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Situating Architecture Lecture Series

27 November 2017, 1:00 pm鈥2:00 pm

The sixth floor of The Bartlett

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Location

The Bartlett, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB - see below for rooms

Brought together alongside The Bartlett's MA Architectural History, the Situating Architecture Lecture Series explores the听powers and effects of architecture today.

Our invited听speakers show how听historical and theoretical听practices听materialise听different architectural听meanings from poetics to ethics, housing to infrastructure,听politics to technologies.听

2听October: Dr Nick Beech, Confronting the Metropole

Stuart Hall

Confronting the Metropole: the urban imagination of Stuart Hall in the late 1950s

听Room 6.02, 1pm 鈥 2pm, Monday 2 October

鈥淐ities both divide and connect. They condense difference.鈥澨齋tuart Hall, 鈥楥osmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Differences鈥 (2003).

Lecturer's Abstract

The late Stuart Hall is widely known as a foundational figure in the formation of Cultural Studies, and for his contributions to the politics of the New Left in Britain. Hall made significant interventions in debates on the development of capitalism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and the black diaspora. His influence can be felt in contemporary architectural history and theory, in providing key categories, concepts and theoretical frameworks for understanding material culture and discursive practices鈥攁 result of his unique readings of Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault, articulated through analyses of contemporary urban conditions in twentieth century Britain.

This lecture provides a basic account of the intellectual formation of Stuart Hall, situated as a colonial figure in the black diaspora, within the late-imperial metropole of London in the 1950s. Through an examination of Hall鈥檚 poetry, essays, and subsequent memoires of the period, the lecture will pose a number of critical questions for contemporary architectural history, theory and practice.


Biography

Nick Beech is lecturer in the History of London at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include construction histories (see his collaborative work with Katie Lloyd Thomas and Tilo Amhoff, Industries of Architecture), and architectural practice in municipal and national governments in Britain. Nick is now completing a book鈥From Progress to Possibility: Architecture and the New Left, 1956鈥1962鈥攚hich concerns urban and architectural debates raised in the 鈥楴ew Left鈥 of the 1950s and 1960s.


Image: Stuart Hall in 1977/78 in Moseley Birmingham,听copyrighted Mahasiddhi/Roy Peters

9 October: Prof.听Mark Crinson, Compartmentalised world

Mark Crinson lecture

鈥楥ompartmentalised world鈥: Race, architecture, and colonial crisis in Kenya and London

Room 6.02, 1pm 鈥 2pm, Monday 9 October


Lecturer's Abstract听

Frantz Fanon鈥檚 idea of colonialism as a 鈥榗ompartmentalized world鈥 provides a starting point for examining the separations but also the entanglements of the building world in Kenya at a time of colonial crisis. Fanon鈥檚 thinking was directly drawn to the claims made by ethno-psychiatry, which was instrumental in understanding Mau Mau revolt as symptomatic of the spatial dislocations and instabilities caused by modernity. Ethno-psychiatry would seem to be a footnote in the study of discredited sciences and of no interest to architectural history, were it not for its influence on policies of 鈥榲illagisation鈥 drawing upon ideas of the pastoral and the vernacular.

This paper argues that this coercive means of population control cannot be isolated or compartmentalised from 鈥榓rchitecture鈥, but that through discourses on race it is connected to many other facets of the production of space in colonialism: from the 鈥榟igh鈥 architecture of the state, through to ideal planning schemes, and modernist housing, both in Kenya and in London.


Biography

Mark Crinson is Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck College. Among his books are Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (1996), Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003), Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence (2012), and most recently Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017).

His book on the architecture of Alison and Peter Smithson will appear in 2018. Mark is currently working on two books: one is a study of Manchester as the 鈥榮hock city鈥 of industrial change in the nineteenth century; the other (with Richard Williams) is an exploration of relations between architectural history and art history since the German tradition of Kunstwissenschaft. He is vice-president of the European Architectural History Network, and Director of the Architecture, Space and Society Centre at Birkbeck.


Image:听Hughes House, Nairobi, Kenya (1956). Courtesy of Richard Hughes.

16 October: Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner, Exhibiting Architecture: the problem of representation

Exhibiting Architecture - the problem of representation

Exhibiting Architecture: the problem of representation

Room 6.02, 1pm 鈥 2pm, Monday 16听October


Lecturer's Abstract

How do we 鈥 and how might we 鈥 exhibit architecture in a museum setting? In one sense the challenge of displaying architecture is complex: its scale, its materials, its immovability, and its site-specificity all seem to work against it being authentically displayed within the walls of a cultural institution. But are these challenges real, or a myth? What do we want out of an architectural exhibit? What curatorial strategies and solutions are there for exhibiting architecture and how can we use them to their full potential?

Biography听

Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner is Senior Curator of Designs at the V&A, and the V&A鈥檚 Lead Curator for the V&A+RIBA Architecture Partnership. After studying at Cambridge, Yale and 香港六合彩中特网, she worked as an Architectural Investigator at English Heritage and as an Historian with the Survey of London. Olivia has lectured and published widely on a variety of subjects, has broadcast for the BBC on architectural topics, and has curated shows in the V&A+RIBA Architecture Display Gallery. A specialist in seventeenth-century British architecture, she is particularly interested in architectural drawing, and in the conundrum of exhibiting architecture.

