Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou to speak at CIBSE Build2Perform Live 2019

Deputy Head of School, and former Director of CASE Research Centre, Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou will be speaking at the upcoming CIBSE Build2Perform Live 2019 at Olympia in London on Wednesday 27th November 2019 with a talk on Urban Design. Her session will run through how the Urban Albedo collaborative research project is looking at the impacts of the urban fabric to the urban temperatures and how new material can improve urban climate. The session will cover:

  • Understanding the principles of urban design
  • Find out the seasonal effects of albedo on urban temperature
  • Understand the impact of urban fabric on urban albedo.

FEW-Meter Project hosts successful Technology and Green Spaces Symposium

Dr Silvio Caputo is leading the UK team in an international 3-year project, funded under the SUGI called Food-Water-Energy Nexus, which started in June 2018. The FEW-meter project aims at measuring the efficiency of urban agriculture in terms of resource consumption, food production and social benefits. Each one of the five countries involved in the project (UK, France, Germany, Poland and USA) will focus on a specific type of urban agriculture and a particular city. The UK will be looking at Community Gardens and City Farms in London, which have recently seen a surge of interest.

Recently, as part of the project, Kent School of Architecture and Planning, and Social Farms and Gardens, the association representing UK community gardens and city farms, organised a symposium, ‘Technology and Green Spaces’ on 29th October 2019.

The symposium was very well attended and participants included organisations such as Forum for the Future, universities such as University of Salford and many other associations that work in the field of urban agriculture and the management of green spaces in cities.

The symposium was structured in two sessions: the first one exploring new food technologies and how these are changing the landscape of urban agriculture and the second one looking at digital tools to enhance user’s experience in public parks. The day ended with a discussion on the future of these technologies, their risks and benefits, with a very high-level exchange of opinions that will surely set the future agenda for projects in this field. KSAP and Social Farms and Gardens will draft a report to summarise the main findings of the event, which will be very useful to trace the evolution of the use of green space in cities.

Dr Peter Buš to give lecture at National United University in Miao-Li

Dr Peter Buš, Lecturer in Digital Architecture and member of DARC Research Centre, will be visiting Taiwan later this month to give a lecture at the National United University in Miao-Li. His lecture titled, ‘Transforming architecture in the age of digitisation of construction: participation, automation and evolving responsive concepts for the 21st Century’, conceptually outlines the idea of crowd-driven assemblies for flexible and adaptive constructions utilising automatic technologies in the context of twenty-first century cities.

The presentation will also look at the results from Peter’s Richard Rogers Fellowship residency in London conducted last Spring dedicated to large-scale urban prototyping for responsive cities. Peter argues that building technology needs to incorporate human inputs following the aspects of customisation to build adaptive architectural and urban scenarios based on immediate decisions made according to local conditions or specific spatial demands. The presentation will focus on large-scale automatic prototyping for built applications at the theoretical level along with interactions between humans and automatic building technologies.

Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin to speak at University’s Roundtable on Heritage

Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin is one of the speakers at the first in a series of Roundtables on Heritage, organised by the University’s Centre of Heritage under the direction of Dr Sophie Vigneron, Reader at Kent Law School. The event will look at the significance of historic buildings as cultural symbols, and how to address the problems and ethical questions that surround their restoration; i.e. who plays a role in the process? What kind of decisions are they making?

One of the central issues is that of the historical recreation, sometime referred to as ‘pastiche’ architecture, and this came to the fore particularly in the aftermath of the recent major fire at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Dr Brittain-Catlin will speak on the theme, ‘There is no such thing as pastiche’. He will be joined by the Surveyor to the Fabric of Canterbury Cathedral, Jonathan Deeming who will be speaking about ‘Challenges of preservation for the Cathedral of Canterbury’, Dr Emily Guerry from the School of History on the topic, ‘The history and identity of the Gothic cathedral’, and Andrew Edwards from Canterbury Cathedral Trust who will be finishing the evening off with, ‘Giving for a good cause, why give to heritage?’.

The first roundtable will be on Tuesday 26 November from 6-8pm in the Moot court room at the Wigoder Law Building / Kent Law Clinic. The discussion will be followed by a drinks reception.

