Tag: Lindsay Bremner

“Humanitarian Sediments”, Lecture by Professor Lindsay Bremner at Goldsmiths’ Visual Cultures Programme, Thursday, February 28, 17:00-19:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Thursday, 28th of February 2019, 17:00-19:00

Where: LG02, Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths, London SE14 6NW

This presentation will be about sediment and humanitarian violence. It will examine the response of the Bangladesh government to the influx of 600,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in 2017. Mobilising suspension as analytical method, it will argue that Bangladesh’s response has enlisted or ‘weaponised’ sediment, to both offer and undercut hospitality to the Rohingya, un-grounding them and heightening their political and material precariousness.

Event is free, no booking required.

Celebrating Geoffrey Bawa, Wednesday, March 13, 18:00-21:00, Room 416, Marylebone Campus

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Wednesday 13th of March 2019, 6pm – 9pm (Talk Starts at 6.30pm)

Where: University of Westminster, School of Architecture & Cities, Room 416, 4th Floor, Marylebone Campus, London NW1 5LS (near Baker Street Station)

 

Monsoon Assemblages has teamed up with the Friends of Sri Lanka to celebrate the work of Geoffrey Bawa.

Bawa (1919 – 2003) is regarded as one of the most in infuential Asian architects of his generation and a pioneer of a style that has become known as “Tropical Modernism”. We hope that staff and students in the School of Architecture + Cities will join us.

Booking is via Eventbrite at https://geoffreybawa. eventbrite.co.uk for a small cost, but there are some FREE places for staff and students at the School of Architecture + Cities. We ask that you kindly email Chamali Fernando at the Friends of Sri Lanka Association Chamali.FOSLA@gmail.com to have your name placed on the guest list.

At the event, architect Wendy de Silva and writer David Robson will look back on the life and work of Sri Lankan master architect Geoffrey Bawa. Both Wendy and David knew Geoffrey Bawa personally and will remember him with professional pride, personal anecdotes and joy. The evening will also incorporate the launch of David’s latest book: Bawa Staircases.

2019 marks the centenary of the birth of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. Bawa was born in Colombo in 1919 to parents of mixed Sri Lankan and European descent. He studied English at Cambridge and Law in London during the Second World War and then worked brie y as a lawyer in Colombo. In 1948, he bought an abandoned rubber estate near Bentota and set out to transform it into a Sri Lankan evocation of a classical European garden. It was this project that inspired him to become an architect. Returning to London, he qualified as an architect at the Architectural Association and, in 1957, became a partner in the Colombo practice of Edwards, Reid & Begg. He then embarked on a forty-year career in architecture, during which he created such masterpieces as the Bentota Beach Hotel, the Sri Lankan Parliament at Kotte, the Ruhunu University Campus and the Kandalama Hotel near Dambulla. Bawa’s career ended in 1998 when he was felled by a stroke and he eventually died in 2003. In 2001, he received the Aga Khan’s Award for a Lifetime’s Achievement in Architecture.

David Robson is a Professor of Architecture and must be the world’s leader in Bawa studies. From 2002, with the publication of his Geoffrey Bawa: the complete works to 2018 and the publication of Bawa Staircases, David has written four major books on Bawa, with more on his associates. He is the holder of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust Award for Lifetime Achievement and he has much to tell us. Copies of Bawa Staircases and other David Robson books will be available to purchase on the night.

Wendy de Silva is an award-winning architect who practices in London at the IBI Group. During the early 1980s, Wendy worked with Bawa on the design of the Ruhunu University Campus. Wendy is also one half of the Chance de Silva practice in London, a practice set up to explore the possibilities of architecture in interaction with other participants: artists, designers, musicians (and who can forget Laki Senanayake’s divine copper balustrade winding its way round the central staircase of Bawa’s Lighthouse Hotel at Galle; the elegant inhabitants of Sri Lanka grappling with occidental invaders, a figure playing a pipe at the very top – oriental calm in the face of violence – nor, amongst many such instances, the same artist’s delicious trees drawn through several storeys of the Triton Hotel at Ahungalla).

Lindsay Bremner & Chamali Fernando

Monsoon Assemblages & The Friends of Sri Lanka Association

l.bremner@westminster.ac.uk  Chamali.FOSLA@gmail.com

Featured image: Geoffrey Bawa, Steel Corporation Offices and Housing, 1966–1969

Expanded Territories Reading Group: “Improvised Lives” by AbdouMaliq Simone, Tuesday, April 9, 18:00, M330

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The Expanded Territories Reading Group will be held on Tuesday 9th of April at 18.00 in M330, Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster NW1 5LS.

