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RIBA Student Support Fund – Autumn 2020 Application Cycle | Deadline: Friday, November 27 at 17:00 GMT

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The RIBA Student Support Fund – Autumn 2020 Application Cycle is now open. The full details including guidance notes and application form can be found on the RIBA website here.

The purpose of the RIBA Student Support Fund is to alleviate financial hardship for students of architecture enrolled in RIBA Part 1 and 2 courses in the UK. Applications are welcomed from students who have encountered recent financial barriers during their studies and would benefit from assistance to successfully complete the academic year. Students may apply for a maximum bursary of £3,000 in this application cycle.

The deadline to apply is 5pm on Friday 27 November 2020.

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “Recent Projects,” Sophie Hicks, Wednesday, November 4 at 17:00 [online via BB]

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Wednesday, 4th of November at 5pm

Event Link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/f9e3ae5001874d12b6a507f5d1160bd6

Sophie Hicks established Sophie Hicks Architects in 1990 whilst still a student at the Architectural Association and she became a chartered architect in 1994. Prior to her career as an architect she worked in fashion: as a stylist for Vogue Magazine; and for the designer, Azzedine Alaia. She leads a practice with a focus on both fashion retail and private residential design. Her retail projects include Westbourne House with Paul Smith, his “shop in a house”; and the development of a store concept for Chloé, with signature plywood walls, which has been used in over one hundred stores worldwide. Sophie has also worked closely with Yohji Yamamoto to design his flagship store in Paris; and she created a new-build flagship store for Acne Studios in Seoul.

In parallel with her retail designs, Sophie Hicks acquired three sites in London, all in conservation areas, with the intention of building a contemporary house on each. The first, a small house in Regent Square, was completed in 2014. The second, a street-facing house in Earl’s Court Square, was completed in 2018. The third, a larger house in Holland Park, has obtained planning permission. New-build, contemporary houses are relatively rare in central London, because of the strong culture in the UK of preservation of the historic environment. Sophie has designed these new houses to “…respect the past, and respond to it, while at the same time expressing the spirit of our own times.” Sophie Hicks is a member of the Panel for Creative and Design at the Institute for Apprenticeships (IFA). The aim of the IFA is to improve the work opportunities and job satisfaction of young people, avoid student debt, and address the skills shortage in the UK.

For more details contact Will McLean – w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk

Technical Studies website – https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/

Competition: Transforming Urban Landscapes | Deadline: December 4, 2020 at 17:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

This new international ideas competition launched by the Landscape Institute will be of interest to students and/or professionals. 

The aim of the competition is to respond to the current debates on the design and use of our urban landscape in light of the COVID-19 crisis. Deadline 4th December.

https://competitions.landscapeinstitute.org/transforming-the-urban-landscape/

Robin Evans Lecture 2020: Eyal Weizman | November 24, 2020 from 18:30 to 20:30

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

About this Event

For the 2020 iteration of the annual Robin Evans Lecture, we are delighted to be joined by Eyal Weizman, founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

In light of the current pandemic this year’s lecture will be delivered online via the University of Westminster’s GoToWebinar account. Further details around the topic and discussion of this year’s lecture will be made available in due course.

Registration for the Lecture

You can register for the event on Eventbrite; either by scanning the QR code in the above invite, or by visiting:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-robin-evans-lecture-2020-eyal-weizman-tickets-125144022139

Upon registration on Eventbrite your name and email address will be added by the Event Coordinator to the individual GoToWebinar registration page. By registering on Eventbrite, you consent to these details being added to the GoToWebinar registration page for the event.

You will receive a separate email within 1 working day from University of Westminster (via customercare@gotowebinar.com) with a calendar invite and a unique link to join the Webinar. Please note: This link is unique to each registrant and should not be shared with others.

About the Speaker

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The author of over 15 books, he has held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In 2019 he was elected life fellow of the British Academy and appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture.

Eyal studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London

About the Robin Evans Lecture Series

This series supports outstanding scholarship in the history of architecture and allied fields, building on the work of Professor Robin Evans (1944-1993). It encourages scholars working on the relationship between the spatial and social domains in architectural drawing, construction and beyond. Evans’ work interrogated the spaces that existed between drawing and building, geometry and architecture, teasing out the points of translation often overlooked.

