Teresa Stoppani: "The possibility of the city as an island"

The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not …
(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, III. Ii)

The city can be redefined as an island, if we reconsider the island in relation to the nature of its edges rather than to the condition of physical delimitation and finished-ness. ‘Island’ is conventionally defined from the outside as a delimited field of physical discontinuity. At the same time, the island increments concentrations and density; it more clearly manifests processes of centripetal convergence; it tolerates, or even imposes, proximity and coexistence. The island can be reconsidered as a field subject to incremental saturation, to the point where an endless interiority could be hypothesized. At once space and edge, the island is an unstable figure, with a mobile and constantly redefined edge. Drawing from works of literature, history, philosophy, cartography, visual arts and architecture, this talk proposes the idea of ‘island’ as instrumentally useful to question conditions of spatial delimitation and physical finitude in the city, in relation to openness and to networked remote relations.

Teresa Stoppani is an architectural theorist and critic. She is Reader in Architecture and Head of the Leeds School of Architecture at Leeds Metropolitan University (UK). Her research explores the relationship between architecture theory and the design process in the urban environment, and the influence on the specifically architectural of other spatial and critical practices. Teresa’s writings include: a series of works on G.B. Piranesi’s etchings in relation to contemporary spatial practices; explorations of the significance of dust in the works of philosophy, the visual arts and media; a study of the complex relation of the project of architecture with the destructive event of war; the book Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge 2010). Her current work proposes a critical consideration of key terms for the reconceptualization of the architecture of the city (X Unorthodox Ways to Rethink the City, Routledge 2015).

This open lecture is the second  in the series Today's 20th Century: Modernism and after, which invites international researchers and architectural historians to present new readings of the architecture of the 1900s. It is hosted by KTH faculty Christina Pech and  Helena Mattson , architect, researcher and Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at KTH School of Architecture.

The talk by Teresa Stoppani is the first part of a double lecture special event in collaboration with the Architecture + Gender lecture series , and will be followed by a lecture by, and conversation with, Peg Rawes of the UCL Bartlett.