The Camden Conference presents Judith Bing and J. Brooke Harrington at the Cushing Public Library on Sunday, February 9 at 1:00 pm. This event is free and open to all.

Over millennia buildings have communicated cultural values and purposes through the media of construction: form, scale, material, color, decoration. Architecture is above all a social art, changing to represent political, geographic, and ideological shifts. Today’s media revolution has certainly expanded architecture’s tools and processes, even materials, but designers deploy these new means to serve timeless human needs for shelter, community, and identity.

This presentation will explore – through selected historic and contemporary examples – how architecture communicates its purposes and values, as a medium of expression. From the pyramids of ancient Egypt or cathedrals of medieval France, to the global modernism of airports, highrises, and museums, buildings “speak” in visual terms legible to most observers – with provocative exceptions.

The presenters are professors emeriti of architecture, Brooke of Temple University and Judith of Drexel University, in Philadelphia. Currently they are Center Associates at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and Visiting Scholars at the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, in Cambridge. They live in Cushing.

Image credits: “The Professor’s Dream” composed by C. R. Cockerell, R. A. (1849), and extract from photograph of Times Square by Terabass (2009)