Category: News

DS22 Student Anna Malicka Wins RIBA Wren Insurance Association Scholarship

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

DS22 student Anna Malicka was one of five outstanding MArch students to receive this year’s RIBA and the Wren Insurance Association award.

Congratulations!

The partnership between the RIBA and the Wren Insurance Association was established in 2013 to reward excellence in architectural education and support outstanding students as they embark on a career in architecture.

Five scholarships are awarded each year to outstanding Part 2 students who show excellent promise and drive to expand their horizons within architecture.

The £5,000 awarded to each recipient may be used in a variety of ways, from elaborating on an existing research interest to looking at how they might develop new ideas, or enabling time to scope different mechanisms and philosophies.

Read more: https://www.architecture.com/knowledge-and-resources/knowledge-landing-page/the-wren-insurance-scholars#

AIAUK Student Charrette, 21st October 09:00-18:00, Roca London Gallery _ REGISTRATION CLOSES TODAY 6pm!

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

A JURIED ONE-DAY DESIGN COMPETITION

From 09:00 – 18:00

Entry Fee: £10 PER STUDENT

Teams of up to 8, and individuals can register. Individuals will be assigned a team on the day. Each team will be mentored by a practicing architect.

The charrette is a CAD-free event. Drawn, modelled and collaged proposals only. Bring your favourite medium and tools with you. Rolls of tracing paper and drawing paper will be provided.

Entry fee includes lunch, refreshments and reprographic services throughout the day.

One team per university per course. Second and third year architecture and interior design students only.

Limited to 80 students.

Where: Roca London Gallery, Station Court, Townmead Road, Fulham, SW6 2PY London

REGISTRATION CLOSES 6PM, 13 OCT 2017

AIA CES 6 CREDITS FOR MENTORS AND JURY

 

Chris Peach at the BAIA’s “Light Narratives” Workshop

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Chris Peach, principal director of fdcreative, recently gave an introduction to lighting design for interiors called “Ruled of Thumb” to second and third year BA Interior Architecture students, as a part of the “Light Narratives” three week workshop.

The lecture covered issues of design, design with light, practical planning, colour and perception.

Douglas Spencer’s “Architecture After California” published on e-flux architecture

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

“Architecture After California” is an essay written by Douglas Spencer and recently published on e flux architecture, as part of their Positions section.

Read an excerpt from the essay below, or access full text here.

 

Neoliberalism delegitimates participation in the political on the ethical grounds that all planning leads to dictatorship, and on the ontological ones of the “necessary ignorance” of human beings. California’s “tools of personal liberation” further the depoliticizing ends of neoliberalism, both in the conditions of temporality they impose, and in their tendency to atomize the social into an aggregate of hyper-connected individuals constituted, as such, by their investments in capital and its technological apparatus. Depoliticization, rather than some unfortunate and unforeseen outcome of an originally radical counterculture, is inherent to it.17 Though McGuirk might lament that the original “spirit of the counterculture” was latterly “recast as a techno-utopian entrepreneurialism,” Stewart Brand, the author of this movement’s bible, the Whole Earth Catalog, was always clear enough in his disavowal of the political.18 As Felicity D. Scott observes, in her Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency, Brand notably refused to protest the US bombing of Vietnam and campaigned on a platform of “environment yes, politics no.”19 The Whole Earth Catalog also provided the counterculture with the slogan perhaps best capturing it antithetical relationship to any politics of collective solidarity when, as McGuirk notes, Catalog editor Fred Richardson declaimed “workers of the world, disperse,” reversing Marx and Engels’ “Workers of the world, unite!”

 

Douglas Spencer is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2016). He teaches and writes on critical theories of architecture, landscape and urbanism at the Architectural Association and at the University of Westminster, where he also leads the MArch Dissertation module.

Call for Papers: “Spaces of Tolerance”, Architecture and Culture Journal – Deadline 15th January 2018

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Call for Papers for the next themed issue of Architecture and Culture journal.

Spaces of Tolerance
Vol. 7, Issue no. 1, March 2019
Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, Editors.

 

Academic journal publishing worldwide has become increasingly watched over and policed by funding bodies and institutions demanding that scholarship be seen to have direct and maximized impact for economic gain or return. As Wendy Brown notes, “the move to judge every academic endeavour by its uptake in non academic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is […] damaging” because “academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization”.3 This monitoring, counting, measuring and quantifying frames assessment of the validity of architectural research and limits the exchange between architectural practice and publishing. Within academic institutions, organizational adjacencies of disciplines create conditions of more or less tolerance in judging the value of a wide and diverse range of architectural outputs and the limits of the form/s original and creative architectural research may appear beyond a building design or a traditional 7,000 word scholarly journal article about a building’s history or performance that is double-blind reviewed by expert peers in architecture.

In an effort to recover architectural publishing as a more liberal, yet rigorous, space of production and imagination, this issue of Architecture and Culture seeks to reveal nuances in publishing and associated academic practices which might exceed or distil conventional and accepted disciplinary limitations. It seeks to instigate more open-ended relationships, interpretations and iterations between theory and practice – between textuality, visuality and aurality – to sway between and across more or less disciplinarity with empathy and insight. Contributions are sought from a range of cultural and geographical positions and perspectives that examine any aspect of the discourse, practice and research of architecture as an exploration of spaces of tolerance.

