KSA’s Dr Davina Jackson to speak at Twentieth Century Society event

The Australian architectural historian and critic Davina Jackson, who has completed her PhD at KSA, will be speaking next week at a special event in London held by the Twentieth Century Society and The Modern House estate agency in London.

The event, entitled ‘Douglas Snelling – Pan-Pacific Adventures in Modern Design and Architecture’ will take place on Monday 9th October at 6.30p-m in FCB Studios 20 on Tottenham Street in London.

Davina Jackoson is the author of the first study of Douglas Snelling’s pan-Pacific life an works. Based in Sydney, Davina works as an author, editor and curator and writes extensively on modernist architecture and design in Oceania. She was also professor of a multi-disciplinary design at the University of New South Wales and an editor of Architecture Australia.

For further information about the event, please see click here.

KSA members can attend free of charge.

PGR Seminar Series commences with Ben Tosland

The first PGR presentation of this year will be held on Wed 5th April at 15.00, and will be given by postgraduate research student Ben Tosland, with his talk entitled ‘The development of green spaces and influence of western landscape architecture in the Persian Gulf during the late twentieth-century’.

Ben’s research aims to show the extent of Western influence over landscape design in the Persian Gulf and its relationship with town planning movements throughout the twentieth-century. Supported through archival research and several case studies, Ben will argue that the Western design of landscapes in the region is due to both the influx of people from Europe and America who worked with oil companies, and their subsequent funding of landscape work. Added to this, there are changing sociological and political forces in the region during this period that will also be assessed. Several themes and sub-themes that will be shown through his research will be:

  • Identity and representation
  • Segregation and inequality
  • Morphology of spatial design
  • Relationship between landscape and townscape

This short talk will attempt to give the context to this research by representing statistics through maps of the region before looking at a chosen case study and briefly explaining how the aforementioned themes affected the design process and the eventual outcome.