Richard Wilson will talk about some of his more grander architectural works from the past 20 years.
Richard Wilson is one of the country’s most renowned sculptors. He is internally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space, which draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.
2012 marked the 200th anniversary of the first publication of the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. To celebrate this occasion FleaFollyArchitects ran a summer atelier on the outskirts of the Black Forest in Germany over the space of 5 weeks. As a group of young architects and designers they planned and built the ‘Grimm City’, a miniature Cityscape based on the imaginations of the Brothers Grimm. Grimm City is a spatial extrapolation of the Grimm Fairytales, an architectural satire that foretells a future state run by creatures with Grimm-esque attributes of gluttony and greed taken perversely out of context. Whilst being lampoonist and satirical, this architectural fairytale draws uncanny parallels with what many believe is the way that cities are run today; corrupt politicians, fraudulent banks, gluttonous churches and a great GDP are common in both the Grimm City and our own cities.
Established in 2012 by Pascal Bronner and Thomas Hillier, FleaFollyArchitects are spatial-storytellers who use narrative to discover, explore and invent unique architectural propositions encompassing all scales. FleaFollyArchitects operate across – and blur the thresholds between – the fields of architecture, design, fashion, contemporary art and installation. Drawing upon their multi-disciplinary experience in both architectural practice and architectural teaching, their objective – no matter what the subject – remains the same: to surprise and delight!
Urban restructuring over the past thirty years has been leading to a sea change in the very nature of the urbanization process. Signs of this change were recognized long ago in such terms as edge cities, outer cities, peripheral urbanization, boomburbs and metroburbia. But few realized that what was happening represented the end of the modern metropolis, the urbanization of suburbia, and the emergence of a very new urban form and way of life. This shift is what is behind such new terms as regional urbanization, city regions, regional cities, megacity regions, megaregions, and such notions as the urbanization of the world and planetary urbanism. This lecture will provide a detailed look at the regional urbanization process as it develops at several different scales.
Edward W. Soja is distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of Urban Planning at UCLA. He is the author of Postmodern Geographies (1989; new Verso edition), Thirdspace (1996), Postmetropolis (2000), Seeking Spatial Justice (2010) and most recently My Los Angeles, forthcoming in 2014 from University of California Press.
The Walmer Yard project explores the possibilities of a dense urban architecture in West London. Walmer Yard is a response to property values and the tightness of the site, which makes demands on the architectural judgement of an appropriate density and privacy.
Peter Salter set up private practice in 1982 after gaining experience in a number of prestigious London firms. His architectural work has focused on cultural, residential and leisure projects, including several projects in Japan. His teaching career began in the 1980s when he joined the AA as a technical tutor in the diploma school. In 1995 he was appointed Head of School and Professor of Architecture at the University of East London, with a focus to develop a school with a specialism in exploring architecture through construction with an emphasis on materials as a way of engaging with issues of sustainability and low energy construction. In 2006, he was appointed Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff. He has over twenty years experience as a visiting critic and lecturer to UK schools of architecture and as a guest speaker at architectural organisations across the world. A widely published author, he has contributed essays to several AA publications and written three AA files. He is the recipient of the Annie Spink Award (2004) and the AJ/Boris Royal Academy Main Award for an Architectural Project for his Thai Fish Restaurant, Tokyo (1991).
The former Royal Hospital for Seamen is one of the greatest and most dramatically sited buildings in English architecture. This lecture will recount its historical evolution and context with reference to the numerous depictions of the buildings and pensioners, and through the comments of visitors.
John Bold is Reader in Architecture at the University of Westminster. He was formerly Head of Architecture at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England before leading the project team which recorded and published the buildings at Greenwich when they were threatened by privatisation in the 1990s.
