In this Zoom talk Lucien Steil discusses his ‘Architectural Capriccios’, as a meditative technique of ‘Design Thinking’, allowing the hand, the heart and the mind to come together in a process of Feeling-Drawing-Building, as an act of connection with our humanness.

His drawings encompass visions of places which can be inhabited poetically and sensuously, from Elsewhere & Nowhere, where architecture emerges as the ‘natural’ habitat of mankind within nature. The Capriccios develop in the same realm of memory, intuition, emotion and desire as the built projects, and their lack of materialisation is not affecting the intensity of their reality.

Fascinated by sketchbooks where the autobiographical, fantastical, and mythical merge into graphical fictions, Lucien sees his sketches as a methodological tool to frame architectural invention, rather than only showing his own work as a part of a professional portfolio.

 The ‘Architectural Capriccio’ is not an antidote to the death of architecture as an essential cultural, artistical and technical endeavour, but it can be considered as a meditative and ‘mnemonic’ act of resistance and reconstruction dedicated to recover and restore the fundamental creative and poetical principles of architectural imagination, theory, and praxis.

Lucien Steil is an author, educator and architect dedicated to the design and building of healthy, durable and beautiful places and buildings in a world of many and diverse inspiring traditions and cultures. He believes traditional cities and architecture have always been the ideals of harmony and beauty in a destabilized, disrupted world. For him traditional cities and architecture have remained desirable models of cultural identity, home, urbanity, and civilization.

To watch the recording of this talk, click here.