Open Studio is an interactive project run by the School of Architecture + Cities at the University of Westminster to make its design, research and practice-based work available online while it is happening. The site acts as a real time teaching and learning environment in which the work of both students and staff is curated and documented – the work of its design studios, or its other teaching and research groups and workshops. Read more in Blog, follow us on Twitter and like us on Instagram.
Monsoon Assemblages will launch Monsoon as Method: Assembling Monsoonal Multiplicities (Actar 2022) online on 8 June, 13.00 – 14.30 (BST). Do join us to celebrate the publication of the book.
At the launch, Lindsay Bremner, Christina Geros, Harshavardhan Bhat, Anthony Powis and John Cook will be joined by Edd Wall, Alfredo Ramirez, Karen Coelho, Pamila Gupta and Jonathan Cane to discuss the book and its methods.
To attend, register using the Eventbrite.
The Architecture and Cities Climate Action Taskforce (ArCCAT) has developed an exciting, slightly-longer-than-a-week programme of events between October 18th and October 28th to support the University’s Sustainability Month, a lead-in to COP 26 in Glasgow at the beginning of November.
Go here for further details of the University’s programme: here: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-university/vision-mission-and-values/sustainability-month.
The ArCCAT programme is as follows:
Cartographies of the Monsoon Exhibition Opening
Venue: Gallery Café, 309 Regents Street, W1B 2HW
Lindsay Bremner in conversation with Tom Corby, Associate Dean of Research, Central St Martins.
This exhibition will show a selection of the maps produced by John Cook for Monsoon Assemblages, a research project in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster funded by the European Research Council between 2016-2021. The project drew on the environmental humanities, the natural sciences and the spatial disciplines to develop an understanding of the entanglements of the monsoon in everyday life, politics and planning in Chennai, Delhi, Dhaka and Yangon, four of South Asia’s rapidly growing cities. The maps were mechanisms through which the project team constructed understandings of the materiality of the monsoon and the many mechanisms that drive it.
What about ‘the other half’ of the ‘UN sustainability goals’?
Venue: Studio
UoW students-as-co-creators project team 2021: Dana Al Khammach, Elantha Evans, Rebecca Kelly, James Mason and Lavinia Peninno.
Join us for a curated, interactive and enjoyable 15-20 min session anytime between 12.30-14.30 on Monday 25th October 2021. This is about what YOU think we can do together, and is part of a wider project about architecture, empathy and the empathic imagination. Come along! And sign up here for more info on the project and future collaborations.
Offered as part of ‘Sustainable Disclosures’ // Expanding architecture education to better nurture people, places and practices for sustainable, inclusive futures (http://eepurl.com/hFy9q1).
Launch of Design Competition for a material reuse station for the studios
Venue: Studio
Doiny Kypraiou, Stefania Bocoletti, Paolo Zaide and Tabatha Mills.
For both students and architectural designers, the physical model is a manifestation of ideas. The act of physical model-making is central to architectural education and our studios. It presents the opportunity to test, explore, speculate, compose and further the design process. How can you as students begin to challenge wasteful practice? Can we make our studio practice more circular?
Five teams of 4 L5 students each, drawn from each of the undergraduate degrees (Interiors, Architecture, AED, Technology) will participate in this design challenge for a week.
The King’s Cross journey to carbon neutrality
Venue: Robin Evans Room (M416) and online; book at Eventbrite: https://www. eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-kings-cross-journey-to-carbon-neutrality-tickets-183433162527
Organiser and Moderator: Johannes Novy
Speaker: Stephen Kellett, Sustainability Manager, Ardent Services LLP
Discussant: Roudaina Alkhani
The King’s Cross Estate is one of Europe’s most significant regeneration projects – this talk will highlight the key decisions made from the projects inception through to the design of its buildings and the management in operation that have enabled it to achieve carbon neutrality, on its journey to net zero carbon.