Realism in cinema and literature was overcome in the 1960’s and 70’s by new forms of abstraction and meta-modernisms, techniques that called into question the conditions that compelled work to be truthful and matter-of-fact. Given the physical and material nature of architecture, it would seem to be nothing but matter of fact, a medium of experiential presence. But with new technologies driving everyday life, architecture has drifted into a hazy peripheral background, well out sight in our digitally focused world. At times, architecture has become spectacular enough to capture our attention, but this work seems somehow less real (unbelievable) than ever as more extreme forms and materials come into play. This lecture, using cultural references and the work of NMDA, will ask questions and make claims about the status of the real in our contemporary landscape.
Neil Denari is principal of Neil M. Denari Architects Inc (NMDA), and Professor of Architecture at UCLA. Denari lectures worldwide and has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and UC Berkeley among other schools and was the Director of SCI-Arc from 1997-2002. He is the author of Interrupted Projections (1996), Gyroscopic Horizons (1999), and Facticity, forthcoming in 2013. Neil Denari was the recipient of the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal in 2011 and was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 2010. In 2009, he was given the California Community Foundation Fellowship from the United States Artists organization and in 2008 he received an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In addition to these personal awards, NMDA has been awarded the 2005 and 2007 National American Institute of Architecture Awards, 2005 Progressive Architecture citation, and the 2011 American Institute of Architecture/Los Angeles Honor Awards in both the built and unbuilt categories.
Arne Quinze was born in 1971 in Belgium and lives and works in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium and Shanghai, China. In the eighties he began working as a graffiti artist but never finished an official art education. Quinze creates large and small sculptures, drawings, paintings, and large-scale installations. Smaller works, sketches, and drawings are the basis and research for his large installations. Recurring fundamentals in his oeuvre are the use of multiple types of wood, including salvaged wood; electrical colours in fluorescent paint; and themes referring to social interaction, communication, and urbanism. For a while he has been undertaking research towards large steel installations.
What drives Quinze is the belief in the possible realization of an idealistic society where all individuals communicate and interact, aiming to bring people together and push them into a vigorous dialogue. In his urban vision, communal activities flourish and social cohesion is the norm. His installations are built to provoke reaction and to intervene in the daily life of passersby confronted with his sculptures. His unconventional public installations have challenged perceptions in the city centers of Belgium (Cityscape, The Sequence), Germany (The Traveller), France (Camille, Rock Strangers), Lebanon (The Visitor), China (Red Beacon) and the USA (Uchronia, Timegate), among others. In every culture Quinze comes across, he unravels physical processes, drawing inspiration for his oeuvre, and is fueled by overwhelming optimism. Every new creative breed captures his research and study on interaction, and urban movement expressing the continuously evolution of human beings and their surroundings. Besides building architectural sculptures, he creates complex art pieces and video installations inscribing his vision in society of how people see themselves and society. Works such as Bidonvilles, Stilthouses, Chaos and My Home My House My Stilthouse, and My Secret Garden have been shown in several exhibitions.
FLEAFOLLYARCHITECTS
With Alexandra Arad, Alexandru Nacu, Azza Al Hinai, Cristian Bucataru, Michela Bonomo, Ramona Bittere & Samuel Little
Free entry.
Grimm City publication available in the Design Museum Shop & online
University of Greenwich School of Architecture Design and Construction
PROGRAMMES OFFERED:
UNIVERSITY OPEN DAYS (10am – 3pm)
NB: All Open Days are held in Stephen Lawrence Building Maritime Greenwich Campus, University of Greenwich Park Row, Greenwich London SE10 9LS
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Heather Ring discusses her unique approach to landscape architecture and urban growing through the creation of narrative environments and spaces of social exchange.
Heather Ring CMLI is the founder and Creative Director of the London-based landscape architecture practice Wayward Plants. Their recent work includes the Queen’s Walk Window Gardens, a micro-city of allotments created for the Southbank Centre, and Borough Market Hall, a new entrance and interior garden for the celebrated food market. Wayward Plants is best known for projects that weave social exchanges and botanical narratives including the Urban Physic Garden, a community-built garden of medicinal plants that is touring internationally, and the Helsinki Plant Tram, commissioned by the British Council for the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012.