Blog

FAB FEST 2018 “Digital City”

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The next edition of FAB FEST will take place from 2nd to 10th July 2018 in Ambika P3.

The festival will broadly follow the same format as the previous two events, although some changes are to make it even bigger and better.

Notes from the organiser on the changes for FAB FEST ’18:

  • We are making an open call to all interested students of architecture and are asking for submissions of Design Concepts this year for either pavilions or smaller installations. All the requirements for submission are on our website.
  • Teams have a month from now to form a team and submit their applications. Successful teams will have a further two months to develop their ideas and produce, with our help, the fabrication information for their pavilion or installation. We’ll then manufacture the parts in the Lab and provide them flat-packed, ready for teams to assemble in P3 from the 2nd July.
  • During the assembly week, we will now have use of the newly refurbished Fabrication Lab, and it will be open in the evening all week for participants in the festival to meet each other and unwind.
  • As requested by previous participants, we are asking teams to keep more closely to the brief and to the rules this time, and so will be making the competition aspect of FAB FEST fairer and more prominent. Many teams have taken the competition seriously, and FAB FEST prizes are becoming prestigious for students to win. We will be making more of this aspect of FAB FEST this year, with more guest judges and a bigger judging and prize-giving event on the Friday night.
  • The following events on the Saturday and afterwards are also differentiated more clearly this time. There are now three distinct events following the main week of pavilion assembly and competition:
  • ‘Let’s Make!’ – We are working with a number of local schools over the coming months to develop the community outreach aspect of FAB FEST, and the Saturday afternoon will now be an opportunity to share the contribution from our local community, and to have a more family-oriented set of making and drawing workshops.
  • ‘Music@ FAB FEST’ – For the Saturday evening, there will be a much higher profile musical performance, making use of the one-off artistic venue that P3 and the pavilions provide. We have some of London’s hottest bands in our sights to make the most of this unique opportunity. The event will be open to all FAB FEST participants, but strictly ticketed this year.
  • FAB FEST Exhibition – Finally, we’re extending the exhibition element of the event, to give more people the opportunity to see the pavilions that everyone has worked so hard to produce, before it is recycled back into new card boards for next year’s event (98% of it!).
  • We are also developing the underlying research interests we have been pursuing through FAB FEST. We’ll be building on papers presented last year both on the role of FAB FEST as an experiment in teaching digital design and fabrication, and as a transient intervention in the City. This year we’re working on links to industry, exploring its relevance to the trend towards offsite construction. Let us know if you might be interested in working with us on any of this research.
  • Finally, we have new partners this year contributing to the events, including the Westminster Architecture Society and Digital Construction Week, with more joining over the coming months. Please refer back to the website for current developments.

For full details, please see the new website: fabfest.london, or pop down to the FabLab if you have any questions.

Conference and Book Launch: The Heritage of Minority Faith Buildings in the UK and The British Mosque (Shahed Saleem)

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The launch of Shahed Saleem‘s new book The British Mosque will take place on Monday 12th March, following a conference on “The Heritage of Minority Faith Buildings in the UK” organised by Historic England and the Society of Antiquaries.

When: Monday, 12th March 2018

Where: Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE

Shahed Saleem is a DS2.3 studio tutor and a practising architect, who researches and writes on architecture’s relationship with cultural identity, heritage and nationhood. He works regularly with Historic England and is a Senior Research Fellow with the Survey of London.

Historic England has been working with partners over recent years to develop and deepen an understanding of the landscape of faith buildings in 20th century England, including the long-standing traditions of Christianity and Judaism. This particular event will instead focus on those faith groups which arrived in the UK in the late 19th and 20th century, and have since made a significant contribution to the heritage of a modern and multicultural historic environment.

For the first time, the Society of Antiquaries of London and Historic England will bring together this new body of research on Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain and Zoroastrian places of worship with heritage practitioners, researchers and theorists. The aim is to provide a platform for a discussion on issues of heritage practice and heritage discourse in the field of multiculturalism, multiple identities and the historic environment. This will provide an opportunity for a long overdue debate on the significance and character of buildings whose quality and importance have not been fully recognised in heritage debates.

Featured image: The Shah Jehan mosque, Woking, designed and built in 1889. Listed Grade II*. © Historic England (taken from the ‘Places of Worship Listing Selection Guide’, 2017, p 29).

