School of Architecture + Cities Public Talk: “Process as Identity in Architecture” by a leading Brazilian architect Daniel Mangabeira (BLOCO Arquitetos) | Tuesday, June 11 at 18:00 (BST) in M416 (Robin Evans Room)

When: Tuesday, 11th of June 2024 at 6pm (BST)

Where: M416, Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS

Book via Eventbrite here.

In this public lecture, Daniel Mangabeira argues that architects play a key role as builders of social well-being. His award-winning practice, BLOCO Arquitetos, asserts the social role of the architect through a meticulous process of design and construction that refrains from any preconceived aesthetic. This approach will be illustrated by a wide range of projects.

Daniel Mangabeira graduated (with distinction) from the MA Architecture programme at the University of Westminster in 2013. He was subsequently elected President of the Council of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal District of Brazil. The work of BLOCO Arquitetos is often featured in the architectural press and has been widely presented across Latin America. This is their first talk in the UK.

The event is chaired by Davide Deriu, Reader in Architectural History and Theory at the University of Westminster. Everyone is welcome.

Symposium: Current Research in Architectural Humanities | Friday, May 17, 2024 at 18:00 (BST) at M416

When: Friday, 17th of May 2024 at 6pm (BST)

Where: M416, Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS

Book tickets via Eventbrite

Architectural Humanities is one of five research groups established by the School of Architecture and Cities in 2021. It focuses on the historical and cultural processes and practices of architecture. Founded on humanities-based methods and including interdisciplinary arts and social science approaches to research, our members address critical questions about architecture and its contexts. These include: archival and documentary analysis, theoretical debates, oral histories, visual studies, drawing, participatory research, installations and exhibitions.

https://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/groups-and-centres/architectural-humanities-research-group

The one-day symposium, organised by Davide Deriu and Kate Jordan (group convenors), will showcase research in progress by members of the group. It will feature a keynote lecture by Professor Christine Wall (Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow); a roundtable discussion, chaired by Dr Elizabeth Darling (Chair of the Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain); and additional contributions by external speakers. The event is open to all.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Featured image by Leonio Berto – mignon, 2016

Falling Away: A one-day symposium held together with the exhibition of Catherine Yass’ film works in Ambika P3

The symposium will bring together researchers and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines to discuss the agency of falling in contemporary culture. Metaphors of falling are often evoked to describe the current period of insecurity and instability. At the same time, the built environment reflects and in turns reproduces this state of suspension: while highrise construction reshapes the landscapes of cities around the world, including London, its impact on our perception of gravity is yet to be understood. Typically defined as ‘the force that makes objects fall toward the earth’, gravity is so pervasive that we may overlook the ways in which it conditions our daily lives, and how we abandon ourselves to its force – or resist it.

How do creative practices engage with the perception of gravity, balance and falling? Can they mediate our fears and desires to lose the ground? What links can be drawn between the vertiginous spaces of our cities and the conditions of social instability in which we live? These and other related issues will be addressed from a variety of perspectives drawing on art, architecture, design, geography, psychology, and dance. Structured around a series of conversations, the symposium will conclude with a panel discussion with the artist Catherine Yass.

The event is organised in conjunction with Falling Away, a major exhibition of Catherine Yass’s work in Ambika P3. Curated by Davide Deriu and Michael Mazière, the exhibition comprises seven vertiginous films of modern architectural structures that embody the institutions which built them. Spanning the past two decades, it is the first retrospective of the artist’s extensive body of film work in the UK. The joint events are aligned with the Vertigo in the City project based at the School of Architecture + Cities, University of Westminster.

Confirmed speakers

  • Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond, Artists-Researchers and Professors of Artistic Research, University of Applied Arts Vienna
  • Amy Butt, Practising Architect and Lecturer in Architecture, University of Reading
  • Emilyn Claid, Dance artist, director, performer and educator
  • John Golding, Professor of Applied Psychology, University of Westminster
  • Andrew Harris, Associate Professor in Geography and Urban Studies, University College London
  • Catherine James, Art Historian and Lecturer in Academic Practice, University of the Arts London
  • Michael Mazière, Ambika P3 curator and Reader in Film and Video, University of Westminster
  • Brendan Walker, Thrill Engineer and Professor of Creative Industries, Middlesex University
  • Catherine Yass, London-based artist
  • Convenor: Davide Deriu, School of Architecture + Cities, University of Westminster

View the Programme for the ‘Falling Away’ Symposium

View the Falling Away Exhibition Catalogue

Register for tickets for the Falling Away Symposium on 22nd October

Register for tickets for the private view of Falling Away on 21st October

View the Falling Away Exhibition Catalogue

Tickets

The event will be delivered as a webcast, with a limited number of tickets set aside for in person attendance in the Robin Evans Room – broken down into AM and PM slots.

Half of available tickets for in person attendance have been set aside for students, so we would much obliged if you could share details with them – and those who you think may find the event of interest. Those attending virtually are welcome to join the session at any point, and a link will be shared with registered attendees prior to the event.

A recording of each of the sessions will also be made available on the School of Architecture and Cities YouTube Channel shortly after the event.

SA+C & LFA: Thinking, Practising, Listening; Exploring Inclusion in Architecture | Monday, June 21, 2021 from 9:30 to 13:00 (BST)

This online symposium will focus on the importance to architectural practice and research of listening. To listen effectively is not just to hear: it means actively seeking perspectives from those people in society whose voices are often the least audible. In exploring a wide range of voices in architectural practice, theory and history, the symposium intersects with the themes of decolonisation and inclusion, which are embedded in the teaching and research culture of the University of Westminster.

The symposium will also focus on the role of universities in developing and promoting the practice of listening and will feature workshops and lightning presentations from students that explore reciprocal dialogue between teachers and learners within architectural education.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr Huda Tayob, Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on migrant, minor and subaltern architectures, the politics of invisibility in space, and the potential of literature to respond to archival silences. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and the digital podcast series and exhibition Archive of Forgetfulness (archiveofforgetfulness.com).

Huda will be speaking on Transnational Architectures of Care, through her research on Somali malls in South Africa and the US.

09:30 Introduction and opening

Kate Jordan & Shahed Saleem

9.45 Session 1

Jane Tankard & Design Studio 3.1

A collaborative visual and verbal presentation emerging out of conversations with students over 7 years. The meetings were structured around speaking and listening to thoughts on pedagogy, studio, reciprocity and notions of home.

Christine Wall

How are architectural histories silenced? This question is explored with reference to two ongoing studies, one a 1970s architectural collaborative in London, and the other the Little Aden Cantonment, the 1960s extension of British colonial military accommodation which became the largest fully modular project in the world.

Tumpa Husna Fellows

Through her practice based research, Tumpa asks how can architecture amplify the voices of underrepresented communities to enable spatial justice and create social value in places, buildings and neighbourhoods? How can designing inclusive spaces help us respond to the climate injustice?

5 min break

11.15 Session 2

Maria Kramer

Leyton Community Hub; a description of the ongoing process of negotiating the complex mix of stakeholders in this project, from student engagement, public consultations & council requirements. How are these various needs and aspirations understood and managed through processes of listening and engaging?

Davide Deriu

‘Beautiful idea; beautiful building; beautiful materials…but I have problems with vertigo.’

Do practising architects listen to prospective users? How can different perceptions and experiences of space be accounted for? Drawing on his ongoing research on architecture and vertigo, this presentation shall discuss how embodied subjectivities are often neglected in the design process.

Through selected examples, this presentation will situate the issue of vertigo in relation to a broad understanding of spatial experience, and argue that a more inclusive approach might be developed through listening and care.

Elantha Evans & Design Studio 11

An introduction to an experimental research session to re-frame design studios with the empathic imagination in mind.

5 min break

12.15 Session 3

Introduction by Samir Pandya, Assistant Head, School of Architecture + Cities

Keynote

Huda Tayob, University of Cape Town

Transnational Architectures of Care

Conversation

Click here to register for the event via Eventbrite

LFA Digital Festival: Falling Away – a prelude, 01 June – 30 June

This event is organised by Dr Davide Deriu (School of Architecture + Cities) and Dr Michael Mazière (CREAM), under Ambika P3 as a London Festival of Architecture partner institution.