Opening of the ArCCAT Sustainable Design + Research Exhibition
Launch of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Campaign
Venue: Marylebone Learning Platform
Speaker: Peter Bonfield
Curators: Lindsay Bremner, Grace Lancto, François Girardin and David Scott, with the assistance of Chris Meloy and John Whitmore.
An exhibition of staff and student work from the School of Architecture and Cities supporting sustainability goals accompanied by the launch of a Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Campaign by the Fabrication Lab and the University’s Estates team.
Practicing Sustainability: from Portfolio to Practitioner
Venue: Robin Evans Room (M416) and online | to book tickets please go to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/practicing-sustainability-from-portfolio-to-practitioner-tickets-191649176847
Organiser and Moderator: Harry Charrington
Speakers: Chris Morgan; John Gilbert Architects, Glasgow; Gordon O’Connor-Read; Rural Urban Synthesis Society and Laing O’Rourke.
How do you take the ideas and commitment of your student portfolio into architectural practice? How can you build a career that reinforces your ideals and aims, rather than compromises them? These two talks, by architects at very different stages of their careers will illustrate ‘how they do sustainable practice’, and the challenges and success they have had in addressing the concerns they had as students through their built projects.
Environmental Design Sourcebook Book Launch and Panel Discussion
Venue: Room M416 and available on https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/
Organisers: Will McLean and Pete Silver
To coincide with Climate Action Week and the recent publication of Environmental Design Sourcebook: Innovative Ideas for a Sustainable Built Environment (RIBA Publish- ing, 2021), the authors Will McLean and Pete Silver will host a book launch and panel discussion. The discussion will feature contributors from the publication including industry collaborators, and University of Westminster staff and student researchers: Kirsten Haggart (Waugh Thistleton), Rosa Schiano-Phan, Guy Sinclair, Urangua Sodnamjamts, Pete Silver and Will McLean.
This panel discussion about design for climate change is the first of a planned series exploring knowledge transfer networks and partnerships with industry. These discussions are hosted by the University of Westminster (on and off-site) and are supported by Dr Stephanie Lasalle from the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office.
For details contact Will McLean: w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk
When: Wednesday, 9th of June 2021, 16:00-18:00 (BST)
Join us for an online event that celebrates University of Westminster‘s work that is being exhibited at the prestigious 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale (22nd May-21st Nov).
Academics based within the College of Design, Creative and Digital Industries have co-produced three different installations to respond to the theme: How will we live together?
At the event, we will hear more about the ideas underpinning each piece of work, and – given the fundamental themes they address – discuss how architecture and practice based research can help us to better understand the world’s most pressing challenges.
Following an introduction to the three installations, Ifor Duncan, an academic based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, will respond to the work. These contributions will be followed by a panel discussion and questions from the audience.
More details about the installations and the academics involved are provided below.
Monsoon Assemblages (led by Lindsay Bremner) and Office of Experiments (led by Neal White) have created an immersive installation that challenges and redefines ideas of border, scale and agency. It draws on climate data and field work to convey how climate change and the Anthropocene are resulting in increasing monsoon volatility, shorter rainy seasons and more frequent extreme weather events. The installation investigates these events through the flight of the Globe Skimmer dragonfly that follows the monsoon from east Africa to southeast Asia and back again. Video footage of the dragonfly collected during field work is projected into the exhibition space highlighting the vulnerability of the dragonfly to shifting monsoonal dynamics.
In a collaboration with the V&A Museum, Shahed Saleem’s Pavilion looks at the self-built and often undocumented world of adapted mosques to explore contemporary multiculturalism in London. The work explores three different case studies that illuminate stories of immigration, identity, and community aspiration. The cases are the Brick Lane mosque, a former Protestant chapel then Synagogue; Old Kent Road mosque housed in a former pub; and Harrow Central mosque, a purpose-built space that sits next door to the converted terraced house it used to occupy. The Pavilion is partly carpeted, as in a mosque, and these stories are explored through 3D architectural reconstructions, filmed interviews and photographs.
