Friday, 23 October 2009, 10am–8pm. (Registration opens 9:30am). All welcome.
Borderlands - Gas, Food, Lodging (© Nina Vollenbröker & James Santer)
part of: Bartlett Architecture &: Interdisciplinary Seminars
Room G02, Wates House, The Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB.
Organisers: Anne Hultzsch, Barbara Penner, Nina Vollenbröker
Participants: Stephen Bann (University of Bristol), Jan Birksted (The Bartlett, UCL), Simon Bradley (Yale University Press), Chloe Chard (Independent), Lilian Chee (National University of Singapore), Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University), Tamar Garb (University College London), Robert Harbison (London Metropolitan University), Susanne Isa and Simon Herron (The Bartlett, UCL), Barbara Penner (The Bartlett, UCL), Victoria Perry (The Bartlett, UCL), Jane Rendell (The Bartlett, UCL), Jilly Tragannou (Parsons New School for Design)
Architecture &: is a termly interdisciplinary seminar providing opportunities for staff and student researchers within the Bartlett School of Architecture to initiate research conversations at interdisciplinary crossings. In the fifth event of the series, we bring together architects, geographers, art historians, editors and writers to explore how travel conceives, represents and defines place; how it relates to questions of identity and location; how it generates specific forms of spatial practice, modes of seeing, and material culture; and how, more generally, it serves as a unique research context for diverse disciplines.
Addressing issues of perception, attraction and mobility, we have designed a day with two sessions of scholarly paper presentations that each concludes with a response from an expert in the field. Woven around these two fixed sessions, we have a mobile session that will take speakers and the audience onto armchair journeys through film or photography offering spaces to pause and reflect. In addition, in the spirit of a tourist taking away a souvenir or photographing a favourite scene while travelling, we have asked all contributors to bring a material object with them on the day that will be arranged in a display. Jan Birksted will respond to this ad-hoc cabinet of curiosities at the day’s end.
The morning session, Perception, focuses on the modes of architectural perception that are prompted by travel and the language used to mediate it. Why, and how, does ‘being-away’ influence the traveller’s sensitivity of the built environment (or vice-versa)? How are these impressions recorded in succeeding representations? Subjects discussed in this session range from guidebooks to jokes to travel as a metaphor for architectural experience. The speakers, Simon Bradley, Chloe Chard, and Robert Harbison, will take us to places such as Worcestershire, St Peter’s Cathedral, and local trains in Mexico and Burgundy – which will then be revisited by Stephen Bann in his response.
The afternoon session, Attraction, considers the attraction between architecture and travel. What attraction does architecture hold for travellers and travel hold for architects? What is learned, taken or brought back, and what fields of sentiment are opened up before, while and after ‘being away’? Papers by Barbara Penner, Victoria Perry, and Jilly Traganou, will consider the way allegories shaped popular touristic routes, how slavery underwrote the invention of classic British tourist destinations, as well as how a revised notion of travel today can still inform architectural production – issues which Tim Edensor will address in his response.
The mobile session, Armchair Travellers, will break up the day at three points to take the audience away from a strictly scholarly context on 30min-journeys through the speakers’ presentation of creative work. With Lilian Chee, Simon Herron and Susanne Isa, and Tamar Garb, we will travel to Singapore, between South Africa and Paris, and across America through various media of representation. Jane Rendell will respond at the end of the day to this collection of journeys.
This will be followed (from 6:30pm in the Bartlett Lobby) by the book launches of Barbara Penner, Newlyweds on Tour and Jilly Traganou and Miodrag Mitrasinovic’s edited Travel, Space, Architecture, as well as the exhibition opening of Nina Vollenbröker and James Santer’s Borderland: Gas Food Lodging. Robert Harbison’s book Travels in the History of Architecture (2009) will also be on sale.
Please join us.
For further details, please see: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/events/seminars/seminars.htm
Or contact Anne Hultzsch: a.hultzsch@ucl.ac.uk