This online event is the prelude to an exhibition of Catherine Yass’s films at Ambika P3. The exhibition, titled Falling Away, showcases a selection of Yass’s vertiginous films of architectural structures from the past 20 years. Initially scheduled in the LFA 2020 ‘Power’ programme, it has been postponed to the summer of 2021. Seven films will be brought together for the most comprehensive show of Yass’s work to date. The buildings in her films are undergoing demolition or construction, some are falling into disrepair: as they crumble, so too do the powers behind them. The viewer is drawn into dizzying spaces as the camera is turned upside down, plunged into water, lowered from cranes, buried under falling rubble. The exhibition addresses our society’s ambivalent relationship with modernity and the material structures that give it form. By addressing urgent issues around architecture and the institutions it embodies, it will contribute to current debates about how built environments shape our lives. In anticipation of this Ambika P3 show, we present one of Yass’s films, Royal London (2018), together with an essay written for the upcoming exhibition catalogue by Christopher Kul-Want.

To view this event please visit here.

Featured image: Still from Royal London (2018). Copyrights: Catherine Yass.

London Festival of Architecture: “Knowledge Territories”, Italian Cultural Institute, Monday 4th June, 19:00-20:30

As part of the London Festival of Architecture programme, Davide Deriu (Director of Research and MA Architecture course leader) will be chairing a panel on Knowledge Territories at the Italian Cultural Institute on the 4th June.

The authors of a recent book about the architecture of higher education will discuss (in English!) university buildings and the politics they reflect.

The event will consider how university architecture should respond to the new conditions under which higher education operates, as well as how architecture may be conceived as central to a substantial contemporary redefinition of higher education comparable to that of 1968, when Joseph Rykwert described the new universities of the time as archetypes of combined urban and educational values for their age.

They will be joined in conversation by Dr Clare Melhuish, Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory.

When: 4th June 2018, 19:00-20:30

Where: Italian Cultural Institute, 39 Belgrave Square, SW1X 8NX

More info and booking (free):

https://www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/event/knowledge-territories/

Featured mage: Photo by Stefano Graziani from LFA’s web-site

LATE Conversations #1 URBAN[scapes], Monday 5th March, 18:00-20:00, Robin Evans Room M416

LATE Conversations #1

Landscape, Architecture and Tourism Explorations

When: Monday 05 March 2018, 6-8pm

Where: Robin Evans Room [M416], Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

URBAN[scapes]

Staging the city: recreating the urban as eventscape

[Andrew Smith]
Like other theatrical metaphors, the idea of the ‘city as stage’ is commonly cited within urban and tourism studies. However, this interpretation treats events and the context in which they happen as separate entities when they are better understood as intertwined. This presentation outlines the contemporary use of public spaces for (planned) events and explores the idea of urban eventscapes – assemblages of people, buildings and event structures. It is easy to dismiss these as temporary phenomena, but there is evidence that festivals, sports events and exhibitions can have lasting effects on urban spaces, and that the built environment is being adapted to accommodate them.

Skywalking in the city

[Davide Deriu]
Ever since the advent of high-rise architecture, the modern city has been a distinct locus of vertiginous experience. Whilst the correlation between vertigo and tall buildings might at first appear to be an obvious one, it is in fact a variable function of ever-evolving techniques and materials, and depends on the psychosocial conditions that underlie the experience of space at a given place and time. The presentation explores the ambivalent concept of vertigo and its significance for contemporary architecture through concepts of transparency, experience, and kinaesthesia. Focusing on the ongoing trend for elevated glass platforms, it proposes that these design features constitute a kind of sixth façade that characterises the emergence of an ‘architecture of vertigo’.

City in flux: mobilities and places in station areas

[Enrica Papa]
Using an approach that considers station areas both as places and as nodes in the transport network, the talk addresses the role of station areas in Greater London, with the aim of supporting long-term integrated land-use and transport strategies at the regional scale. In fact, ‘Transit Oriented Development’ has also been widely advocated and applied in London; however, so far no study has systematically developed a TOD typology in the London context. This paper fills this gap. The main innovation of this application of the node-place is that it is applied in the day hours and the night hours. Using GIS, the paper analyses network connectivity (‘node values’) and geographically detailed data on amenity levels, job and employment densities (‘place values’), revealing opportunities for (i) land-use densification within catchment areas or (ii) increased network connectivity of the stations supporting the 24 hour London economy.

