Clemson University’s School of Architecture has announced its 2024 Spring Lecture Series, “The Third Place,” continuing its theme from Fall 2023.

The spring series will feature five distinguished speakers, two of whom will present at the Clemson Design Center in Charleston.

“The Third Place,” refers to spaces for socialization separate from the usual environments of home and work, and it represents a rapidly changing landscape. Traditionally, third places have included churches, community centers, neighborhood bars and coffee shops. However, recently, there has been an increase in the use of non-traditional systems and alternative spaces serving as third places.

This series will examine how the disruption of social, political and economic structure is reframing our society’s relationships with traditional third places. From theoretical proposals and critical practices to historical analysis, The Third Place series will also discuss the intersection of identity, cultural expression and social interaction and the impact gentrification, displacement and creative production have on our communities.

The first guest lecturer for the Spring semester will be Javier Arpa Fernández. Fernández is the Research and Education Coordinator of the Why Factory at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. The Why Factory is a think-tank led by Professor Winy Maas that explores possibilities for the development of our cities by focusing on the production of models and visualizations for cities of the future. Fernández currently also holds a position of lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has been a lecturer at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the U.S., ENSA-Bellevile and ENSA-Versailles in France and IE University in Spain. Fernández was Editor in Chief for a+t research group, one of Europe’s leading publishers in architecture and urban design. He is the curator of the exhibition “Paris Habitat,” held at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris and is the author of the monograph “Paris Habitat: One Hundred Years of City, One Hundred Years of Life.” In 2013, he co-organized the conference “The City That Never Was” in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York. This event used the recent economic and urban crisis in Spain as a lens through which to consider future global patterns of urbanization and settlement. As a lecturer and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently conducting the research project “Africa: An Atlas of Speculative Urbanization” and curated the exhibition “African Speculations” at the Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival.

The lecture will also be streamed on Zoom. The link is available at https://www.clemson.edu/caac/academics/architecture/lecture-series.html