Professor Martin Bressani is the guest of the Kent School of Architecture and the CREAte research centre for several days of teaching and research activities in November. This visit has been kindly supported by Professor April McMahon, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), Dr Anthony Manning, Dean for Internationalisation, and by Professor Philippe de Wilde, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research and Innovation.
Martin Bressani is the Sir William C MacDonald Chair in Architecture and Director of McGill University’s School of Architecture (Montreal). He is the author of a monograph on French architect and theoretician Eugéne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugéne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Ashgate, 2014), and co-editor of Gothic Revival Worldwide. A W N Pugin’s Global Influence (Leuven University Press, 2017) and The Companions to the History of Architecture – Nineteenth-Century Architecture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). He has contributed essays and articles to many books and scholarly journals.
CREAte Events
Tuesday 14 November, 18.00
St Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate CT11 9NY
An event with the Friends of St. Augustine’s and the Pugin Society. Martin Bressani will talk about the international importance of Pugin’s architecture in Ramsgate, followed by a digital presentation by Howard Griffin that will interact with the geometry of the church and animate the three-dimensional space. A musical interlude will be provided by CREAte members Gimin Lee and Giacomo Damiani and the evening will be concluded with musical performances from Henry Sparks and Daniel Duarte-Grilo-Montene. All welcome.
Wednesday 15 November, 15.00 – 17.00
Digital Crit Space, Marlowe Building
Martin Bressani will join a CREAte postgraduate seminar on the gothic revival. Judith Hill will give a presentation entitled ‘Why did the elite build castles in Ireland after the Union with Great Britain in 1801?’.
Wednesday 15 November, 18.00
Woolf Lecture Theatre
CREAte Open Lecture: House as Melodrama: the Strange Case of A W N Pugin’s Saint Marie’s Grange
The talk addresses architecture’s capacity for symbolic action, following the general thesis that symbolic systems ‘shape’ and ‘reshape’ reality through an aesthetic grasping of the world. It will present a detailed analysis of British Gothic revival architect A W N Pugin’s Saint Marie’s Grange, a house he built for himself near Salisbury in 1835, and the first building of his phenomenally productive career. The contention is that Saint Marie’s Grange embodies a need for melodramatic dramatisation, tending towards an excessive representation of life which situates its inhabitants within the grandiose terms of a moral battle: not within the domain of realism, as its robust functionalist distinction of building elements have led certain commentators to place it, but in the higher domain of truth. The house thus demonstrates how, for Pugin, a spiritual reality lies just below the surface of daily life, how gestures within the world of the gestures within the world of the everyday refer to one another, and how a hyperbolic set of gestures implicates the fight between good and evil. All welcome.
Martin Bressani will also be taking part in Teaching Events on Thursday and Friday with our Stage 2 and Stage 3 cohort.