To download full version of call for papers:  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hs3jqampgpnx5zz/AACDK59VbnNJmSeV-pBNMJ5ba?dl=0

Image: John Hejduk, 13 Watchtowers of Cannaregio, 1978.

Designing Buildings Wiki Competition: Deadline 2nd November

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

How can buildings be designed today to ensure they are resilient to the challenges they will face tomorrow?

Students and professionals are invited to offer innovative, unusual and radical ideas in response to this question.

This is a great opportunity to:

  • Engage with a vitally important subject
  • Apply developing technical and theoretical knowledge
  • Be featured in BSRIA’s Delta T magazine and on Designing Buildings Wiki (with your university and course being acknowledged)
  • Win £500 in BSRIA publications, training and membership

Find out more:                           https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Tomorrow%27s_challenges_in_today%27s_buildings

 

Technical Studies Lectures: Amin Taha + Jason Coe, Thursday 5 October, 6pm, M416

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Technical Studies Lectures are back!

Join us for the first in the series of lectures starting next Thursday 5th October at 6pm, with Amin Taha and Jason Coe of Amin Taha Architects.

159-168 Upper Street and other Projects

Replacing a gap site which was never redeveloped after WWII, Amin Taha architects have reconstructed an extraordinary but ‘misremembered’ facsimile of the bookend of a late 19th Century terrace opposite Islington Town hall. All external mouldings, window surrounds and features as well as internal skirting, dado rails, cornices and anglypta wallpaper were 3D modelled and then robotically routed into an expanded polystyrene formwork. The entire façade (including roof) was then cast insitu in a special terracotta/concrete mix. The walls are half a metre thick, are load-bearing, and perform as thermal barrier, and internal/external finishes. The terracotta structural skin was then filled with a series of cross laminated timber floors threaded through the outer shell. Up close the remarkable and innovative process of construction is revealed in the subtle ‘cast’ quality of eccentric details and features in a structural shell, which also contains secret panels and openings only visible on closer inspection. Amin Taha architects were established by Amin Taha in 2005 and the practice have recently been shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize for their brick and wicker housing project in Barrett’s Grove, London.

when: Thursday 5th October, 6pm

where: Marylebone Campus, Room M416

Drawings by former DS18 students, John Cook and Ben Pollock, to be exhibited in Michigan and Toronto

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Two former DS18 students, John Cook and Ben Pollock, will have their drawings featured at the upcoming international conferences and exhibitions in Michigan, USA and Toronto, Canada in September / October 2017.

John Cook’s drawing “CSP Plant Jupiter Overview 3000” was produced for his project “Camdeboo Solar Estate” located in South Africa in 2014/2015 for Design Studio 18, and will be exhibited as a part of the Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural, an exhibition and symposium, which will take place at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning from 25th September to 19th October 2017.

Ben Pollock‘s drawing “Global Flows” was produced in 2015/2016, also for Design Studio 18, the year when the studio worked on projects situated in the Maldives. This drawing will be shown as a part of EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation and Technology, a festival which will take place in Toronto from 28th September to 8th October 2017.

Find out more here: https://geoarchitecture.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/drawings-by-former-ds18-students-to-feature-at-exhibitions-in-michigan-and-toronto/ 

BAIA Success at the Architects for Health Student Awards

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

A cloud tethered above Great Ormond Street Hospital providing a great place for children and family to escape and ‘to go crazy’ with a strong architectural response, sensitive to patient needs.(Architects for Health Student Design Awards 2017)

On the 26th June, an Interior Architecture (BA Hons) student Pamela Jankowska received 2 prizes at the Architects for Health Student Awards.

Competing alongside 12 strong projects from UAL Chelsea and University of Westminster, Pamela‘s project “Chumura – Cloud (in Polish)” won her the “LONDON Award”, and she was also awarded the prize for the “Best Drawing”. Her drawing is featured on the cover of the awards booklet.

It was Paul Hyett, an ex-RIBA president, who gave Pamela her prize at the awards event organised by the Architects for Health, which took place at the Wellcome Institute and was attended by the judges, Architects for Health members, as well as tutors and students from the participating colleges (AA, UOW, UAL Chelsea, KLC…)

Congrats to Pamela on this great achievement!

The awards booklet: https://www.architectsforhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/170622_AfH-Student-Design-Awards-2017_FINAL-TO-PRINT.pdf

 

Free Range 2017 – Thursday 13th July – Saturday 15th July

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Recent graduates from our Interior Architecture (BA Hons) course will be exhibiting their work as a part of Interior Educators at Free Range 2017 , from 13th until 15th July in The Old Truman Brewery.

Part of the exhibition will be dedicatedto the work produced as a part of a Parallel Cities 2, a collaborative project / workshop between students from the Pratt Institute in New York City and the University of Westminster’s Interior Architecture (BA Hons) students, lead by Alessandro Ayuso.

Launch: Thursday 13th July 6-10pm

Exhibition opening times: Friday 14th July – Saturday 15th July, 10am-7pm

Awards+INT.ALK+Bar: Friday 14th July, 7-9pm

Admission is free and the events are open to public.