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Decolonising Performative Architecture Seminar Series: “Sustainable Architecture in the Digital Era” Hanaa Dahy, BioMat, ITKE, University of Stuttgart, Tuesday, March 16, 2.00pm GMT | Online

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Tuesday, 16th of March at 2.00pm GMT

Blackboard link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/a1f67e76494344a3ba9b0a002be29c38 

The seminar is organised by Paolo Cascone, Yota Adilenidou and Maddalena Laddaga in the frame of Architecture and Environmental Design DS3A “Decolonising Performative Architecture” seminar series.

Hanaa Dahy is a registered architect, engineer and material developer who established in the frame of her professorship the research department BioMat (Bio-based Materials and Materials Cycles in Architecture) as a Junior Professor at ITKE (Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design) since July 2016 at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning in the University of Stuttgart. She earned her PHD from ITKE in Stuttgart in 2014 with Excellence and earned her Bachelors and Master Degree in ‘Architectural Engineering’ in 2003, 2006 respectively from Ain Shams University in Cairo with Honors. Hanaa developed, designed and manufactured a number of innovative sustainable building products that were widely presented in international exhibitions and attracted a lot of industrial interests. Among other research areas, she is particularly interested in biomimetic principles, sustainability and their impact on architectural practice and applications. She has pending European and international patents, earned the best of Materials and Design award (Materialica) in Munich in 2015 and the Material Prize award (MaterialPreis) in 2016 from the Design Center of the state Baden-Württemberg in Germany, a fellowship for the innovation of university-teaching in 2017, a number of research/industrial project funds and is a member of a number of European and international scientific and professional bodies. Her teaching and training are in the area of architectural design, composites, structure and materials, smart systems, fabrication and biomimetics 

Archisource Drawing of the Year 2020 | Deadline: January 10, 2021

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The aim of the competition is to celebrate the amazing talent of architecture and design students around the world through the drawings that they create. 

For 2020 Archisource is collaborating with an exciting number of partners to provide a collection of prizes worth total £4,750 to be won across four categories including:

  • Drawing of the Year
  • Narrative Award
  • Architectural Award
  • Environmental Award

Get your best drawings ready and enter here!: https://archisource.org/  

The competition is now open and entry closes 10th January!

The aim of the competition is not to create new works but to celebrate what has already been produced – unless you want to! 

This year the partners are providing prizes worth £4,750 (triple the value of last year!!) The prizes include beautifully crafted physical awards designed by The New Raw, designer furniture by Case, an Innovator 16 Pen Display and an Artist Display 13.3 Pro (Holiday Edition!) graphics tablets by XP Pen, brand new ‘Rebelle 4’ software licenses, creative books by gestalten, a huge supply of art and design materials by London Graphic Centre, edding and Pink Pig, with designer bags by QWSTION to carry it all!

Archisource truly believes in the power of a drawing to communicate and represent more than what you see on the surface and are excited to judge an array of innovative and high quality works. The competition is in no way limited to architecture and Archisource very much welcomes those from other arts and design industries.

London Festival of Architecture: City of London School Competition | Deadline [first stage]: Midday, Friday, December 18, 2020

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

At the LFA, our competitions are an important part of our mission to democratise the discussion around architecture. Now, we’re pleased that our Collaboration team will be also running competitions as New London Architecture to build upon this, expanding with a joint competitions programme and a wider range of opportunities for our friends and supporters to get involved in.

London Festival of Architecture

New London Architecture (NLA) and the City of London Corporation have launched a new open call competition to find a design team to take forward a major redevelopment programme at City of London School. The competition is a unique opportunity to transform one of London’s most prestigious schools, on one of the most prominent sites in the City of London. 

The open call competition is open to architecture practices all shapes and sizes, including teams of smaller and medium-sized practices who are being actively encouraged to join together to bid for the project, which has an estimated project cost of £19 million.
 
City of London School was founded in the fifteenth century and is one of London’s leading day schools. The school’s current building – on the City of London riverfront beside the Millennium Bridge – dates from 1986 and is one of the City’s most recognisable buildings. Facilities have changed little since then, however, and development is now essential to accommodate increased pupil numbers and to allow City of London School to grow and thrive. 
 
A masterplan completed in 2019 identified a range of new facilities to be delivered over a series of phases, and work is now under way on an initial phase to provide improved sports and dining facilities. The City Corporation and the School are now working with NLA to find the design team that deliver subsequent phases, and in doing to maximising the use of the School’s site and delivering multi-use spaces and classrooms which are flexible, inviting and inspiring. In particular the masterplan has identified the following elements for delivery:

  • A new courtyard building located on the existing playground, providing around 1,200 sq.m of classroom and office space;
  • Improving circulation and access around the playground and the wider school campus;
  • Refurbishing part of the main school building to provide improved Junior School accommodation;
  • Extending the main school building to enhance science teaching facilities;
  • Refurbishing and remodelling existing space to create a new sixth form centre and common room, administrative and pastoral facilities, alongside sports changing facilities;
  • Reconfiguring the design technology and computing building;
  • Opening up and enlarging circulation space within the main school building.

