This event celebrates the six winning entries of the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. This prestigious award program selects exemplary built work that combines social and ecological concerns with innovative and exemplary design.
Surfacing Work presents recent projects by Spinagu, a Los Angeles-based research and design studio that explores architectural ideas and processes through spatial, experimental, and exhibitionary formats.
Founded in 1988 by Gilles Saucier and André Perrotte, Saucier + Perrotte Architectes is a multidisciplinary practice that is internationally renowned for its institutional, cultural, and residential projects. Saucier + Perrotte’s highly acclaimed buildings have been published the world over, reflecting the office’s status as one of Canada’s premier design firms.
Join a panel to discuss the role of planning, architecture and landscape design in understanding the collective memory contained in the land. From the horizon to the Cartesian grid, what have we built and how does this influence a sense of belonging that one feels? What is the relationship between memory and the land?
The event is the first of a series of conversations to launch the recently published book The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture (Quodlibet, 2020). The first group of speakers moderated by Roberto Damiani, the book editor, includes Brigitte Shim as a discussant and the volume contributors Joan Ockman, Richard Sommer, Hans Ibelings, Michael Piper, and Andrew Choptiany.
Towards Half: Design for a Climate Positive Future. How can the built environment meet the 2030 target and halve the emissions of construction and operations this decade? MASS's Good, Clean, & Fair approach offers a language and approach to address this profound challenge - linking climate and socio-economic justice in the process.
We are shaped by our context and histories. However, we also and critically shape our context and history to influence the future. While this appears so obvious, it took my leaving Kenya to study and work in the US, to discover my own deep-seated biases and discriminations that had influenced my design thinking. This lecture will reflect on how sketching can be utilised as a tool for introspection, with specific regard to breaking down deep-seated biases that are the basis for institutional discrimination. Through my sketches and the work of KDI I will explore the potential of Landscape Architecture, Architecture and Urban Design to shape our context and drive a more equitable future, in Kenyan Urban Space.
This talk looks at a small handheld globe manufactured by the British cartographer Herman Moll in 1719. Though small in size and overtly commercial in use, the object serves as a particularly useful case study for understanding the relationship between cartography, consumerism, and certain geopolitical developments that historians have seen as president of global modernity, namely speculative capitalism—including its troubling connections to colonialism and slavery. Additionally, the talk sketches the parameters of a new line of architectural research on the history of European-supported entrepôts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as they relate to early modern shipping networks and the formalization of the modern stock exchange in Amsterdam and London.
For almost two centuries, urbanization has been achieved by conquering land and using the natural environment as a disposable commodity. As a result, we have depleted our forests, wetlands, and soils. These effects have impacted the quality of life in urban areas, as well as the health of urban residents. And yet, the same pattern of development continues to be used, even as its negative consequences are amplified by climate change. Our forest conservation and restoration efforts, shaped by constant struggles against development, are reactive, opportunistic and ad-hoc rather than strategically planned.
The professional packaging of the design discipline - intent on creating, projecting and transforming - may overlook the pertinence and relevance of being first and foremost curious observers and empathetic listeners, capable of celebrating and recognizing what already exists.
Oscillating between the past and present, original and referent, reconstructions are historiographic representations, yet inevitably also something new. Here, the propositional practice of constructing (and reconstructing) history is intimately linked to how we address challenges of the present. Drawing on diverse practices of reconstruction in fields from architecture and landscape to geology and archaeology, Aisling O’Carroll will share research and speculative design studies from her practice to explore the politics, truth, and affective nature of reconstruction and representation in framing knowledge and ideas of landscape.
