London: The Latest Architecture and News

Al-Kindi Society for Engineers will be holding its annual engineering forum in London, titled “Iraq Architecture and Planning 2016”.

Videos

Communicating forms
André Tavares debates with Mark Tuff and Tim Abrahams

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale is very pleased to announce the kick-off debate - Communicating Forms – with André Tavares chief curator of 2016’s Lisbon Triennale, Mark Tuff and Tim Abrahams.

For the inaugural talk in World Monuments Fund Britain's Heritage & Conflict series, we welcome Prof. Maamoun Abdulkarim, Director-General of Antiquities and Museums for Syria, to give the human story behind the global headlines, and James Davis from the Google Cultural Institute, to report on the latest international efforts to scan and document cultural heritage through advancing technology. The evening will be introduced by Lisa Ackerman, Executive Vice President of World Monuments Fund.

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.

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.

Terreform ONE: Hackerspace + Bio Design - 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.

A much anticipated retrospective—The World of Charles and Ray Eames—opens today at London's Barbican Centre. The show, curated by Catherine Ince and designed by 6a architects, surveys the careers of Charles (1907-1978) and Ray (1912-1988), and the extraordinary body of work prodced by the Eames Office: a ‘laboratory’, active for over four decades, in which the Eameses, their collaborators and staff produced "an array of pioneering and influential work – from architecture, furniture, graphic and product design, to painting, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, multi-media installation and exhibitions, as well as new models for education."

+ 5

Transforming “Made in China” to “Created in China”
A conference on collaboration in design between the UK and China

“With the transformation of London’s industrial Royal Docks, it is a fitting location for China Design Week and this fascinating conference. The importance of design and our relationship with China cannot be overstated. There is huge potential for learning and collaboration, and it’s in this spirit that we welcome China Design Week.”
Munira Mirza, Deputy Mayor for Education and Culture of London

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.

RIBA Bookshop presents the book launch of 'REGENERATION! Conversations, Drawings, Archives & Photographs from Robin Hood Gardens' by Jessie Brennan.

London School of Economics (LSE) has launched a call for expressions of interest for its next major building project; the redevelopment of 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields (44LIF), which will be known as the Paul Marshall Building.

Following its redevelopment, the new building on the site of 44LIF will house a number of academic and research departments including the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship. Paul Marshall is a major benefactor of the School and the Marshall Institute will make its permanent home in the new building at 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields which will take his name.

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.

+ 30

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.

London-based British practice Jonathan Tuckey Design (JTD) have created a series of residential interiors for the 'Gasholder Triplets' in London's formerly industrial King's Cross district. 145 individual apartments have been designed inside these mid-nineteenth century structures, within which Wilkinson Eyre Architects have created the "architectural insertions" (the buildings themselves).