Featured in both the book Anglo Files: rising UK architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2005), one of my publications, and Space Invaders, the British Council international touring exhibition, 2001-3, I curated with Pedro Gadanho (a catalogue is still available, and a series of video interviews filmed by Elliott Chaffer is now a collectors’ item), the irrepressible
The New Generations Festival – 28-30 November 2013 – in Milan will be one of the high points of a research project led in 2012 and 2013 by Itinerant Office. The New Generations research, led by Itinerant Office, the architectural practice founded by Gianpiero Venturini, has for the last two years been analysing the impact
Masterplanning Futures, Lucy Bullivant’s latest book published by Routledge in 2012, has been shortlisted for the Urban Design Group’s Francis Tibbalds Award. For the fourth year running, the Urban Design Group (UDG) Awards programme will include a Book Award named in memory of the exceptional UK urban planner Francis Tibbalds, who championed the causes of good urban design until his
The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, a building with an extension designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, will open to the public in Kensington Gardens, five minutes’ walk away from the Serpentine Gallery itself, on Saturday, 28 September 2013. A conversion of The Magazine, a former gunpowder store dating from 1805. At 900m2, it gives the Gallery, led
Super-Seeding, the latest international architectural symposium in the acclaimed Proto/e/co/logics series curated by architects Alisa Andrasek (Biothing) and Bruno Juričić and staged by MLAUS, the Mediterranean Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Strategies, a private institute of architecture founded in Croatia by architect and academic Bruno Juričić, will be held on Saturday 24 August 2013 from
The FRAC Centre in Orléans, the largest cultural collection, gallery and research centre of architecture and art in France outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, will open its doors on 14 September in a new location, reaffirming its identity as one of the city’s leading assets. The former 19th century ‘Subsistances militaires’ army base site on
What if London’s buildings grew according to the amount of data they generate? Stephan Hügel (@urschrei) and Flora Roumpani (@en_topia) two PhD students from The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, have been working on a system to read in Twitter data to CityEngine and link the geo locations to building outlines. ‘As part of our
Like John F.C. Turner, the British-born architect who in the 1970s and 1980s influenced some of the World Bank’s most progressive urban programmes, we believe that decision-making and initiatives on housing related issues are better left at the local level. This is especially true in contexts such as Mumbai, where government-led schemes and incentives to
Play Me, a video exploring patterns in children’s play across cultures, was produced in 1997 by Helena Bullivant, the film producer and Director of Fierce Bird Films for the highly successful international touring exhibition Kid size: The Material World of Childhood for Vitra Design Museum, Germany, co-curated by her sister Lucy Bullivant, curator, author and founder of Urbanista.org, and Jutta Oldiges, curator at Vitra Design Museum, which toured globally for a phenomenal eight year stint. Clearly, such a unique, cross-cultural, anthropological-design historical focus had rarely been applied to this absorbing, seminal topic affecting everybody around the world.
Architecture has a massive capacity for cultural agency, and yet in the last few decades it has only marginally addressed the issue of its social relevance. Until recently, global conflicts, political and ecological migration, overpopulation and the explosive formation of slums certainly did not play a central role in the research, planning and training in