Author: Mirna Pedalo

MArch DS22 tutors, Dr Yara Sharif and Dr Nasser Golzari, to screen their film alongside an interactive installation “Secrets of a Digital Garden” at the Berlinale Film Festival on Wednesday, February 19, 7pm at Betonhalle, Silent Green Kulturquartier, Berlin

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

MArch DS22 tutors, Dr Yara Sharif and Dr Nasser Golzari, have been invited to show their recent work Secrets of a Digital Garden at this year’s Berlinale Forum Expanded.

The work consists of a film and an interactive installation, previously exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019.

Secrets of a Digital Garden follows on the duo’s ongoing research by design, which aims to explore the hidden potentials of the Palestinians landscape, and the right to the rural. 
 
The work was produced in collaboration with Riwaq: Centre for Architectural Conservation, and is realised with the fantastic support of UNESCO, University of Westminster, Fabrication Lab, NG Architects, DOEN, Sweden/Sverige and PART.

The exhibition runs from February 19 to March 22.

Expanded Territories Reading Group: “Unthought: The Power of Cognitive Nonconscious” by N. Katherine Hayles, Tuesday, February 11, 18:00, M330

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When: Tuesday, 11th of February, 18:00

Where: M330, Marylebone Campus, NW1 5LS

The Expanded Territories Reading Group in the School of Architecture + Cities invites all college staff and students who might be interested, to join us in reading “Unthought: The Power of Cognitive Nonconscious” by N. Katherine Hayles.

The School of Architecture + Cities celebrates great success at the RIBA President’s Awards 2019

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Both MArch students and the SA+C staff excelled in RIBA President’s Medal Awards 2019 / RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2019 earlier this week.

Ruth Pearn won a Dissertation Medal  for her MArch dissertation ‘Age Through the Terrace: The Evolving Impact of Age on Social and Spatial Relations in the Home’ (Tutored by Prof. Harry Charrington).

DS18 celebrated a double-win by their former MArch students:

Rachel Wakelin was the winner of the Serjeant Award for Excellence in Architectural Drawing at Part 2, for her MArch design project project ‘Avian Air – A Tropospheric Bird Sanctuary’

and

Fiona Grieve was given a Commendation in the Dissertation Medal category, for her MArch dissertation ‘The Reception of Refugees in the UK.’ (Tutored by Dr. Davide Deriu).

DS22 celebrated their former MArch student Sun Yen Yee, who won the SOM Foundation Fellowship (UK Award) at Part 2, for his MArch design project ‘SEED of Havana: Dissolving Condensers.’

Prof Kester Rattenbury (DS15 tutor) was shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Award for Research, in History and Theory category for her project ‘The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy Architect.’  

Tumpa Fellows (PhD researcher within the Experimental Practices research team and BSc Architectural Technology tutor) received a commendation for the Annual Theme: Building in Quality category in RIBA President’s Award for Research, for her project ‘Improvised architectural responses to the changing climate; making, sharing and communicating design processes.’

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE WINNERS!

Open Lecture Series: “Tech Trends on a Budget” by Adam Perry, Event Tech Live, UK, Monday, December 9, M416 Robin Evans Room, Marylebone Campus, 17:00

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When: Monday, 9th of December 2019, 17:00

Where: M416, Robin Evans Room, 35 Marylebone Rd, London NW1 5LS

To book your free tickets please click here.

Adam Parry is the co-founder of Event Tech Live.

About this Event

Co-founder of Event Tech Live and the editor of Event Industry News will explore the event technologies that will trend in 2020. The session keeps budget in mind suggesting technologies that are affordable for most events.

Learning outcomes:

  • Understand the advantages of using various technologies to enhance the event experience
  • Understand the budget interface with specific engagement technologies
  • Understand emerging technology trends for 2020

Open Lecture Series: “Designing Destination Attractors” by Tracy Halliwell MBE, London&Partners, and “Designing Eventscapes” by Prof Graham Brown, University of South Australia, Monday, December 2, M416 Robin Evans Room, Marylebone Campus, 17:00

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When: Monday, 2nd of December 2019, 17:00

Where: M416, Robin Evans Room, 35 Marylebone Rd, London NW1 5LS

To book your free tickets please click here.

Tracy Halliwell MBE, London and Partners, and Professor Graham Brown, University of South Australia.

About this Event

Designing Destination Attractors with Tracy Halliwell MBE.

London is one of the worlds most exciting cities for events. But how does Visit London, the destination authority design world class events to attract local and international attendees? This session explores how the ideation and creation process works in the worlds greatest city.

