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.
We are pleased to be joined by journalist and Architect Alison Killing for the 2023 Robin Evans lecture, both in-person and as an online streamed event.
‘Investigating Xinjiang’s network of detention camps’
China has built a vast network of detention camps in the north west region of Xinjiang, as part of its campaign of oppression against Turkic Muslims. It is believed that more than a million people have been detained. Our team used satellite imagery, architectural analysis and eyewitness interviews to uncover the camp network and investigate what was happening there. Alison will talk about the process of doing this Pulitzer Prize winning investigation, as well as the wider relevance of architectural skills in investigative journalism.
About the Speaker
Alison Killing is an investigative journalist and licensed architect. In 2021 she and her colleagues Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek won the Pulitzer Prize for an investigation that uncovered a secret network of detention camps in Xinjiang, China. She is a senior reporter on the FT’s Visual Investigations team.
About the Robin Evans Lecture Series
This series supports outstanding scholarship in the history of architecture and allied fields, building on the work of Professor Robin Evans (1944-1993). It encourages scholars working on the relationship between the spatial and social domains in architectural drawing, construction and beyond.
Evans’ work interrogated the spaces that existed between drawing and building, geometry and architecture, teasing out the points of translation often overlooked. From his early work on prison design and domestic spaces, through to his later work on architectural geometry, Evans sought to articulate the multiple points at which the human imagination could influence architectural form. His first book, The Fabrication of Virtue, analysed the way that spatial layouts provided opportunities for social reform via their interference with morality, privacy and class. In The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Evans traced the origins of the humanist tradition to understand how human form influenced architectural drawing and construction, focusing on aesthetic dimensions in the production of architectural space.
This series will provide opportunities for the creation and/or dissemination of work by scholars working on similar questions of space, temporality, and architecture. In particular, it supports work that breaks the boundaries of traditional disciplines to think though these complex networks involved in the space between human imagination and architectural production.
Please join us this Friday for a one-day international conference on creative technologies for the design, creative + digital industries. Following the conference, we invite you to attend a Private View in Ambika P3 of a new exhibition of work from contributors from the UK, Canada, and North America using creative technologies in a diverse range of built projects, installations, films, posters, and interactive workshops.
The Private View will also feature for one night only a unique Arch-asino designed and created by first-year MArch students from the School of Architecture + Cities. You’ll be able to play architecturally-inspired reinventions of classic Casino games between 18:00 – 20:00 (strictly no money involved!) with awards for the winning games and best players at 20:15. Dress code for the Arch-asino is Black Tie (creative interpretations allowed).
Admission to both the Conference + Exhibition Private View / Arch-asino is free but booking is essential to guarantee your place:
Join us on Friday 22 September for the launch of MORE 2023, an exhibition of the University of Westminster’s School of Architecture + Cities Master’s students’ thesis project, across the following disciplines:
MA Architecture
MA Interior Architecture
MSc Architecture and Environmental Design
MA Urban Design
MA International Planning and Sustainable Development
MA Event Design & Management | MA Tourism Management
MSc Logistics and Supply Chain Management
MSc Transport Planning and Management
MA Urban and Regional Planning
RIBA Part 3
Research
PhD
The celebratory event will be followed by contributions from each of the participating courses and the School’s annual student awards.
The physical exhibition will be supported by an online iteration – MORE 2023 – which will also launch on the evening of Friday 22 September at:
Now that OPEN2023 has closed, please enjoy these wonderful videos of the MArch design studios at this year’s graduating students’ exhibition. They were made by our talented 1st year MArch student Kevin Wong from DS10.
Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE)
To mark the Centre’s relaunch, the new leadership team of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE 2) – a multi-faculty research centre spanning Westminster Business School (WBS) and the School of Architecture and Cities (SA+C) at the University of Westminster – is inviting you to a research symposium on the future of the study of the production of the built environment.
In a time of crisis, when social relations of building production are faced with rapid transformation, the symposium will be an opportunity to discuss and formulate proposals to help set the agenda for the future direction of research on the production of the built environment, in particular the issues that most urgently need addressing such as combatting climate change. It will bring together ProBE members, past, existing and prospective collaborators, project partners from the within the University of Westminster and beyond, including academic organisations, unions, industry practitioners, environmental organisations, policy makers and the wider society, for an interactive day of discussion.
The symposium will include keynote presentations, roundtables and panel discussions on the following key research areas – Vocational Education and Training, Oral and Labour Histories, Sustainable Urban Settlements and Low Carbon Construction, Equality in Construction, Climate Change, Work and Environmental Technologies, and Capital and Labour Relations.
Prof Dejan Mumovic – Professor of Building Performance Analysis
Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering – UCL
Prof Mumovic is a building scientist with a background in heating, ventilation and air conditioning engineering and the extensive experience of monitoring and modelling work in the field of the built environment. In the last 20 years Prof Mumovic has led, co-led or significantly contributed to 60 research projects, and co-authored over 250 peer reviewed publications. 17 doctoral researchers graduated under his supervision. Prof Mumovic’s research expertise include:
(a) modelling aspects of building performance analysis, including the application and development of advanced modelling techniques utilizing performance data and simulation as a design driver
(b) monitoring aspects of building performance analysis in the context of health, comfort and cognitive performance
(c) building stock performance analysis, including the development of semi-empirical bottom-up physically disaggregated building stock models as well as top-down statistical modelling studies.
Prof Katie Lloyd Thomas – Professor of Theory and History of Architecture
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape – University of Newcastle
She is an editor at the international journal arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, and a founder member of the feminist collective taking placewww.takingplace.org.uk. Her research is concerned with materiality and technology, and their intersections with architectural concepts, practice and design, and with feminist practice and theory. Notable edited collections include Material Matters (Routledge, 2007) and with Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech Industries of Architecture (Routledge Critiques, 2015). Her monograph Building Materials: Material theory and the architectural specification was recently published in London (Bloomsbury, 2021). In her current joint Brazil/UK project Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour for the New Field of Production Studies,http://www.tf-tk.com/(funded by the AHRC and FAPESP), she, together with an international team of researchers, debates and explores the cross-cultural potential of the unique and significant body of the work of the Brazilian architect, artist and theorist Sérgio Ferro for understanding art, architecture and desgin through the lens of labour and production.
Prof João Marcos Almeida de Lopes
Institute of Architecture and Urbanism – University of São Paulo
He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Methodology of Science from the Federal University of São Carlos. He currently is one of the coordinator of the research group on Housing and Sustainability (HABIS), and an associate researcher with Usina, where he acted as coordinator between 1990 and 2005. Usina was founded in June 1990 by a multidisciplinary working group as a technical advisory to social movements, since, it has worked to mobilize processes that engage the workers’ own capacity to plan, design and build, mobilizing public finances to aid the struggle for urban and agrarian land reform. Usina’s team strives to overcome narrowly conceived individualist and commercially-minded modes of Architecture and Urbanism and to that effect, strives to integrate and engender processes that may subvert the logic of capital through counter-hegemonic social, spatial, technical, and aesthetic experiences.
Together with Professor Katie Lloyd Thomas (University of Newcastle) and Dr Silke Kapp (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Prof João Marcos Almeida de Lopes is also developing Translating Ferro/Translating Production.
Prof Linda Clarke – Professor of European Industrial Relations
School of Organisations, Economy and Society – University of Westminster
Former co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE), on the European Institute for Construction Labour Research (CLR) (www.clr-news.org) board, and Associate Director and partner in the Canadian ACW project on climate change and work (see https://adaptingcanadianwork.ca/), Prof Clarke has extensive experience of comparative research on labour, equality and diversity, vocational education and training (VET), and wage relations in the European construction sector. Current research interests cover a) building labour history, particularly focussed direct labour organisations; b) VET and low energy construction, including retrofitting; c) labour and climate transition; d) women in construction; and e) blacklisting in the construction sector. In 2022, Prof Clarke was awarded the VET Research Excellence award by the European Commission.
Recent projects include:
Climate Literacy for Construction: Integrating climate literacy into the construction trades to prepare the construction workforce to better meet Canada’s climate change commitment,SkillPlan, Canadian Building Trade Unions, $4.2m, 2021-2025, part of Climate Industry and Research Team (CIRT) with responsibility for Europe, funded by Canadian government ‘Employment and Social Development Canada: Union Training and Innovation Fund’;
Vocational Education and Training for Low Energy Construction, European Commission project led by European Construction Industry Federation (FIEC) and European Federation of Building and Woodworkers (EFBWW), with 10 country partners (Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Spain), external expert (Prof. Linda Clarke, Dr. Colin Gleeson, Dr Melahat Sahin-Dikmen), January 2017-December 2018.
Prof Christine Wall – Professor of Architectural History
School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster
Former co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE), Trustee of The Construction History Society, Editor of The Construction History Journal and a member of the Editorial Committee for The Oral History Journal.
Prof Wall has developed a distinctive multi-disciplinary approach, using oral histories together with documentary and visual research, to reveal and examine the social processes underpinning the production of the built environment. This has proved effective in broadening both investigation and theoretical interpretation in architectural and construction history and built environment heritage; for example, her research on the women involved in constructing Waterloo Bridge. She led the Leverhulme Trust funded oral history project, Constructing Post-War Britain: building workers’ stories 1950-1970, and her books include An Architecture of Parts: architects, building workers and industrialised building in Britain 1940-70, (2013) and Work and Identity (2011). In 2022 she was awarded a two-year Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for her current research project, ‘If I had a hammer’: feminist activism and the built environment 1975-2000.
Dr Claudia Loggia
Associate Professor and Academic Leader for the Housing Programme at the School of Built Environment & Development Studies (SoBEDS), University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.
