Taking cues from the building’s location, character and textures, three new choral works developed by composers Claudia Molitor, Michael Betteridge and members of the ensemble are presented to the choir for the first time on the day, rehearsed in one-hour workshops, and performed in the evening alongside a diverse programme of music juxtaposing traditional and contemporary choral material with music concrète. A sonic view workshops are open to the public.

To find out how to get involved and for full evening concert programme
visit the event website →

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Musarc is a research project based at the The Cass School of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University, dedicated to the study of music, sound and the subject of listening and sensory perception in the context of architecture and the built environment. At its heart lies a dynamic choral ensemble whose members develop Musarc’s own creative work, teaching programmes, artists commissions and curatorial projects.

www.musarc.org

Image: Musarc performing at Antistrophe, V22, June 2012. Photo by Yiannis Katsaris

Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design
London Metropolitan University
Spring House
40 – 44 Holloway Road
London N7 8JL

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Visit our other exhibitions:

School of Art and
School of Media and Music Technology
Wednesday 13  – Sunday  17 June 2012

School of Design
Friday 22  – Saturday 30 June 2012

The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Media and Design
London Metropolitan University
Central House
59 – 63 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7PF

The theme of the year’s conference is The Intercultural Studio; we are aiming for a focus on the culture of studio teaching, the studio as a place of production and exchange, criticality, the relevance of the crit and other forums of discussion, the studio as a place of learning through making and other issues.

The conference includes a guided tour and private view of the Faculty’s Summer Exhibition 2012.

For further details, full programme and registration visit the Studio Culture website →

Introduction
Prof Robert Mull

Keynote Speaker
Tom Emerson
(6a Architects / ETH Zürich)

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

The conference will take place on Friday 29 and Saturday 30 June 2012 in the Libeskind designed Graduate Centre at London Metropolitan University, and Spring House, the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design.

Registration →
£40/£20 (concessions)
London Met students and staff free

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

To mark this moment, the faculty is hosting a small event. Colin Davies will give a short illustrated talk on his recent visit to Beijing and there will be more talks and performances by friends, followed by a reception.

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.