Learning outcomes:

  • Understand how destinations can design events to create place attractors for event tourism
  • Understand the process and the management of stakeholders in the design of placemaking events
  • Understand the design and delivery process of placemaking events

Eventscapes with Professor Graham Brown.

The presentation will explore how to design eventscapes. From a planning perspective, it will show how to select the best locations where the settings add value to event experiences and where event facilities can create long-term benefits for host communities. From a design perspective, examples will show the way graphic design has been used to create visual settings. 

Learning outcomes:

  • Understand how specific locations have an impact on eventscapes
  • Understand how host communities benefit from large public events
  • Understand how the design of eventscapes can benefit from graphics as semiotic indicators

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “The Cosmic Economy of Eladio Dieste” Prof Remo Pedreschi, University of Edinburgh Thursday, December 5, M416, Marylebone Campus, 18:30

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When: Thursday, 5th of December, 18:30

Where: M416, Robin Evans Room, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Eladio Dieste (1917-2000) was a Uruguyan engineer who studied in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Montevideo. In his book on the work of Dieste, The Engineer’s Contribution to Contemporary Architecture: Eladio Dieste, Remo Pedreschi explains that Dieste’s university education was formative and crucially provided him with the fundamentals of maths and physics, which was so instrumental in his conception of structures. Some of the earliest work that Dieste undertook as an engineer was on concrete shell structures and on first glance whilst studying projects such as his free-standing vaults for ANCAP in Montevideo (1955) you could easily be forgiven for thinking that they were fabricated out of reinforced concrete. In fact, these shells were made from a unique system devised by Dieste of clay bricks reinforced with steel cables and cement. As with other great structural ‘artists’ of that period such as Felix Candela and Pier Luigi Nervi, Dieste was engineer, builder (and latterly architect) of his projects. He established the firm Dieste y Montañez in 1955 and as Remo Pedreschi explains “…the firm was in effect, a major design and build contractor that had developed its own innovative construction techniques.”

Remo Pedreschi is a chartered engineer and Professor of Architectural Technology at the University of Edinburgh. He joined that university after holding senior positions in the construction industry and continues to work with industry. He has undertaken research in a range of materials including concrete, steel, timber, and stone and currently is Director of the Master’s programme in Material Practice. He obtained his PhD for research in post-tensioned brickwork and has published a number of scientific papers in his area. This research led to his interest in the work of Eladio Dieste. He developed and co-edited a series of books exploring the relationship between engineering and architecture, The Engineer’s Contribution to Architecture, for which he wrote the monograph on Eladio Dieste. Remo was also the co-author of the seminal Fabric Formwork book.

For lecture details contact Will McLean

w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk

https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/

Thomas McLucas’ last year’s project for DS2.6 selected for exhibition at the RIBA Architecture Gallery

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The work of Thomas McLucas, Architecture BA Honours student, was selected from entries drawn across the UK for the exhibition ‘INDUSTRIALISED’ at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

University of Westminster | News

The RIBA exhibition titled ‘INDUSTRIALISED’ shows drawings by over 40 students from 20 schools of architecture across the UK. It parallels another exhibition in the Architecture Gallery called ‘Beyond Bauhaus’, both exhibitions respond to the centenary of the opening of the historic Bauhaus school. 

The Bauhaus school was established under the Weimar Republic in 1919 and closed in 1933 under the Nazis. The school’s teaching program cohered around a novel concept of industrial design, which for them meant the production of a universal, totally integrated environment.

This year, the BA Architecture Studio DS2/6 set out to work in a truly post-industrial environment in a project led by Dr Victoria Watson, Senior Lecturer at the University. The project was called CAR PARK to COSMOS, it asked students to remodel a car park in Stevenage for a hypothetical organisation, ‘The International Institute of Cosmism (IIC)’, who plan to develop the car park as a place of post-industrial work, specifically to make Cosmist movies. Students were encouraged to think like Russian Cosmists and to invent their own utopias, just like architects of the Bauhaus would have done. 

Thomas McLucas’ approach was heavily inspired by the monumentalism of the Soviet Union, as can be seen, for example, in the Shukov tower or Fernsehturm in Berlin, which the students visited on their field trip. 

Speaking about his work, Thomas said: “It is highly exciting to be exhibited at the RIBA as part of the Bauhaus centenary celebrations. It is important to reflect on our industrial past as we are in a new technological revolution, one where what we are producing is less material but no less impactful.