She holds a PhD and a MEng in Building Engineering from Cagliari University (Italy). Since 2016, Claudia is a Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellow (2016-2024), for a project in partnership with the University of Westminster (London), titled: “Building Urban Resilience for Self-Reliance in African Cities”. She was also Principal Investigator for the South African team of the ISULABANTU project (www.isulabantu.org) focused on Community-led Upgrading for self-reliance in informal settlements in South Africa. She is also collaborating on valuable research projects in South Africa with local governmental institutions, NGOs and local communities, such as the uMngeni Resilience Project aimed at increasing resilience of vulnerable communities in a rural area in KwaZulu-Natal and the informal settlement upgrading of Khan Rd settlement in Pietermaritzburg.
Dr Viloshin Govender
Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at UKZN.
His research involves working with Marginalized communities, especially those in Informal settlements, using drone technologies and community collaboration to create solutions that form a bottom-up approach. He is also an Architect with research interests that include resilient cities, building adaptability, and how insurgency affects city planning.
Stephen Craig
National Development Officer, Unite the Union
Stephen Craig is National Development Officer with Unite the Union (UK), responsible for learning, and skills activities at public and private sector level. Previously, a Trade Union Studies/Industrial Relations Lecturer in Further and Higher Education, he has taught at the ILO Training Centre in Turin and was researcher on several learning and skills-related reports. Foe over twenty years he worked as a Project Manager on several national/international learning and skills initiatives (including European Social Fund, Union Modernisation, and the Union Learning Fund).
A Full-Time Official in union’s covering the maritime industry, education and construction sectors, Stephen has progressed skills and joint union-management programmes with companies including EDF, Fords, BP, Skanska. He was on the Drafting Group for the ILC ‘Shaping skills and lifelong learning for the future of work’ (2021) report; is Trade Union Coordinator (Ethical Trade Initiative); Advisory Board member Work & Equalities (University of Manchester); on the Unite Environment Taskforce.
On Friday, June 23 an ‘experimental walk’ organised by ArCCAT (Corinna Dean and Diana Periton), as a part of London Festival of Architecture 2023, took place along the River Lea.
The walk started at Bromley-by-Bow and ended at Cody Dock, where the group gathered in the newly built ‘Growing Space’, a project designed and realised this year by MArch DS20 students led by Maria Kramer and Corinna Dean.
The walk was jointly led by Corinna Dean, Lindsay Bremner, and Diana Periton, all from the University of Westminster’s School of Architecture and Cities. The group was joined by a Pakistani performance artist, Abuzar Madhu, whose performance practice embodies a profound communication with nature, becoming an act of resistance against prevailing power structures.
Rowland Parker’s book The Common Stream tells the history of a Cambridgeshire village through the stream that sustains it. The stream is water source, sewer, communication channel, and common element around which the village coheres.
On this walk from Bromley-by-Bow to Cody Dock along the River Lea, we open a conversation about how bodies of water enact their common presence, raising provocations to be discussed as we walk. What is water as a material – what does it mean to drink it, contaminate it, remediate it? What is water as an entity – what is its legal status, what are its rights? How does water connect – how does the River Lea speak to the creeks of Manila or Chennai and the River Ravi? We will gather our discussions in the Cody Dock Open Air Classroom.
The walk will be jointly led by Corinna Dean, Lindsay Bremner, Stroma Cole and Paolo Zaide, all from the University of Westminster School of Architecture and Cities.
The performance artist Abuzar Madhu will be joining, who’s performance practice embodies a profound communication with nature, becoming an act of resistance against prevailing power structures.
The School of Architecture + Cities is excited to invite you to join us for a new international conference and exhibition on creative technology. It will be held this September 21-23 jointly in Ambika P3 and the Fabrication Lab. The conference is multimedia and the call for work is now open. We welcome contributions of films, posters, exhibits, and hands-on workshops as well as short papers from both academic and technical staff, and students and professionals.
The conference coincides with the 10-year anniversary of the Fabrication Lab and themes include Learning Through Making and an exploration of makerspaces; Design Through Making and practice-based research; and Tomorrow’s Tech, looking particularly at the opportunities and issues raised by the latest developments in artificial intelligence.
In the spirit of design through making and practice-based research, we want the conference to be a forum for the discussion of current ideas and work in progress as much as the presentation of finalised projects. Please submit an abstract of 300 words and 3 images for non-text media before the deadline on July 7. You’ll find full details here:
Where: MG14, University of Westminster Marylebone Campus, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS
How does a school of architecture + cities pursue school-wide equity? How are questions of equity emerging in student projects, and how could these projects inform school strategies? What can practitioner perspectives offer the way in which a school shapes its approach?
This inaugural symposium will bring together academics, students, and practitioners to discuss projects and exchange ideas on the notion of equity for built environment disciplines. The symposium will open with an introductory talk on the tactics and challenges of introducing a ‘cultural infrastructure’ to support the pursuit of equity in the School. This will be followed by two panels in succession: a practitioner panel, and a student panel. Members of each panel will present a short talk on one project relating to equity, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A.
The projects and their themes will be wide-ranging, but all linked by a focus on the cultural approaches, forms of intelligence, and skills required to move towards greater equity. The symposium will conclude with the formal launch of ‘Urban Equity’, an Open Access online resource, followed by refreshments and networking.
