Barking from Without was part of the 2010 Cities Methodologies exhibition and conference organised by the UCL Urban Lab. The exhibition took place at the Slade Research Centre on Woburn Square from 5 to 7 May 2010.

Barking from Without is an interactive installation presenting material from an ongoing case study of the new Barking Town Square in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Part of a broader research project on design in the contemporary public realm, the case study is supported primarily by participant-observer methods that draw as much on ethnographic fieldwork as on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. The research is presented in the form of an open dialogue which visitors are encouraged to join by leaving written comments.

All material from the installation is posted on barking-assemblage.org under the category Barking from Without. Comments are still very much welcome! Please participate by sending your comments to comment@barking-assemblage.org

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 occupied by a micro-narrative of immediate satisfaction by indiscriminate consumption. Looking at the ease with which designed objects can be used to carry extremely different meanings and values forces us to reflect on the communicative power of design and its information value. Forms generated by design represent a presence in space that doesn’t end in the fulfillment of its function, but continues in force of their mere existence, in their relationship with the rest of the environment.

“Critical minds: critical spaces” is a one-day symposium organized by a group of UCL research students gravitating around this blog, as Gabriele Oropallo and Wesley Albrecht. The event is conceived of as an occasion to look at the work of architects, planners and designers and its social and cultural relevance in stimulating awareness and criticism of the contemporary. Very often, at the heart of cultural production, there is a practice shaped by a rational or existential response to material, technical or cultural constraints. This practice generates products that are designed as tools to enable the rest of the community to critically understand and question messages, objects and environments, rather than taking them for granted. The colloquium will feature some presentations on current research in design theory and history and on recent design projects. A final panel discussion will follow, with Justin McGuirk, editor of the Icon magazine, and Mark Cousins (Architectural Association, London Consortium). The event also marks the closing of CitiesMethodologies, an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities at the Slade Research Centre (Woburn Square, 5-7 May 2010). Speakers include Mark Cousins (Architectural Association), Annelys de Vet (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam), James Auger (Royal College of Art), Jimmy Loizeau (Goldsmiths), Teresa Stoppani (University of Greenwich), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), Jonathan Hill (Bartlett School of Architecture).

The colloquium will be followed by a wine reception in the Wilkins Building Haldane Room. Participation is free and open to all (for information email: g.oropallo@ucl.ac.uk, wesleyaelbrecht@gmail.com). Critical minds: critical spaces is supported by the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction, the Graduate School Research Project Fund and the Department of Italian Studies.

In the Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin suggested that German culture, being peripheral to the European intellectual life of the eighteenth century, had to define itself in opposition to the dominance of French culture. It was this negative self-identification that resulted in the birth of the Romantic movement. The 2010 Research in Progress Conference, likewise, proposes that this condition of dependence, generated by geographical distance, can be stimulating, productive, and sometimes even liberating.

How and by whom are such notions as “periphery” and “province” constructed? How does the acceptance or denial of one’s own “provincialism” influence identity and culture in general? What are the factors that produce cultural distance and why does it still exist in our contemporary high-speed and digital world? These are a few of the many possible questions our conference hopes to address. We encourage presentations that discuss various episodes in the history of art, architecture and culture in general, which may include such topics as European colonial empires, diasporas of war, and the effects of exile, mistranslation, migration and separation in aesthetic practices.

Deadlines:
November 15: Abstract submission (maximum 300 words). Please send abstract and a short cv in doc or pdf format to rip@mit.edu.
December 1: Participants notified.
January 31: Paper submissions due (2500 words, 20 minute presentations)
February 27: Conference.

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