Tag: School of Architecture + Cities

Huge congratulations to Robert Beeny from MArch DS16 on winning the RIBA President’s Silver Medal 2020!

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The School of Architecture + Cities is delighted to announce that Robert Beeny, MArch student from Design Studio 16 won this year’s RIBA President’s Silver Medal for his project Devil’s Valley Geothermal Co-operative.

This project is situated in an area of Tuscany, Italy known as the Devil’s Valley, which had become known for its production of renewable geothermal energy over the past century. To protect the livelihood of local communities relying on that energy source, Robert proposed a new rural self-build development, powered by a geothermal well, with a pipeline and manufacturing spaces cascading down the valley landscape.

Read more about the project here.

Huge congratulations to Robert and his tutors Anthony Boulanger, Stuart Piercy and Callum Perry from DS16 on this amazing achievement!

Featured Image: The Geothermal Co-operative by Robert Beeny via RIBA

OPEN2020 Rolling Programme and Launch

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

The OPEN2020 has been revised to more accurately reflect its nature as a rolling programme of events and an evolving platform being created by the School’s staff and students.

As a result, the schedule of events is planned to take place as follows:

6.30pm, Thursday 2 July

  • Introduction to the VirtualOPEN2020 programme and the collaborative OPENwestminster.london exhibition platform
  • OPEN2020 Catalogue and Film presentation

11am, Monday 6, Wednesday 8, and Friday 10 July

Digital Employability Skills for the Post Covid-19 World Webinar Series – for all SA+C students, hosted within the construction site of the Virtual OPEN2020 platform.

6.30pm, Thursday 16 July 

  • Opening of the VirtualOPEN2020 Exhibition Platform
  • Opening speech by Prof Sadie Morgan

Congratulations to MArch DS23 5th Year Student Hamza Shaikh on being featured on Design Boom!

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

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

LFA Digital Festival: Falling Away – a prelude, 01 June – 30 June

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

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.

Expanded Territories Reading Group: “Unthought: The Power of Cognitive Nonconscious” by N. Katherine Hayles, Tuesday, February 11, 18:00, M330

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

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.

The School of Architecture + Cities celebrates great success at the RIBA President’s Awards 2019

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

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.

Ruth Pearn won a Dissertation Medal  for her MArch dissertation ‘Age Through the Terrace: The Evolving Impact of Age on Social and Spatial Relations in the Home’ (Tutored by Prof. Harry Charrington).

DS18 celebrated a double-win by their former MArch students:

Rachel Wakelin was the winner of the Serjeant Award for Excellence in Architectural Drawing at Part 2, for her MArch design project project ‘Avian Air – A Tropospheric Bird Sanctuary’

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!

Expanded Territories Reading Group: “The Companion Species Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, Tuesday, May 7, 18:00, M330

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

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.

Architecture Research Forum:”Architectures of Nothing: Aldo Rossi & Raymond Roussel”, Victoria Watson, Thursday October 4, 13:00-14:00, Erskine Room, 5th Floor

Posted on by Mirna Pedalo

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.