• Thursday 9^th March 2017, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

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.

• Thursday 2nd March 2017, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

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 57^th 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.

• Monday 20^th February 2017, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

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.

• Thursday 16^th February 2017, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

 

 

‘What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it. In three partitions; with their several sections, members, subsections, philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut up…’ – Robert Burton, ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’

This lecture explores the Post Truth world where everything that was once stable appears suddenly uncertain. A powerful interplay between the forces of nature and technology against those of culture and economics. Facts and Alt facts grotesquely distort picturesque futures. The New Wunderkammer – an encyclopedic inventory of complex interconnected taxonomies. Presented here with meticulous footnotes, exhibit cards, carefully catalogued listings and Latin citations of provenance – guided by the reassuringly confident tone of the absent narrator. A delirious journey confronting complex strands of interwoven narrative and inexplicable facts; finally balanced on the edge of reason and bathed in doubt. From the Historical Arcane and Natural Curiosa in the private collections of 16^th and 17^th Century Europe, to vitrines of state, and the ever-present digital cloud.

Simon Herron & Susanne Isa were both trained at the Architectural Association London. They currently teach design studios at the University of Greenwich, where Simon is Academic Leader Architecture, and Susanne is Year 1 Design Coordinator. They were Previously postgraduate design tutors to MArch Unit 16 at the Bartlett and DS 14 University of Westminster, and have also run international studios at Sci-Arc Los Angeles and Lund Sweden. Both have lectured and exhibited internationally. Built works include Machi no kao: three pavilions for Toyama Prefecture, Japan [Herron Associates @ Imagination 1991-94] and a collaboration with AHMM & Studio Myerscough to produce the Millennium products touring exhibition for the British Council, and display units for the Millennium Dome Learning Zone [1998]. Their current research interest reflects on Architecture in the age of the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on photography and architectural drawing. With Mark Morris [Architectural Association] they are documenting and curating the Ron Herron Archive. This project has been supported by a research and development grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

 

 

 

 

 

• Thursday 26^th January 2017, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

The distinction between avant-garde and mainstream is constitutive of architecture’s evolution. Only by differentiating the avant-garde as a specific subsystem can contemporary architecture actively participate in the evolution of society. The distinction between avant-garde and mainstream is non-evaluative. Both sides of the distinction are necessary. The architectural avant-garde functions as the R&D segment of our discipline. The destiny and redemption of avant-garde production is mainstream proliferation. Avant-garde becomes mainstream.

Patrik Schumacher is a practicing architect, educator and architectural theorist^. He is the principal of the Zaha Hadid Architects, where he has completed projects such as the Vitra Fire Station (1992) and the Stirling Award winning MAXXI centre of Contemporary Art in Rome (2010). Patrik was the founder of the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association (AADRL). He has taught at a number of schools internationally, including Harvard and Columbia in the US, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Innsbruck University in Austria. He has written extensively on parametricism, a phrase he coined, which he argues is poised to become the global epochal style for architecture, urbanism and design of the 21st century. His books include The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.1: A New Framework for Architecture and The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.2: A New Agenda for Architecture.

Christophe Girot & Charles Jencks discuss The Course of Landscape – Moderated by Tim Richardson

[The Course of Landscape – Thames & Hudson Book Launch]

• Thursday 24th November 2016, 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

Christophe Girot is director of Atelier Girot. Since 2001, he also is Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the ETH Zurich. Through the projects of his design office, and his role in the ETH, he is a recognized expert in state of the art technologies for field applications in large scale landscape designs. Prizewinner of many competitions and prizes of excellence, he completed the Master Plan for the Central Campus in Zurich, the Parco di Castello in Florence and is currently designing a large topographic project for the Swiss tunnel engineering firm AlpTransit in Ticino. He is an effective partner in project acceptance by political and public authorities. His projects have been extensively published and exhibited, amongst others at the Groundswell exhibition at the MoMA, Harvard, and in Essen Germany. His new book, The Course of Landscape is out now.

Charles Jencks has held simultaneous jobs over his seventy-plus years: architectural critic and historian, cultural theorist, designer of cosmic landscapes, co-founder of the Maggie Cancer Care Centres and what he is best known for – becoming the protagonist and definer of Post-Modernism. After getting degrees at Harvard, in English literature and architecture, he moved to the UK in 1965 where he has lived ever since. In 1970 Jencks received a PhD in architectural history, studying under the radical modernist Reyner Banham. His many works include; Modern Movements in Architecture (1973), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Towards a Symbolic Architecture (1985), The New Moderns (1990), The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (1995) and The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (2011).