 

For conference programme and bookings please go to: https://www.sal.org.uk/events/2018/03/heritage-of-minority-faith-buildings/

LATE Conversations #1 URBAN[scapes], Monday 5th March, 18:00-20:00, Robin Evans Room M416

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

LATE Conversations #1

Landscape, Architecture and Tourism Explorations

When: Monday 05 March 2018, 6-8pm

Where: Robin Evans Room [M416], Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

URBAN[scapes]

Staging the city: recreating the urban as eventscape

[Andrew Smith]
Like other theatrical metaphors, the idea of the ‘city as stage’ is commonly cited within urban and tourism studies. However, this interpretation treats events and the context in which they happen as separate entities when they are better understood as intertwined. This presentation outlines the contemporary use of public spaces for (planned) events and explores the idea of urban eventscapes – assemblages of people, buildings and event structures. It is easy to dismiss these as temporary phenomena, but there is evidence that festivals, sports events and exhibitions can have lasting effects on urban spaces, and that the built environment is being adapted to accommodate them.

Skywalking in the city

[Davide Deriu]
Ever since the advent of high-rise architecture, the modern city has been a distinct locus of vertiginous experience. Whilst the correlation between vertigo and tall buildings might at first appear to be an obvious one, it is in fact a variable function of ever-evolving techniques and materials, and depends on the psychosocial conditions that underlie the experience of space at a given place and time. The presentation explores the ambivalent concept of vertigo and its significance for contemporary architecture through concepts of transparency, experience, and kinaesthesia. Focusing on the ongoing trend for elevated glass platforms, it proposes that these design features constitute a kind of sixth façade that characterises the emergence of an ‘architecture of vertigo’.

City in flux: mobilities and places in station areas

[Enrica Papa]
Using an approach that considers station areas both as places and as nodes in the transport network, the talk addresses the role of station areas in Greater London, with the aim of supporting long-term integrated land-use and transport strategies at the regional scale. In fact, ‘Transit Oriented Development’ has also been widely advocated and applied in London; however, so far no study has systematically developed a TOD typology in the London context. This paper fills this gap. The main innovation of this application of the node-place is that it is applied in the day hours and the night hours. Using GIS, the paper analyses network connectivity (‘node values’) and geographically detailed data on amenity levels, job and employment densities (‘place values’), revealing opportunities for (i) land-use densification within catchment areas or (ii) increased network connectivity of the stations supporting the 24 hour London economy.

Urban architectural representation of post-conflict destination branding

[Maja Jovic]
For this talk, Maja is looking at the concept of ‘urban’ in architecture and national identity, and its relation to tourism in post-conflict countries. Today, these countries are transitional economies that brand themselves as touristic destinations in order to find a unique position on the world map. Maja is questioning the role of architecture in shaping the destination identity – in particular the dialogue between urban and rural. Political and cultural transformations have a spatial dimension and Maja tries to understand the way national identities are reshaped, reproduced and differentiated from one another through architectural analysis. The findings are illustrated with the post-conflict regions of South East Europe, their creation of national stories on one side and Europeanism on the other. The dialogue between modernisation and the traditional resulted in a change of represented destination identity and a shift of attitude towards traditional and modern age architecture.

Moderation

[Victoria Watson]

People

Andrew Smith is a Reader in Tourism and Events and co-leads the Tourism and Events Research Group. His research focuses on city events and urban tourism and he works in and between the fields of urban studies and tourism/event studies. His work has been published in a variety of journals including Urban Studies, ARQ, European Planning Studies and Annals of Tourism Research and he has written two books: Events and Urban Regeneration: The Strategic Use of Events to Revitalise Cities (Routledge, 2012) and Events in the City: Using Public Spaces as Event Venues (Routledge, 2016). His current work focuses on the contested use of London’s parks as venues for large scale events; and the significance of urban light festivals .

Davide Deriu is a Reader and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. He holds a PhD from UCL and was awarded grants from the AHRC, Yale University, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), where he curated the exhibition Modernism in Miniature. His main research interests lie at the intersection between spatial and visual cultures, and he has published on a wide range of subjects – from underground space to aerial photography. Recently, Davide was a Mellon Fellow on the CCA research program Architecture and/for Photography, and Rowe Lecturer at RIBA. He leads the interdisciplinary project Vertigo in the City, which received seed funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Enrica Papa is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Planning and Transport of the University of Westminster, joined the ETC Board in November 2017. She is the Course leader of the MSc in Transport Planning and Management and leads the transport group of the AESOP (European Association of Schools of Planning). Enrica’s research is positioned at the intersection of urban, transport and economic geography. She has published extensively on geography of mobility, planning for sustainable accessibility, transitions to low-carbon and low-energy living and societies. Within the AET Board, she will be responsible for the AET Marketing and Recruitment activities and will coordinate the AET Ambassadors network.

