Christian Frost, ‘Spatial Hierarchies and Janus Faces’
Seminar with Christian Frost on the topic ‘Spatial Hierarchies and Janus Faces: A brief presentation on the representation of processional order of the City of London’, as part of a series of talks on The Human Face of Architecture; hosted by Eric Parry Architects on 25 March 2026.
00:00:08 Eric Parry
00:01:49 Christian Frost
00:57:41 Q&A
Synopsis: In November 2024, Professor Tony Travers gave a lecture for Eric Parry Architect’s series Urban Continuities entitled ‘The City of London: How its history shaped today’s Greater London’. The lecture described how the historical governance and boundaries of the City of London continue to shape its contemporary developments. In this talk I will be adding a further layer to this narrative regarding the relevance of the past by looking at the way other aspects of the order of the medieval city – more related to threshold, kingship and processions – have also left their imprint on London. In this topic, the two-faced Janus (the Roman god of the threshold) offers an alternative way of understanding fixed boundaries used for delineation
by suggesting they can also be seen as borders where different groups interact. In events where such borders are activated, dignitaries normally accommodated out of view of the public emerge and engage in processions and feasts that also contribute the civic identity of the city.
To do this I will use a reproduction of an image of King Edward VI’s procession from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster on the day before his coronation in February 1547 alongside other more famous European paintings that represent equally festive, transitional, religious and civic behaviour. I will be arguing that it is in the depth of this ceremonial and ritual life that European cities were able to move from the necessity of economic ‘bodies’ to the more profound insights of governing ‘bodies’ in order to maintain their identity within the vicissitudes of history.
Architect and academic Christian Frost worked for architectural firms in London, Berlin, Perth and Melbourne for over ten years before becoming a full time academic. He became the first Oscar Naddermier Professor of Architecture at Birmingham City University in 2013 and in 2019 he joined London Metropolitan University as Head of Architecture. In 2023 became Head of Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design.
Alongside this professional career, in 2001 he began research into the history of the foundation of Salisbury which resulted in the publication of his first book Time, Space and Order: The Making of Medieval Salisbury (Peter Lang, 2009). This book, as well as other research on architecture and heritage, has led to recent AHRC Grant success as a part of a multidisciplinary team working on re-staging musical performances in Coventry from 1451-1652.
His latest book Architecture and Cultural Continuity: Festival, Experience and Historicity (Bloomsbury, 2025) uses an in-depth study of the contemporary Festival of San Giovanni in Florence to argue that architecture is best evaluated through active experiences in relation to cultural traditions as well as spatial settings.
