Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

• University of Greenwich
• School of Architecture & Construction
• Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
• Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
• Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 27 October 2010 18.30

Brian Hatton
REVISING THE CITY: NATO & ECSTACITY

No field of architectural modernism has been so thoroughly revised as that of the city. The lecture looks at the diverse lines of criticism that were levelled at the modern movement’s model of urbanism during the late 20th century. As the 21st century unfolds, this restless uncertainty shows no sign of resolution; indeed it has spread around the globe.

The lecture concentrates on the experiments of the NATo group (Narrative Architecture Today), which combined filmic montage with London punk situationism to generate “Gamma City”, and on Nigel Coates’s more recent global projection of multitrack narratives, “Ecstacity”.

Brian Hatton teaches history and theory of architecture at Liverpool John Moores University, the Architectural Association in London, and the University of Greenwich. A critic for many art and architecture journals, he has written studies of Dan Graham, Cedric Price, Zaha Hadid, Langlands & Bell, among others. A collaborator with and writer on the  NATo group in the mid‐80s, he is now working with them on a retrospective exhibition and book of their work.

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

• University of Greenwich
• School of Architecture & Construction
• Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
• Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
• Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 13 October 2010 18.30

Ed Frith
WA(L) KING OF THE G(R)ATE WAY: PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIC WANDERINGS – WILL MERLEAU-PONTY AND ZIZEK LAND ON AIR STRIP ONE?

From Michel de Certeau to Richard Long, city to country, aerial panoramas, and labyrinthine wanderings. Set the zooming, walk the Gateway, wake the history: take Eames’s film The Powers of Ten (with original credit to Kees Boeke), cross with David Lean’s Great Expectations; the moment where Pip is turned upside down by Magwitch. Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of body movement experiences a Zizek’s filmic ‘All that Solid Melts into Air’ moment; a body scale from the cosmic to  microcosmic, ten by ten, to a revolving moment. Our walking investigations combine geographical, psychological, and narrative with a projected architecture leaning on writers such as Auster, Ballard, Sinclair, Perec and Carter. The scale of the study touches on the immensity of the Gateway on the edge of the continental shelf, yet at the same time the phenomenological scale of the body. It is searching for an architecture concerned with identity and the body, whether it is the visit to the graves at Cooling with Jools, Queen Victoria and Falstaff in the background, or Wittgenstein visiting the library of memories at the heart of old and new Medway. Where the projects travel from the Garden Shed to the Container Terminal, a place of mental travail. The investigations come from Atelier 11, Thinkers and Makers, a research and design unit in the School that has been digging narratives across the Thames Gateway, a slice of the expansion and regeneration of London and its hinterlands to the East, this critique asks for a broadening and deepening of scale. Is there an argument for an architecture of walking mediation, or perhaps for the leaping and ripping the plasma and layers of graphene apart to reveal the apocalyptic dark underbelly … quick, squeeze Mies, catch Fevvers, and fly.

Ed Frith is Diploma Programme Leader and Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich, School of Architecture & Construction, and Design Tutor for Atelier 11, Thinkers and Makers. Architect/Director of Moving Architecture, Hackney based laboratory and research practice constructing through performance and architecture. He studied at Bristol, Cambridge, was a visiting fellow at Princeton and Columbia, worked with a number of practices ranging from Diller Scofidio to Julian Harrap Architects and was Berthold Lubetkin’s gardener . With Moving Architecture he has developed performance pieces and buildings with choreographer Caroline Salem in London, China, New York and Spain. He has written for a number of magazines, such as Building Design, Architects Journal. ‘Draw Like a Builder, Build like a Writer’ based on the work of Atelier 11 with Alex Graef is published in The Humanities in Architectural Design. A Contemporary and Historical Perspective (Routldge 2010).

References

Introduction

Berman, Marshall: All That’s Solid Melts into Air, MIT 1984

Rykwert, Joseph: The Idea of the Town, MIT 1988 The Introduction

Thom, Rene Traces of Dance: Choreographers’ Drawings And Notations

1994 Dis Voir

1    Representation

Aerial Ground and Zooming

De Certeau, Michel: The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984) ISBN–10: 0520236998. (See Part III – Spatial Practices Particularly Chapter VII – Walking in the City, Chapter IX – Spatial Stories)

Merleau–Ponty, Maurice: Phenomenology of Perception, 1945; Translation Colin Smith Routledge 1998; ISBN 0415278414

Zizek, Slavoj: Living in the End Times, Verso 2010; ISBN-10: 184467598X

Auster, Paul: New York Trilogy, City of Glass

Eames, Charles & Ray: Powers of Ten, Film for IBM 1968

Boeke, Kees, Cosmic View, 1957

1 Walking On Across and Around

Richard Long, Around Rome and London

Chatwin, Bruce: Songlines

Rykwert, Joseph: The Idea of the Town, MIT 1988 p65 The First Furrow

Sinclair, Iain: London Orbital

Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT 1990

Self, Will: Walking to Hollywood

Sennett, Richard: Fall of the Public Man.