Professor Gerald Adler to speak at ‘Bye Bye Bauhaus’ Symposium

The ‘Bye Bye Bauhaus’ Symposium, organised by Kent School of Architecture and Planning Lecturer, Professor Alan Powers, in conjunction with the Twentieth Century Society will be held at the University of Westminster School of Architecture on 30 November 2019.

The Bye Bye Bauhaus one-day symposium offers new perspectives and stories that have not yet been told, concerning design in Germany and Britain during the past century. The programme includes Professor Gerald Alder, Head of School, Kent School of Architecture and Planning, who has recently been commissioned by Bloomsbury to write a monograph on Heinrich Tessenow, the German ‘reform’ architect.

Professor Alan Powers comments, ‘For me, the Bauhaus centenary this year has been a fascinating thing to be part of, with my book, Bauhaus Goes West, published in February by Thames and Hudson, and getting quite widely reviewed, and a lot of other activities around the theme of how Britain related to the Bauhaus. My conference is a miscellany rather than a thesis as the centenary year draws towards its end. While the Bauhaus itself continues to be a subject of interest, it is the peripheral things about Germany and Britain that offer scope for new discoveries, and the event on 30 November brings together a lot of disparate knowledge in ways that I think will be new to a lot of the audience. It is great that we are still within the range of direct memory of some of the people involved, including my panel at the end about people who were students at the Bauhaus and then came to Britain.’

The symposium opens with Richard Hollis on the Belgian Art Nouveau designer Henry van de Velde, includes Dr David Haney, author of When Modern was Green (2010), and Professor Frederic Schwartz, UCL who poses the question, ‘What was the Bauhaus?’. The afternoon programme includes Valeria Carullo, Curator at the RIBA British Architectural Library, Sophie Jump, theatre designer and the final session introduces five lesser-known Bauhäusler in Britain: Jilly Allenby on her grandfather, the sculptor Johannes Ilmari Auerbach; Marcus Williamson on René Halkett, painter, designer broadcaster and lyricist for the punk band Bauhaus; John Allan on the graphic designer George Adams (Teltscher), Rachel Dickson on puppeteer Werner ‘Jacky’ Jackson and Danyel Gilgan on his grandfather, the maker and teacher Wilfred Franks.

Book your place online; tickets include refreshments with sandwich lunch and post-conference drinks.

IMAGE CREDIT: PAUL AND MARJORIE ABBATT PLAY TRAY, DESIGNED BY FREDA SKINNER, C. 1935

Sir Terry Farrell introduces masterclass at Kent School of Architecture and Planning

Sir Terry Farrell personally introduced a masterclass session at Kent School of Architecture and Planning (KSAP) on Friday 25th October with a talk about his urban design projects. His audience included students from all levels at the School, plus a group of 35 4th and 5th year visiting students from ENSAP (Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture et de paysage de Lille), led by Gilles Maury and his colleagues. Gilles Maury and the school are old friends and partners of KSAP, and their arrival followed a tour around the South East which included visits to Philip Webb’s Red House and Standen, the University of Sussex and the Ditchling Museum of Arts + Craft. The event was planned by KSAP tutors John Letherland and Dr Ambrose Gillick, with the participation of Dr Tim Ireland and Dr Peter Buš.

Sir Terry followed the design session with a lecture at the University organised by the Canterbury Society. His theme was the way in which his own design career had evolved from his earliest landscape paintings of the Northumberland countryside, through his major London projects, his Thames Gateway plan and championing of Kentish towns, to his current large-scale work in China. Sir Terry was introduced to the audience by Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin who played a central role in the Twentieth Century Society’s campaign to protect postmodern buildings in England.

 

Digital Architecture Open Lecture: Mike Oades, Atomik Architecture

The next DARC (Digital Architecture Research Centre) Open Lecture will be given by Mike Oades, Director of Atomik Architecture, with his talk titled, ‘Hard balls in soft socks / soft balls in stiff socks!’ on Tuesday 12 November at 6pm in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

The ambiguous title of the lecture refers to a conversation with the architect Kathryn Findlay one afternoon at the Ushida Findlay studio in London. She was, of course, describing a set of rules for engaging with organic architecture. The lecture will be a candid trajectory around expressionist architecture, a personal orbit that has glanced off both analogue and digital worlds. The talk will be illustrated by a series of key projects along Mike’s career – built, unbuilt and demolished.

