The Architect and the Academy

Reviews / Votes

"The Architect and the Academy encapsulates specificity and speciality within the eminent career of Dean Hawkes, a true symbiosis between academia and practice - whether tectonic-musical 'play' between Alvar Aalto and Joonas Kokkonen, or career-comparisons of Leslie Martin and Serge Chermayeff. Hence Hawkes' essays bring compulsive fascination and intrigue to the 'environmental dimension of architecture'."

Colin Porteous, Emeritus Professor, The Glasgow School of Art, UK

"Dean Hawkes' career connecting architectural research, practice, writing and teaching has spanned fifty years. His new book collects reflections on architectural research culture, and environmental and technical imagination. Hawkes's essays demonstrate that environmental theories and histories - increasingly popular and urgent because of our climate crisis - are not new but extend from long-standing disciplinary values and habits."

Adam Sharr, Professor of Architecture, and Head of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, at Newcastle University, UK

"Drawing from essays written across his long career, Hawkes establishes design as the proper mode of inquiry in architecture, distinguishing it from the kinds of research conducted in the sciences and humanities from which it necessarily borrows. He explores similar approaches by Renaissance and contemporary architects, for whom experiments with light, sound, and heat are methods of discovery and invention."

William W. Braham, FAIA, Professor & Director, Department of Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, USA

"These Dean Hawkes' reflections become a fundamental book for understanding a fundamental moment in the evolution of architecture."

Sergio Los, Professor of Architectural Composition, IUAV University of Venice, Italy

"Dean Hawkes' books never fail to delight and to inspire, and this one is no exception. It is both thoughtful and thought-provoking, beautifully evocative and simultaneously rigorous in its historical and factual approach. This is a book to be read slowly and savoured as the themes of each essay unfolds. It deftly establishes the positioning of architecture within the academy and the manner in which different disciplines and the strands of education, research, and practice were woven together - with different degrees of tension - to shape that positioning."

Fiona Smyth, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland