United Kingdom

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Architectural charity Article 25 has revealed a selection of the images to be included for auction in their annual 10x10 fundraising auction. One of the highlights of Article 25's calendar, each year the 10x10 event divides an area of the city of London into 100 sections, challenging the participants to produce a drawing or other artwork inspired by the location assigned to them. This year, Article 25 abandoned the usual grid in favor of 100 areas along the Thames, taking in the many landmarks along the river's winding route. Article 25's list of participants includes architects such as Rafael Vinoly, David Adjaye, Sir Terry Farrell, Will Alsop and Chris Wilkinson, alongside artists including Antony Gormley and Wolfgang Buttress.

Last year's 10x10 event raised over £120,000 for Article 25's healthcare projects in the developing world. This year, the 100 drawings will once again be briefly exhibited at the RIBA headquarters in London on December 1st before the work is auctioned, an addition to an online auction which will begin on November 24th at 10x10london.com.

Read on to see a selection of the artworks to be auctioned.

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

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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.

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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."

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