Tag Archives: Architecture

“Who rejects design, accepts to be designed”

Critical minds: critical spaces
Cruciform Building, Lecture Theatre Two
University College London
8 May 2010, 
15.00-19.00 hrs
Art historian Giulio Carlo Argan formulated his famous sentence in the nineteen-seventies, when then the modernist grand narrative of “good design” had already long disintegrated, leaving something of a semantic vacuum in the designed object, an empty space that had been promptly [...]

Human, all too human

“Parametricism,” in the words of his main proponent, “is the great new style after modernism.” A design style in which “buildings are developed using problem-solving as the driving force rather than by grouping together architectural objects.” We have seen this in the last years in the voluptuous shapes of [...]

Architecture as hard work

David Chipperfield exhbition at the Design Museum (”Form Matters”, 21 October – 31 January 2010).

Jaffa Peace House

The idea of the Peace House was originally launched by the late Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. Named after the latter, it’s part of the seafront redevelopment of the mixed city of Jaffa and was designed by Massimiliano Fuksas as a dramatic spacial progression of pale green concrete slabs interspersed by glass panes, which offer [...]

architecture & travel: perception, attraction, mobility

Friday, 23 October 2009, 10am–8pm. (Registration opens 9:30am). All welcome.
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), [...]

Sensing Cities II

[REMEMBERANCE OF SMELLS PAST. A BBC World Service programme]
“How do smells impact on memories and emotions? Science is unraveling how a whiff of perfume or a newly mown lawn can offer us a free ticket back to our childhood.”

Suggested Reading: Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith with an afterword by David Harvey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
I’ve been working on Lefebvre’s theorisation of space off and on for about 8 years now, and in that time quite a bit has changed in terms of how The Production of Spaceis understood, or engaged with, in the [...]

Sensing Cities

[SOUND ARCHITECTURE, A BBC World Service programme]

“Professor Trevor Cox, science broadcaster and acoustic engineer explores the idea of aural architecture – architecture for your ears.
Now, through new technology and a new way of thinking, acousticians and architects are working together to create spaces that both function better but also look good too.”

[...]

A Revaluation of Public Space in Toronto (1955-2005)

Paper presented at the 2009 Anglo-American Conference of Historians “Cities” in London.
You can download the full paper with images here.
INTRODUCTION
What we will look at in the next twenty minutes is a study of three iconic projects in Toronto that were all planned and built between the years 1955 and 2005: City Hall and Nathan Phillips [...]

Spatial design as territorial control

First foreign translation, in Italian, for Eyal Weizman’s book on the use of space as a tool to articulate power in the Occupied Territories.