Maja Jovic’s interests in the city, nation and destination branding, and in image management and national identity, lead her to question how it shapes the built environment and is shaped by a conflict and its residue. She focuses on the power of brand management, how fluctuations in national stories reflect on the built environment and the intersection of tourism and architecture in creating a destination brand. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Branding Post-Conflict Cities and Nations’ explored how branding helps recreate an image of a post-conflict city or nation. Maja took an interdisciplinary approach to identify the relations between the effect of national image and nationalism to brands, power, the built environment and the image as a destination. Maja teaches across departments to undergraduate and postgraduate students – Tourism, Architecture, Architectural Technology, Planning, and Property and Construction.

Victoria Watson is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Westminster, a partner in Doctor Watson Architects (DWA) and a visiting tutor to the MA Architecture degree at the Royal College of Art. She has contributed articles about Mies van der Rohe to the Journal of Architecture and to the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society. She has written about colour theory for a variety of journals and magazines. In 2010 she won a Rome scholarship and in 2012 her book, Utopian Adventure: the Corviale Void was published. Her architectonic models, derived from the study of colour in Miesian architecture, have been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. She is currently writing a book about the cultural economics of architecture.

LATE Conversations is a series of events exploring the interactions between Landscape, Architecture and Tourism. It aims to engage an interdisciplinary conversation across the departments of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and foster dialogue between academics,/professionals and students from different disciplines engaged with the Landscape.

Format

18:00 – 19:00 introduction of session and speakers + interventions [10m each speaker]
19:00 – 19:30 extended conversation between guests and audience
19:30 – 20:00 drinks

Organisation: Westminster Architecture Society and Westminster Tourism Society.

Coordination: Duarte Santo and Helen Farrell

LATE conversations is a joint event of the Department of Architecture and the Department of Planning and Transport. Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Westminster.

#LATEconversations
#architectureandbuiltenvironment
#universityofwestminster
#urbanscapes

Professor Richard Sennett – Book Launch of “Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City”; Monday 5th March, 19:00, Southwark Cathedral

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

An evening with Professor Richard Sennett will be hosted on Monday 5th March by Southwark Cathedral and Penguin Random House, to mark the release of his new book Building and Dwelling: Ethics for a City. This event is a part of a series of events on the theme of creating ‘A Good City for All’.

The evening will begin with an introduction by Richard Sennett on the creation of cities in the future, followed by a panel discussion looking at how cities are built and how people live in them. The panel will be chaired by the Revd Canon Giles Goddard, Vicar at St John’s Waterloo at the heart of the South Bank Centre, and joining Professor Richard Sennett on the panel are two of London’s leading practitioners on the urban environment, Mike Hayes CBE and Professor Noha Nasser.

When: 5th March, 7-8.30pm

Where: Southwark Cathedral

Booking and further info: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/building-and-dwelling-ethics-for-the-city-panel-discussion-tickets-39729007531

Architecture Research Forum: “Accounting for Alognon Pragma: Recent work in the Studio and On-site” Alessandro Ayuso, Thursday 1st March, Erskine Room, 5th Floor, 13:00-14:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

ALESSANDRO AYUSO: Accounting for Alognon Pragma: Recent work in the Studio and On-site

My work explores the intersection of human bodies and architecture by envisioning non-ideal, deviant, playful, and personal images of embodied conditions. It is de ned by artefacts generated in the pursuit of three interconnected strands. The first investigates the potential of representations of human figures, or Body Agents, to embed subject-positions in architectural de- sign through their depiction in drawings, models, and ornament. The second, the Agent Bodies drawing series, envisions imagined body-like assemblages ‘from the inside-out,’ revealing a fictional spatiality of the posthuman body. The third strand, Leaky Embodiment Alter-ego Personas, are full-scale constructions of figures that I see as tragicomic actors with uncooperative bodies. They are provocations, presenting a monstrous, ridiculous subjectivity. These pieces are steeped in idiosyncrasies and intuition, and could be considered as alognon pragma, or ‘things without account’. Their discursive value is presented here through a framing and recounting of the underlying questions, processes, and precedents integral to their conception.

