The event is the first of a series of conversations to launch the recently published book The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture (Quodlibet, 2020). The first group of speakers moderated by Roberto Damiani, the book editor, includes Brigitte Shim as a discussant and the volume contributors Joan Ockman, Richard Sommer, Hans Ibelings, Michael Piper, and Andrew Choptiany.
Towards Half: Design for a Climate Positive Future. How can the built environment meet the 2030 target and halve the emissions of construction and operations this decade? MASS's Good, Clean, & Fair approach offers a language and approach to address this profound challenge - linking climate and socio-economic justice in the process.
We are shaped by our context and histories. However, we also and critically shape our context and history to influence the future. While this appears so obvious, it took my leaving Kenya to study and work in the US, to discover my own deep-seated biases and discriminations that had influenced my design thinking. This lecture will reflect on how sketching can be utilised as a tool for introspection, with specific regard to breaking down deep-seated biases that are the basis for institutional discrimination. Through my sketches and the work of KDI I will explore the potential of Landscape Architecture, Architecture and Urban Design to shape our context and drive a more equitable future, in Kenyan Urban Space.
This talk looks at a small handheld globe manufactured by the British cartographer Herman Moll in 1719. Though small in size and overtly commercial in use, the object serves as a particularly useful case study for understanding the relationship between cartography, consumerism, and certain geopolitical developments that historians have seen as president of global modernity, namely speculative capitalism—including its troubling connections to colonialism and slavery. Additionally, the talk sketches the parameters of a new line of architectural research on the history of European-supported entrepôts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as they relate to early modern shipping networks and the formalization of the modern stock exchange in Amsterdam and London.
For almost two centuries, urbanization has been achieved by conquering land and using the natural environment as a disposable commodity. As a result, we have depleted our forests, wetlands, and soils. These effects have impacted the quality of life in urban areas, as well as the health of urban residents. And yet, the same pattern of development continues to be used, even as its negative consequences are amplified by climate change. Our forest conservation and restoration efforts, shaped by constant struggles against development, are reactive, opportunistic and ad-hoc rather than strategically planned.
The professional packaging of the design discipline - intent on creating, projecting and transforming - may overlook the pertinence and relevance of being first and foremost curious observers and empathetic listeners, capable of celebrating and recognizing what already exists.
Oscillating between the past and present, original and referent, reconstructions are historiographic representations, yet inevitably also something new. Here, the propositional practice of constructing (and reconstructing) history is intimately linked to how we address challenges of the present. Drawing on diverse practices of reconstruction in fields from architecture and landscape to geology and archaeology, Aisling O’Carroll will share research and speculative design studies from her practice to explore the politics, truth, and affective nature of reconstruction and representation in framing knowledge and ideas of landscape.
This is the second in a series of panel sessions launching the fourth volume of Bracket, titled Takes Action. Bracket [Takes Action] collects essays and projects that question how actions can be designed, accommodated for, and encouraged through both creative practice and design citizenship.
We spend more time indoors due to COVID-19—limiting social contact to reduce disease transmission. Even before this era of quarantine, 80% or more of our time as a society was spent indoors. This has significant impacts on health and wellbeing. Now more than ever, attention to indoor environmental quality and how it affects people is critical to architectural design and building operation.
Strange Primitivism and Other Things’ is a conversation between Adrian Phiffer and Tei Carpenter, moderated by Hans Ibelings. It takes as its subject Phiffer’s new book ‘Strange Primitivism’, published by the Architecture Observer in June 2020.
