Speakers:
Dagmar Motycka Weston
University of Edinburgh
Neil Spiller
University of Greenwich
Marko Jobst
University of Greenwich
Rahesh Ram & Sarah Allan Sinclair
University of Greenwich / urbanvistas
Simon Withers
University of Greenwich / Architectural Association
Nic Clear
University of Greenwich
Keynote:
Mark Morris
Architectural Association
As part of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) conference in September the University of Greenwich will also be curating an exhibition of London landscape architecture projects.
The theme of this year’s conference is Creation/Reaction. Speakers will explore design and Invention, Innovation and Technologies, Urbanism and Planning, Creative Destruction/Revolution, Consultation and Co-creation, Landscape Democracy, Planting and Ecological Processes, Remediation, Reclamation, Amelioration and Restoration, Collaboration and Community Engagement, Urban Development and Gentrification, Natural Disasters, War Relief and Rebuilding, Materials and Waste
Creation almost always provokes a responsive reaction, sometimes as an opposing natural force or process, and often a human response ranging from approval and celebration to extremes of disgust and opposition. Creation can result in transformation as well as revolution – for better or for worse. The processes of transformation and revolution in design are an inherent part of the creative process, and it is often the moments of conflict or tension that can be the most creative. These catalysts may be found in creation and reactions across all practices in landscape, and thus we encourage participants to explore these active and often-difficult situations they find in the course of their work.
For conference information:
University of Greenwich, Department of Architecture and Landscape
The Digital Grotesque II project is a human-scale, highly ornamental grotto that was specifically designed to fully exploit the potentials of large-scale binderjet sand printing. It was guided by the search for new design instruments, and by a redefinition of the role of the computer vis-à-vis the architect. A new type of topological subdivision algorithm was devised that allowed not only the deformation and articulation of surfaces, but also the successive refinement of solid volumes. An orientable surface with genus 0 can evolve into a form with a genus of thousands – a single input volume can spawn millions of branches, with hundreds of metres of surface being compressed into a 3.5m high block that forms a landscape between the man-made and the natural.
Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who explores the use of computation to generate and fabricate architectural form. Recent projects include the Sixth Order’ installation of columns at the Gwangju Design Biennale, the ‘Platonic Solids’ series, and the fabrication of full-scale 3D printed grottos for FRAC’s Archilab exhibition as well as for Centre Pompidou. Michael most recently taught as a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He previously taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and Southeast University in Nanjing. Prior to this, he worked at Herzog & de Meuron architects and in the consulting and financial industries at McKinsey & Company and J.P. Morgan respectively.
The book – printed or otherwise – continues to be the architect’s most fertile and celebrated form of media output. This exhibition presents a wide range of rare books from the fields of Architecture, Art, Design and Literature, and explores how book design can be conceived as a type of architectural project – the book as an interplay of formal-material ideas and a manifestation of spatial concepts through graphic means.
Organised around three key themes, this exhibition investigates the book as an immersive space to be entered upon reading, the physical book as an architectural object, and speculates on the future possibilities of the architectural book. These themes are further sub-categorised through a utilisation of theories originating from studies in literature, design, media and comics.
Also exhibited are the book works of Mike Aling, with his ongoing architectural book design research praxis explored in relation to the themes of the show. Mike’s books are known in architectural circles for their challenging design languages, spatial qualities and sumptuous materialities. Mike Aling is the MArch Architecture Design Co-ordinator and Publications lead for the AVATAR research group at the University of Greenwich.
An Exhibition
> Private View: Friday 21 April 2017, 5-8pm
Exhibition Open
Sat 22 April > Thurs 18 May
[Tues > Fri 11 > 5]
[Saturdays 11 > 4]
Exhibition Design & Curation: Mike Aling
Friday 21st April 2017
10.30am – 5pm
Location: The Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre
10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich, London SE10 9BD
5pm – Drinks reception and Future Cities 6 Exhibition Private View
(Location: Project Space)
Keynote Speaker:
Michael Hansmeyer
Neil Spiller
University of Greenwich
Dagmar Motycka Weston
University of Edinburgh
Shaun Murray
University of Greenwich
Mark Morris
Architectural Association
Nic Clear
University of Greenwich
You+Pea
[Sandra Youkhana + Luke Caspar Pearson]
Bartlett School of Architecture
“Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful.”
— André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924)
Future Cities 6 will be the sixth AVATAR (Advanced Virtual And Technological Architecture Research) conference hosted by the Department of Architecture and Landscape held at the University of Greenwich. It builds on the previous success of Future Cities, Future Cities 2, 3, 4, 5 events – that have been international, cross-industry, multi-disciplinary event themed around pressing architectural issues related to the challenges faced by megacities, the architectural discipline and pedagogical challenges in an increasingly technologically advanced, yet resource-constrained world. This year the theme of the conference will centre on The Marvellous and asks what creative opportunities architectural design in the twenty-first century offers and how it is possible to work with such tensions. It also raises questions about how we may deal with the nature of ecology, urban environments and an increasing global society – all composed of many different, often contradictory bodies.
