GREENwich Forum 2010

The GREENwich Forum has been running for a few years now, and has established its place in the London Architectural calender. I gave a paper there last year on future scenarios, Gregory Bateson and Extended Mind theory, in an interesting day that included great presentations by Rachael Armstrong, Alan Powers, and the event organiser Mark Titman. Mark intuits, and is researching through these events, a conception of a modern yet romantic metabolism with the non-human universe. This is useful work, and these annual events - which normally include a couple of presentations by recent students of Greenwich School of Architecture - are worth attending. The details are:

GREENwich FORUM
10:00 FRIDAY JANUARY 10th, 2010
Queen Anne Court room 280, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London SE10

“Today is the notion of poetic space as a wild place of otherness, unclaimed and unprogrammed simply a romantic desire? Does modern architecture as a more functionalconstructionneed a romantic notion of Nature? Is there an important place for Nature and romantic thinking in a quantum-digital age?”

“OPTIMISM, POWER AND CONCERN” by Mark Titman
Today the older 20th Century territories of architecture have become blurred and new alliances need mapping. It is no longer a matter of design philosophy or built form or even simply silky concepts which can be used to meaningfully denote or understand architecture. I suggest that it is the ’spirit’ in which work is undertaken, in person, in practice and in the application throughout the design and construction of space that must define architecture in our age of climate change.

“THE EDEN PROJECT” by Jolyon Brewis
Since opening in 2001, the Eden Project has become one of the most successful tourist attractions in England and a beacon for sustainable design and climate debate. It’s all a far cry from its previous life as a worked-out china clay pit. Join Jolyon Brewis, Managing Partner of Grimshaw, as he explores the design and development of Eden. Jolyon will address how the study of nature, combined with cuttingedge design, turned a derelict industrial site into one of the world’s largest greenhouses, capable of growing bananas in Southern Cornwall.

” 2KM LIGHT DENSITY GRADIENT LANDSCAPE” by Phil Watson
Phil Watson, thinker and lecturer at The Bartlett and Nottingham University will discuss the Surreal romance of an architecture surmised on the promises of new technologies. Here the alchemical feats of the imagination place architecture firmly back in the body; where these emergent technologies of: nano-mechanics, biological cell engineering and artificial nerve and skin growth allow for a fantastical testing: testing the old ideas of space with the creation of new limits and boundaries that ignore the staus quo once called environment.

“PROGRAMME FOR FUN” by Matt Cannon
“The historical evolution of man into a predominantly urban and industrial creature: an unthinking termite”; John Fowles
A second year project that explores Canary Wharf as a p[reprogrammed space designed as a habitat for a pre-programmed mind. Challenges provided bt nature are designed to stimulate and liberate the people that use these spaces every day, providing an exciting humourous release from the day-to day routine.

“THE PASTORALISTS” by Colin Harrison
Colin Harrison has been the curator of British art in the Ashmolean since 1995 and was one of the co-curators of the bicentenary exhibition on Palmer in 2005-6 at the B.M. and Met. Mus. New York. He has worked extensively on Palmer and the pastoral tradition including the romantic paintings of the movement.

“PRACTICAL INSANITY - COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN” by Jim Dodson
Partner Jim Dodson of “Various Architects” will present a series of real and competition projects that demonstrate their creative use of technology and innovation to create practical architecture. The projects presented will include: a 2.1 kilometer long retractable sound barrier powered by coffee grinds and solar power; the worlds largest mobile performance venue that features a structural inflatable skin; a 120m tall hay-bale cladd tower of massive-timber and fly-ash concrete in downtown Dallas, Texas; and a low-energy low-carbon office building for the west coast of Norway.”

“SERVER” by Alastair Parvin
Server is a large scale planning experiment based on a deceptively simple proposition: Could a motorway be self-sufficient? Working with existing processes, prices, communities and capacities the project takes a section of the M1 and investigates its redesign as a self-sufficient farming system (or ‘Industrial Ecology’); a belt of knowledge-intensive agriculture producing no waste and consuming minimal external resources. In getting there the project explores the role of knowledge in feeding cities, considers future forms of citizenship, casts doubt over our conception of urban design, and questions some of the fundamental assumptions which currently dominate green politics.

“PASTORALISM IN 18th CENTURY MUSIC” by Ann Van Allen
Anne Van Allen, lecturer at The Trinity College of Music, will discuss the naturalist tendancies and pastoral spaces evoked in classical music. The sublime elements of the pastoral idyll have been well expressed in music and the antique tradition of romanticism in music is adhered to in the pastoralist movement of music from the 18th century. Through the ages, music like architecture has taken inspiration from the natural world and the countryside in particular.