Please note that Friday’s talk has been cancelled due to adverse weather.
Finola O’Kane Crimmins (UCD Dublin)
Designed in Parallel or in Translation?
Plantation Landscapes from Ireland, Jamaica and Georgia 1730-1830
2 March, 6pm, Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square
. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: 18C, 19C, ASSC, Finola O'Kane Crimmins, Georgia, History of Art, Ireland, Jamaica, Landscapes, The Architecture Space and Society Centre (ASSC)
A reminder of the reading group next Thursday:
Our next Architecture Space and Society Centre reading group meeting is on Thursday March 16, 3-4.30pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Sq. You are all warmly invited to join what promises to be a rich and lively discussion, with the focus on the industrial city. Please also circulate to any PhD students who might be interested.
Discussion will be led by Mark Crinson. The readings and images are available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dzepdpmzw253rqe/AADVFnmJTtoeFythr7gx9x02a?dl=0
A message from Mark:
The Industrial City
For our next reading group I have got together some images and texts on the topic of the industrial city. Most of the material is pretty classic stuff on this subject but it could all do with a closer scrutiny and new angles on to it. It includes the following two readings –
Friedrich Engels – extract from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), pp82-109 in the current Penguin edition.
Elizabeth Gaskell – extract from North and South (1855), chapter 8 ‘Home Sickness’
There are also five images –
James Mudd – ‘The River Irwell from Blackfriars Bridge’ (1859)
James Mudd – untitled photograph of mills in Manchester (c1860)
William Wyld – ‘Manchester from Kersal Moor’ (1857)
AWN Pugin – Contrasted Towns, from Contrasts (1840)
Robert Owen – ‘The Old Moral World and the New Moral World’ (1832) and ‘Plan of a Self Supporting Home Colony’ (1841)
The Architecture Space and Society Reading Group meets once or twice a term to discuss a wide range of texts, sites and questions related to architecture and space, across periods, geographies and disciplines.
All meetings are on Thursday, 3-4.30pm
Upcoming meetings and people taking the lead:
16 March: Mark Crinson, Keynes (see above)
11 May: Lesley McFadyen, Gordon Sq, G02
15 June: Tag Gronberg, Keynes
Dr Leslie Topp
Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history/staff/teaching-staff/topp
Architecture Space and Society Centre
. . Category: Archived Reading Groups . Tags: Architecture, Architecture Space and Society Centre, ASSC, HoA, Mark Crinson, Reading Group
We are delighted to announce our next speaker in the annual Thinkers in Architecture series:
Prof. Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL: Housing Biopolitics and Care
Monday, 20th March, 6pm, Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck
This talk outlines how Spinoza’s seventeenth-century philosophy constitutes a humane and ethical ratio within a biopolitical discussion of the UK housing crisis. For Spinoza, ratio constitutes different modes of environmental, corporeal and societal lives. Drawing from Foucault’s writings on technologies of the self, and Spinoza’s geometric essay The Ethics (1677), I explore how Spinoza’s ‘radical enlightenment’ thought has resonance with architects and professionals who challenge the inhumane ratios of inequality that currently form UK housing provision. For those interested in the talk, you can also watch the film, Equal By Design (2016), in advance. Co-authored with Beth Lord (Aberdeen), and in collaboration with Lone Star Productions, it is available here: http://www.equalbydesign.co.uk
Peg Rawes is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Programme Director of the Masters in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. Recent publications include: Equal By Design (2016); ‘Humane and inhumane ratios’ in The Architecture Lobby’s Aysmmetric Labors (2016); Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed., 2016); Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity (ed., 2013).
All welcome. The event is free of charge. To book a place, click here.
Architecture Space and Society Centre
Dr Leslie Topp
Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history/staff/teaching-staff/topp
. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: Architecture, Architecture Space and Society Centre, ASSC, Bartlett, History of Architecture, HoA, Housing Biopolitics, Peg Rawes, philosophy, SpinozaNew Books Series: Healing Spaces, Architecture and the Body
Co-hosted by Architecture Space and Society Centre and Centre for Medical Humanities, Birkbeck
3 February, 2-5pm, Keynes Library
You can now book your place here.
