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

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

Call for Papers: “Spaces of Tolerance”, Architecture and Culture Journal – Deadline 15th January 2018

Call for Papers for the next themed issue of Architecture and Culture journal.

Spaces of Tolerance
Vol. 7, Issue no. 1, March 2019
Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, Editors.

 

Academic journal publishing worldwide has become increasingly watched over and policed by funding bodies and institutions demanding that scholarship be seen to have direct and maximized impact for economic gain or return. As Wendy Brown notes, “the move to judge every academic endeavour by its uptake in non academic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is […] damaging” because “academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization”.3 This monitoring, counting, measuring and quantifying frames assessment of the validity of architectural research and limits the exchange between architectural practice and publishing. Within academic institutions, organizational adjacencies of disciplines create conditions of more or less tolerance in judging the value of a wide and diverse range of architectural outputs and the limits of the form/s original and creative architectural research may appear beyond a building design or a traditional 7,000 word scholarly journal article about a building’s history or performance that is double-blind reviewed by expert peers in architecture.

In an effort to recover architectural publishing as a more liberal, yet rigorous, space of production and imagination, this issue of Architecture and Culture seeks to reveal nuances in publishing and associated academic practices which might exceed or distil conventional and accepted disciplinary limitations. It seeks to instigate more open-ended relationships, interpretations and iterations between theory and practice – between textuality, visuality and aurality – to sway between and across more or less disciplinarity with empathy and insight. Contributions are sought from a range of cultural and geographical positions and perspectives that examine any aspect of the discourse, practice and research of architecture as an exploration of spaces of tolerance.

To download full version of call for papers:  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hs3jqampgpnx5zz/AACDK59VbnNJmSeV-pBNMJ5ba?dl=0

Image: John Hejduk, 13 Watchtowers of Cannaregio, 1978.