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Events - 23.01.2018 - 00:00 

A view behind the facades of buildings and people

In Spring Semester 2018, the University of St.Gallen will invite the general public to 39 public lecture series. Three lectures will deal with buildings, their facades and the rooms behind them. Two further lectures will look behind the facades of the unconscious: those of dreams and those of the stories written by Federica de Cesco. The Public Programme will start on 19 February 2018.
Source: HSG Newsroom

23 January 2018. "Our public programme always has depth," writes Prof. Dr. Florian Wettstein, Head of the Public Programme, in the preface to the brochure about the public lectures at the University of St.Gallen. In the Spring Semester, however, five lectures literally look behind facades – behind facades of buildings and behind the facade of the unconscious.

The history behind St.Gallen buildings

The Business Administration lecture will encourage the audience to understand space as a process. It will explain how architecture and interior design transport personality and value, and what challenges this confronts planners and owners with. An architectural lecture will focus on buildings of the St.Gallen region from five centuries: on their facades, rooms, the people who lived in them and the lives that were lived in them. A second architectural lecture will take the audience on a guided tour of architectural and building projects in the City of St.Gallen.

The basic patterns behind Federica de Cesco's stories

However, people often also look behind facades in the figurative sense of the term, namely when they try to recognise others behind their mere exteriors. This does not only happen with strangers but sometimes with oneself. Thus the psychology lecture will provide an introduction to dream analysis, and the audience will learn what lies dormant beneath the surface and must be ascribed to people's inner life.Federica de Cesco, too, has created dreams with her books. In the lecture, the Swiss writer also homes in on the unconscious, the hidden fundamental patterns that inevitably lie behind the facades of fiction. Her books have been permeated by such a fundamental pattern for six decades: the postulate of freedom. Thus for Cesco, freedom becomes the actual existential question.

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