Peter Scriver

Background

About Peter Scriver

I am an architect and a historian by training; an academic by vocation. I work to reveal through my historical research and scholarship how the built environments that we construct are both an extension of our ‘being’, and a projection of our ‘imagination’. Buildings, and the urban environments that they frame, are the laboratory in which we seek answers to fundamental questions about who we are as cultural producers, and how we relate to each other and the world(s) around us as social beings. This understanding of Architecture incorporates but is not limited to the art, or the science of building. Rather, what I study is the built/designed environment itself: the material and conceptual frameworks in which power (physical, political, economic), knowledge (cultural, spiritual, scientific) and trust (ethics, values, beliefs) are constantly being invested, contested and exchanged. It was this idea of Architecture that my teachers inspired me to study; the synthesis, as I saw it, of all branches of a university education in one discipline. Architecture in this larger sense is what I continue to seek to inspire my peers and my students to think about more deeply. Architecture is the world we make around us, in which we declare our values and shape our thought. It matters, far more than most people ever pause to think.