The Living Memory of Cities 2021-22

The Living Memory of Cities is a project originally conceived by Dr José de Paiva as an international symposium, and convened thereafter as a collaboration between Eric Parry Architects and London Met's research group Ecological, Architectural and Civic Humanities in Design (EACHiD) at the University's Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE).

Over the last few decades, the field of architecture has been enriched by generous contributions, from research and education to the work on projects responding to the urban scale of cities. Across a vast body of work – drawn and written, published and built – many authors have been a living reference for generations of architects by deepening the field of thinking, dwelling, building in the world we live. This same group now comes together for a forum on cities and their time, and the layers of their history: not so much those layers we recall or have now forgotten, but those that cities remember. Intervening in this living ground is often the beginning of a debate that challenges time-honoured custom as well as new ways of life, all of which have their most visible reflection in the field of architecture.

These online seminars have as their main focus the contemporary drama of intervening in the historical fabric of cities, which is also the fabric of living memory. This is a central topic within the scope of urban projects cast through the light of architectural tradition and urban memory in a world undergoing fast transition and change. The series aims to uncover a broader territory and body of work as well as contributing to the international debate: on what we have inherited, on what we have been building and the cities in which we live today.

Please sign up for tickets for an online seminar by using the following booking links. Everyone is welcome.

On cities: The Living Memory of Cities
Seminar series 2021–22

On sacred space: Presence, Person, Beauty 
Seminar series 2021–22

An additional series organised by Eric Parry Architects in collaboration with The Reverend Canon Peter Newby, St Mary’s University (currently a doctoral candidate at London Met), is running in parallel to The Living Memory of Cities. Find out more information on the Eric Parry Architects website.

This series brings contemporary authors to reflect on some of the most primary questions for theology and philosophy as well as the history of art and architecture. From divine dwelling in the Old Testament to its Christian understanding, the question of divine presence in the visible world has been at the heart of the community of the faithful. From the ancient search for the face of God to the traditional understanding of person, the question of personhood and its myriad implications have challenged our understanding throughout history. They have also guided our understanding of what it means to live together and build our world. And yet, in our contemporary lives, we often seem oblivious to the natural goodness and beauty of the created world in which we dwell and build; even in today’s sacred art and architecture, the word beauty is scarcely, if ever, used. These online seminars on presence, person and the theology of beauty – of the created world, of art and architecture – explore these topics in a way that is by no means exclusive to the sacred, but hopefully provocative in the best sense of the term.