From his early work on prison design and domestic spaces, through to his later work on architectural geometry, Evans sought to articulate the multiple points at which the human imagination could influence architectural form. His first book, The Fabrication of Virtue, analysed the way that spatial layouts provided opportunities for social reform via their interference with morality, privacy and class. In The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Evans traced the origins of the humanist tradition to understand how human form influenced architectural drawing and construction, focusing on aesthetic dimensions in the production of architectural space.

This series will provide opportunities for the creation and/or dissemination of work by scholars working on similar questions of space, temporality, and architecture. In particular, it supports work that breaks the boundaries of traditional disciplines to think though these complex networks involved in the space between human imagination and architectural production.

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “Sartfell Retreat,” Greg Lomas, Thursday, October 22 at 18:00 [online via BB]

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Thursday, 22nd of October at 6pm

Event Link:  https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/6a1c461ca47949b5b6fbe718f5b076a5

‘Sartfell Retreat is one of those rare projects which appears to emerge out of the earth, providing a sense of permanence and protection for the clients to live with, and amongst the elements of the weather, wildlife and local ecology’  

Will Foster (Foster Lomas)

Foster Lomas is a UK-based architecture practice established by William Foster and Greg Lomas in 2005.  The practice has developed a diverse portfolio of work, ranging from highly tailored homes for private clients to a canal-side mixed-use development in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the multi award winning Sartfell Retreat on the Isle of Man and a 10-year masterplan for a 134-hectare site set within the Grand Sasso National Park of Abruzzo, Italy. 

Sartfell Retreat is part of a growing body of commissions through which the practice explores the relationship between landscape and self-sustaining architecture. Foster Lomas’ response to the site relates to their research and experience of drystone construction whilst working in the Abruzzo region of Italy. Building on this vernacular technology, they have reinterpreted the local Manx stone structures to create an original building in its unique setting. The rural environment inspires their architectural aesthetic and the practice’s diverse backgrounds in craft and product design, including blacksmithing and lighting, allow for continual experimentations and innovations. 

For more details contact Will McLean – w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk 

Technical Studies website – https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “Natural Builder: Building with Bamboo,” Jan Balbaligo, Thursday, October 15 at 18:00 [online via BB]

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Thursday, 15th of October 6pm 

Event Link:  https://eu.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/guest/9aee3d5c1e2e42998b4074a8b1245dd0

… the green steel of the 21st Century 

Vo Trong Nghia

Bamboo is not a new building material, but given changing environmental design imperatives, this aggressive fast-growing plant species provides a strong and durable construction material. Bamboo is the largest member of the grass family and is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet – Moso bamboo from China can grow up 900 mm a day. Bamboo can be ready for harvest and construction use in three-five years compared with 20-25, for softwood timber. 

In January 2020, designer and Bamboo builder Jan Balbaligo working with non-profit arts and social enterprise Cosmic Convergence completed the Eco-Salon in San Pablo La Laguna, Solalá, Guatemala. The Eco-Salon is a multi-functional indoor space (85 m2) built on top of an existing public school to provide space for music, sports, arts, dance and other activities to complement and enrich the formal education. The building structure is a bamboo framework, with a bamboo lathe (bamboo splits) roof and bamboo split walls with a Bajareke (clay and sand) infill. Jan Balbaligo is a great advocate for the use of bamboo in construction and she has worked on a number of temporary festival structures and small school and community buildings and we are delighted to welcome Jan back to Westminster.

For more details contact Will McLean – w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk

Technical Studies website – https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/ 

Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows’ article for RIBAJ: “Practical steps towards real inclusion”

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows, an architect, researcher, and the BSc Architectural Technology Year 2 leader has published an article in The RIBA Journal on how the architects can use their skills to help improve conditions for the disadvantaged and marginalised communities and members of our society.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities and highlighted the urgency for community collaboration towards positive societal changes.  The pandemic has changed our lives in many ways. My family is grieving the loss of several family members and friends (of Bangladeshi origin), living in the UK.

Research issued by Public Health England reveals that you are more likely to die from Covid-19 if you are BAME than someone who is white, and people of Bangladeshi ethnicity are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than those who are white and British. The recent global protests for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement brought to focus communities’ collective actions to rise up against racial injustice and various social and health inequalities which have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The power of community action and collective response has become urgent for communities worldwide, whether they are affected by racial injustice, health inequality or new developments in their neighbourhood (sometimes resulting in eviction) and for all those passionate to change systemic racism and inequalities.