Accompanying the conference is an exhibition in the Stockwell Street Project Space featuring works by five of the participants. Keynote speaker Michael Hansmeyer is exhibiting prints of his dazzling 3D ‘Digital Grotesques’ that are currently part of the ‘Printing the World’ exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Hansmeyer is also exhibiting a video specially commissioned for the Pompidou show. Young London based architectural design practice You+Pea (Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson) are showing their highly exuberant ‘Tokyo Backup City’ project. Dr Shaun Murray is showing some of the extraordinary drawings that were recently part of an exhibition at the Lightroom Gallery at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. Professor Neil Spiller will be exhibiting more staggering works from the ‘Communicating Vessels’ project and Nic Clear will be showing a series of new works, ‘Dreamspaces’, studies for his Chthonopolis Project that will shortly be featured at the ‘The Factory’ gallery, London.
The results of that untutored, self-reliant form of artmaking known as ‘Outsider Art’ have been widely collected and admired in recent years. No less intriguing is its cousin, Outsider Architecture (the production of art environments), which is concerned with the solo efforts of individuals keen to enhance their living-space and thus to ‘make special’. Their choice of outlandish materials and their challenging messages can provoke wonderment and awe, and open onto the discussion of moral and political issues.
Roger Cardinal is an international authority on Outsider Art and Outsider Architecture and has written widely on the unlikely work of dedicated individuals ignorant of academic ideals. His book Outsider Art (1972) defined a field of interest in the light of Hans Prinzhorn’s and Jean Dubuffet’s pioneering art collections, and led to his involvement with numerous creative mavericks. Cardinal taught modern French literature for many years at the University of Kent and wrote a book about modern European poetry, Figures of Reality (1981). He is Emeritus Professor of Literary and Visual Studies.
In a world of make-believe, what can we keep faith in? Does controlling context control receipt? Our mission is to disrupt – not as brands intend, purely as a way to attract attention through random narratives, but to constantly undermine the coded pattern-making hypnosis of our communication world. Communication should be a process of dialogue, not monologue, and our goal should be that of revealing through un-fixed states. True interactivity gives either party license to transform the other, not simply a process of selecting from pre-assigned choices while promising real change. Difference is vital, and means more than a change of colour or font. Fun with flags!
Neville Brody is acknowledged as a seminal designer specialising in digital design, typography and identity. His insight and passion for pushing creative boundaries informs the work of Brody Associates, the collaborative creative agency he founded. His main focus is on exploring the edges of visual languages, and seeking an experimental approach to design and communication. His work over three decades ranges from album sleeves and identities for cultural institutions to corporate work for global businesses. Brody is also Dean of the School of Communication at London’s Royal College of Art. He is a Royal Designer for Industry, and past president of Design & Art Direction, which promotes creative excellence. He lectures globally on design and education.
Charlotte Skene Catling will talk about her approach to excavating meaning from context as a means of developing architecture. Where geology is focused on the study of the earth and the rocks from which it is formed, archeology concentrates on the ‘biofacts’, artifacts, architectures and cultural landscapes within a given place. Using a combined ‘geological’ and ‘archeological’ approach, her practice has developed an unusual method of making architecture that enters into adjacent disciplines. Her talk will be illustrated by five projects: three buildings, one opera and an art installation for the 57th Venice Art Biennale to open in May 2017.
Charlotte Skene Catling is an architect and director of the architectural practice Skene Catling de la Peña. She uses research as a basis for design, with a particular interest in the borders between architecture and other disciplines. She has written about architecture in The Architectural Review and ARCH+, made internationally screened architectural films and is launching the inaugural architectural film festival ArchFilmFest in London this June. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany and is an advisor to the London School of Architecture (LSA). Charlotte is currently completing a research project with the RCA and the Rothschild Foundation on architectural representation. Her practice has won numerous awards and has been extensively published internationally. She was named a Debrett’s 500 People of Influence in Architecture & Design in 2016 and was shortlisted for the 2016 Architectural Review Women in Architecture award.
Typically associated with drawing and the circulation of media images, postmodern architecture is generally understood to have been largely a matter of style and surface ornament, freed from the exigencies of political and technical systems by the force of architectural autonomy. Close attention to the conditions of production within which architects like Peter Eisenman, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and others worked, challenges this view by embedding the expected imagery of postmodernity within materials that demonstrate the dense tangle of regulations, production specifications and technologies that constrained architectural design rather than liberated it. While these True Stories of Postmodern Procedures describe a less heroic and autonomous architect, they also produce a more persuasive account of architectural ingenuity as it sought to survive the bureaucratization not merely of the architectural profession but of the very idea of architecture.
Sylvia Lavin is an internationally known critic, historian and curator whose work explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods. She is Professor, Director of PhD Programs and former Chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia among other schools. She is a frequent contributor to journals such as Artforum, Perspecta and Log and among her books are Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Kissing Architecture and Flash in the Pan. Recent exhibitions include Everything Loose Will Land: Art and Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1970s, The New Creativity and The Artless Drawing. She has been recognized by many grants and awards, most recently from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Getty Research Institute and the Graham Foundation.