Architectural Association School of Architecture

Speaking in favour: Lord Robert Winston, Imperial College London
Speaking against: Professor Robert Mull, London Metropolitan
Chair: Austin Williams, Future Cities Project

Traditional institutions of adult learning pledged a well-rounded education. Our contemporary system has given rise to increasingly specialist training. Old benefactors have been replaced by corporate partnerships with multinational organisations. The 2010 spending review has prioritised STEM subjects. A new era of education is dawning.
 
What lies ahead? The present government has placed the needs of the economy at the heart of its plans but what will our future require and who will be the drivers? Is it more valuable to study a BA rather than a BSc? Are traditional Honours degree’s too specialist in an age of mass education? Do the arts have any value in a contemporary society increasingly fixated by technological innovation? How might we bridge the gap between Arts and STEM subjects?   

Chaired by the director of Future Cities Project and founder of mantownhuman, Austins Williams  and featuring contributions from leading thinkers including popular BBC host and Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, Lord Robert Winston with Professor Robert Mull, Dean of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Media & Design and Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University.

The Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, Lecture Theatre 1

This is a FREE public event, no booking required.

For more information please contact: emma.emerson@network.rca.ac.uk

To coincide with the opening of the major Stirling retrospective at Tate Britain, EXP (the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster) and The Architecture Foundation present one of James Stirling's greatest and most controversial buildings for critical and public debate.

Followed by drinks reception
Venue: Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
Tickets: Supercrit #7 is free. Places are strictly limited and must be booked in advance. You can book online at www.tate.org.uk or by telephone on +44(0)20 7887 8888.

Sponsored by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF), and organised by The Architecture Foundation, the Student Travel Award was established in 2004 as a means of supporting the development of talented UK architecture students by enabling them to undertake international travel and research.

The deadline for submissions is 6 May and details regarding the entry requirements can be found at the website at: architecturefoundation.

Latest in a series of scholarly exchanges between the Cambridge University History of Art Department and the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology

Tuesday, 15 March, 9.30–5.30

History of Art Department, Scroope Terrace, Lecture room 2

From Columbia University, New York:
Katherine Morris; 'An Elevated Architecture: Medieval Churches Built Above
City Streets'
Jeffrey AK Miller; 'The Gothic Choir of Southwell Minster: A Product and
Agent of Reform'
Subhashini Kaligotla; 'Beyond Borderland: Reimagining the Temple
Architecture of the Early Deccan'
Carolyn Y. Yerkes; 'Surveying Michelangelo'
Jessica Basciano; 'Notre Dame de Bonsecours (1840-44) and the Origins of
Gothic Revival in France'
Robert Wiesenberger; 'The German Werkbund and Modern Design'

From the University of Cambridge:
Emily Guerry; 'A New Space for the Apocalypse? Envisioning Eschatology in
the Sainte-Chapelle'
Bláithín Hurley; 'Musical Spaces and Living Places in Renaissance Venice'
Emma Jones;'Priestly Patronage in Late Renaissance Venice: Antonio Gatto's
Funerary Complex in San Polo'
Hannah Malone; 'Death, Architecture and Nation: The Nineteenth-Century
Italian Cemetery'
Frank Albo; 'Freemasonry and the Origins of Gothic Architecture in
Nineteenth-Century Britain'
Anna Ferrari; 'Henri Laurens's Architectural Sculpture in interwar France'

Based on the infamous 2010 assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mahbouh in a five-star hotel in Dubai, Face Scripting: What did the Building See? is a collaboration between artists Jane & Louise Wilson, AA alumni/Goldsmiths Research Architecture director Eyal Weizman and AACP director Shumon Basar.
The film reflects on the mediatisation of the incident as a new kind of film-making and 21st century forensics. The project was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, and co-produced by the Farook Foundation, with Mohammed Hafiz & Dalia Asaad and Luis Augusto Teixeira de Frietas.

See http://www.sharjahart.org/biennial/sharjah-biennial-10/artists-participants

See exhibition details at:

beirutartcenter
beirutartcenter.org/parallel-events
dailystar.com
ciapiledevassiviere

Deadline: Friday 8 April

The Resourceful Architect is an open call for ideas about the future uses of architecture from the RSA and The Architecture Foundation, in development of the AF's 2009 project, And Now What? Rethinking Spatial Practice.

We are collecting new or developed but under-exposed examples of the resourcefulness that architects are showing in this climate of financial constraint and emphatic localism, to give them a public platform. The call is open to architects, architecture students and multidisciplinary teams. Shortlisted entries will be presented before a panel of critics and an audience of potential collaborators, patrons and clients at a public 'Day of Ideas' in the RSA's historic Great Room auditorium on 18 May, with mentoring and a cash prize awarded for the best idea.

Deadline for submissions is Friday 8 April. For further information on how to apply, go to AF

Supported by Austin-Smith:Lord and Land Securities

The full competition brief is available from http://designcomp.affinitysutton.com|

| Please note: To be eligible to enter, you must be currently enrolled on, and working towards, RIBA validated Part 2 course. Recent graduates will unfortunately not be eligible to take part.

dmfk is a mid-sized design-led London-based architecture firm, and are actively employing graduates and qualified architects for design-led refurbishment projects.

See www.dmfk.co.uk
  
Direct applications to:
Julian de Metz julian@dmfk.co.uk
de Metz Forbes Knight Architects Limited
The Old Library, 119 Cholmley Gardens, London NW6 1AA
t: 020 7435 1144 f: 020 7435 0884

The Department of History of Art and Screen Media at Birkbeck, University of London, welcomes you to this upcoming talk by Professor Christopher Long of University of Texas at Austin.

