International Lecture Series: Gunnar Parelius

KADK is proud to welcome vice-dean Gunnar Parelius from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The Lecture is part of the International Lecture Series. 

The Architectural education based in the universities is under pressure to understand itself as “research based education”. As a result the architects tend to fade into silence, no longer able to confidently apply the language that used to accompany their teaching and their picture shows. In a time where the field need to recapture and reinvigorate its momentum in face of incoming challenges, this defensive strategy does not suffice.

To establish itself an academic discipline the field of architecture need to determine which academic practices, investigations and reflections is able to support and develop the education of architects. Then research is not enough; we need also include art as a social project to gain and develop insight - and we need to understand that the architectural learning process constitutes a third way of maintaining and developing architectural knowledge.

I will show some converging attempts to gain insight into the architectural learning processes and establish discourses able to acknowledge students and external users as individual representatives of cultures vastly broader then the present day Canon of Architecture.

About Gunnar Parelius
Born 1951 in Bergen, Norway. Qualified architect from NTNU 1978 with main focus on the aesthetic and semiotic foundations of the architectural design process. From 1987 Faculty director at The Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art – becoming Vice-Dean in 2013.

A regular NTNU-representative in national and international organizations as the Nordic Academy (NAA) and EAAE

An active role in several academic societies – within the field of architecture and semiotics - both doing organizational work and by presenting papers, doing editorial work, moderating, evaluating, peer-reviews etc.