November 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Running parallel to the back of each row of townhouses is a long subterranean corridor, cramped, artificially lit but still dark, with pipes and cables running through its length, moisture trickling down its unfinished concrete walls, it’s the mechanical and services spine of the block. Garbage cans are lined up at each door marking the [...]
Thanks to Ben Sweeting, PhD candidate in Architectural Design at the Bartlett, for his input on this post.
Saturday 6th June 2011 saw the launch of the post-exhibition catalogue following up last December’s ‘Invisible Machines’ exhibition, held at Grand Parade in Brighton, which investigated the various relations between machines and architecture. Although the invocation [...]
By external contributor Deepa Ramaswamy.
A lot has been already said about the slums of Mumbai and their role within the city’s memory and identity. Dharavi, which is supposedly the largest of Mumbai’s slums, figures very prominently in most of these discourses. Dharavi has developed and expanded over the last few decades [...]
Buildings at their most primal provide a means of sheltering people from the extremities of climate; historically building fabric offered mediation between the external environment and inhabitants with minimal energy use.
Responding to the climate developed broad vernaculars that offer legible interpretations of local environmental conditions: Light weight stilted dwellings in the tropics respond to the [...]
Yesterday the 2011 Bartlett PhD Research Projects conference took place. In the comments period following presentations one question was repeated several times and particularly caught my attention. How did your interest in this topic start? What is the starting point?
It came back to mind after the event concluded because to me it illustrates we might [...]
February 23, 2011 – 3:04 pm
As part of the coalition government’s education reforms, approximately 735 school projects were stopped as part of the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. (1)
There is certainly need to improve the delivery of school buildings; BSF often resulted in buildings costing over the odds. However, the Department for Children, [...]
December 4, 2010 – 10:56 am
Last night Owen Hatherley gave a talk at the UCL occupation in the Jeremy Bentham Room as part of a seminar on ‘Architecture and social change’. I will attempt to summarise the main points in this post and leave the criticism for the comments section.
The broad topic of his talk was campus architecture and the [...]
November 26, 2010 – 10:36 am
Filmmaker Patrick Keiller studied architecture at the Bartlett, and his latest offering Robinson in Ruins is part of a larger AHRC-funded project,The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image, which explores narratives of mobility and the political in landscape and place. The film acts as a filter for some of these narratives, combining near-static [...]
November 16, 2010 – 8:00 pm
This is the second of a two-part post on the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. The first can be read here.
…In Expo’s final week, people seemed determined to ward off the meta-question of “what’s it all for?” by concentrating on the mechanics of the Expo breakdown. The newspapers were full of speculations about the fate of [...]
November 10, 2010 – 2:30 pm
This is the first of a two-part post on the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
Shanghai World Expo 2010 will probably to go down in the history books as one of the most successful world’s fairs ever. The Chinese government was aiming for 70 million visitors; by the time Expo closed on 31st October, they’d reportedly had [...]