CREAte are pleased to announce the publication of Riverine: Architecture and Rivers by Routledge

Riverscapes are the main arteries of the world’s largest cities, and have, for millennia, been the lifeblood of the urban communities that have developed around them. These human settlements – given life hrough the space of the local waterscapes – soon developed into ritualised spaces that sought to harness the dynamism of the watercourse and create local architectural landscape. Theorised via a sophisticated understanding of history, space, culture, and ecology, this collection of wonderful and deliberately wide-ranging case studies, from Early Modern Italy tyo the contemporary Bngal Delta, investigates the culture of human interaction with rivers and the nature of urban topography. Riverine explores the ways in which architecture and urban planning have imbued cultural landscapes with ritual and structural meaning.

Edited by Gerald Adler and Manolo Guerci, the book results from the CREAte (Centre for Research in European Architecture) conference held in 2014, and contains a selection of papers from that event in addition to pieces specially commissioned for the publication.

Dr Luciano Cardellicchio receives mention at the 8th conference on Construction Research

Dr Luciano Cardellicchio presented the first results from his Leverhulme-funded research project ‘Our Future Heritage’ at the 8th International Conference on Construction Research organised by the prestigious Eduardo Torroja Institute in Madrid. The principal purpose of the institute is to carry on scientific research and technical development in the field of construction and construction materials.

The paper titled ‘Ageing pattern of Contemporary Concrete: the case study of the Jubilee Church by Richard Meier in Rome’ has received a mention from the conference jury, which included the editor of Casabella Professor Francesco Dal Co, award-winning Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto De Moura, and the Director of the Eduardo Torroja Foundation Pepa Cassinello.

CASE Dalby Square Project ‘highly commended’ at Kent Design and Development Awards

The Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment’s Dalby Square project was shortlisted in three categories: Conservation, Residential Minor and Environmental  Performance in the Kent Design and Development Awards and won ‘highly commended’ in the Environmental Performance category. Focusing on key national priorities of climate change and aging population, the project evaluated exemplar climate change adaptation and retrofit strategies for heritage townhouses, while promoting opportunities for inter-generational living.

The Dalby Square project in Margate is a cross-sector collaboration between Kent County Council (KCC), Thanet District Council, CASE (Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment) at the University of Kent, 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 refurbishment of the heritage townhouse in Dalby Square, Margate, has been completed and Kent County Council are looking for tenants. The three-generation family will be 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. A ‘Sustainable Heritage Toolkit’ will be published to help other coastal towns across the UK.

Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin joins the World Architecture Festival

Timothy Brittain-Catlin will be joining the world’s leading architects at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam at the end of November. The Festival’s super jury includes Sir David Adjaye and Nathalie de Vries, director and co-founder of MVRDV, and other participants include Simon Allford, Allison Brooks, Nigel Coates, Peter Cook, Deborah Saunt and many more from all over the world. Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf and Charles Jencks are among the speakers, and Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, and the editor and critic Catherine Slessor will also be participating.

Dr Brittain-Catlin will be part of a judging panel that includes Joyce Owens of Studio AJO and Torben Østergaard of the international Danish practice 3XN for the Future Projects category. The Festival runs from 28th to 30th November and will be held at the RAI Amsterdam convention centre.

The World Architecture Festival is the only global awards programme where architects present their completed buildings and future projects live to a panel of internationally renowned judges and delegates from around the world. This year there will be more award finalists to see, more presentations and prizes to be received, more delegates to network and more fringe activity than ever before.

Professor Gerald Adler published in Architecture Philosophy journal

‘Architecture is concealed unto itself: Helmuth Plessner and his influence on twentieth-century architecture’, written by Gerald Adler has just been published in the latest issue of the journal Architecture Philosophy. This is the journal of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture, and is a special issue devoted to papers presented at its major conference in 2016 at Bamberg University, Germany. The conference topic was ‘The Human in Architecture and Philosophy’ and Adler presented a paper on Plessner, one of the key philosophers of Weimar-era ‘Philosophical Anthropology’. He elucidates Plessner’s ‘place’-centred philosophy, and contrasts this with the time-centred thinking of his far more well-known peer Martin Heidegger. Adler presents the architectural implications of Plessner’s thinking, demonstrating this through the design of his own house (by Lucy Hillebrand), and by allusions to the pragmatic approach of the Viennese architect Josef Frank. The article will be of interest to those who wish to go beyond mere appearances to get to the philosophical underpinnings of design. It will also come as an antidote to those who recoil at ‘philosophy’ (and certainly the difficulties of Heidegger’s writing), and to those with an interest in the wider cultural and anthropological implications for architecture.

Guest-edited by the conference organisers, Martin Düchs and Christain Illies, the journal contains a number of interesting articles, including ones by keynote speakers Karsten Harries and the (recently topical) Roger Scruton.

PhD Seminar Series: Maria Dimitriou

This week’s PhD Seminar Series will take place in the PGR Hub, Digital Crit Space on Wednesday 14 November from 16.00 – 17.30, given by Maria Dimitriou, a Kent School of Architecture PhD Candidate in Architectural Heritage and Conservation. Her talk, based on her research is titled, ‘Transformation of Industrial Heritage: The Case of Volos, Greece’.

