Dialogue: towards a community of praxis – Professor Robert Brown (Part of the Inaugural Professorial Lecture series)

About us

Re-examining the architectural and pedagogic practice

Our cities are sites of difference, marked by the presence of often disparate communities and conflicting socio-cultural, economic and political forces. Our challenge is how we respond to that difference. Too often this response has been one of neglect or marginalisation, or at best accommodation. Can we consider a different response where we instead dialogically embrace 'the other'? What does this mean for architecture and other disciplinary practice? In what way does this influence how we educate for that practice?




Robert Brown, Professor in Architecture, will explore these questions and consider the potential of dialogue both as communication and as an attitude towards addressing these issues. Putting this dialogue into practice, Robert will be joined by colleagues both from within and outside the University – a filmic provocateur, an efficacious communicator, a studious angler and an embodying architect. Through shared discussion, Bob will reflect upon his own work as an architect, an educator and a researcher, in order to critically re-examine and theorise an architectural and pedagogic practice i.e. a praxis of dialogue.

Throughout his career, Robert has been situated somewhere else – an educator teaching in China and Egypt, an architect practising in India, Kenya and London's East End. In these settings, he has found himself as the 'other', the one 'outside' the normalised, locally-held sense of culture. While a position of 'outsideness' offers a useful perspective on the local, it can also prompt reflection upon ourselves as an 'other'. More notably, it has fostered awareness of the potential of dialogue, both in operating across socio-cultural, economic and political divides and as an overarching praxis. Discussion of this potential will act as a springboard to consider the possibility for such praxis at a broader scale, and what this might mean for universities in general and the University of Plymouth specifically, both as a sense of agency and as a place.