Mike is a Director at Atomik Architecture – a design practice with studios in London and Almaty.Growing up in his parents’ holiday camp on the Lincolnshire coast, he developed a strong affinity for the temporary and the nostalgic, and narratives of time and legacy have run through his work ever since. Mike’s ability to take a lateral view has since become a fundamental part of Atomik’s ethos, with the varying geographies of the team regularly exploited to get a broader perspective on architectural ideas.

All welcome!

Image credit: Doha Villa by Ushida Findlay

CASE Dalby Square project featured on BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire Show

The Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment’s (CASE) Dalby Square project was recently featured on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme. The Dalby Square project in Margate is a cross-sector collaboration between Kent County Council (KCC), Thanet District Council, Kent School of Architecture and Planning, the School of Psychology and the private sector. The aim was to develop and retrofit the KCC owned property at 12a Dalby Square into an exemplar residence that simultaneously addresses the challenges of climate change and promotes opportunities for inter-generational living, whilst also ensuring that the existing architectural details of the property are conserved and restored.

“The council wanted to address some of the issues with Dalby Square, and bring it back to its former glory, as part of the wider regeneration of Margate”, says Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou, CASE founder and director of the centre between 2011 and 2018. She also notes that, “If you have an extended family living together they they can afford the house, they’re in a better situation, while also looking after each other. Whether that’s grandparents looking after their grandchildren, or an extended network of siblings.”

CASE worked with architects Lee Evans Partnership to transform the five-story terraced townhouse from former subdivided hotel rooms into a home that enables several generations of the same family to live together under one roof, with both communal and private living areas.

The refurbishment of the heritage townhouse in Dalby Square, Margate, has been completed and a three-generation family are part of the innovative project, where extensive monitoring will take place, to evaluate the climate change adaptation strategies, whilst focusing on overheating, thermal comfort and energy performance, while testing the concept of multi-generation living. CASE aims to develop a ‘Sustainable Heritage Toolkit’ to help other coastal towns across the UK.

You can watch the episode on BBC iPlayer, with the feature on 12a Dalby Square starting at 47.31.

CASE Open Lecture: Tim Stonor, Space Syntax

The next CASE Open Lecture will be given by Tim Stonor, Managing Director of Space Syntax, with his talk titled, ‘Space Syntax: a Smart City approach to urban planning and design’ on Tuesday 19th November at 6pm in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

Tim Stonor is an architect and urban planner who has devoted his career to the analysis and design of human behaviour patterns – the ways in which people move, interact and transact in buildings and urban places. He is an internationally recognised expert in the design of spatial layouts and, in particular, the role of space in the generation of social, economic and environmental value. Tim is the Managing Director of Space Syntax, an urban planning and design company created at University College London in 1989 to develop and apply predictive design technologies. He is Director of The Academy of Urbanism, a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, a Harvard Loeb Fellow and Deputy Chair of the UK Design Council.

Space Syntax: a Smart City approach to urban planning and design

The spatial layout of the buildings and urban places exerts a powerful influence on human behaviour. The way that people move, interact and transact is directly influenced by the way that places connect as networks of space.

The science-based and human-focused approach developed by Space Syntax aids the planning and design process by identifying the fundamental links between spatial layout, land use attraction and the performance of places.

In his talk, Tim will describe the way that Space Syntax has used data, algorithms and predictive analytics over thirty years of international planning and design practice.

‘The Edwardians and their Houses’ on BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour

Timothy Brittain-Catlin presented an episode from his forthcoming book The Edwardians and their Houses on BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour last night. This told the story of how from 1900 the London County Council, controlled by members of the Liberal Party, transformed a district of industrial works and slums at the southern edge of the Palace of Westminster into an idealised ‘late Stuart’ residential quarter around the baroque church of St John, Smith Square.

Some of the finest buildings here, including 4, Cowley Street (pictured), were designed by the architect Horace Field, whose commercial buildings look as if they were the homes of prosperous Restoration merchants and were thus the harbinger of much interwar high street bank architecture. Appropriately, this house, which had been built as the offices of the North Eastern Railway, served as the headquarters of first the Social Democratic Party and until recently, the Liberal Democrats. Today the district serves as a fine example of a politically inspired residential area which looks as if it has ‘always’ been there.

The report starts at 45′ on BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour.