Studio Culture conferences are funded by the Centre for Education in the Built Environment (CEBE), and targeted at design studio teachers of UK based Undergraduate Architecture Courses. The aim is to promote discussion and sharing of experience amongst teachers of architecture.

We invite tutors to consider issues around teaching architecture, and make invitations to host one of a series of a 1 hour workshops at the conference or to present a 40 minute paper. Deadline for submissions is 1^st May 2012.

2012 is the last of five Studio Culture conferences to be funded by CEBE following its phasing out and incorporation into the Higher Education Academy by Summer 2012. Given the end of this funding, this year we aim to consider ‘the intercultural studio’ by reflecting on the interactions in studio culture. This will consider the relationships between cultures that surround architectural education, relationships between international institutions, practice, clients, other disciplines, and within the studio itself.

The conference will be held on Friday 29^th and Saturday 30^th June at London Metropolitan University, during the season of summer exhibitions in London (including non-London schools of architecture), and thus at a point where the varied products of studio methods are on show.

We invite studio teachers to present workshops around aspects of studio culture, considering the following plus related issues:

• How is a ’studio culture’ set up within a studio?  How does the nationality and background of the students, tutors and visiting critics influence this?
• How can we capitalise on cultural variations to ensure that they contribute to studio teaching and learning? The role of studio teaching in providing ‘intercultural’ skills that allow students to successfully develop and express architectural proposals.
• How do we produce criticality in a post crit culture? How do we crit design? How do we do this constructively?
• How can exchanges of students, lecturing architects, academics, study trips and events promote an understanding of architecture beyond the parochial concerns of one institution or the professional scene (or ‘industry’) in one particular country? How can this perspective become a critical too?
• How can those doing research into new forms of practice and attempting to adapt the role of the architect (for example London Met’s Free Unit) interact with those who study the discipline of architecture (history, technique, language etc.)?
• How can an architecture education prepare students for moving around to find work (especially given the current financial crisis and great differences in opportunities between neighbouring countries)?
• How do the agendas underlying architectural education in different countries affect the position and status of architects in their respective countries?
• How can working or having sites for teaching projects in other countries inform teaching and practice?
• How can global challenges, e.g. financial and environmental, be addressed within teaching – especially as many countries have different standards (cultural and regulatory).
• How can architecture educators influence policy making to support a design culture (for example by increasing open competitions or supporting students more financially).

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The likely programme of the conference will be:

Friday 29 June 2012, am
Introduction by Professor Robert Mull – Conjoint Dean of Faculty of Architecture an Spatial Design and Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Media and Design at London Metropolitan University. Followed by a series of papers from invited speakers

Friday 29 June 2012, pm
Workshop 1
Workshop 2
Workshop 3

Friday 29 June 2012, evening
Evening Reception and Keynote Lecture

Saturday 30 June 2012, am
Workshop 4
Workshop 5
Workshop 6

Saturday 30 June 2012, pm
Introduction by London Met studio teachers to ASD’s Summer Show 2012

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Please submit proposals for workshops and/or papers (max 500 words) and a short CV to:
j.ng@londonmet.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions is 1^st May 2012.

Advisory Board
Anne Markey, Director of ASD Projects
Jen Ng, ASD Graduate at ASD Projects
Viktor Jak and David Leech, ASD Studio 1
Nina Lundvall and James Payne, ASD Studio 5
Fran Balaam and Michael Corr, ASD Studio 9

VIVA LA RESISTENZA!

Long Live the Resistance!

This lecture represents a synthesis of various issues and problems which are posed to the architect: the relation between politics and architecture, the social role of the architect, the importance of ethics, and the responsibility of intellectuals – and hence also of schools – in relation to the problem of war in a society which defines itself as a democracy.

Snozzi will address the relation between man and nature and the repercussions of this with regards to the architectural project, highlighting the importance of history and the context of the place of architectural intervention.

With reference to several urban projects, concrete solutions are proposed for the development of the contemporary city, as an antithesis to the current praxis of contemporary urban planners and the issues resulting from the uncontrolled expansion of cities today.

The lecture will in part be based on a series of aphorisms written by the architect in the 1970’s and edited in 1973 for his first year of teaching at the ETH in Zurich, accompanied by the presentation of several projects at the urban scale including proposals for various cities in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Holland spanning between 1972 -2006.

The lecture will also consider the planning guidelines and work developed by the architect for the municipality of Monte Carasso, near Bellinzona, a project ongoing since 1979. Monte Carasso, and the slow and careful transformation of this one place over the last three decades, is often referred to by the architect as his ‘urban planning testing ground’. His work there recieved the ‘Prince of Charles Award’ from Harvard in 1993 and he has been directing an annual International Design Seminar there since 1993.

Luigi Snozzi

I was born in 1932 in what is now the Architectural Academy of Mendrisio – in a building that at the time was the Hospital of the Holy Virgin. Could this coincidence perhaps have lead me, later in life, to choose the profession of architecture?…

So starts the biography of Luigi Snozzi, who studied at the ETH in Zurich and established his first architectural studio in Locarno in 1958, working in close collaboration with Livio Vacchini during 1962-71 and later establishing a second studio in Zurich with Bruno Jenni. His current studio in Lausanne was established in 1988.

Snozzi has been a visiting professor at the ETH in Zurich (1973-75 and 2003-04), the University of Geneva (1980-82), and the Federal Polytechnic at Lausanna where he was a full professor between 1985 – 97. He has since been a visiting professor at the Architecture Departments of the University of Trieste (1998-2000), and the University of Alghero, in Italy (since 2002).

He is a tireless critic and educator and has attended conferences in an array of countries all over the world. He has also exhibited internationally since 1993 and won numerous prizes and awards.