The African Fabbers School video-installation project, curated by Paolo Cascone and Maddalena Laddaga, proposes an innovative research by practice agenda for the next generation of European and African architects. The African Fabbers School [AFS] is an itinerant laboratory of ecological design and self-construction for community-oriented projects between Europe and Africa. This ecosystem of site-specific projects has structured an abacus of paradigmatic design to build modus operandi based on a learning by doing methodology. Thanks to the interaction between people from different backgrounds (including African artisans, local communities, European students) the [AFS] investigates the relationships between traditional knowledges, advanced design processes and digital manufacturing.
Respondent
Ifor Duncan is a Post-doctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is a writer and inter-disciplinary researcher, with a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. His research concerns the relationships between political violence and watery spaces and materialities. Previously Ifor taught at the CRA and in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.
Monsoon [+ other] Grounds is the third in a series of symposia convened by the Monsoon Assemblages project. It will comprise a key-note address, inter-disciplinary panels, and an exhibition. The event will bring together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines to engage in conversations about geologies, soils, histories, spatialities, and modifications of monsoon [+ other] grounds.
The confirmed keynote speaker is:
Tim Ingold, Professor and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His early work involved ethnographic research amongst the Skolt Saami of northeast Finland. This led to a more general concern with human-animal relations. Most recently, he has been working on the connections between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, conceived as ways of exploring the relations between human beings and the environments they inhabit, as mutually enhancing ways of engaging with our surroundings. Ingold is author of numerous books, anthologies and essays, including, most recently, The Life of Lines (Routledge, 2015) and Anthropology: Why it Matters (Polity Press, 2018).
15.30 Registration / Tea
15.45 Welcome: Simon Joss, University of Glasgow
16.00 – 17.00 Exhibition walk-about led by John Cook
Exhibitors: Alexandra Arenes, Matt Barlow, Blue Temple, Hari Byles, Corinna Dean, DS18 students, Tumpa Fellows, MONASS, Ben Pollock
17.00 – 18.00 [multi]grounds
Chair: Ed Wall, University of Greenwich
Lindsay Bremner, MONASS: On sediment as method
Ifor Duncan, Goldsmiths College: Sedimentary Witness
18.30 Keynote Lecture: Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen
Chair: Lindsay Bremner
09.45 Registration / Coffee
10.00 Welcome + introduction: Lindsay Bremner, MONASS
10.15 – 11.30 [over]ground matters
Chair: Godofredo Pereira, Royal College of Art
Alexandra Arenes, University of Manchester: Mapping the Critical Zones
Christina Leigh Geros, MONASS: Here be Dragons
Avi Varma, Goldsmiths College: Unjust Intonations
11.30 – 11.45 Tea
11.45 – 13.00 [inter]ground matters
Chair: Kirsten Hastrup, University of Copenhagen
Owain Jones, Bath Spa University: Monsoon + Tide
Jonathan Cane, University of the Witwatersrand: Permeability, Ocean, Concrete
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch: Convivial Grounds
14.00 – 15.00 [under]ground matters
Chair: Tim Waterman, The Bartlett UCL
Anthony Powis, MONASS: The Materiality of Groundwater: Leaking, Seeping, Swelling, Cracking
Matt Barlow, University of Adelaide: Floating (under) ground
15:00 – 16:00 [in]ground matters
Chair: Alfredo Ramirez Galindo, AA
Eric Guibert, University of Westminster: Architectural Soils
Harshavardhan Bhat, MONASS: About a Monsoon Forest
16.00 – 16.15 Tea
16.15 – 17.30 [with]ground matters
Chair: Radha D’Souza, University of Westminster
Naiza Khan, Goldsmiths College: Sticky Rice and Other Stories
Beth Cullen, MONASS: Brick
Labib Hossain, Cornell University: Wetness and the City: A Critical Reading of the Dry and Permanent Ground Through the Practice of Muslin Weaving in Bengal
17.30 – 17.45 Closing Remarks: David Chandler
17.45 -19.00 Drinks
Deadline: 08 January 2018
Symposium Dates: 12-13 April 2018
Venue: University of Westminster, London, UK
Proposals for papers are invited for Monsoon Waters, the second in a series of symposia convened by Monsoon Assemblages, a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
We live in a world where political geography and spatial planning have assumed permanent and easily observable divides between land, sea and air. Land is understood as solid, stable, divisible and the basis of human habitation; the sea is understood as liquid, mobile, indivisible, and hostile to human settlement; air is understood as gaseous, mobile, invisible and indispensable to human life. The monsoon cuts across these divisions. It inundates lived environments every year, connecting land with sea and sky. It is a spatial practice that reorganises air, water, land, settlements, cities, buildings and bodies through heat, wind, rain, inundation, saturation and flow. It unites science with politics and policy with affect. Today climate change is disrupting its cycles and explosive social and economic growth and rapid urbanisation are increasing the uncertainty of its effects. How can spatial design and the environmental humanities respond to these conditions by drawing on the monsoon as a template for spatial theory, analysis and design practice?
