ACC Lectures 2023 | 7. Francesca Hughes | 20.04.2023

Selected readings:

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What’s not to love?

The English expression What’s not to love? carries a double entendre. Used colloquially it describes a subject that is unquestionably lovable. Understood literally, what is not to love,  it presents an ontological question: what is the nature of not loving?
This lecture will briefly tour the networked relations between seven reasons (sins) that should organise our hate of architecture, but they don’t: Chauvinism; Appropriation; Fetishisation; Repression; Zealotry; Laziness; Vanity. In so doing, it will ask, enlisting both of the double senses, what’s not to love about: disciplinary paranoia; reproductive metaphors; redundant precision; denial of the other; redemptive techno-determinism; reductive isomorphism; and the insistence on a causal linearity that enshrines singular authorship; respectively.

About Francesca Hughes

Francesca Hughes is an architectural theorist and educator who works at the feminist intersection of architecture, history of science and technology. Having taught for over two decades at the AA and the Bartlett she was recently Head of School at UTS, Sydney. She is editor of The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press, 1996) and author of The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision (MIT Press, 2014) and Architectures of Prediction (Ediciones ARQ, 2019). Her current work in progress, The Architect’s Computer: An Indiscrete History of the Universal Discrete Machine, explores the histoire longue durée of architecture’s indiscrete relations to the project of computation.

Contacts