Conference | 'Writing Not Typing' by Thomas Weaver
Projeto Fish-A

Thursday, 22 May 2025, 6h30 pm, Long Table Room

Thomas Weaver, a writer, editor, and guest professor of architectural criticism at the Accademia d’architettura Mendrisio and Princeton University, presents a lecture at FAUP to discuss architecture's long and sometimes tense relationship with writing.

The session, organized as part of the Fishing Architecture project, which is being coordinated by researcher André Tavares and conducted at the Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, will explore architecture’s longstanding, if somewhat strained, relationship with writing, through an analysis of not just those rare moments when the words architects commit to paper evoke feelings of delight, but through a teasing kind of parlour game that highlights some of architecture’s less auspicious literary moments. Along the way, it will argue for the appropriateness of the essay over the monograph or the manifesto as the writerly form best suited to architecture, as much as it reviews several recent publication projects that collectively try to make architecture’s sentences as meaningful as its forms.

Thomas Weaver is an architectural teacher, writer and editor, and guest professor of architectural criticism at the Accademia d’architettura, Mendrisio and at Princeton University. Formerly the editor of AA Files at the Architectural Association and a senior commissioning editor for art and architecture at the MIT Press, he is the author of a number of books and many published conversations, and co-directs (with Françoise Fromonot) the new Gumshoe series of architectural mysteries (published by Park Books) as well as lecturing worldwide in numerous schools and institutions.


About Fishing Architecture
Fishing Architecture is a research project conducted at the Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (CEAU-FAUP), funded by the European Research Council. It seeks to explore the ecological history of architecture in the North Atlantic based on cod, sardine, and tuna, with case studies in the United States, Canada, Iceland, England, Norway, France, and Portugal.


+ info
www.fishingarchitecture.com
www.ceau.arq.up.pt

Free admission.
The conference will be held in English, with no translation available.

Programme subject to change (without prior notice).
This event may be recorded and shared by FAUP through photography and video.