Meet the Jury Robert Somol on Speaking of Architecture…” (Authorship/Objecthood/Criticism)

Arenberg Doctoral School is proud to invite you to Meet The Jury!

When internationally renowned experts visit KU Leuven as a member of a PhD Examination Committee, we like to seize this opportunity to give this expert a forum to a large audience. All members of Science, Engineering & Technology are most welcome to the Meet The Jury Lectures.

Prof. Robert Somol (University of Illinois, USA) will give a lecture on “Speaking of Architecture…” (Authorship/Objecthood/Criticism)”.

This seminar examines architecture as a fundamentally discursive practice, arguing against recent tendencies to reduce architectural work to agency, process, impact, or material performance alone. Starting from the premise that architecture is never simply an object but always also a cultural, authorial, and critical construction, the seminar reconsiders the relationship between words and things, saying and seeing, intention and form. Through debates on authorship, objecthood, minimalism, criticism, posthumanism, and new materialism, it traces how twentieth-century architecture negotiated the unstable relation between ideology and object, and how this tension produced the figure of the architect-critic. Rather than accepting the contemporary displacement of meaning by measurement, or authorship by horizontal models of collaboration and agency, the seminar asks how discursivity, interpretation, and critical intention might still offer productive ground for architectural practice today.

Following the lecture, there will be opportunity for young researchers to interact with him.

• Venue: Paleizenstraat 65, 1030 Brussels
• Date: 3 September 2026 – 18:00-19:00
• Prof. Robert Somol is visiting KU Leuven on the occasion of the PhD defence of Johannes Berry