In order to deepen its responses to these questions Monsoon Assemblages is convening three symposia between 2017 and 2019 framed by the states of matter connected by the monsoon – air, water and ground. Monsoon [+ other] Airs took place in April 2017. The second symposium, Monsoon Waters will take place on 12-13 April 2018. It will comprise inter-disciplinary panels, key-note addresses and an exhibition and aims to bring together established and young scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines, literatures, knowledge systems and practices (theoretical, empirical, political, aesthetic, everyday) to engage in conversations about the ontologies, epistemologies, histories, politics and practices of monsoon waters. We are particularly interested in contributions that investigate
1. Wet monsoon ontologies
Following Mathur and da Cunha we are interested in contributions that explore wetness (in the air, on the earth, under the earth) as a way of being, cultures of wetness, and the urban, environmental and political consequences of attitudes towards being wet.
2. Late-modern monsoon waters
We are interested in contributions that explore attitudes towards water in south Asia since the mid 1980’s, their history, their urban, environmental and political consequences and the ways-of-being-monsoon-water that these attitudes have produced, such as flood-water, deficient-water, toxic-water, beautified-water, bottled-water etc.
3. Monsoon waters in a changing climate
We are interested in contributions that explore monsoonal cycles of wetness and dryness from the perspective of climate change, any changes in political, social or economic behaviour these might be catalysing and in new or invigorated social movements these changes might be inspiring.
4. Visualising monsoon waters
We are interested in contributions that explore ways of visualising monsoon cycles of wetness and dryness, (in the air, on the earth, under the earth) and their consequences for spatial design practice.
Confirmed key note speakers at the symposium are:
Anuradha Mathur Dilip da Cunha: architects, planners and landscape architects based in Philadelphia, USA and Bangalore, India, whose work is focused on how water is conceptualised and visualised in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, and the opportunities that its ubiquity offers for new visualizations of terrain, and resilience through design.
Kirsten Blinkenberg Hastrup: environmental anthropologist based in Copenhagen, Denmark, whose work deals with social responses to climate change across the globe, currently centered in the Thule Area, NW Greenland.
Contributions are invited in response to these provocations. They should take the form of 150 – 250 word abstracts for either papers or creative, practice based contributions such as drawings, photographs, videos, performances, musical compositions etc. Enquiries or abstracts should be sent to Lindsay Bremner at l.bremner@westminster.ac.uk by 08 January 2018. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Monsoon Assemblages team and authors will be notified by 29 January 2018 whether their contributions have been accepted or not. There is no registration fee for the symposium, but participants will be required to secure their own funding to attend it. Participants will be requested to submit their contributions for publication in the symposium proceedings, or, potentially, a special journal issue.
Monsoon Assemblages, a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 679873).
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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!
![Monsoon [+ other] Grounds – Full Programme_Thursday 21st and Friday 22nd of March,](http://www.openstudiowestminster.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/D2BLq5AX0AAh-O1.jpg)