Professor Lindsay Bremner will introduce AbdouMaliq Simone’s Improvised Lives (2018).

The poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In this important new book AbdouMaliq Simone portrays urban districts as sites of enduring transformations that mediate between the needs of residents not to draw too much attention to themselves and their aspirations to become small niches of exception.

Suggested future titles are:

Amitav Gosh (2016). The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cadena, M. de la and Blaser, M., eds. (2018). A world of many worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Viriasova, I. (2018). At the limits of the political: affect, life, things. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Architecture Research Forum: “Sediments of the Rohingya” Lindsay Bremner, Thursday, November 22, 13:00-14:00, Erskine Room, 5th Floor

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: 13:00-14:00, Thursday, 22nd of November

Where: Erskine Room (M523), 5th Floor, Marylebone Campus

Lindsay Bremner is Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture + Cities and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded Monsoon Assemblages project.

Design Agency within Earth Systems Symposium, Architectural Association, Friday 26th of October, 9:30-18:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Friday, 26th of October 2018, 9:30 – 18:00

Where: AA Lecture Hall, Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

 

8,000 meters above sea level exists what climbers call the ‘death zone’. This altitude marks the limit for human habitation, above which our species cannot survive. We thrive in the ‘life zone’ – the earth’s land surfaces and oceans, its geological layers beneath, the dynamic atmosphere above – all affected by gravitational and magnetic forces beyond. This living world is constantly being transformed by our social, economic and political interactions revealing our intricate dependencies on the the earth and its systems.Terms such as ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ have drawn attention to the role of political economy in transforming these earth systems and positioned design as a major geological force shaping the planet.

The ‘Design Agency within Earth Systems’ symposium invites participants to look through these planetary lenses to reflect upon the complicity of design in the destruction of the planet; to question the two dimensional, land based political technologies, by which we order our lives and our relations to the earth; to explore the material dimensions of air, ground and ocean as inter-twinings of socio-political and earth systems; and to imagine relations between socio-political and earth systems differently through design.

 

Architecture Research Forum: “What About Design?” Kester Rattenbury, Thursday 17th May, Erskine Room, 5th Floor, 13:00-14:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

KESTER RATTENBURY: “WHAT ABOUT DESIGN?” The Research Assessment and You

Westminster has an amazing body of active, diverse, internationally recognised staff teaching our students design. Their outputs – your outputs – include buildings, competition designs, exhibitions, books, collaborations, products, blogs, new ways of working. This work is recognised locally, nationally and internationally. But is it research?

Arguably in all case, and demonstrably in some, yes, it is. And when the next national University research appraisal, the REF, takes place, all staff will be considered to see what their ‘research outputs’ have been, and will have to make submissions demonstrating this.

In the last REF, Architecture was able to submit Design Portfolios of selected staff projects for the first time. This Research Forum opens the discussion on how this will work – and whether we can in any way shape the process so as make the work of our remarkable staff a more more visible part of our School.

This is a short, three part event to open the discussion:

*Professor Lindsay Bremner and Professor Susannah Hagan will give short accounts of how the process worked last time;

*Toby Burgess and Arthur Mamou-Mani will give short presentations of the range of work they do, as an example of the range of our staff work

*Open discussion chaired by Kester Rattenbury on how we might approach Design Folios in the next REF and whether we could turn any part of the exercise to our advantage.

When: 17 May 2018, 13.00–14.00

Where: Erskine Room, 5th Floor

The Architecture Research Forum is a seminar series hosted by the Architecture + Cities Research Group where staff present work-in-progress for discussion.

ALL WELCOME

Book Launch: ‘Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict’ by Yara Sharif, 5th April, Robin Evans Room M416, 18:30-21:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: 5th April 2018, 6.30pm – 9.00pm

Where: Robin Evans Room M416, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS

Join the author Yara Sharif and a number of outstanding speakers and panellists for the book launch of Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict published by Routledge.

Robert Mull, Sarah Beddington, and Tanzeem Razak will join the author with presentations on offering unconventional alternatives while dealing with contested space.

The author and speakers will be in discussion and open Q&A with panellists, Lindsay Bremner, Harry Charrington, Murray Fraser, Nasser Golzari, Kim Trogal, Nouha Hansen and Rim Kalsoum on themes raised in the book concerning spatial resilience, politics and place.

