What is the true task of the architect? In this episode we talk to Peter Lynch about what the role of architecture really is. Can we create spaces that are more hospitable to both humans and other living beings? How can we truly get to know places – and the mysteries hidden beneath them? What is architecture's hidden spiritual dimension, and what does it take to create spaces more beautiful than we could have imagined?

Peter Lynch is an architect, and recently a guest professor at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm. He has founded and directed architecture offices in New York, Detroit, Shenzhen, and Beijing, and has decades of experience of teaching architecture students in the United States and Sweden. Find him at https://buildingculture.se

READING LIST & LINKS:

• Peter Lynch’s website, with three lectures that touch on many of the topics of the episode: https://buildingculture.se/three-lectures-on-landscape/


• A further description of Peter's Timescape Gardens project in Norrköping: https://buildingculture.se/timescape-garden/


• Dancer Anna Asplind’s website: annaasplind.se


• Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990)


• Gilles Clément (gardener/landscape designer), essays on his website http://www.gillesclement.com/index.php


• Christophe Girot, "Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture" in James Corner ed., Recovering Landscape (1999)


• Francois Jullien, Living Off Landscape (2014)


• Stanislaus Fung, "Movement and Stillness in Ming Writings on Gardens" in Michel Conan, ed., Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion (2003)


• Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (1947)

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Keywords: philosophy, ideas, Peter Lynch, architecture, Giorgio Agamben, landscapes, singularity, landscape architecture, Japanese gardens