12.00 – 13.00 BST, Zoom Webinar
Contrasting approaches to conserving visual history and identity in London and Edinburgh
Historic views have played a significant role in London and Edinburgh’s separate and distinctive evolving city identities. This lecture will consider how the pressures of urban change and the consequent visual effects on the settings of major heritage assets have been embraced or resisted by successive decision makers. Particular reference will be made to the City of London’s emerging ‘Eastern Cluster’ of tall buildings and the relative conservatism of the Cities of Westminster and Edinburgh.
Robert Tavernor
Robert Tavernor is Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the London School of Economics, where he taught between 2005-11. He was previously Forbes Professor of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh (1992-5) and Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath (1995-2005) and has held visiting academic posts internationally. His books include Palladio and Palladianism (Thames & Hudson, 1991), On Alberti and the Art of Building (Yale University Press, 1998), and Smoot’s Ear: the Measure of Humanity (Yale UP, 2007; paperback version 2008). He is a co-translator of Leon Battista Alberti’s 16th century De re aedificatoria, translated as On the Art of Building in Ten Books (The MIT Press, 1988), and Andrea Palladio’s 17th century I quattro libri dell’architettura, as The Four Books on Architecture (The MIT Press, 1997). He wrote introductions to new translations of Vitruvius’ treatise, On Architecture, Penguin Classics (2009), and the first English edition of Daniele Barbaro’s Vitruvius of 1567, Birkhäuser Basel (2019). He edited the monograph, Edinburgh (Rassegna, vol. 64, Birkhäuser Basel 1996). The Tavernor Consultancy, Architecture + Heritage founded in 2001 has advised on many major masterplans and building projects in central London.
