University of Westminster, Architecture Exhibition, 2009 – extended opening
By popular demand, the University of Westminster, Architecture Department’s annual exhibition will now remain open until the 10th July 2009.
Architecture Studios, 35 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5LS
10am to 9pm everyday
http://openstudiowestminster.org/
Fourth Door Review
This commentary on the journal Fourth Door Review will be published sometime in some form in the magazine Green Building.
Review of Fourth Door Review
The Fourth Door Review is a very curious publication. It engages
thoughtfully with content that ranges from technology and new media to
holistic ecological theory, yet whilst it focuses in particular on
architecture and design, art and music - each issue typically include
a few random entries as well - there is a recipe for carrot soup in
this issue, for example. There is however, a pattern that connects the
entries, and in a marketplace saturated with safe approaches to
journalism, FDR is neither the woolly sub-phenomenological babble that
can too often characterise attempts at ecological holistic writing,
nor is it the glossy techno-worship that is frequently pushed at
visually vulnerable design students. It occupies rather, a
productively unstable and hybrid modern position, which can perhaps
ultimately be understood as contributing to a new interpretation of
the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical
Regionalism?
The Fourth Door Review is published on a highly irregular basis - the
latest, number eight, is the first for several years - and its
editorial seems to enjoy the fact that the arrival of issues is
becoming even less predicable! However, as soon as one starts to read
the publication, one can begin to understand why that might be.
Firstly, it is very beautifully produced - neither a book nor a
magazine - it is more like a lovingly crafted journal or notebook. The
content further supports such a diaristic interpretation: whilst there
are contributions from several different authors, the majority of the
material is developed out of a series of conversations between Oliver
Lowenstein - the journals founder and editorial co-ordinator - and
various artists, practitioners and thinkers. Whilst this unusual
editorial balance could be seen as a weakness in the journal, it
actually becomes a strength and defining characteristic. Indeed, in so
far as the substance of the Fourth Door Review is largely interview
based, it is perhaps best understood as working within the tradition
of a literary form that would include Fritof Capra’s Conversations
with Remarkable People, and even G.I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings with
Remarkable Men. Lowenstein is an independent academic and researcher,
and his projects and travels feed into and determine the direction of
each issue. His recent projects have included a proposal for a chain
of bicycle stations, and curating a exhibition exploring the cultural
use of wood in Scottish architecture, and the research generated for
latter of these projects in particular has found expression in the
current issue.
The FDR is then primarily a series of collaborative, even co-designed
texts: dialogues fleshed out where necessary with further stories,
anecdotes and facts. Their success is based upon the real quality of
the individuals that Lowenstein engages with. In the latest issue, we
meet architectural thinkers and practitioners of global significance,
such as Peter Zumthor and Juhani Palasmaa, in substantial
conversations that provide new insights to their work, thereby making
a real contribution to the academic material on these thinkers.
Operating at a similar level of cultural recognition are several of
the musicians whose work is explored. David Sylvan’s seminal works in
the eighties and nineties inspired many other more commercial groups,
and defined much of the sound of that period, whilst Jen Finer was a
guitarist (and more) with The Pogues. Sylvan - in a revealing and
personal dialogue - discusses recent developments in his recorded
music. Moving in a very different direction, Jen Finer discusses
both his millennial 1000 year duration Long Player, and more recent
though equally experimental acoustic-landscape art hybrids.
In summary, it is perhaps the range of material touched upon, that
makes FDR a dialogue worth eavesdropping on. In this issue, one finds
references to the CERN collider a few pages away from Stewart Brand’s
Long Now Foundation, Goethean Science based studies of flow near
internet based community mapping experiments. We find Passivhaus
pioneers next to the digitally fabricated patterned brickwork of ETH
Zurich’s Gramazio and Kohler, and references to Paul Virilio’s Grey
Ecology not far from a review of a Mongolian music festival. As
Lowenstein comments whilst deep in his Swiss travels, “I felt that I
was in the presence of a new hybrid, machine augmented to be sure,
though also within the bounds of craft, even if it was very definitely
another kind of craft, another way of making.”
Jon Goodbun (jon@wag-architecture.co.uk) was a founding partner of
architecture and design group WAG (www.wag-architecture.co.uk), and
contributes to the Polytechnic research group (www.thepolytechnic.org)
at University of Westminster, where he will shortly be submitting his
PhD thesis Ecological Cybernetics: Architecture and the Extended Mind
More bad news on climate change from MIT
James Lovelock’s prediction that the environment is past the tipping point, and that the human population will have collapsed by 80% by 2100 look increasingly likely to be accurate, given the data in a new report from MIT’s Centre for Global Change Science based on their Integrated Global System Model.
Their model, which is unique in that it incorporates data on human-activity—such as economic growth and energy use—as well as analyzing atmospheric, oceanic, and biological systems, suggests that global warming is likely to be twice as severe as previously thought. Their analysis is based upon running multiple scenario variations, giving probabilities of possible outcomes. After 400 runs, their model suggests that there is a 90 percent probability that temperatures will have risen 3.5 to 7.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Their models suggest a very low probability of less than two degrees warming, which is generally agreed to be the point at which runaway warming starts due to positive feedback from various sources (such as reduction in albido and methane release.) These kinds of temperature changes are widely agreed to mean the catastrophic collapse of planetary ecosystems, and the total breakdown of current social and economic structures: see for example the Stockholm Networks Report.
“There is significantly more risk than we previously estimated,” according to Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the program. “This increases the urgency for significant policy action. There’s no way the world can or should take these risks.”
