Klaske Havik

Dr Klaske Havik is professor of the chair Methods, Analysis & Imagination of the Faculty of Architecture at TUDelft (NL) and has been a guest lecturer at the TU of Tampere (FI) for a long time where she was awarded a Honorary Doctorate “in recognition of the study of architectural writing and of texts on architecture and urban planning”.

In her book ‘Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture’ (nai010, 2014), based on her PhD thesis ‘Urban Literacy. A Scriptive Approach to the Experience, Use and Imagination of Place’ (TUDelft, 2012), she discusses how literature can be a good source of knowledge about how people experience, use and imagine places. In order to discuss the different perspectives that a literary approach to architecture can offer, this work assumes a trinity of concepts: description, transcription and prescription. The book was translated into Spanish in 2016 (Unal, Bogotá, CO).

She publishes regularly in architecture journals in the Netherlands and Scandinavia and is editor of the Belgian-Dutch architecture journal OASE.

Poems and stories by Klaske have appeared in a number of books and literary magazines such as Uit de Lucht and DWB. For her contribution to the architecture debate, she received the Dutch Architect of the Year Award in 2014.

Currently, Havik is Action Chair of the European COST network Writing Urban Places, New Narratives for the European City.