Nigel Coates' Tales of the City' Lecture 30 November

Nigel Coates
30 November | 18.30 – 20.00
Christopher Ingold Auditorium, UCL
20 Gordon Street | WC1H 0AJ | Map
No booking required | first-come, first-seated

Tales of the City

Forget the boulevard and the block: it’s an inherent confusion that makes cities so vital. Against a background of mutating functions, and accidental superimpositions, switching scales and flashes of desire, Nigel Coates has always drawn inspiration from the entire breadth of the urban environment. Architecture always needs to celebrate its contingency on life in the city and raise the bar for the citizen. In our role as architects and designers, how can we channel this turbulent mix? In his own form of architectural storytelling citing installations exhibited in various galleries over three decades, Coates will explore his recurring theme of the fictional urban model. From 'Ecstacity' to 'Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens', these mix photography, found objects, 3D printed buildings and occasional film and furniture of his own design.

University of Westminster BAIA students at Parsons The New School for Parallel Cities 1

Parallel Cities 1 explored the process of craft techniques combining digital and analogue media with film and physical models to uncover relationships between bodies, networks, and spaces in New York City.

The workshop brought together 8 graduate and undergraduate students from Parsons’ Temporary Environments course and 8 second year students from the University of Westminster’s BA (Hons) Interior Architecture Course. The students received training in Rhino and Grasshopper, in addition to digital fabrication processes focused on networked workflows. Individually, they developed their own site study of a portion of Long Island City, while contributing to the overall workshop goals of the design and fabrication of a larger group installation.

more information here.

'Variations on a Theme Park' by Michael Sorkin

University of Westminster Visiting Professor Michael Sorkin's critique of urban public space has overlaps with a critique of tourism and urban leisure and has implications for public space and tourism in the UK and London.

"America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life."

More on the book.

Sorkin is lecturing Thursday 26 November.  

James Corner Lecture: 18 November

James Corner
18 November | 18.30 – 20.00
UCL Chemistry Auditorium
20 Gordon Street | WC1H 0AJ | Map
No booking required | first come, first seated

Intimate Immensity: Public Space in the City

Renowned landscape architect James Corner, founder of Field Operations, will discuss current ideas about the design of vibrant urban public spaces, the importance of seeing cities as landscapes, and the capacity for landscape to create new forms of city-making. He will present his designs for New York’s High Line, Santa Monica’s Tongva Park and London’s South Park at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, among other innovative public realm projects around the world. Read more>>

A new book, The High Line, published by Phaidon, will be available for sale and signing by James after the talk.

Michael Sorkin Inaugural Lecture at University of Westminster: 26 November

Competition for Wuhan Qingtan Lake Ecological Park Urban Design Competition 2014, First Place.

MICHAEL SORKIN
VISITING PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE
INAUGURAL LECTURE

26 November 2015, 18.30 – 20.00

University of Westminster
Room MG14
25 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5LS

City States

In his inaugural lecture as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Westminster, Michael Sorkin will speak about the relationship between equity and sustainability in cities and advocate for a radical assumption of responsibility by cities. He will argue for the necessity of creating both new kinds of urban relations as well as new kinds of cities. The talk will be illustrated by a series of examples of work by the Michael Sorkin Studio and Terreform.

Michael Sorkin is an architect and urbanist whose practice spans design, criticism, and teaching. He is the principal of Michael Sorkin Studio in New York, a global design practice focused on urbanism and green architecture, and Terreform, an independent urban research and advocacy centre whose mission is to investigate the forms, policies, technologies, and practices that will yield equitable, sustainable, and beautiful cities for our urbanizing planet

'Ordinary Streets' Film Launch, 6th October at LSE

Tuesday 6th October, 6.30-8pm, Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE

‘Ordinary Streets’ is a short film based on an ethnographic and visual exploration of the spaces, economies and cultures of ‘street’. Through the lens of Rye Lane in Peckham in south London, the film engages with issues of migration, urban multiculture and regeneration.

Myfanwy Taylor from Just space will provide a commentary on the film.

‘Ordinary Streets’ is a film by Sophie Yetton, based on research led by Suzi Hall at LSE Cities.

The film screening will be followed by a drinks reception, which will take place directly outside the Wolfson Theatre.

– For further details of the research, please go to the ‘Ordinary Streets’ project page.

– For details about our latest ESRC research across streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Leicester, please go to the ‘Super-diverse Streets’ project page.

– For full details on the launch event please see the ‘Ordinary Streets’ event page.

Image: Rye Lane, Peckham (Photo Credit: Nicholas Palominos, Ordinary Streets, LSE Cities, 2012)

DnA Episode: Zombie Urbanism

A recent episode of LA-based podcast DnA asks:

"What happens when residential real estate is treated like a safe deposit box? DnA explores the urban impact of global investment in high end homes -- in London, New York and L.A." 

Listen here.

and read more about 'zombie urbanism' in London here.

Collages by Frank Dresme

"Project 360U+00B0 was a thesis project produced at The Utrecht School of Arts in 2007. The project, was vested in the production of four psychogeographic maps. These maps are the routes between personal destinations in Amsterdam."

more here.

CJ Lim lecture: 'Food Cities', 1 Oct 2014

CJ Lim

Food City: Lecture and Book Launch. 
01 Oct 2014
6.30pm – 8pm
No booking required / first come, first seated
Darwin Lecture Theatre
Map

Food City, the follow up to Smartcities and Eco-Warriors, explores the issue of urban and architectural transformation and how the creation, storage and distribution of food has been, and can again become, a construct for the practice of everyday life.