“My project acts as a critique of the post-industrial nature of mass media, aiming to highlight this by pulling the production and transmission into one transparent structure. Transparent, in that activity can be seen through the meshwork form, and that the architecture clearly expresses what it does.”

Talking about his achievement, Dr Watson said: “Thomas McLucas’s project is remarkable for the way it poses questions about the nature of post-industrial work and of the new kinds of media technologies that effect our environment, even though we cannot necessarily see them.”

The exhibition will run until 30 November at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place.

University of Westminster | News

Featured image: ©Thomas McLucas

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “An Introduction to the History of Fortifications” Prof Jeremy Black, University of Exeter, Thursday, November 28, M416, Marylebone Campus, 18:30

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When: Thursday, 28th of November, 18:30

Where: M416, Robin Evans Room, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Prof Jeremy Black MBE is a British historian and a professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is the author of over 100 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th-century British politics and international relations, and has been described as “the most prolific historical scholar of our age”.

Black graduated from Queens’ College, Cambridge, with a starred first and then did postgraduate work at St John’s and Merton Colleges, Oxford. He taught at Durham University from 1980 as a lecturer, then professor, before moving to Exeter University in 1996. He has lectured in Australasia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the U.S.. He was editor of Archives, journal of the British Records Association, from 1989 to 2005. He has served on the Council of the British Records Association (1989–2005); the Council of the Royal Historical Society (1993–1996 and 1997–2000); and the Council of the List and Index Society (from 1997). He has sat on the editorial boards of History Today, International History Review, Journal of Military History, Media History and the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute (now the RUSI Journal). He is an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

Wikipedia 2019

For lecture details contact Will McLean

w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk

https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/

Open Lecture Series: “Immersive Gastronomic Experiences” by Marcis Ziemins and Gundega Skudrina, Untamed Dinner (Skudras Metropole), Latvia, Monday, November 25, M416 Robin Evans Room, Marylebone Campus, 17:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Monday, 25th of November 2019, 17:00

Where: M416, Robin Evans Room, 35 Marylebone Rd, London NW1 5LS

To book your free tickets please click here.

Marcin Ziemins and Gundega Skudrina creative directors at award winning Untamed Dinner (formerly Skudras Metropole).

About this Event

One the most innovative and imaginative off-the-wall caterers in Europe. This small but perfectly formed catering company from Riga, Latvia once served cocktails in flower pot that included blooming flowers. On another occasion Gundega and Marcin created a live banquet using builder’s tools to prepare the dishes in front of diners.

They love to combine gastronomy, theatre, music, art and other fields, to create immersive experiences for selected guests as well as for corporate clients. They have made ice cream out of playing piano, made 400 kg of jelly that were poured into tables as content, burned plates in front of audience, made edible light bulbs.

Learning outcomes:

  • Understand how to immerse attendees into gastronomic experiences
  • Understand what elements are available for immersive gastronomy
  • Understand how attendee participation can be used to create positive memories

ArchiIMPACT Symposium: ONEPROJECT | Monday, December 2, 10:00-16:00, M416, Marylebone Campus

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Architects, Students and Academics were invited to each present a single project from their practice, University design project or academic research that can be discussed in regard to (all/some of) the following principles of low energy architecture. 

This is deliberately a mixture of architectural practitioners at all stages of their careers  showing built and un-built projects, the successful and the unsuccessful (?!), side-by-side in an effort to collectively learn from one another, presenting a single project each with regard to the same set of criteria across all projects.

Each presentation will last around 30 minutes in sets of 3 presentations, with a conversation afterwards.

The chosen projects address the following issues:

  • Site Specific: Does the building employ existing features of the site as part of its environmental strategy? Utilising orientation, topography, existing structures, water and trees?
  • Climate Responsive: Does the project respond to local (micro) climatic conditions and environmental factors such as heat, light, sound, wind and air quality?
  • Efficient in Use: Is the building suited to its purpose, appropriate in its size and optimised in its use?
  • Climatic Envelope: Does the building have a highly energy-efficient building envelope suited to its location and use?
  • Energy Use: Has the design minimised operational energy, is the building a low carbon (CO2) emitter and a net producer of energy?
  • Material Construction: Has the use of (local) resources been optimised and embodied energy (CO2) reduced through appropriate material choices?
  • Waste and Water: Has the material waste, pollution and water use been minimised? Could the project collect and treat water?
  • Time Dependent: How does the building operate diurnally, annually and throughout its life? Is the building flexible, adaptable, easy to maintain and does it allow for reuse of all or some of its parts at the end of its life?