Speakers

  • 6.30 pm Harry Charrington Welcome
  • 6.45 pm Yara Sharif Introduction to the book
  • 7.00 pm Robert Mull On Offering Alternatives
  • 7.15 pm Tanzeem Razak Subverting the Black Narrative in Post-Apartheid Context’
  • 7.30 pm Sarah Beddington The Logic of the Birds

7.45 pm Panel discussion and open Q&A joined by

  • Lindsay Bremner
  • Harry Charrington
  • Murray Fraser
  • Nasser Golzari
  • Kim Trogal
  • Rim Kalsoum
  • Nouha Hansen

8.15 pm Drinks

Copies will be sold at discounted price.
The event is free and open to the public

About the Book

Architecture of Resistance investigates the relationship between architecture, politics and power, and how these factors interplay in light of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It takes Palestine as the key ground of spatial exploration, looking at the spaces between people, boundary lines, documents and maps in a search for the meaning of architecture of resistance. Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse that can nourish the Palestinian spaces of imagination, the author reinterprets the land from a new perspective, by stripping it of the dominant power of lines to expose the hidden dynamic topography born out of everyday Palestine. It applies a hybrid approach of research through design and visual documentary, through text, illustrations, mapping techniques and collages, to capture the absent local narrative as an essential component of spatial investigation.

Endorsement

In this subtle, compassionate, and clear-eyed book, Yara Sharif offers architecture as both a tactic of physical resistance and a contesting form of knowledge and possibility – a critical mnemonic for a culture under erasure. Her profound mapping of Palestine beautifully harmonize space and life and, with courageous modesty, advance creativity and improvisation in defense of a beleaguered, precious normality. (Michael Sorkin)

History and Theory Open Lecture Series: Peg Rawes “Housing, Biopolitics, and Care” – Tuesday 6th February, 18:00, Robin Evans Room (M416)

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The History and Theory Open Lecture Series for the academic year 2017/2018 begins today, with Peg Rawes‘ lecture “Housing, Biopolitics, and Care”.

When: Tuesday, 6th February, 18:00

Where: Robin Evans Room (M416), Marylebone Campus

Peg Rawes is a Professor in Architecture and Philosophy, Programme Director of the MA Architectural History, and a PhD Supervisor for Architectural Design and Architectural History and Theory PhD Programmes at the Bartlett, UCL. Trained in art history and philosophy, her research and teaching focus on material, political, technological and ecological histories and theories of contemporary architecture and art. She regularly gives talks in the UK, EU and overseas, and has recently been invited to give lectures at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, University of Regensburg, University of Minnesota, Iowa State University, The British School in Rome, KTH Stockholm, London School of Economics, KADK Copenhagen and TU Delft.

Other speakers in the series will include:

  • 20th February, 17:15, M416: Emma Cheatle (Newcastle University) “As/saying Architecture: A Ficto-Spatial Essay of Lying-in”
  • 27th February, 18:00, M416: Tilo Amhoff (University of Brighton) “Architectural History and Theory Between Labour and Capital, 1967-1977”
  • 6th March, 18:00, M416: Lindsay Bremner, Andrew Peckham, Douglas Spencer (University of Westminster) “On Archipelago: Three Perspectives”
  • 13th March, 18:00, M416: Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh) “Auto-Affection: On Michael Webb’s Sin Centre and the Drawing of Mobility”

Architecture Research Forum: MONASS “Reporting from the Field” with Lindsay Bremner, Beth Cullen and Christina Geros_19th October, Erskine Room, 5th Floor, 13:00-14:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

MONASS: Reporting from the Field

With: Lindsay Bremner, Beth Cullen and Christina Geros

Monsoon Assemblages is a five-year-long European Research Council funded research project investigating relations between rapid urbanisation and changing monsoon climates in South Asian cities. The MONASS team spent six weeks in Chennai over the summer conducting field work for the project. In this seminar, we will briefly sketch out the monsoon assemblage thesis and the questions that framed this field work. We will take you to a number of the sites we studied and discuss how our engagement with them has both challenged and extended our thesis and shaped future work.

Lindsay Bremner is a Professor and Beth Cullen and Christina Geros are Research Fellow at the University of Westminster

Where: Erskine Room (M/523), Marylebone Campus

When: Thursday 19 October, 13:00–14:00

ALL WELCOME!

OPEN2017: The Future of Architecture _ Part 2/2

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Hello and welcome to Part 2 of our report on OPEN2017.

Here we bring you some of the MArch RIBA Part II, Interior Design (BA Hons) and Architectural Technology (BSc Hons) students’ work, which had been on show in our Marylebone studios from June 15th until July 2nd.