27 October: Architectural History听Symposium and Exhibition

MA Architectural History Symposium

Architectural History Symposium and Exhibition

10:00 鈥 20:00, Friday 27 October听


Building Ruptures

The MA Architectural History 2016/17听cohort present听Building Ruptures, a symposium, exhibition and publication launch. Building Ruptures will feature a series of position papers from guest speakers, presentations by graduating students, discussions with guest respondents and an exhibition of students鈥 work.

13 November: Anna Minton,听Big Capital

Anna Minton's book Big Capital

Big Capital

JZ Young Lecture Theatre
6.30pm 鈥 8pm, 13 November听


Lecturer's Abstract听

Anna Minton will talk about her book, 'Big Capital: Who is London for?', which investigates the causes of the housing crisis. The UK has long had a housing crisis but since the financial crash the situation has become acute, with soaring rents and house prices creating widespread housing precarity. At the same time, the demolition of housing estates is being accompanied by the development of hundreds of towers of luxury apartments in their place, out of reach for the majority and marketed to foreign investors. The financialisation and commodification of housing means that it has become primarily a financial asset rather than a public good and human right. How did we get here and what we can do to fix it?

Biography

Anna Minton is a writer, journalist and Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. She is the author of 'Big Capital: Who is London for?' (Penguin 2017) and 'Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the 21st century city' (Penguin 2009/12). Between 2011-14 she was the 1851 Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition Fellow in the Built Environment. She is Programme Leader of the University of East London's听MRes Architecture programme, 'Reading the Neoliberal City', and is a regular contributor to the Guardian.听

20 November: Dr Lynne Walker and Dr Elizabeth Darling,听Architecture 鈥 Gender 鈥 History:听A Sisyphean Task?

An architectural partnership: Aiton and Scott

Architecture 鈥 Gender 鈥 History: A Sisyphean Task?听

Room 6.02, 1pm 鈥 2pm, Monday 20 November听

Lecturer's Abstract听

Having completed four years work on the AA XX 100 project 鈥 a book, exhibition and international conference celebrating 100 years of women in the Architectural Asssociation听鈥 Lynne Walker and Elizabeth Darling will consider the steep learning curve of the experience. They will reflect on how it emerged from, and fits in with, their previous work and perspectives on architecture, gender and history.听

Biographies听

Elizabeth Darling is Reader in Architectural History at Oxford Brookes University. Her work focuses on gender, space and reform from the听1890s to the 1940s,听the genesis and nature of English modernism between the wars,听and sometimes the intersections between the two. Her books include 'Re-forming Britain' (2007), 'Women and the Making of Built Space in England' (2007) and 'Wells Coates' (2012), while her recent articles have explored queer space in Cambridge (Journal of British Studies, 2011) and womanliness and reform in the slums of Edinburgh in the early twentieth century (Gender and History, 2017).

Lynne Walker is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has written extensively on gender, space and architecture, having curated and edited the first historical assessment of British architecture听designed by women, 'Women Architects: Their Work' (1984) at the RIBA. She extended her interest in a later RIBA exhibition and publication, 'Drawing on Diversity: Women, Architecture and Practice' (1997), which considered women鈥檚 participation in architecture from the late sixteenth to the late twentieth century. She has served as a member of the editorial boards of Art History, Journal of the Association of Art Historians and the Woman鈥檚 Art Journal (USA).听听听

27 November: Dr Kim Kullman,听Caring Architectures: Un/making Bodily Relationships

Kim Kullman

Caring Architectures: Un/making Bodily Relationships

Room 6.02, 1pm 鈥 2pm, 27 November

Lecturer's Abstract听

Originating in early feminist thinking, the ethics of care attends to bodies as fragile entities and affirms their interdependency with the world. Seeing bodies as both providers and receivers of care, the orientation offers a unique way to explore human change across the lifespan, while also opening a space for envisioning alternative arrangements of care beyond dominant institutional formations.

This lecture asks whether a distinctively architectural ethics of care is possible by discussing the design and use of a community building for disabled people in Berkeley, California. Interspersing scenes from the present of the building with ones from the 1960s and 1970s radical disability activism that influenced it, the lecture describes how architecture can serve as a speculative site for making and unmaking relationships of care between bodies, materials and spaces.听

Biography

Dr. Kim Kullman is a lecturer in geography at the Open University. He has a longstanding interest in practices of urban mobility and especially in how these are learned, unlearned and re-learned across the life-course.

His current research explores the limits and possibilities of temporary urbanism as well as engaging with disability groups and practitioners to investigate everyday environments that seek to move beyond standard notions of accessibility and inclusion.

Image:听Jeremy Segrott,听My disability does not define me,听2016.


Image at the top of the page: the sixth floor of the Bartlett, photograph by Jack Hobhouse听