Lecture, discussion and poetry evening with Klaske Havik (Netherlands)

Monday, May 5th
19:30
University of Tartu Library Conference Hall

The lecture “Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture” will focus on questions such as how we can read and write places and how the gaze of the literary writer offers tools for architects and planners to make designs more site-specific, more empathic, and more evocative. Through the book Urban Literacy, three literary perspectives are proposed that address the experiential, social and imaginative aspects of place as branches of a literary approach to architecture. In the conversation “Writing Places” with Eik Hermann, the practical and philosophical potential of a literary approach to architecture will be discussed, including the initiative Writing Urban Places, an international network of architects, writers, literature scholars, and others interested in urban narratives. The poetry reading will include poems from the collection of poems “Way and Further”. In this collection of poems, Klaske Havik builds her worlds in words. With stone, sand, snow and salt as founding materials, her poems unveil lived, remembered, and imagined places. Poems will be read in Dutch / English by author Klaske Havik and in Estonian translation by Urmo Mets.

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