Press release: Making Infrastructure Beautiful

Lecture explores the roles of beauty and longevity in ‘good’ infrastructure

Looks at co-creation with communities, eg Hastings Pier and Maggies’ Centres

Embargo: 25 April 2023 6pm UK time

I would like to invite you to a lecture on Architects and Engineers: Making Infrastructure Beautiful by Sadie Morgan OBE, on 25th April 2023, 6pm (UK time) at Gresham College or online. In this lecture, Professor Morgan will explore the elements needed for good infrastructure design, suggesting how beauty and longevity can be built into our environment.

Sadie Morgan will say: “Building beauty into places involves more than improving the way things look – Indeed the word ‘beauty’ when associated with the built environment has become an emotive subject. Reduced all too often to a battle of aesthetics modern vs traditional, we need to work harder to understand what really matters to people, place and of course, the challenge of the climate crisis.” She will define beauty by longevity, looking at “how beauty can be derived from listening directly to what people want and need – how it truly gains meaning when it adds value to people’s lived experience and does so for the long term.”

Morgan took as the ethos for her architectural practice ‘social usefulness’ “putting people and their needs first no matter the brief or project we were tackling.” In the lecture she will talk about their Stirling Prize-winning design for Hastings Pier and how that came out of their collaborative people-first approach.

ENDS

Notes to Editors

You can sign up to watch the hybrid lecture online or in person; or email us for an embargoed transcript: l.graves@gresham.ac.uk / 07799 738 439