With Ellis Woodman

God’s instruction to Noah that he should build an ark of specific materials, dimensions and arrangement might be claimed as the earliest architectural brief.  It is also one that has been subjected to an extraordinarily wide range of interpretations. Over the course of the past 2000 years, artists, architects, theologians, scientists and shipwrights have all made their own attempts to imagine the ark: depictions have provided a register of man’s developing understanding of the world and of the hopes and anxieties that this knowledge has engendered.  The architecture critic, Ellis Woodman, will present a survey of ways in which the ark has been envisaged from early Christian culture to Darren Aronofsky’s recent film, Noah.

The talk will be followed by a workshop in which participants will develop the design of an ark for the twenty first century.