​AA tutor Teresa Stoppani gives lecture on architecture and language at Exactitude Conference

Teresa Stoppani, History and Theory Studies and Landscape Urbanism tutor, will speak at EXACTITUDE 2020, A Five College Architecture Symposium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on 2-3 October 2020.

The symposium is a virtual international gathering of contemporary theorists and architects, convened by Pari Riahi (UMass Amherst), Micheal T. Davis (Mount Holyoke College), and Laure Katsaros (Amherst College).

The symposium considers the ever-growing need for precision and efficiency in architectural practice by revisiting Italo Calvino’s discussion of exactitude in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in which he places ‘exactitude’ between ‘bodiless rationality’ and the attempt for the author to create an equivalent to ‘the density and continuity of the world’ – as a writer, by filling the page with words. The symposium will discuss how ‘exactitude’ can help us reconsider the current state of architecture and, specifically, how it is shaped by three factors: a created environment that needs as much, if not more, reconfiguring as do new buildings; novel and complex construction techniques that must be absorbed and mastered by architects; and an array of digital media that have dramatically shifted established norms of thought and action.

Teresa’s paper, ‘The In-exact Words of Architecture’, will look at words in architecture that perdure beyond definitions, cultures and times, resetting themselves each time, to adhere to something that continuously change. It will argue that it is in the space between the word and the thing/space that the project of architecture becomes possible and remains active, and that the words that perdure allow us to plot continuities and transformations, adaptations and permanence. In particular the paper will argue that “inexactitude” is necessary for the word “city” to be, as much as change is necessary in order for the city to be.

Exactitude 2020 will be held virtually via a Zoom webinar. Find out more