Professorial inaugural lecture: “Architecture, Language, Politics” by Sean Griffiths

In this inaugural professorial lecture, Sean Griffiths explored the fraught relationship between architecture and politics, arguing that a materialist conception of language offers a possible way to link architectural meaning and production. Starting from the premise that language and production are necessary attributes of human sociality, the lecture explores how they combine to produce different notions of ‘architectural language.’ Following philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of language, the lecture used Marxist analysis to propose that different modes of production create the physical patterns produced by both language and the built environment.