By Weston Loyd

(Feb. 8, 2016) — The University of Kentucky's Gaines Center for the Humanities, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design are teaming up to present a new program on violence and the human condition. The series’ fourth event, a lecture on "Architecture and Conflict" by Malkit Shoshan, founder of the Amsterdam-based architectural think-tank FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory), will begin at 2 p.m. Friday, Feb. 12, in 118 White Hall Classroom Building. The event is free and open to the public.

Known for projects that explore the relationship between architecture, politics and human rights, "Architecture and Conflict" will look at Malkit Shoshan's work on the landscape of United Nations peacekeeping operations as a part of a discussion about militarized landscapes and their impact on the civilian realm.

Wallis Miller, the Charles Parker Graves Endowed Associate Professor in Architecture and organizer of this event, believes Shoshan’s talk will give others a new way to look at the landscape. "The conceptual approach and material techniques of the architect have allowed her to develop a different understanding of conflict and the way it affects daily experience."

Shoshan is the author of the award-winning book “Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine” and co-author of “Village: One Land, Two Systems and Platform Paradise.” She was recently named the curator of the Dutch Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

During her visit to UK, Shoshan will also participate in two other programs focused on her work on contested and militarized landscapes and on drones.

"Architecture and Conflict" is part of a year of programming around the broad theme of "Violence and the Human Condition" being sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Gaines Center. Over the course of the 2015-16 academic year, faculty members from many different UK departments will collaborate with each other and with visiting experts from other universities in a series of mini-conferences and workshops that will be free and open to the campus as a whole.

The partnership will explore the theme of violence across many different registers — architecture and conflict, political violence, war and gender, transnational dimensions of violence, the intersections of violence in Latin America, and the notion of war without end as a metaphor in contemporary life.

For more information on this event, contact Wallis Miller, of the UK School of Architecture, at wmiller@uky.edu. For more on the year of programming, contact the Gaines Center at 859-257-1537.