As practitioners and architects, we could act many ways to facilitate the voices of those who have been marginalised in the society. One of these is to get involved in local planning issues: for example, by alerting the planning authority to any new development that negatively affects low-income communities in the neighbourhood through gentrification.

I am passionate about being part of the change in my area, so volunteered to be part of my borough’s design review panel. There I have the opportunity to help address some of the issues and push the design team and the developers, to hear and respond to the voices of the community. Unfortunately, in all the recent projects we have reviewed (which happened to be led by influential architects), the design decisions did not reflect local engagement (in an area with one of the largest BAME communities in London), and showed a lack of communication with the community they had designed for. Very little work had been done towards any such local engagement in the design process. […]

Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows for RIBAJ, October 2020

To read the full text please go here.

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “Building with Cross Laminated Timber (CLT),” Andrew Waugh from Waugh Thistleton Architects, Thursday, October 8 at 18:00 [online via BB]

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

When: Thursday, 8th of October at 6pm

Event link:  https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/8d7c6b34eb16433cb169a07f519d9712

A mass timber building will weigh about 30% of a regular building, and so much reduced foundations … these buildings can be re-purposed, they are easy to adapt.

Andrew Waugh

Andrew Waugh of Waugh Thistleton Architects is a great advocate for the use of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) in construction and he first used it in a small project in 2003. His practice, subsequently built a nine-storey residential CLT tower in Murray Grove, Hackney, London and has demonstrated its success for the construction of dense urban housing and office projects. Waugh has also used other engineered timber products such as Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL), which is a large section of bonded timber veneers providing the equivalent cross-sectional strength of steel.

Andrew Waugh and Anthony Thistleton, met as students at Kingston University and established Waugh Thistleton in 1997. Waugh Thistleton Architects is a Shoreditch based architectural practice producing thoughtful and sustainable projects in its own neighbourhood and beyond. The practice is a world leader in engineered timber and pioneer in the field of tall timber buildings. In addition to being immersed in both design and construction, they run research projects, teach and experiment in timber, with their full-time timber engineer and the many PhD and Masters students that come to work with them.

For more details contact Will McLean – w.f.mclean@westminster.ac.uk

Technical Studies website – https://technicalstudies.tumblr.com/

Technical Studies Lecture Series: “The Shape of Green” Mick Pearce, Thursday, October 1, 18:00 [online via BB]

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Thursday, 1st of October at 6.00pm

Event link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/guest/2415664a77cb470bb266d845cf4bcb76 

Michael Pearce is a graduate of the AA and was a student of the socio-technology gurus Reyner Banham and Cedric Price. Pearce was responsible for the design and supervision of the award-winning Eastgate Centre in Harare and the CH2 (Council House 2) Municipal offices in Melbourne Australia. The metaphor for Eastgate was the termitary, the metaphor for CH2 is the tree. Pearce believes that the architecture and its visual expression should respond to the natural, socio-cultural and economic environment of its location in the same way that an ecosystem in nature is embedded in its site. 

Pearce has been working in Zimbabwe and Zambia for 33 years. His experience covers a wide range from building in remote parts of Central Africa to converting buildings in north east England and large-scale city developments in Harare, Zimbabwe. Committed to appropriate and responsive architecture, Michael Pearce has specialised in the development of buildings which have low maintenance, low capital and running costs and renewable energy systems of environmental control. His most recent work involves developing passive control systems in small-scale single storey buildings as well as large-scale commercial multi-storey buildings using building methods which rely even less on imported materials, technologies or human resources. He has been closely involved in the development of rammed earth construction for low cost housing in remote locations in Zimbabwe where transport and energy are the largest costs in producing buildings.  

The Architecture Drawing Prize 2020 | Entry deadline: October 2, 2020

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The Architecture Drawing Prize is an international competition that celebrates the art and skill of architectural drawing. The prize is curated by Make Architects, Sir John Soane’s Museum and the World Architecture Festival.

In the spirit of many great architects of the past, from Palladio and John Soane to Le Corbusier and Cedric Price, it’s an ideal platform for reflecting on and exploring how drawing continues to advance the art of architecture today.

Entries are welcomed from architects, designers and students from around the world, in the following categories: hand-drawing, digital and hybrid.

The winning and commended entries will go on display at a dedicated exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The winners will also receive a delegate pass to the World Architecture Festival where they have their work on display and they will be presented with their award.

For more information please visit here.