The latest article is available here (http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2009JCLI2863.1), although this journal does not have Athens login. An older version can be downloaded here: http://globalchange.mit.edu/files/document/MITJPSPGC_Rpt169.pdf
The report abstract is below:
The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model’s first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.2°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios. However, if recently published data, suggesting stronger 20th century ocean warming, are used to determine the input climate parameters, the median projected warning at the end of the 21st century is only 4.1°C. Nevertheless all our simulations have a much smaller probability of warming less than 2.4°C, than implied by the lower bound of the IPCC AR4 projected likely range for the A1FI scenario, which has forcing very similar to our median projection. The probability distribution for the surface warming produced by our analysis is more symmetric than the distribution assumed by the IPCC due to a different feedback between the climate and the carbon cycle, resulting from the inclusion in our model of the carbon-nitrogen interaction in the terrestrial ecosystem.
Alex Scramm launches new website
Former Polytechnic Diploma Studio student Alex Schramm has launched a new website: http://www.alex-schramm.com/
I like this new series of work entitled LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor):
It is said that:
Alex Schramm is an investigative and vigorous tinkerer whose work may be seen in the context of Sci-Fi Historicism.
He has evolved a structuralist approach to anthropomorphic movements, achieving an invigorating beauty with
meticulous finishes that overshadow a quite technical approach. He fuses linguistic and mechanical ready-mades into
characters with a kind of visual consistency never seen before.
The quality of his work is reminiscent of drawings by Francis Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Max Ernst and the writings
by Alfred Jarry, Lewis Carroll and Rabelais.
Alex Schramm currently lives and works as artist and architect in London.
Will McLean and Pete Silver - Introduction to Architectural Technology
The forthcoming RAE and general publishing phenomenon known as Will McLean and Pete Silver are releasing yet another book, this one is an ‘Introduction to Architectural Technology.’
Check out the fantastic photo of their living model of the Forth Rail Bridge featuring Yonca Ersen.
AA PhD Research Symposium: Ideology in Transparency
This Friday I will be giving a paper entitled ‘A Political Theory of Ecology in Architecture (or, Is the AA-DRL a right wing think tank!?)’, at the AA PhD Research Symposium.
IDEOLOGY IN TRANSPARENCY
AA PhD Dialogues, 2nd Annual AA PhD Research Symposium
Architectural Association
School of Architecture
36 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES
Friday 8 May 2009, 10am-7pm
http://www.aaphdsymposium.net
THEME:
The notion of transparency has achieved a continued, if varied, currency in
architectural discourse throughout the twentieth-century. Along with a
multitude of material attributes, transparency advocates a shifting, yet
ever-present, ideological sensibility. Towards the latter part of the
twentieth-century, however, the general notion of transparency as an
ideological mechanism began to decline. Today, while a literal sense of
transparency remains, seemingly its ideology does not. This symposium aims
to resurface the question of ideology in (contemporary) architectural
discourse by creating dialogues around the following questions:
_ As the notion of transparency appears to be superseded by the
immateriality of the digital, how can contemporary architectural research
address transparency’s role as a technological innovation, as a mechanism
for design, and, above all, as an ideological device?
_ Do new design technologies and media produce more transparent systems of
communication?
_ Despite the apparent displacement of ideology in current architectural
arguments and projects, what are the subjacent ideologies that remain and
how might we be able to scrutinise them?
The abstracts of all the papers and biographies of the participants can be accessed through the website http://www.aaphdsymposium.net
10.00 - Welcome : Brett Steele
10.20 - Paper 1 : Kathleen O’Donnell (The Bartlett)
10.40 - Paper 2 : Emma Cheatle (The Bartlett)
11.00 - Paper 3 : Hyun-Tae Jung (Coumbia GSAPP)
11.20 - Paper 4 : Eva Eylers (AA)
11.40 - Paper 5 : Yara Sharif (Westminster)
12.00 - Discussion, with Marina Lathouri
13.00 - Lunch
15.00 - Paper 6 : Kirk Wooller (AA)
15.20 - Paper 7 : Nuria Lombardero (ETSA Sevilla)
15.40 - Paper 8 : Anirudha Dhanawade (The London Consortium)
16.00 - Paper 9 : Jon Goodbun (Westminster)
16.20 - Paper 10 : Emanuel de Sousa (AA)
16.40 - Discussion, with Murray Fraser
17.40 - Tea
18.00 - Keynote : Roemer van Toorn
PCL: Building Architectural Education in the 1960s
Tanis Hinchcliffe’s rescheduled lecture, PCL: Building Architectural education in the 1960s will now take place this Thursday (7th May 2009)
6.30pm, Room M421
University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road, London NW1. (opposite Madame Tussauds, nearest tube Baker street)
On the 10th May 1960, almost exactly 49 years ago, the then London County Council announced proposals for the development of the Polytechnic:
“Proposals for the establishment of a college of architecture and building as part of a scheme for the reorganisation of Regent Street Polytechnic…we have approved in principle proposals for the transformation of the Polytechnic into a federal institution, composed of three colleges, namely a college of architecture and advanced building studies, a college of engineering and science, and a college of commerce… Each of the three constituent colleges would have the fullest possible measure of independence and would, it is hoped, attract principles and staff of high quality.”
(Source: Ethel M. Wood, ‘A History of the Polytechnic’, 1965)
The Sensuous Metropolis
Wednesday 22nd April 2009, 2pm-6pm
Room M/413, University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road, London N1W 5LS
FREE ADMISSION!
David Serlin University of California, San Diego
The Sensuous City
Jenny Bavidge University of Greenwich
Vital Victims: Senses of Children in the Urban
David Cunningham SSHL, University of Westminster
Phenomenology of the Metropolis, or Abstraction as Experience
Jon Goodbun SABE, University of Westminster
Empathy, Abstraction and the Metropolitan Nous
Chaired by: Marquard Smith Westminster & Journal of Visual Culture
A conversation co-organised by the University of Westminster’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages and School of Architecture and the Built Environment.
