London: The Latest Architecture and News

An international seminar and exhibitions on the experiments of design research in alternative contexts, it provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the potentials and limits of design research, a fundamental shift in contemporary architecture, tested against the hybrid conditions of practice. Speakers include Stephen Hodder, Francois Penz, Jeremy Till, Murray Fraser, Felipe Hernandez, Ingrid Schroder, Helen Castle, Pingping Dou, Andong Lu, Lu Feng, Ling Zhou, Hua Li, Wowo Ding, Chen Zhao. The seminar is accompanied by three exhibitions, featuring especially the outputs from the Investigate-It Workshop (2015 Nanjing, China) by ten leading young Chinese architects/scholars practicing their visions/methods/theories on a common site.

The design media is little more than a sycophantic, vapid and naval gazing extension of the PR industry. Our monographs, magazines and museums feed a cycle of shallow celebratory hysterics with little to no investigative or critical practice. Awards programmes lurch between jacking off the already engorged egos of starchitects or chasing the virginal myth of untainted emerging designers preying simultaneously on the young's insecurity and the old's fear of death in the name of profit for disconnected share holders. Cosy relationships between judges and judged, editors and edited amount to mild corruption - unsubscribe now.

Community consultation is meaningless vacuous tick-box bullshit. It has become a decoy that developers deploy to shove unwanted projects down the throats of an unconsenting public. Its cringeworthy language of community empowerment is just thinly veiled power moves and lazy spin. The profession, the public, and the built environment would be better off without it.

Consultation Con is one in a series of debates rugby tackling six fundamental issues facing contemporary practice with a playful and combative format designed to ferment open and critical discussion. Framed by theatrically provocative opening gambits, a series of free debates will turn conventional consensus on its head.

We all assume that to quit architecture is to fail. Yet the vast majority of those who stick it out are sucked into a world of disempowered subservience to big business. Becoming an architect squanders the creativity and energy of those who are attracted to study architecture in the first place, robbing society and the individual of their potential. There is a better way. We should all quit architecture before it's too late.

This lecture will discuss Terreform ONE, a non-profit design group that promotes smart design in cities. Through intensive projects, the group aims to illuminate the environmental possibilities of New York City and inspire solutions in similar areas globally. The group develops solutions for local sustainability in energy, transportation, infrastructure, buildings, waste treatment, food, and water. These solutions are derived from the interface of design, computation and synthetic biology.

China Design Week (CDW) supported by the China Britain Business Council (CBBC) is pleased to host this timely conference to discuss the possibility of increasing creative links between China and the UK.

Even though China has become the world’s second largest economy and the world’s largest manufacturing base, the term ‘made in China’ still has negative connotations.

Transforming “Made in China” to “Created in China” is a key challenge for Chinese enterprises urgently in need of world-class creative design. What are the best methods, models and practices of designing? What is the value and the role of creativity in emerging markets? What are the contemporary ideas in design thinking? Are they appropriate in the Chinese context? What is “good design?”

We will be hosting the forthcoming Autumn talks for the London Design Computing Community at the offices of nbbj during the evening of Thursday October the 22nd. Speakers include Werner Sobek, One to One, nbbj, AKT II and Pilbrow and Partners.

The Design Computing Community is a social network focused on design and technology. It is comprised of professionals within the building industry including architects, engineers, manufacturers and design specialists. While the advancements in practice define the main focus of the group, it maintains close contact and collaboration with academic institutions and technology organizations.

RIBA Bookshop presents the book launch of 'REGENERATION! Conversations, Drawings, Archives & Photographs from Robin Hood Gardens' by Jessie Brennan. The publication contains Brennan’s two series of drawings Conversation Pieces and A Fall of Ordinariness and Light, among other research – including contributions by authors Owen Hatherley and Richard Martin – from Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London.

From a review of claims involving innovative design, new materials and value engineering through to the impact of the Insurance Act 2015 and an assessment of the particular difficulties associated with concurrent delay, this conference, chaired by Paul Reed of Hardwicke, examines a range of topical and tricky issues and will appeal to all those who need to keep up to date with all the latest hot topics and big issues.

The theme of Parallelism in Architecture and Computing Techniques (PACT) 2016 explores the relations between computational design software in architecture, organizational and global, ever-changing and pervasive contexts. This conference looks at how the new trends of architectural technologies and computational thinking can adapt to increase the ability in finding a complex digital fabrication, augmented reality, and intelligent environment. PACT 2016 is organized by The University of East London (UEL), in collaboration with the International Experts for Research Enrichment and Knowledge Exchange (IEREK) institution.