The winning team will be one that can help City of London School become a flagship in renewable energy use and greening, and to promote environmental consciousness across the school and the City of London. The design team will be required to consult with multiple stakeholders, and to execute a well-planned programme of works that meets the School’s timetabling requirements and allows the school to remain on site with minimal disruption. 
 
The deadline for the first stage of the competition – requiring teams to complete prepare and expression of interest and complete a selection questionnaire – is midday on Friday 18 December 2020. Up to six shortlisted teams will then be invited to develop a design concept for the project and awarded an honorarium of £1,000. It is expected that a winning design team will be identified in March 2021. 
 
All information for entrants is available on the capitalEsourcing portal here

Tamsie Thomson, managing director of New London Architecture, said:
 
“This competition is a fantastic opportunity to work with one of London’s leading schools, and to make a real difference on one of the most important sites in the City of London. The competition has been carefully designed to make it accessible for teams of all shapes and sizes to enter, and we want to see as many practices entering as possible. In keeping with New London Architecture’s work to broaden opportunities for architects in London we are actively encouraging collaborations, and want to see a really broad and diverse range of talent coming forward.”
 
Alan Bird, Head of City of London School, said:

“This redevelopment will provide additional teaching space, whilst facilitating the use of modern and emerging technologies to support teaching and learning.It will also provide the scope to work increasingly closely with other schools across the City of London Family of Schools, through increased partnership and enrichment activities.The project will also demonstrate our commitment to developing a school building that embraces its environmental responsibilities. We look forward to working with the chosen architect to develop a proposal that will meet the needs of all our pupils, and excite and inspire for many years.”

Featured Image: City of London School by Wayland Smith via Architects’ Journal

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “Natural Builder: Building with Bamboo,” Jan Balbaligo, Thursday, October 15 at 18:00 [online via BB]

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Thursday, 15th of October 6pm 

Event Link:  https://eu.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/guest/9aee3d5c1e2e42998b4074a8b1245dd0

… the green steel of the 21st Century 

Vo Trong Nghia

Bamboo is not a new building material, but given changing environmental design imperatives, this aggressive fast-growing plant species provides a strong and durable construction material. Bamboo is the largest member of the grass family and is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet – Moso bamboo from China can grow up 900 mm a day. Bamboo can be ready for harvest and construction use in three-five years compared with 20-25, for softwood timber. 

In January 2020, designer and Bamboo builder Jan Balbaligo working with non-profit arts and social enterprise Cosmic Convergence completed the Eco-Salon in San Pablo La Laguna, Solalá, Guatemala. The Eco-Salon is a multi-functional indoor space (85 m2) built on top of an existing public school to provide space for music, sports, arts, dance and other activities to complement and enrich the formal education. The building structure is a bamboo framework, with a bamboo lathe (bamboo splits) roof and bamboo split walls with a Bajareke (clay and sand) infill. Jan Balbaligo is a great advocate for the use of bamboo in construction and she has worked on a number of temporary festival structures and small school and community buildings and we are delighted to welcome Jan back to Westminster.

For more details contact Will McLean – w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk

Technical Studies website – https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/ 

AHRA 2020: “Housing and the City” Conference _ Deadline for Abstracts: June 30, 2020

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

AHRA 2020 Housing and the City conference online only. Information on fees and registration will be communicated at the end of the month. 

17th Annual International Conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association

Hosted by the Architecture, Culture and Tectonics Research Group, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham 

Given the changes to our lives brought about by the current Covid19 pandemic, we are sending a short additional call for papers for this year’s AHRA International Conference, Housing and the City, as follows:

Housing and the City After the Pandemic 

The primary question asked by the original AHRA 2020 conference call was this: what does it mean to be at home in the city in the twenty-first century? As the world continues to fight the rapid spread of Covid19, we might not yet be in a position to substantively rethink this question, let alone to predict a new urban reality of segregation and containment. However, we invite you to reflect and speculate on how the effects of the pandemic will shape our lives, how it challenges our conception of the home and the city, and how it affects the complex relationships between the individual and the collective, the public and the private. We ask how it might affect the dynamism of the urban.

We invite contributions in the form of individual papers or roundtable discussions, as well as submissions in a range of media, for example film, artwork or photography, that reflect and speculate on how the pandemic will shape our urban lives into the future. 