Alessandro Ayuso is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, where he teaches design and theory on the Interior Architecture and Architecture courses.

Where: Erskine Room (M523), Marylebone Campus

When: 1 March 2018, 13.00–14.00

ALL WELCOME

Joseph Grima’s Talk at Sir John Soane’s Museum, Wednesday 28th February, 19:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Sir John Soane’s Museum will be hosting a talk by Joseph Grima on Wednesday 28th February at 7pm.

Joseph Grima, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven, will speak as part of the talk series ‘Architecture on Display’. In this series, Sir John Soane’s Museum and James Taylor-Foster are inviting curators and thinkers to reflect on the meanings, implications and varying strategies behind the display of architecture.

Tickets are £10 (adult price) and £5 for students.

Event runs 7pm-8pm. Doors open at 6:45pm. For more information visit the museum’s website.

Monsoon [+Other] Waters Symposium: 12th and 13th April, University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus, Room M416

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Monsoon Waters is the second in a series of symposia convened by the Monsoon Assemblages project. It will comprise inter-disciplinary panels, key-note addresses and an exhibition. It will bring together established and young scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines, knowledge systems and practices to engage in conversations about the ontologies, epistemologies, histories, politics, practices and spatialities of monsoon waters.

Confirmed key note speakers at the symposium are:

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha: landscape architects based in Philadelphia, USA and Bangalore, India, whose work is focused on how water is conceptualised and visualised in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, and the opportunities that its ubiquity offers for new visualisations of terrain and resilience through design.

Kirsten Blinkenberg Hastrup: environmental anthropologist based in Copenhagen, Denmark, whose work deals with social responses to climate change across the globe, currently centred in the Thule Area, NW Greenland.

When: 12th and 13th April 2018

Where: Room M416, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

For full programme and bookings please go to Eventbrite page.

“The Social (Re)Production of Architecture” Book Launch – Thursday 1st March, 6.30pm, Central St Martins

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

An evening symposium celebrating the launch of The Social (Re)Production of Architecture co-edited by Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal will take place on Thursday, 1st March.

MArch DS22 studio leaders and tutors Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari will present their contribution to the book followed by discussion.

When: 1st March 2018,  6.30pm

Where: LVMH Lecture Theatre, Central St Martins, Granary Building, 1 Granary Sq, London N1C 4AA

RSVP: The event is free no RSVP is needed, however seats can be reserved via Eventbrite, doors open at 6.15PM

Speakers include:

  • Doina Petrescu & Kim Trogal (Editors) – Introduction to The Social (Re)Production of Architecture;
  • Kathrin Böhm & Michale Smythe – Phytology National Park: strategies to keep public spaces complex;
  • Helge Moohshammer & Peter Mortenbock – Tent Cities, peoples kitchens, free universities: The global villages of occupation movements;
  • Yara Sharif & Nasser Golzari – Cultivating spatial possibilities in Palestine: searching for sub/urban bridges in Beit Iksa, Jerusalem;
  • Rory Hyde – Ways to be public

The Social (Re)Production of Architecture brings the debates of the ‘right to the city’ into today’s context of ecological, economic and social crises. Building on the 1970s’ discussions about the ‘production of space’, which French sociologist Henri Lefebvre considered a civic right, the authors question who has the right to make space, and explore the kinds of relations that are produced in the process. In the emerging post-capitalist era, this book addresses urgent social and ecological imperatives for change and opens up questions around architecture’s engagement with new forms of organisation and practice. The book asks what (new) kinds of ‘social’ can architecture (re)produce, and what kinds of politics, values and actions are needed.

The symposium will be followed by drinks.

Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA): MArch DS23 visit to Brunel Building in Paddington

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Yesterday morning, MArch Design Studio 23 visited Brunel Building construction site.

Brunel Building is an innovative new workplace located on the Grand Union Canal opposite Paddington Station. The scheme includes significant improvements to the public realm, and when complete will create a new section of canal towpath to link the Paddington Basin with Little Venice. (Fletcher Priest)

The architects behind the project are Fletcher Priest and the contractor is Laing O’Rourke.

This visit was part of a 3-stage programme with Laing O’Rourke under the theme of DfMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly), which links with DS23‘s design brief this year.

The programme, which also included a seminar with students and Laing O’Rourke on DfMA at the University of Westminster, as well as an upcoming visit to the Laing O’Rourke Explore Industrial Park Workshop, has been organised by Scott Batty.