- Thursday 21st January 2016, 6.30pm
- Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]
Days after Zaha Hadid became the first woman to receive the RIBA Gold Medal, she was panned in the media for her questionable choice of clients – Middle East rulers and Russian oligarchs. The inference was she is complicit in the abuses of those she works for. Why is it so much more damning to be creating architecture for an authoritarian regime than to be filling up our tanks with their petrol? What would have happened if some of the greatest architects in our history had refused to work for an autocratic pope or emperor? These are conflicting times. A month after the RIBA awarded Zaha with her medal, they drew up a shortlist for the Stirling Prize of socially worthy buildings – a cancer centre, a school, social housing, an extension for a university museum and a school of architecture. The judges complimented AHMM’s winning Burntwood School for its ability to demonstrate ‘the full range of skills that architects can offer society’. At a time that high-quality commissions in education and housing are few and far between, what is an architect’s responsibility to steer a socially meaningful course for architecture? And what might that look like?
Helen is Editor of Architectural Design (AD) and Executive Commissioning Editor on the Global Architecture list at John Wiley publishing. She has over 25 years of publishing experience on architecture publications. She had her first job as a graduate on AD in the early 90s before working for other publishers and coming back to AD in 1999 to work for Wiley. She has a BA in History of Art and Architecture from the University of East Anglia and a Masters in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.