Expressions of interest should take the form of an abstract of 300 words, be submitted via the conference website, by 30 June 2020. 

You should submit your abstract by visiting our EasyChair account here: 
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-eng/ahra-2020/index.aspx

Conference dates: 19, 20, 21 November 2020  (Virtual Conference)

Featured Image: © Atelier Z+& Ye Xu

Congratulations to George Hintzen, DS10 alumnus, on receiving funding through Dragon’s Den for further development of his company TOAD.ai

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

This episode of Dragon’s Den can be viewed on the BBC iPlayer, and will be available for the next 28 days.

TOAD.ai is a “data-driven outdoor advertising agency powered by technology.”

It was founded by George Hintzen in 2017, and their focus is on consolidating all of the UK’s outdoor advertising locations and layering it with geo-spatial audience data.

Award-winning Architect George held computational roles at top UK offices Heatherwick Studio, Zaha Hadid and Wilkinson Eyre on groundbreaking projects in like the Bombay Sapphire Distillery and Battersea Power Station. He specialised in optimisation of complex geometries and integrated signage – communicative architecture. Drawing from his experiences, he moved into the world of Outdoor Advertising – where the built environment meets media. He loves retrofit infrastructure: Mobile phone masts, billboards and treehouses.

TOAD.ai

Featured image: TOAD.ai

Drawing Matter Writing Prize_ Deadline: June 19, 2020, 5pm

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Two cash prizes of £1000 and up to ten awards of £300 for runners-up.

Deadline for entries: 17.00 (GMT) 19 June 2020.

The Drawing Matter Trust is delighted to announce the Drawing Matter Writing Prize. The competition invites a coming generation of writers to consider what drawings reveal about the process of design, and the buildings or objects they represent. We hope to make this an annual event.

Entries to the competition may approach drawing as shorthand for describing any process of design. In this context the word ‘drawing’ is as much a verb as a noun, implying that a purpose exists – perhaps a building or an object – for which it is being made. Certainly, the ‘drawing’ itself may be something other than paper and pencil, a plan or section; it may encompass a sequence or series (such as a sketchbook), and a broad range of techniques, such as collage, photography, models, paintings and, of course, digital media.

Designers or artists are welcome to submit an essay on a drawing of their own. If you are writing about your own work, we are interested in hearing about a specific approach to drawing that you have incorporated into your own practice.

Above all else, we want everybody to write about what they are seeing, and to consider the act of looking itself.

Competition and Awards

The competition is open to anyone between the ages of 18­–40, with or without a background in architecture or design. We welcome a broad range of approaches towards writing, and voices from art history, the sciences and humanities, alongside practitioners – architects, designers, photographers, artists, students and writers.

Entrants to the Writing Prize should submit two texts:

  • A long-form text (1,000–1,500 words)
  • A short-form text (no more than 350 words)

Each text must address a different architectural or design drawing, or sequence of drawings; one of these texts must be on a work from the collection of Drawing Matter. For the long-form text, entrants may choose to include up to 3 additional illustrations.

Two prizes of £1000 each will be awarded, for the best single long- and short-form texts.

In addition, a minimum of five runners-up will each receive £300 – this may be for an entry in either category.

The winners, and other writers with outstanding entries, will be invited to publish their texts on our website. We also plan to incorporate many of the winning texts as an early volume in a series of printed publications, based on material published on drawingmatter.org.

Access to the Drawing Matter Collection

In addition to the drawings published on our public website, drawingmatter.org, entrants can find more material from the Drawing Matter collection through our closed-access catalogue. To look at the collection, register for catalogue access here, stating ‘Writing Prize’ in the ‘company name’ field of the form. If you require a high-resolution photograph of a drawing in the collection, please request one from image.requests@drawingmatter.org. (Entrants should note that our public website, drawingmatter.org, publishes drawings not only from within the collection but also from other sources, which are clearly captioned as such. Drawing Matter material can be verified on the collection website).

Judges

The Writing Prize will be judged by a panel of distinguished writers, scholars and practitioners, with a broad range of interests and experience. The judges will blind-read the texts; their decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the judging process.

All winners will be notified by email before the end of August 2020.

See the list of judges here.

More about Drawing Matter

Drawingmatter.org is a growing collection of texts that explore the role of drawing in architectural thought and practice. The majority of the drawings on the website are held in the physical archive of Drawing Matter, based in Somerset, UK. The website also publishes work from other collections, and by practitioners for whom drawing is part of their design process. New writing is published online every week with a selection of articles included in a monthly digital newsletter. Alongside digital projects, Drawing Matter has a robust print publishing programme.

How to enter

(1)

Purchase an entry ticket → Entry Ticket

You will receive an order number with your purchase (can’t find it? See advice here). Please make a note of this as it will be needed for your entry form and will allow us to circulate entries anonymously to the prize judges.

