Tag: MArch Dissertation

Congratulations to Charlotte Penny, former MArch student in the SA+C, on receiving the “Highly Commended” IHBC Gus Astley Award for her MArch dissertation “Conservation Theory and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Manifesto: The Red House and the Contest between the Theoretical and Practical Nature of Conservation”

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Charlotte was mentored by Dr Kate Jordan, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture + Cities.

Dr Kate Jordan, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Westminster, said: ‘Charlotte mined a variety of sources to produce a thought-provoking analysis of contemporary conservation practice and theory. Her work makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship of architectural heritage.’

Charlotte Penny said: ‘I am delighted to have received the ‘Highly Commended’ Gus Astley Student Award. I would like to sincerely thank the IHBC for the recognition and the opportunity to attend the Brighton School, as well as Dr Kate Jordan from the University of Westminster for her uplifting support and shared enthusiasm for my research.’

‘I very much enjoyed researching and writing my dissertation, in particular delving into archives and finding fascinating resources. The question of ‘the contest between the theoretical and practical nature of conservation’ was the subject of the dissertation, which centred on the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’ Manifesto and more specifically with the ongoing conservation of the historic fabric at William Morris’ Red House.’

‘I learned that philosophy and practice appear to only touch the surface of conservation and as such, conservation cannot solely be considered as three dimensional; the fourth dimension of time must be taken into account. Many factors are involved in the consideration of conservation work and custodians have to balance a wide range of often conflicting constraints, whilst also acting as faithful guardians of the United Kingdom’s shared heritage.’

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Rhiain Bower wins RIBA President’s Dissertation Medal 2017

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Congratulations to Rhiain Bower, our MArch student who won the RIBA President’s Dissertation Medal 2017 for her thesis ‘Baricsio: The Slate Quarrymen’s Barracks in North West Wales’.

Tutored by Professor Harry Charrington, Rhiain used a combination of fieldwork, archival data, newspaper clippings, poetry and local accounts, to write a compelling study of the 19th-century barrack dwellings constructed for workers at a slate quarry in Wales. You can see parts of Rhiain’s dissertation here.

‘The remote architecture was not particularly well-documented at the time, so Bower combined her own visual documentation with accounts gleaned from the time to draw a portrait of the harsh conditions experienced by the quarrymen who lived in the stark barracks from week to week for the opportunity of a salary.’

This is the fourth year in a row that a student from the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment has won an award in the RIBA President’s Medals. An outstanding achievement!

Douglas Spencer’s “Architecture After California” published on e-flux architecture

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

“Architecture After California” is an essay written by Douglas Spencer and recently published on e flux architecture, as part of their Positions section.

Read an excerpt from the essay below, or access full text here.

 

Neoliberalism delegitimates participation in the political on the ethical grounds that all planning leads to dictatorship, and on the ontological ones of the “necessary ignorance” of human beings. California’s “tools of personal liberation” further the depoliticizing ends of neoliberalism, both in the conditions of temporality they impose, and in their tendency to atomize the social into an aggregate of hyper-connected individuals constituted, as such, by their investments in capital and its technological apparatus. Depoliticization, rather than some unfortunate and unforeseen outcome of an originally radical counterculture, is inherent to it.17 Though McGuirk might lament that the original “spirit of the counterculture” was latterly “recast as a techno-utopian entrepreneurialism,” Stewart Brand, the author of this movement’s bible, the Whole Earth Catalog, was always clear enough in his disavowal of the political.18 As Felicity D. Scott observes, in her Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency, Brand notably refused to protest the US bombing of Vietnam and campaigned on a platform of “environment yes, politics no.”19 The Whole Earth Catalog also provided the counterculture with the slogan perhaps best capturing it antithetical relationship to any politics of collective solidarity when, as McGuirk notes, Catalog editor Fred Richardson declaimed “workers of the world, disperse,” reversing Marx and Engels’ “Workers of the world, unite!”

 

Douglas Spencer is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2016). He teaches and writes on critical theories of architecture, landscape and urbanism at the Architectural Association and at the University of Westminster, where he also leads the MArch Dissertation module.