Urban architectural representation of post-conflict destination branding

[Maja Jovic]
For this talk, Maja is looking at the concept of ‘urban’ in architecture and national identity, and its relation to tourism in post-conflict countries. Today, these countries are transitional economies that brand themselves as touristic destinations in order to find a unique position on the world map. Maja is questioning the role of architecture in shaping the destination identity – in particular the dialogue between urban and rural. Political and cultural transformations have a spatial dimension and Maja tries to understand the way national identities are reshaped, reproduced and differentiated from one another through architectural analysis. The findings are illustrated with the post-conflict regions of South East Europe, their creation of national stories on one side and Europeanism on the other. The dialogue between modernisation and the traditional resulted in a change of represented destination identity and a shift of attitude towards traditional and modern age architecture.

Moderation

[Victoria Watson]

People

Andrew Smith is a Reader in Tourism and Events and co-leads the Tourism and Events Research Group. His research focuses on city events and urban tourism and he works in and between the fields of urban studies and tourism/event studies. His work has been published in a variety of journals including Urban Studies, ARQ, European Planning Studies and Annals of Tourism Research and he has written two books: Events and Urban Regeneration: The Strategic Use of Events to Revitalise Cities (Routledge, 2012) and Events in the City: Using Public Spaces as Event Venues (Routledge, 2016). His current work focuses on the contested use of London’s parks as venues for large scale events; and the significance of urban light festivals .

Davide Deriu is a Reader and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. He holds a PhD from UCL and was awarded grants from the AHRC, Yale University, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), where he curated the exhibition Modernism in Miniature. His main research interests lie at the intersection between spatial and visual cultures, and he has published on a wide range of subjects – from underground space to aerial photography. Recently, Davide was a Mellon Fellow on the CCA research program Architecture and/for Photography, and Rowe Lecturer at RIBA. He leads the interdisciplinary project Vertigo in the City, which received seed funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Enrica Papa is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Planning and Transport of the University of Westminster, joined the ETC Board in November 2017. She is the Course leader of the MSc in Transport Planning and Management and leads the transport group of the AESOP (European Association of Schools of Planning). Enrica’s research is positioned at the intersection of urban, transport and economic geography. She has published extensively on geography of mobility, planning for sustainable accessibility, transitions to low-carbon and low-energy living and societies. Within the AET Board, she will be responsible for the AET Marketing and Recruitment activities and will coordinate the AET Ambassadors network.

Maja Jovic’s interests in the city, nation and destination branding, and in image management and national identity, lead her to question how it shapes the built environment and is shaped by a conflict and its residue. She focuses on the power of brand management, how fluctuations in national stories reflect on the built environment and the intersection of tourism and architecture in creating a destination brand. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Branding Post-Conflict Cities and Nations’ explored how branding helps recreate an image of a post-conflict city or nation. Maja took an interdisciplinary approach to identify the relations between the effect of national image and nationalism to brands, power, the built environment and the image as a destination. Maja teaches across departments to undergraduate and postgraduate students – Tourism, Architecture, Architectural Technology, Planning, and Property and Construction.

Victoria Watson is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Westminster, a partner in Doctor Watson Architects (DWA) and a visiting tutor to the MA Architecture degree at the Royal College of Art. She has contributed articles about Mies van der Rohe to the Journal of Architecture and to the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society. She has written about colour theory for a variety of journals and magazines. In 2010 she won a Rome scholarship and in 2012 her book, Utopian Adventure: the Corviale Void was published. Her architectonic models, derived from the study of colour in Miesian architecture, have been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. She is currently writing a book about the cultural economics of architecture.

LATE Conversations is a series of events exploring the interactions between Landscape, Architecture and Tourism. It aims to engage an interdisciplinary conversation across the departments of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and foster dialogue between academics,/professionals and students from different disciplines engaged with the Landscape.

Format

18:00 – 19:00 introduction of session and speakers + interventions [10m each speaker]
19:00 – 19:30 extended conversation between guests and audience
19:30 – 20:00 drinks

Organisation: Westminster Architecture Society and Westminster Tourism Society.

Coordination: Duarte Santo and Helen Farrell

LATE conversations is a joint event of the Department of Architecture and the Department of Planning and Transport. Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Westminster.

#LATEconversations
#architectureandbuiltenvironment
#universityofwestminster
#urbanscapes