 

MArch RIBA Part II

The MArch programme is underpinned by critical agendas, which through its studio culture, are explored as speculative realities. […] The evolving nature of the city, environmental intervention, digital craft, cinematic investigations of space, chance operations, spaces of conflict, industrial regeneration – these are just some of the themes explored by staff and students. (Darren Deane, Course Leader, OPEN2017 Catalogue)

 

DS10 lead by Toby Burgess and Arthur Mamou-Mani believes that architecture should be fun and is obsessed with giving the students an opportunity to build their own projects in the real world. The studio is focused is on physical experiments tested with digital tools for analysis, formal generation and fabrication. This year, students worked on three different briefs: From Symbols to Systems: Pavilion Proposal, Pavilion Construction and The Big Plan. The three briefs are 3 steps towards a creation of a pavilion for Burning Man 2017. This year’s field trip was to the utopian city of Auroville and the many temples of Hampi Valley.

 

DS11 lead by Andrew Peckham, Dusan Decermic and Elantha Evans, had chosen Budapest as the location and focus of their studio projects this year. This choice was directly related to an initial interest in the constitution of twin cities, where twinning as a theme might be understood at different scales: from a transnational context to that of the city itself, its urban districts and interiors. The studio developed three short study project themes, however the main Year One design project was Reconfiguring the Baths, and the Year Two design thesis associated with Architectures of Stasis and Flux. Both were introduced before the visiting Budapest and conducting a city survey.

 

DS12 lead by Ben Stringer, Peter Barber and Maria Kramer, focused on imagining and designing densely populated and ‘publicly owned’ city island villages in the Thames Estuary, a project that intersects issues of housing, industry, ecology and environment. A key issues that studio deals with is a severe shortage of housing in London and the construction of the Thames Tideway ‘super-sewer’, which will help bring new life to estuary ecology. Both were taken as catalysts for imagining new and better modes of existence and new ways of designing the cities. At the beginning of the second semester students went on a field trip to India, where they visited three big cities: Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai.

 

DS13 lead by Andrew Yau and Andrei Martin operates as an applied think-tank, performing cultural analysis and design research. This year the studio focused on the role, relevance and political agency of architecture in contemporary cultural landscape defined by affect, mood, atmosphere and sensation. This was done through the context of Hong Kong’s urban transformation.

 

DS15 lead by Sean Griffiths, Kester Rattenbury and Ruby Ray Penny studies ‘chance’ as a design method via the transposition into architectural design of the American composer John Cage’s aleatoric techniques for musical composition. The studio’s approach encourages students to divest themselves of existing prejudices, tastes and preconceptions in the development of inventive design processes that challenge the underlying assumption that design is rational, linear and preordained activity predicated on intentionality.

 

 

DS16 lead by Anthony Boulanger, Stuart Piercy and Callum Perry returned from a sabbatical this year to continue to build on an ethos that challenges students to create experimental spatial design project that are informed by a critical response to social, cultural, political and economic contexts with an emphasis on an engagements with materials and an understanding of craft. The year began with an intense 5-week creative collaboration with the ceramics expert Jessie Lee at the Grymsdyke Farm. From there the investigation shifted to Porto, Portugal, which became a base for the main individual design project, where students conceived their own briefs and conducted their research.

 

DS18 lead by Lindsay Bremner and Roberto Botazzi has been participating in the research agenda of Monsoon Assemblages since 2016, a 5-year ERC funded project taking place in three cities in South Asia: Chennai, Dhaka and Delhi. These cities are places where neoliberal development is conspiring with changing monsoon patterns to produce floods, heatwaves, outbreaks of disease or water shortages and making urban life increasingly vulnerable.  In 2016/17 the studio began simulating monsoon rain as a way to develop its programme and aesthetics. The students visited Chennai where they were hosted by the School or Architecture and Planning at Anna University.

 

DS20 lead by Gabby Shawcross and Stephen Harty uses film to design and represent architecture. The aim of the studio is to explore animated relationships between architecture and occupants, simulate moving experiences of space, describe dynamic events and speculate on future scenarios. The year the students looked at motion in architecture and architecture in motion. They made journeys through space (quick direct routes and choreographed spatial sequences) in search of architecture that permits encounter and elicits delight.

