architecture and Urbanism beyond the Capitalocene and Fielding Architecture..

Professor Elke Krasny will be coming to Brighton University on 26th June to give a lecture titled  ‘On Critical Care for a Broken Planet –Architecture and Urbanism beyond the Capitalocene’ an event sponsored by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics.

In medical terms critical care, also known as intensive care, is a specialized branch of medicine dedicated to diagnosing and treating life-threatening conditions. This term is used here to address the planet’s life-threatening condition. The planet has made headlines throughout the twenty-first century. And the news is not good. The diagnosis is bleak. The condition is critical. We have come to understand that the planet is much, much worse than merely weakened. The planet we live on and we live with is exhausted, drained, depleted, damaged, broken. In short, the planet is urgently in need of critical care to repair livability and its continued existence in the future. Modernist aspirations in architecture were based on the promise of building a better future. Today, we live in the ruins of this promise. This lecture asks in what ways architecture and urbanism can contribute to such critical care taking acknowledging that there is no promise of a better future, but much rather a process of permanent repair.

Professor Elke Krasny will be also coming to join us in the Fielding Architecture symposium next Monday 24 and Tuesday 25 in 154 Edward Street. We have a brilliant group of speakers coming from Johannesburg, the U.S., Chile, Edinburgh, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and Sweden amongst others; and fabulous invited speakers: Katie Lloyd Thomas from Newcastle University, and Naomi Stead and Justine Clark (PARLOUR) coming from Australia. This symposium touches on very important issues relevant to all of us in terms of what we teach and how we teach on a daily basis to a wonderfully rich and diverse group of students.

The images above were taken when Professor Krasny worked with our Deputy Head of Research Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn on Hands-on Urbanism 1850–2012: The Right to Green  (for the Architekturzentrum Wien) with the latter shown at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale) Viljoen and Bohn contributed material from their research work which involved looking at urban agriculture in Cuba.

Elke Krasny is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her curatorial and editorial projects include The Force is in the Mind: The Making of Architecture and Hands-on Urbanism 1850–2012: The Right to Green (both for the Architekturzentrum Wien, with the latter shown at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale). Krasny and Angelika Fitz are curators of the exhibition at Architekturzentrum Wien, CriticalCare: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet and the editors of a volume by the same name, forthcoming from MIT Press in 2019.

If you haven’t registered but still want to attend Fielding Architecture please contact Laura Williams from Southcoast Conferences southcoast@brighton.ac.uk as registration through the website is already closed.