Book Launch Double Bill: Nicholas Temple & Christian Frost in Conversation

Hosted by CUBE, this event celebrates new books by two of our professors, Christian Frost and Nicholas Temple.

In the form of a conversation, Nicholas Temple and Christian Frost will present their most recent publications – books which tackle issues of architectural identity, heritage, culture, temporality and festival. Both account for ambitious projects that aim to address concerns in contemporary architecture and from the past across the globe. The authors offer ways of discussing architecture that open up the possibility for acknowledging new horizons of architectural experience. The discussion will be chaired by Dr Maximillian Sternberg (University of Cambridge).

The details of the two books are:

Architecture and Cultural Continuity: The Making of Festival, Experience and Historicity (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Christian Frost.

Architecture and Cultural Continuity explores a dynamic way of viewing architecture – arguing that all architecture is best evaluated through active experiences in relation to cultural traditions of community and belonging, space, ritual, and setting. A work in three parts, the book first analyses the Festival of San Giovanni in Florence, an annual series of celebrations involving the entire city. This case study is used to explore ideas of continuity and tradition and how these shape and are shaped by architecture and the city. Part 2 gathers theoretical tools from philosophy, anthropology, and performance studies to offer a framework for the appraisal of architecture as experience rather than form. Part 3 presents historic and contemporary case studies to explain the theory in practice, from Lord Leighton's House in London to Beit Beirut in Lebanon; from Salisbury's medieval Chapterhouse to the contemporary Australian Parliament building. 

The Temporality of Building: European and Chinese Perspectives on Architecture and Heritage (Routledge, 2025) by Nicholas Temple, Yun Gao and Jing Xiao.

This comparative study of European and Chinese traditions examines the role that time plays in the life of buildings. A guiding premise of the investigation is that notions of building time require insight into how cultural habits commingle with natural rhythms, or what David Leatherbarrow calls “concurrency”. Rather than examining specific buildings, the first three chapters apply key themes (language, ritual and heritage) as cultural lenses to reveal differences and similarities between the two traditions. Buildings, interiors and their exterior spaces are explored to demonstrate how building time involves particular situations or settings and their correlating relationships to past traditions. The final chapter considers notions of time in the context of contemporary buildings in Europe and China, drawing on the earlier historical investigations and addressing globalising influences.

Speakers

Christian Frost is an architect and currently Professor of Architecture and Head of Research in the School of Art, Architecture & Design at London Metropolitan University. Other works include his monograph Time Space and Order: The Making of Medieval Salisbury (Peter Lang 2009).

Nicholas Temple is Senior Professor of Architectural History at London Metropolitan University and formerly Director of the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE). Among his many books are Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II (Routledge, 2011) which was shortlisted for the CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award, and Architecture and the Language Debate: Artistic and Linguistic Exchanges in Early Modern Italy (Routledge, 2020).

Chair

Maximillian Sternberg is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Pembroke College and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department School of Architecture. Key publications include Cistercian Architecture and Medieval Society (Brill, 2013), Modern Architecture and the Sacred (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) co-edited with Ross Anderson, and Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture (Ashgate, 2015), co-edited with Henriette Steiner.

Image caption:

Walter Burley Griffin, preliminary plan for Canberra (1913). Reproduction of plan from Supplement to "Building and Real Estate Magazine" in 1913. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canberra_Prelim_Plan_by_WB_Griffin_1913.jpg

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