All proceeds from the entry tickets will be applied directly to student scholarships for our annual Architectural Drawing Summer School.

(2)

Download and complete the Writing Prize entry form → Drawing Matter Writing Prize 2020 Entry Form

(3)

Email your completed entry form, long-form and short-form text, and images to editors@drawingmatter.org. Texts and images should be formatted as follows:

Texts:

  • Both texts should be submitted as separate files. Each file name should include your order number and the type of text (short or long): for example, OrderNumberHere_Long-text.doc and OrderNumberHere_Short-text.doc.
  • Texts should be formatted as word documents, double-spaced, 12pt.
  • Numbered image captions should follow the body of each text.
  • Footnotes and bibliographies are not required.
  • Texts should be submitted in English.

Images:

  • Each file name should include your order number and the type of text (short or long) followed by the image number: for example, OrderNumberHere_Long-text_image1.jpeg.
  • Images should have a resolution of 300 dpi and should be .jpeg files.
  • You do not need to submit image files for drawings in the Drawing Matter collection, but they should be included in captions.

Featured image: Rem Koolhaas (*1944), Elia Zenghelis (*1937) and Zoe Zenghelis (*1937), Collage for Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972. Pen, ink, photo-collage in colour and black-and-white, on silver backing, 295 × 420 mm from drawingmatter.org.

ADAM Architecture Travel Scholarship 2020_Deadline: April 30, 2020

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

ADAM Architecture is inviting students to apply for the annual Travel Scholarship to support overseas research in architecture, architectural technology and urban design.

The closing date is 30th April 2020. The award of £2,000 supports overseas research in architecture, architectural technology and urban design.

Judges will be looking for a significant piece of original research work, and an outstanding contribution to architectural knowledge. The award is not focused on traditional architecture and the judges are stylistically neutral in their evaluation of the proposals.

The travel scholarship is open to students enrolled at a UK or International University or School of Architecture, studying RIBA Part I; applicants who are 3 years post their Part II qualification; to students studying a CIAT accredited degree, post-graduate course, or equivalent qualification.

First launched in 2005, the scholarship is now in its 15th year and has a proven track record of supporting students to travel overseas to further develop their current research interest or to kick-start something new, often outside of their studies.  A brief summary of the previous winners is on ADAM Architecture website.  Many past recipients have been invited to present their research at a public event hosted by ADAM Architecture.

Talking about his experience, previous Travel Scholarship winner, Sam Little who studied at the Architectural Association, said: 

The Scholarship was fantastic in giving me the impetus to fulfil a project which otherwise would have been left in the locker. It gave me the will and economic means to pursue a trip to Iran to look at 11th century Seljuq buildings. It was a trip which simply would not have been possible without the agency which the scholarship gave me. The whole process was thoroughly enriching and being encouraged to work with freedom helped to place an emphasis on the experience of the trip, rather than any rigid preconceived understanding of the subject.  I would encourage anyone thinking about applying to do so.

Full details and how to apply are available at: www.adamarchitecture.com/academic/travel-scholarship

Friday Technical Surgeries

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Each year, the final year MArch and Year 3 BA students are invited to attend the Friday Technical Surgeries, to help them develop the technical side of their design projects. 

The tutorials are organised by Dr Will McLean, and the University of Westminster (UoW) Technical staff is joined by the visiting structural engineers, environmental consultants and practising architects who act as consultants for the students. 

In attendance last Friday were:

  • Scott Batty (UoW)
  • Will McLean (UoW)
  • Andrew Whiting (HUT) (UoW)
  • Chris Leung (UCL) (UoW)
  • Paolo Cascone (UoW)
  • Alison McLellan (UoW)

Plus:

MArch DS22 tutors, Dr Yara Sharif and Dr Nasser Golzari, to screen their film alongside an interactive installation “Secrets of a Digital Garden” at the Berlinale Film Festival on Wednesday, February 19, 7pm at Betonhalle, Silent Green Kulturquartier, Berlin

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

MArch DS22 tutors, Dr Yara Sharif and Dr Nasser Golzari, have been invited to show their recent work Secrets of a Digital Garden at this year’s Berlinale Forum Expanded.

The work consists of a film and an interactive installation, previously exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019.

Secrets of a Digital Garden follows on the duo’s ongoing research by design, which aims to explore the hidden potentials of the Palestinians landscape, and the right to the rural. 
 
The work was produced in collaboration with Riwaq: Centre for Architectural Conservation, and is realised with the fantastic support of UNESCO, University of Westminster, Fabrication Lab, NG Architects, DOEN, Sweden/Sverige and PART.

The exhibition runs from February 19 to March 22.