De-industrialization poses a major challenge for the preservation of the heritage of industrial towns in Europe. Volos, an industrial harbour town in central Greece, provides a typical example of this phenomenon. Redundancy and decay of many of the city’s 20th-century industrial buildings threaten the survival of a significant aspect of the heritage of Volos. Infusing new life in these buildings requires the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders as well as the development of new management and conservation strategies. For this reason, the urgent contribution to the European discussion on preservation and future maintenance of such areas will require vital solutions that will save them from falling into ruin.

This dissertation applies an interdisciplinary approach that will seek to identify an innovative model for the strategic management and re-use of the industrial heritage of Volos. It provides new ways to understand preservation theory and management objectives for industrial heritage sites by analyzing existing mechanisms for their preservation through values and practices. In addition, this research identifies characteristics and values aimed at expanding the framework of historic industrial preservation practice. It argues that management strategies based on traditional preservation practices are insufficient for interpreting the complexity of these historic places, and that historical industrial preservation is best served by attending to the range of values and processes associated with the historic landscape and its protection.

 

CASE Open Lecture: Dr Maria Kikira, UK Green Building Council

The next CASE Open Lecture will be given by Dr Maria Kikira from UK Green Building Council, with her talk titled, ‘The role of UK Green Building Council in the built environment: Get involved, stay engaged!’. The lecture will take place on Tuesday 20th November at 6PM in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

The presentation will cover the five thematic areas of UKGBC such as: climate change, resource use, nature & biodiversity, health & wellbeing, socio-economic impact, and how they are related to the built environment. There will also be an introduction to our Net Zero, Circular Economy, Climate Resilience, Cities and Social Value programmes from the perspective of working towards a sustainable future.

Maria is an architect with a passion for sustainable development in the built environment. She works for UK Green Building Council with the Learning and Development team, aiming to increase awareness and inspire the building industry on issues ranging from climate change, resource efficiency to health and well-being. Maria has a PhD on façade performance evaluation in relation to the indoor environment and extensive experience on European research programmes in the field of sustainability.

All welcome!

PhD Seminar Series: Khaled Sedki

The first PhD Seminar Series of the year took place earlier this week with Khaled Sedki presenting his research, ‘The role of architecture in the urban modernisation and social transformation of the historic city and the representations of time.’

This presentation gave an overview of a dissertation on French architect, archaeologist and planner, Michel Écochard, and his work in Damascus between 1931 and 1968. It focused on the ways in which the architect’s work had influenced the urban modernisation of the city in relation to social and cultural transformations, during this period, and explores, in reverse, the City’s impact over his views on architecture and the development of his concepts and methods. The study relates concepts of time-geography in understanding the role of architecture in the representation of time, and develops a method based on New-Historicism to produce a narrative of history which evades reduction and escapes canons and celebrates complexity and multiplicity. The aim of the presentation was to bring the subjects of this study out of anonymity and to share some ontological concerns about architecture and illustrate some of the methods and concepts used to tackle this and to invite others to participate in this exchange.

Dancing through the Veil: the great KSA debate

On Thursday 22 November, CREAte (Centre for Research in European Architecture) will be hosting a great debate on the direction of design teaching in the School. CREAte have invited four leading guests to join a conversation about the broader aims of the upcoming Stage 3 BA (Hons) Architecture Collective Dwelling and Architectural Design projects.

CREAte’s guests will be Charles Holland, the architect of the House for Essex; Catherine Slessor, critic, and former editor of the Architectural Review; Ruth Lang, design tutor at CSM and historian of public housing in London, and the well known architect Richard Reid, whose Epping Forest Town Hall is one of the great masterpieces of British postmodernism and has recently been listed for conservation by Historic England.

The debate is open to all, and will take place in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 from 5.30-7pm on Thursday 22nd November, supported by KASA (Kent Architectural Student Association).

Historic Building Services Symposium featured in CIBSE Journal

A symposium held at the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) on 25 July 2018, organised by Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt in collaboration with CIBSE Heritage Group has been featured in an article in the September issue of CIBSE Journal, written by Liza Young, Deputy Editor. To read the full article, please see here: http://portfolio.cpl.co.uk/CIBSE/201809/28/.

The symposium, ‘Historic Building Services in Education, Practice and Research’, explored the value of studying historic building services and how it can inform the practice and education of building service engineers today. Through talks and discussions, the event provided a forum for practitioners, engineers and educators to investigate these questions. Speakers and panel chairs included Professor Dean Hawkes, University of Cambridge, Dr Neil Sturrock, Chairman of CIBSE Heritage Group, Caroline Cattini, Historic England, Phil Jones, Chairman of CIBSE CHP & District Heating Group, Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt, University of Kent, Andrew More, Senior Building Services Engineer, Historic England.

Kent School of Architecture MSc Architecture and Sustainable Environment students, and CASE (Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment) PhD students presented their work at the event, in addition to a PhD student from Cardiff University.