Robert Tavernor, ‘Reimagining antiquity through architectural design’
Presentation by Robert Tavernor (Emeritus Professor, LSE) on ‘Urban Continuity: Reimagining antiquity through architectural design’. Hosted by Eric Parry Architects in London and organised with MOLA—Museum of London Archaeology, for the series ‘Urban Continuities: Architecture and Archaeology in the City’, on 5 March 2025:
00:00:00 Robert Kennett (Eric Parry Architects)
00:03:16 Robert Tavernor – Keynote presentation
00:50:34 Q&A
Synopsis: Recent creative urban and architectural responses to the historic urban character of the City of London have reevaluated and redefined historic alleyways, processional routes and significant vistas, revealed archaeological sites and ‘found’ gardens. This lecture will consider two urban blocks in the City that achieve new and revived continuity of space, form and meaning with the past: the former Bucklersbury House on Victoria Street built on the site of the Roman Temple of Mithras and now occupied by Bloomberg’s European HQ; and the Hall Island site on Fenchurch Street that incorporates the former Clothworkers’ Hall, alongside the historic Tower of All Hallows Staining and Lambe’s Chapel Crypt, a site currently being redeveloped according to designs by EPA.
Robert Tavernor is Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the LSE, 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 sixteenth century De re aedificatoria, translated as On the Art of Building in Ten Books (The MIT Press, 1988), and Andrea Palladio’s seventeenth 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 founded the Tavernor Consultancy, Architecture + Heritage, in 2001, which advises on major masterplans and building projects in in the context of historic London.
