Author: Mirna Pedalo

When: Thursday, 12th of March, 6pm (GMT)

Where: Room M416 (The Robin Evans Room), Marylebone Campus, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS

We are pleased to be joined by Suzi Hall for the 2026 Robin Evans lecture, both in-person and as an online streamed event.

People, Place, Power: Drawing our social world

Drawing is that evocative and precise practice that allows us to sense and make sense of the world around us. In so doing we depict a set of relations in space and time, partly to unpack a story for ourselves and partly to share this story with others. In being given the opportunity to engage with Robin Evans’ work I explore the practice of drawing the social world. I focus on the complex conditions of migration and on drawing the relations of people, place and power. The practices I have engaged in with collaborators surface the long histories of global domination that shape migration in the UK. I hope they also retrieve the all-too-reductive figure of the migrant to an active participant in shaping our everyday cultural life.

The Lecture will be broadcast online as a webcast in addition to the In-person iteration and will be followed by a drinks reception to close.

About the Speaker

Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and has practised as an architect in South Africa.

Suzi’s work focuses on everyday claims to space and how political economies of displacement shape racial borders, migrant livelihoods and urban multicultures. She is the author of The Migrant’s Paradox (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and City Street and Citizen (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City (with Ricky Burdett).

About the Robin Evans Lecture Series

This series supports outstanding scholarship in the history of architecture and allied fields, building on the work of Professor Robin Evans (1944-1993). It encourages scholars working on the relationship between the spatial and social domains in architectural drawing, construction and beyond.

Evans’ work interrogated the spaces that existed between drawing and building, geometry and architecture, teasing out the points of translation often overlooked. From his early work on prison design and domestic spaces, through to his later work on architectural geometry, Evans sought to articulate the multiple points at which the human imagination could influence architectural form. His first book, The Fabrication of Virtue, analysed the way that spatial layouts provided opportunities for social reform via their interference with morality, privacy and class. In The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Evans traced the origins of the humanist tradition to understand how human form influenced architectural drawing and construction, focusing on aesthetic dimensions in the production of architectural space.

This series will provide opportunities for the creation and/or dissemination of work by scholars working on similar questions of space, temporality, and architecture. In particular, it supports work that breaks the boundaries of traditional disciplines to think though these complex networks involved in the space between human imagination and architectural production.