 

DS21 lead by Clare Carter, Gill Lambert and Nick Wood is interested in edgelands. Working within a post-industrial landscape, the studio made a proposition for revitalising and re-imagining the town of Doncaster and its former mining colonies. The year began with a forensic study of the land, resulting in richly illustrated mappings, followed by production of artefacts which came as a result of working with the material culture of local communities. The major design project Doncaster Works had students speculating on the idea of a resurgent Doncaster, whether to make a new civic space, repurpose an existing structure or suggest a new industrial infrastructure for the town and its environs.

 

DS22 lead by Nasser Golzari and Yara Sharif aims to create a strong link between the practice, research and academia, so this year the studio continued ‘research by design’ journey across ‘absent’ and uncertain landscapes where time and mobility have become irrelevant. Looking at the Mediterranean sea as a prototype for hyper-connected and enduringly fragile world of present, leading to the edges of the Red Sea, Dead Sea and Persian gulf, the students tried to unpack the and expose the hidden layers and dynamic potential of coastal cities.

 

Light and Flight is a collaborative project between DS22, Palestine Regeneration Team (PART) and Golzari-NG Architects, in collaboration with Amos Trust. Exhibited at the OPEN2017, the project was also part of London Festival of Architecture (LFA). The installation celebrates notion of memory – this year’s theme at the LFA.

 

Interior Architecture (BA Hons)

Interior architecture is a distinct context-based practice concerned with re-reading, re-using and altering an architectural shell. Whether at the scale of the city, a building, or a room, the ‘interiorist’ always starts with something and within something. By altering those structures, Interior Architecture allows a building to have many different lives. London is our campus and projects this year included study spaces in the Victoria and Albert Museum, installations at Wilton’s Music Hall, live-work dwellings on Columbia Road and a broadcasting facility in Unity House, Woolwich. (Ro Spankie, Course Leader, OPEN2017 Catalogue)

 

Year 1: lead by Lara Rettondini (Module Leader), Sue Phillips, Yota Adilenidou, Allan Sylvester, Matt Haycocks

In the first year, students on the BA Interior Architecture course are introduced to underlying concepts and principles associated with the discipline and learn fundamental processes, skills and techniques relevant to conceive and develop, resolve and communicate spatial design proposals. They are also get to grips with the use of graphic design, CAD and 3D modelling software, as well as the Faculty’s Fabrication Lab. The projects undertaken over the course of the first year range from short-term tasks in semester one, followed by a study space design for researcher-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the interior design of a small building in semester two.

 

Year 2: lead by Matt Haycocks, Mike Guy, Mohamad Hafeda, Tania Lopez Winkler, Alessandro Ayuso (semester one includes: Julia Dwyer, Diony Kypraiou, Ro Spankie) 

This year the students were asked to look at two very different buildings: Wilton’s (a Victorian music hall in London’s East End) and Unity House (a marine engineering workshop on the banks of the Thames in Woolwich). Both studio projects were focused on the role of the existing building fabric in the process of regeneration, but also the role politics and the place play in interpreting the present and imagining the future. In semester one the students joint the third year students to work on the ideas related to domesticity and home, then worked on design proposals for the temporary inhabitation of Wilton’s Music Hall and finally in semester two they devised their own proposals for the adaptation and reuse of Unity House.

 

Year 3: lead by Ro Spankie, Alessandro Ayuso, Diony Kypraiou, Matt Haycocks (semester one includes: Julia Dwyer, Mike Guy, Mohamad Hafeda, Tania Lopez Winkler)

Third year students started this academic year working together with second year students on a joint project Home Acts. The aim was to explore an idea of home constructed through acts and rituals, rather than brick and mortar. Their own experience of home was then rehoused to a public realm, culminating into an installation and/or performance at Wilton’s Music Hall. The final Major Project in BA Architecture is self derived with students selecting their site and setting their programme.

 

Architectural Technology (BSc Hons)

Architectural Technology offers specialism in the technological, environmental, material and detailing decisions necessary to solve design problems. It requires sound understanding of design process, design and architectural composition, construction technology, and management tools for the effective communication of design information. (Virgina Rammou, Course Leader, OPEN2017 Catalogue)

This year, the second year students were asked to design a nursery school for 85 children and the third year students a new building for White Cube Galleries.

Year 2: lead by Adam Thwaites, Paul Kalkhoven, Tabatha Harris Mills, Virginia Rammou

Year 3: lead by Adam Thwaites, Paul Smith, Tabatha Harris Mills, Virginia Rammou

 

Make sure you like and follow our Instagram and Twitter pages, as we plan to reflect back on the OPEN2017 throughout the month of July.

Happy summer everyone!