Tag: Douglas Spencer

Symposium “Postmodernism Now: Politics, Culture, Context” at Design Museum London _ Saturday 30th June, 11:00-18:00

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Douglas Spencer, lecturer at the University of Westminster and the leader of the MArch Dissertation module, will be speaking at:

Postmodernism Now: Politics, Culture, Context

This symposium investigates the revival of postmodernism, and what it might mean for our current moment.

When: Saturday 30 June, 11:00-18:00

Where: Design Museum London

In this symposium, leading architects, designers, artists and critics reflect on the influence and legacy of postmodernism, and ask what the renewed interest in its ideals and values has to do with our own period of political and economic uncertainty.

Postmodernism emerged in the 1970s as the cultural response to the era’s shifting economic and political sands: the break with the mixed economy of the post-war years and the emergence of neoliberalism. This moment of flux was manifested in a culture that was colourful, ironic and self-aware. In contrast to the certainties of the post-war era, all became relative in an invigorating culture of permissiveness and free-floating signifiers.

The backlash began in the early 1990s when postmodernism began to be seen as an aesthetic aberration forever associated with reactionary politics, Thatcherism and the hyper-consumption it unleashed. Today, we are told that Postmodernism is back, with a slew of books, reappraisals, and a new generation of architects and designers advocating its principles of aesthetic pluralism, licentiousness and stylistic promiscuity. But what should we make of it?

This event has been organised alongside the exhibition ‘The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture’, which is on at Sir John Soane’s Museum, 16 May – 26 August 2018.

For more info and booking: https://designmuseum.org/whats-on/talks-courses-and-workshops/postmodernism-now-politics-culture-context

Featured image credit: Al Yaqoub Tower, Dubai, 2013, by Adnan Saffarini, via Design Museum

Conference “Superstructures: The New Architecture 1960-1990” at The Julian Study Centre and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts on the 8th and 9th June 2018

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

Douglas Spencer, lecturer at the University of Westminster and the leader of the MArch Dissertation module, will present his work at:

SUPERSTRUCTURES: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE 1960–1990 CONFERENCE

See below for dates / £50/£37.50 concessions, Free for students. Pre-booked tickets only / The Julian Study Centre and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

To book please call Visitor Services 01603 593199

Explore the influences and legacies of the iconic ‘High-Tech’ building style. International architecture and design historians will unpick and magnify themes from the Sainsbury Centre’s 40th anniversary exhibition, SUPERSTRUCTURES: The New Architecture 1960–1990.

Conference Programme

Friday 8 June | 4:30 – 7:30pm

A special exhibition tour with SUPERSTRUCTURES co-curator Professor Jane Pavitt will be followed by the conference Key Note speech by Professor Todd Gannon. ‘Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech’ will reassess the work of one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history.

Saturday 9 June | 10am – 4pm

Encounter a day of stimulating talks covering subjects from the mid-century designs of Charles and Ray Eames, to the spectacular growth of British leisure centres throughout the 1970s.

Speakers will convene for questions with plenty of opportunities to hold further discussions over lunch and refreshments.

Speakers include:

Professor Jane Pavitt, Head of the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University.

Professor Todd Gannon, Head of Architecture Section at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School and author of Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech.

Professor Pat Kirkham, Professor of Design History at Kingston University.

Dr Otto Saumarez Smith, Shuffrey Junior Research Fellow in Architectural History Lincoln College, University of Oxford.

Douglas Spencer, Lecturer in Historical and Critical Thinking at Architectural Association and author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism.

Programmed in partnership with the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston School of Art (Kingston University)

This event is inspired by SUPERSTRUCTURES: The New Architecture 1960–1990, an exhibition that marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the first public building designed by the world-renowned architect Norman Foster.

Exhibition runs until 2 September 2018.

History and Theory Open Lecture Series: Peg Rawes “Housing, Biopolitics, and Care” – Tuesday 6th February, 18:00, Robin Evans Room (M416)

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The History and Theory Open Lecture Series for the academic year 2017/2018 begins today, with Peg Rawes‘ lecture “Housing, Biopolitics, and Care”.

When: Tuesday, 6th February, 18:00

Where: Robin Evans Room (M416), Marylebone Campus

Peg Rawes is a Professor in Architecture and Philosophy, Programme Director of the MA Architectural History, and a PhD Supervisor for Architectural Design and Architectural History and Theory PhD Programmes at the Bartlett, UCL. Trained in art history and philosophy, her research and teaching focus on material, political, technological and ecological histories and theories of contemporary architecture and art. She regularly gives talks in the UK, EU and overseas, and has recently been invited to give lectures at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, University of Regensburg, University of Minnesota, Iowa State University, The British School in Rome, KTH Stockholm, London School of Economics, KADK Copenhagen and TU Delft.

Other speakers in the series will include:

  • 20th February, 17:15, M416: Emma Cheatle (Newcastle University) “As/saying Architecture: A Ficto-Spatial Essay of Lying-in”
  • 27th February, 18:00, M416: Tilo Amhoff (University of Brighton) “Architectural History and Theory Between Labour and Capital, 1967-1977”
  • 6th March, 18:00, M416: Lindsay Bremner, Andrew Peckham, Douglas Spencer (University of Westminster) “On Archipelago: Three Perspectives”
  • 13th March, 18:00, M416: Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh) “Auto-Affection: On Michael Webb’s Sin Centre and the Drawing of Mobility”

Architecture Research Forum: “Still Dreaming? Space After Spectacle and the Indifference of Architecture” Douglas Spencer – 2nd November, Erskine Room, 5th Floor, 13:00-14:00

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Douglas Spencer: Still Dreaming? Space After Spectacle and the Indifference of Architecture 

Susan Buck-Morss, in her Dreamworld and Catastrophe, observed that the end of the Cold War was marked by the passing of the dream-forms of modernity — capitalist, socialist and fascist — as sustained through the experience of the built environment. If, following Walter Benjamin, we understand awakening from the dreamworld to be premised on the conscious realisation of its utopian fantasies, then what hope remained now, she asked, in the absence of any dreamworld? This paper takes up this question through an analysis of the seemingly indifferent and post-spectacular spaces of contemporary architecture, offering, in response, an analysis that explores both its historical and its phenomenological implications.

Douglas Spencer teaches at the University of Westminster and the Architectural Association, and is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Where: Erskine Room (M/523), Marylebone Campus

When: Thursday 2nd November, 13:00-14:00

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.

Teaching and Learning Forum: “Why Theory?” with Douglas Spencer, Thursday 23rd March, 13:00, M523

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The last Teaching and Learning Forum of this year will be held 1-2pm this Thursday 23rd March in the Ralph Erskine Room, M523.

Douglas Spencer will give a brief talk and then chair a discussion.

All staff and students are welcome.