During the first decades of the last century, Vienna was a fertile ground not only for discussions about the use and meaning of ornament in architecture, but also an important discourse concerning ideas of space, movement, and procession. This lecture will examine the works and ideas of four seminal thinkers—Adolf Loos, Oskar Strnad, Josef Frank, and R. M. Schindler—and how each contributed to modern conceptions of space-making.

Christopher Long is professor of architectural and design history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Josef Frank: Life and Work (2002), Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design (2007), and The Looshaus (forthcoming).

This event is free and open to all. 6.00–7.30, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library

www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history/our-staff/teaching-staff/topp

10 Felstead Street, Hackney Wick, London E9 5LT
Opening times from 11.00–7.00* (*open later for evening events)
 
The Wick Curiosity Shop is an informal archive and cultural space dedicated to Hackney Wick. It will take over an empty shop in Olso House for the first week of March, hosting a series of events about the goings-on in the Wick of the past, present and future.
 
The Shop traces, documents, promotes, hosts and connects the many histories, initiatives and ambitions of the area. It is also a space for debate and action for change in which desires, ideas and makers can meet to plot collective or individual futures.
 
This coming week Wick Curiosity Shop focuses on current activities and programmes including self-initiated, commissioned, informal and formal projects. The programme splits into three groups of events:
The Way We Walk
The Way We Make
The Way We Talk

All events free
For full details and schedule, see www.wickcuriosityshop.net

Abitare (February 2011) published an interview with Paolo Cascone on post-vernacular design and  the Atelier Paolo Cascone self-construction experiment in Sourgoubila, Burkina Faso.
Please see for www.abitare.it for more information

Cascone was invited to lecture on eco_logic design at the SCI-ARC (Los Angeles), 16 February
See http://www.sciarc.edu/lectures.php?id=1896 for more information

Gustafson Porter – whose principals include Neil Porter, ex AA tutor and Mary Bowman, ex AA Council – has won a high-profile competition to design the Valencia Parque Central. The winning project Aigua Plena de Seny was developed by an international multi-disciplinary team, which is a joint venture led by Gustafson Porter and includes Borgos Pieper architects, Nova Ingeniería Project Management and Grupotec Engineers from Valencia. The competition initially drew 36 teams from eight countries. The five short-listed design teams to submit a masterplan at the final stage of the competition also included Foreign Office Architects, Zaha Hadid Architects, Rogers Stirk Harbour +Partner and West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture. The designs were judged by a jury comprising prominent members of the local architecture and landscape community and the Mayor of Valencia, Rita Barberá, who announced the winning design of the international competition on 25 January.

The Valencia Parque Central project covers the central urban area affected by the arrival of high-speed trains to Spain’s third largest city. The new contemporary public park is made possible by the tunnelling the existing railway lines below ground. More than half of the available site will be planted, and a new 23-hectare Central Park will become the heart of Valencia’s most important redevelopment project to date.

The design celebrates the landscape and culture of the Valencia region and builds on Valencia’s unique location between ecological habitats: the Turia River reserve, the agricultural plain (La Huerta), the Albufera natural park and the Mediterranean – resulting in its role as a major European trading and cultural centre throughout history. Inspired by the local tradition of ceramics, the concept of the 'bowl' incorporates the unifying gesture of the Park – with water as the overarching design theme. Its shape represents the idea of containers. Each of these containers holds art, activities, people, landscapes, history and cultural memories. Water, landform, plants and existing buildings are the design elements used for the configuration of the individual bowls.

 

Gustafson Porter wins competition to design Milan CityLife Park
Gustafson Porter has won the competition to design the Milan CityLife Park with their concept CityLife – A Park between the Mountains and the Plain. The park is a central element in the fairground redevelopment area in Milan with residential projects by architects Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki and Daniel Libeskind which is one of the largest urban regeneration projects in Milan's recent history.

The other selected practices taking part in this high-profile international competition were Agence Ter, Rainer Schmidt, Latz + Partner, Christophe Girot, Erika Skabar, Latitude Nord and PROAP. The Competition initially drew more than 70 entries from practices worldwide. Gustafson Porter is leading an experienced multi-disciplinary international team with !melk, One Works and further support from cost consultants Studio Tre Architetti and lighting designers Ferrara Palladino.

Gustafson Porter’s concept builds on Milan’s commanding position between the rich agricultural plains of the Po to the south and the routes across the Alps to the rest of Europe to the north ‒ resulting in its role as a major European trading centre throughout history.

 

Gustafson Porter receives commendation at the MIPIM AR Future Projects Awards 2011

Gustafson Porter’s project Bay East, Gardens by the Bay in Singapore has received a commendation in the category Big Urban Projects at the 2011 MIPIM Architectural Review Future Project Awards. The design team with design team leader Gustafson Porter includes Arup, Davis Langdon Seah, and PMLink and CPG from Singapore. The client is the National Parks Board Singapore.

The Gardens by the Bay form an integral part of the strategic development plan to promote Singapore as a ‘City in a Garden’. Gustafson Porter addressed not only the environmental concerns within the site but worked collaboratively with Government agencies to understand how the Bay East Gardens can enhance the future development of Singapore.

The official awards ceremony will take place in Cannes on 9 March.

Read more about the École d’architecture presentation, Montreal University at: http://www.arc.umontreal.ca/docs/pdf/evenements/2010-2011/seminaire_phyllis_lambert_2011.pdf)

Christopher Ingold Auditorium, UCL
 
No ticket required: Places limited to 310 and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.