Professor Nicholas Temple – Tonight MLT1 at 6pm

CREAte would like to invite you all to tonight’s open lecture given by Professor Nicholas Temple in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1 at 6pm.

Nicholas Temple

Rome and the Orient: Speculations in Language and  Landscape

Nicholas Temple is Professor of Architecture at the  University of Huddersfield. He has previously taught at the Universities of  Leeds, Pennsylvania (U.S.A.), Nottingham, Liverpool, and Lincoln, where he was  both Professor of Architecture and Head of the School of Architecture. Born in  Australia, Temple studied architecture at Cambridge University and has a PhD on  the subject of architecture and urbanism in early 16th Century Rome. He was a  Rome Scholar in Architecture (1986-88) at the British School at Rome, and  recently was awarded a Paul Mellon Rome Fellow (2012). Temple’s recent research  and scholarship focuses on the historical inter-relationships between  architecture, topography, ceremony and geography, examining territorial,  symbolic and ideological exchanges between interiors, buildings, cities and  regions. This examination transgresses the conventional boundaries between  architecture, painting, inscription, cartography and sculpture, incorporating  broader inter-disciplinary research across historical periods and regions. Much  of the research has been focused on the city of Rome, as evidenced in his  numerous publications and in Temple’s recent award as the Paul Mellon Rome  Fellow. At the same time Temple has engaged in detailed research on the study  of architecture as a humanistic discipline, examining in particular connections  between architecture, language and pictorial representation. This research has  highlighted how the humanistic tradition of linguistic enquiry, during the  early modern period, served as a critical backdrop to the emergence of modern  forms of Encyclopedism and the increasing interest in the possibility of both a  universal linguistic system and an architectural language.

This lecture examines the reception of China in Rome in  the 17th and 18th centuries, in the context of the transformations in European  culture. It focuses on two key areas – language and landscape – that provided  the basis for intellectual and creative speculations in the idea of universal  principles. The first emerged largely through Jesuit missionary activities to  the East in the 17th century, with their interests in ethnographic and  linguistic comparisons, which occurred at a time of a crisis in Humanism. The  second considers the growing interest in the aesthetics of landscape during the  Grand Tour in the 18th century, when Chinese gardens and architecture were  conceived by European travellers (such as Sir William Chambers) as universal  ’emblems’ for the European landscape. I will argue that the transformation from  one to the other represented one of the first formulations of a globalised  perspective of the world.