All who work in the field of architecture today know of Snozzi…Snozzi’s designs are internationally known. He speaks to us through them. In pursuit of the essential, far from all forms of dramatic rhetoric, his language is clear, subtle and critical. His operative method is a process which aims at transfiguring human existence. This means resistance, critique, challenge, polemic, struggle and concrete responses which take the form of design with a clear foundations.

(Peter Disch, ‘An Architect in Search of a Place’, in ‘Luigi Snozzi, the Complete Works, 1958-2003’.)

Image Captions: Sketches by Snozzi of ‘Deltametropolis’, Holland (2001- 03) and Monte Carasso in Switzerland (1979 – ongoing).

Event website →

Ten years have passed since the end of Angola’s civil war, in 2002. Since then, the country’s neoliberal trajectory, fuelled by the burgeoning oil industry, has turned its capital, Luanda, into the World’s most expensive city. However, current debates fall short on grasping the numerous stakeholders in Angola’s recent development, mainly because they fail to embrace aspects of urban “informality”.

This show delves into the hidden territories of Luanda, which turns out to be far more complex than a commonplace “global city” surrounded by desperate “informal settlements”. Which aspects tie the urban continuum together? How does the city work?

A collection of visual elements and artifacts, produced during on-site participatory workshops and off-site research and editing, contribute to address these questions. The materials result from an ongoing dialogue between planning entities and city-dwellers, ranging from local authorities and citizens, to NGOs and architecture students.

The pop-up show will include the screening of two short films featuring testimonies from Angolan urban migrants and former Portuguese colonizers, focusing on social and spatial circumstances before and after Angola’s independence (1975). The launch of a book edited by Paulo Moreira – consisting of a comprehensive compilation of original contributions by emerging and established experts, practitioners and researchers from different fields, reflecting the contents of the exhibition – will be followed by a closing party.

Visit event website →

Strike the Viol

Musarc’s choir and friends will be performing music by Thomas Morley, John Dowland, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis and Georg Phillip Telemann; as well as a number of works surrounding the theme of ‘female monarchs’, including works by R.V. Williams, music by Edward Elgar and Henry Purcell’s Come ye sons of art.

Conductor: Cathy Heller Jones

Purcell, Come ye sons of art
Catherine Braine and Sibel Ozcan (violin), Graeme Smith (viola), Karen Davies (cello), Lauren Knuckey (oboe) and Peter Twitchin (hapsichord)

Telemann, Concerto for Four Violins in G Major
Maria Smith, Anna Kerrane, Jessica Smulders-Cohen and Dominic Weil.

Eight lectures on sound

John Tyndall’s course of eight lectures on the topic of ‘Sound’, delivered in front of a mesmerised audience at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1867, today offers a fascinating account on how sound was understood in the 19th century. It also marks a transformation in our attitude to the subject that was going to have a profound effect on the way we listen and make music today.

For Chambers 2012, Musarc re-enacts selected experiments and passages from Tyndall’s lecture with the help of a magic lantern and other apparatuses.

I am sitting in a room

Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) is an American composer whose work is influenced by the science and physical properties of sound itself. I am sitting in a room for voice and electromagnetic tape (1969) is one of Lucier’s most important and best-known works. During the performance, the sound of speech is recorded on tape and re-recorded as it is played back into the room. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have a characteristic resonance, certain frequencies are gradually emphasized as new ‘generations’ of the recording are created, until eventually the words become unintelligible – replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The text spoken by the performer describes this process in action.

Tickets

Advance bookings only
£12.00 / £8.00 concessions
Book tickets →

Date and time

Friday 30 March 2012, 7.30pm
Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design
London Metropolitan University
Spring House
40–44 Holloway Road
London N7 8JL

Doors open 7.00
Concert 7.30pm
Bar 9.00pm
Doors close 10.00pm

One built project for a house in Balsthal is examined in more detail, both as a comprehensively executed set of information and with photographs by Ioana Marinescu and Pascal Flammer.

Read more about Pascal Flammer here.

Young Swiss architect Pascal Flammer studied at the ETH Zurich, EPF Lausanne and TU Delft. Since starting his own practice in 2005, he has been awarded the Swiss Art Award, the Weissenhof Architecture Award and the Architekturpreis 2012. Pascal has taught at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University, Cambridge, and since 2006 is a teaching associate of Valerio Olgiati at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Switzerland. The lecture and exhibition will explore a number of international projects and a recently built house in the Swiss Jura mountains.

Models for the exhibition have been produced by Metropolitan Works.

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The exhibition opening is supported by the Swiss Embassy in the United Kingdom

S2750, Ecobuild, ExCel Centre

Unit 8’s team Heliomet are showing a section of Sunbloc, their solar powered house at Ecobuild 2012.

Sunbloc is London Metropolitan University’s entry into Solar Decathlon Europe 2012 – a global competition in which universities from all over the world compete to design, build and operate a house that is self-sufficient in energy using the sun as the only energy source.

There will be presentations running throughout the Ecobuild event at the Sunbloc stand (S2750, South Gallery). On Thursday 22^nd March, there will be an event with sponsors and collaborators:

‘Get involved!’

Thursday 22nd March, 2.30 to 4.30pm:

2.30 Nate Kolbe, Diploma Unit 4, Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design – Introduction to Sunbloc house and SDE 2012

2.45 Robert Mull, Dean Architecture and Spatial Design  – Introduction to the Faculty and live projects

3.00 Anne Markey, Director, ASD Projects – Introduction to the Projects Office

3.15 Marcus Bowerman, Manager, Metropolitan Works – Introduction to Metropolitan Works, the production house of live projects

3.30 Tea Break

4.00 Round table discussion about getting involved with live projects

4.30 End

http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/