Longplaying 2: Paul Shepheard
For this one-off event, writer and architect Paul Shepheard devised a lecture on ‘The Bowl of the Horizon’, based on initial discussions he had as part of the original Longplayer steering group. There was a conversation about what kind of instrument could play for a thousand years, and one of the examples was the cathedral clock in Salisbury cathedral, which is now about 800 years old.
Developing from this are some thoughts about the gothic cathedrals, which model deep time structures in actual space. There is a sense in which infrastructure overcomes its first purpose and develops meaning over long periods of time. This is most telling in viewing the horizon, which is what the lecture will ultimately describe; and associated with this viewing is the equation of experiment with experience that was explicit to the early scientists.
Paul Shepheard
Paul Shepheard is a writer living in London, England. He is married with three children. He is qualified as an architect but since the publication of What is Architecture? by the MIT Press in 1994 has gradually shifted the emphasis of his activities to writing and lecturing. He has two other books with the MIT Press: The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), about landscape, and Artificial Love (2003), about architecture and machines. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London, the University of Texas at Austin and the Academie Van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam. His website is www.paulshepheard.com.
