Next Thursday May 22nd, by 6.30 pm at the long table room of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, Thomas Weaver will present the lecture “Writing Not Typing”.

The session, organized as part of the Fishing Architecture project, which is being coordinated by researcher André Tavares and conducted at the Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, will explore architecture’s longstanding, if somewhat strained, relationship with writing, through an analysis of not just those rare moments when the words architects commit to paper evoke feelings of delight, but through a teasing kind of parlour game that highlights some of architecture’s less auspicious literary moments. Along the way, it will argue for the appropriateness of the essay over the monograph or the manifesto as the writerly form best suited to architecture, as much as it reviews several recent publication projects that collectively try to make architecture’s sentences as meaningful as its forms.

Thomas Weaver is an architectural teacher, writer and editor, and guest professor of architectural criticism at the Accademia d’architettura, Mendrisio and at Princeton University. Formerly the editor of AA Files at the Architectural Association and a senior commissioning editor for art and architecture at the MIT Press, he is the author of a number of books and many published conversations, and co-directs (with Françoise Fromonot) the new Gumshoe series of architectural mysteries (published by Park Books) as well as lecturing worldwide in numerous schools and institutions.