Bachelard, Gaston: Poetics of Space

Solnit, Rebecca: Wanderlust,

2 Gateway Games

With projects by

Lawrence Becker, Tim Wolfe Murray and Heidi Lee

Atelier 11 Blog

Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations film – David Lean

Sinclair, Iain: Downriver

Berman, Marshall: All That’s Solid Melts into Air, MIT 1984

Perec, Georges: Life, A Users Manual

Ballard, J G: The Atrocity Exhibition

Sinclair, Iain: Hackney, that Rose Red Empire,

4     Air Strip One

Carter, Angela: Nights at the Circus,

Orwell, George: 1984

13^th October 2010 Ed Frith

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

• University of Greenwich
• School of Architecture & Construction
• Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
• Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
• Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 3 November 2010 18.30

Alessandro Aurigi

THE CITY, AUGMENTED: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN URBAN SPACES BETWEEN INEVITABILITY AND DESIGN

The recent history of the relationships between the city and the emergence of a ‘digital’ society has been often characterised by contrasting, extreme dialectics. On the one hand the hype associated with an ever-increasing usage of manifestos and buzzwords such as the ‘digital’ or ‘virtual city’ of the 1990s and early 2000s, or the more recent ‘u-city’ developments in hi-tech intensive countries like South Korea. On the other side, the acknowledgment – often dystopia-driven – of how the ‘digital’ and ‘mobile’ could create more displacement and kill entire sets of urban functions, virtualising them. This talk looks at the city as naturally ‘augmented’ by high technologies, ubiquitous and mobile networks and the like, but draws its attention to whether we can proactively intervene on it by design. It tries to look at space as one, un-divisible, complex and increasingly tech-rich,
environment, which presents some very challenging tensions. On the one hand it is argued here that traditional urban design principles and ways to look at the city should still inform and guide the shaping of urban augmented spaces. On the other hand it is acknowledged how some of the ‘normal’ spatial and social relationships described and dealt with by these principles can be extended and somehow challenged by ICTs.

Alessandro Aurigi (MArch Florence Italy, PhD Newcastle) is Professor of Urban Design and Head of the School of Architecture, Design and Environment at the University of Plymouth. Alessandro was previously Head of the Architecture Department at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, where he was member of the Global Urbanism Research Unit (GURU) and taught architectural design and theories on the information age, high technologies and architecture. Previously, he worked as a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Planning, University  College London and as a research fellow in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL.

His main research focuses on the relationships between the emergence of the information society and the ways we imagine, conceive, design, and manage our places. Alex has produced several publications on the topic, among which the 2008 multi-disciplinary book Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City (Ashgate, edited with Fiorella De Cindio), and the 2005 book Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space (Ashgate). He has also published in a variety of international journals, including the Journal of Urban Technology, the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Knowledge, Technology and Policy, Springer’s LNCS
and Town and Country Planning.

Watch This Open Lecture Again

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The Architecture Open Lecture Series provides a public platform for debate by bringing together the different components of the School and the University and guests from architectural theory and practice, as well as from other related disciplines.

Below are details of Open Lectures of previous years in PDF format.

2009 – 2010

• Dr Tim Stoner – Space Syntax
• Professor Paul Murrain Architecture vs Urbanism
• Roisin Heneghan – new Greenwich Architecture School

2008 – 2009

• Adrian Hornsby – POTS, PLOTS, AND DESPOTS
• Alex Schweder – THIS FORM FOLLOWS YOUR PERFORMANCE
• George L. Legendre – SURFACE GOODNESS
• Hélène Frichot – FOAMING RELATIONS URBAN HABITUS OF AFFECT
• Hilary Powell – OLYMPIC INTERVENTIONS
• Isotta Cortesi – FROM PERIPHERAL VOID TO PUBLIC SPACE IN MOTION
• Koen Vanmechelen – THE CHICKEN’S APPEAL
• Mario Fallini – CONCETTISMO AND GIULIO CAMILLOs theatre of memory
• Mark Crinson – JUNK, BUNK AND TOMORROW
• Pedro Ignacio Alonso – PREMODERN POSTDIGITAL
• Ranulph Glanville – CYBERNETICS FOR ARCHITECTS
• Raymond Quek – MODERN NOCTURNE
• Sarah Chaplin – (Learning from) Las Vegas, Love Hotels and Low Brow Architecture
• Sibylle Heil – IS IT BURNING YET

2007 – 2008

• Andrew Benjamin – Mondrian’s abstracting line
• Arden Reed – Slow Art
• Brendan Prendeville – Haunted
• Charles Rice – Snapshots for a History of the Interior
• Fabrizio Barozzi – Between Realities – Mondrian’s abstracting line
• Francois Roche – Pink Dystopia
• Ivana Wingham – Travel and mobility beyond representation
• John Macarthur – Architecture, painting and Titian’s Madonna di ca’ Pesaro
• Maria Theodorou – Architecture and the Political
• Mike Sillett – Durrat Al Bahrain
• Naomi Stead – Notes on Reading, Writing and Thinking Architectural Criticism
• Rainer Hofmann – Bogevischs City
• Stefano Graziani – Taxonomies
• Tim Antsey – Architecture and Rhetoric

2006 – 2007

• Andrew Leach – Between Research and Interpretation
• Doreen Bernath – The Constructed Image as a Space of Translation
• Lorens Holm – Slip of the Tongue
• Oren Safdie – Private Jokes or Public Places
• Patrick Lynch – At Work
• Yvonne Farrel – Anchor and Animation