Open Studio is an interactive project run by the School of Architecture + Cities at the University of Westminster to make its design, research and practice-based work available online while it is happening. The site acts as a real time teaching and learning environment in which the work of both students and staff is curated and documented – the work of its design studios, or its other teaching and research groups and workshops. Read more in Blog, follow us on Twitter and like us on Instagram.
Hamza Shaikh is an MArch student at the School of Architecture and Cities, who has just completed his RIBA Part 2 Diploma in DS23, and is well-known for his popular podcast series on architecture and design Two World Design.
His MArch final project “The Sleep Institute” was recently featured on Design Boom.
To read more about his project and look at his fantastic portfolio please visit here.
Featured image by Hamza Shaikh
This event is organised by Dr Davide Deriu (School of Architecture + Cities) and Dr Michael Mazière (CREAM), under Ambika P3 as a London Festival of Architecture partner institution.
This online event is the prelude to an exhibition of Catherine Yass’s films at Ambika P3. The exhibition, titled Falling Away, showcases a selection of Yass’s vertiginous films of architectural structures from the past 20 years. Initially scheduled in the LFA 2020 ‘Power’ programme, it has been postponed to the summer of 2021. Seven films will be brought together for the most comprehensive show of Yass’s work to date. The buildings in her films are undergoing demolition or construction, some are falling into disrepair: as they crumble, so too do the powers behind them. The viewer is drawn into dizzying spaces as the camera is turned upside down, plunged into water, lowered from cranes, buried under falling rubble. The exhibition addresses our society’s ambivalent relationship with modernity and the material structures that give it form. By addressing urgent issues around architecture and the institutions it embodies, it will contribute to current debates about how built environments shape our lives. In anticipation of this Ambika P3 show, we present one of Yass’s films, Royal London (2018), together with an essay written for the upcoming exhibition catalogue by Christopher Kul-Want.
To view this event please visit here.
Featured image: Still from Royal London (2018). Copyrights: Catherine Yass.
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.
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.
DS18 celebrated a double-win by their former MArch students:
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!
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 some of the foundational texts of new materialism and post humanism over the coming months. We meet once a month in M330 on the Marylebone Campus.
The next reading will be Donna Haraway’s “The Companion Species Manifesto” introduced by Harshavardhan Bhat. This will take place at 18.00 in M330 on 07 May.
The text is available for download here:
http://xenopraxis.net/readings/haraway_companion.pdf
If anyone would like to be added to the Expanded Territories Reading Group mailing list, please let Lindsay Bremner know at l.bremner@westminster.ac.uk.
When: 13:00-14:00, Thursday 4th Of October
Where: Erskine Room (M523), 5th Floor, Marylebone Campus
At the 2018 EAHN conference in Tallinn I gave a paper under the session theme of Architecture’s Return to Surrealism. The session asked how the reanimation of surrealism in the work of architects active in the 1970s and ‘80s – at the ‘tangled, asynchronous juncture of the modern and the postmodern,’ – allowed architecture to ‘formulate a critical project in reaction to the neoliberal economy that was producing its own dreams, needs and desires.’ Based on my conference paper, this presentation looks at Aldo Rossi and the connection to surrealism in his work through the influence of the writer Raymond Roussel. I argue that Rossi used Roussel to make memory an active ingredient in the architectural imagination, hence the reference to surrealism within the formulation of architectural projects after modernism.
Victoria Watson teaches in the School of Architecture + Cities and practices as Doctor Watson Architects.
