Professor Christophe Girot of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, will be speaking at the University of Greenwich on 24 November to launch his new book The Course of Landscape Architecture.

Girot will be joined in a debate by cultural theorist Charles Jencks, moderated by writer Tim Richardson. The event takes place from 6.30pm–7.30pm (with drinks afterwards) at the Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre, 11 Stockwell Street, London SE10. The event will be free and open to the public on a first-come, first served basis.

The evening is part of the university’s 2016–17 Hawksmoor lecture series. Other lectures this semester include: Kathryn Gustafson on the Contemporary Picturesque, Bryan Cantley on Postliminal Fuzz (10 November); Eva Jiricna, Amanda Levete and David Nixon on Future Systems (16 November); and Iain Sinclair on Nicholas Hawksmoor (17 November). Lectures last year included James Corner, Martin Rein-Cano and Charles Waldheim.

• Thursday 24^th November 2016, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]
• The Hawksmoor International Lecture Series 2016-2017
• Free and open to the public on a first-come, first served basis

Christophe Girot is director of Atelier Girot. Since 2001, he also is Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the ETH Zurich. Through the projects of his design office, and his role in the ETH, he is a recognized expert in state of the art technologies for field applications in large scale landscape designs. Prizewinner of many competitions and prizes of excellence, he completed the Master Plan for the Central Campus in Zurich, the Parco di Castello in Florence and is currently designing a large topographic project for the Swiss tunnel engineering firm AlpTransit in Ticino. He is an effective partner in project acceptance by political and public authorities. His projects have been extensively published and exhibited, amongst others at the Groundswell exhibition at the MoMA, Harvard, and in Essen Germany. His new book, The Course of Landscape is out now.

Charles Jencks has held simultaneous jobs over his seventy-plus years: architectural critic and historian, cultural theorist, designer of cosmic landscapes, co-founder of the Maggie Cancer Care Centres and what he is best known for – becoming the protagonist and definer of Post-Modernism. After getting degrees at Harvard, in English literature and architecture, he moved to the UK in 1965 where he has lived ever since. In 1970 Jencks received a PhD in architectural history, studying under the radical modernist Reyner Banham. His many works include; Modern Movements in Architecture (1973), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Towards a Symbolic Architecture (1985), The New Moderns (1990), The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (1995) and The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (2011).