This event marks the publication of the collected volume Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2016).
We are delighted to welcome the co-editors Dr Sarah Schrank, Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, and Dr Didem Ekici, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham.
Programme:
Didem Ekici and Sarah Schrank, Introduction to the volume
Didem Ekici, The Physiology of the House: Modern Architecture and the Science of Hygiene
Sarah Schrank, Naked Houses: The Architecture of Nudism and the Rethinking of the American Suburbs
Respondent: Caitjan Gainty, Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Kings College London
There will be a drinks reception afterwards.
All welcome!
. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: Architecture, Architecture and the Body, Architecture Space and Society Centre, ASSC, Centre for Medical Humanities, Healing Spaces, History of Art, medical humanitiesArchitecture Space and Society Centre Reading Group – 2016-17
Birkbeck’s Architecture Space and Society Centre reading group, which had its first meeting in May, is a forum for wide ranging discussion of architecture, space and society, across periods, geographies and disciplines.
Each session is led by an ASSC member (or 2-3 members), who will assign preparatory tasks. These will normally be texts to read, but preparation could also include a building, site, or set of images to look at, for instance.
All academics and research students at Birkbeck with an interest in the themes discussed are welcome to participate. We also extend a warm welcome to ASSC speakers from beyond Birkbeck, who are encouraged to invite their research students.
These are the dates and names for 2016-17. Specifics about themes and texts, etc will be sent out closer to the time. Scans of texts will be available.
All meetings are on Thursday, 3-4.30pm.
8 December: Leslie Topp – Keynes Library
9 February: Peter Fane-Saunders – B02, 43 Gordon Square
16 March: Mark Crinson – Keynes Library
11 May: Lesley McFadyen – G02, 43 Gordon Square
15 June: Tag Gronberg – Keynes Library
For details of the reading group and the texts/themes discussed in the first session, please see – http://www.bbk.ac.uk/assc/reading-group/
. . Category: Events, Reading Groups . Tags: Architecture Space and Society Centre, ASSC, History of Art, Reading GroupBirkbeck’s Architecture Space and Society Centre is inaugurating a reading group. It will be a forum for wide ranging discussion of architecture, space and society, across periods, geographies and disciplines.
Each session will be led by an ASSC member (or 2-3 members), who will assign preparatory tasks. These will normally be texts to read, but preparation could also include a building, site, or set of images to look at, for instance.
All academics and research students at Birkbeck with an interest in the themes discussed are welcome to participate. ASSC speakers from beyond Birkbeck will also be invited and encouraged to invite their research students.
1st session, Thursday 19 May 3.30-5pm, 43 Gordon Sq, Room 112
Architecture Across Time – led by Nic Sampson and Leslie Topp
To inaugurate the reading group, we have chosen two texts which address the question of what happens when we look at issues in architecture across disparate time periods.
Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (2012), chapters 2, 18 and 19.
Reyner Banham, ‘Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945-1965’ in John Summerson, ed., Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing presented to Nikolaus Pevsner (1968)
Nagel’s book is a provocative argument for a new flexibility in history of art that tries to shake up our strict adherence to periods and style, and see important multiple connections between modern and pre-modern art. We’ll read a short intro chapter in which he sets out his stall and two chapters (also fairly short) on the medieval cathedral and early 20th-c architectural modernism (German and Russian).
The Banham essay, with its rich account of the polemics around British post-war modernism and various periods and traditions in pre-modern architecture (from Renaissance humanism to 18th-century picturesque), is a lively document of post-war debates about period-hopping with a close link to Birkbeck’s famous past Professor Pevsner.
If you are interested in attending please contact Leslie Topp (l.topp@bbk.ac.uk), who can send you the readings.
The reading group will be followed by:
Thurs 19 May, 18.00-19.30, Birkbeck main building, entered off Torrington Square, Room 153
Mark Crinson, ‘Brutalism: From New to Neo’
The last few years have seen a wealth of publications and exhibitions about Brutalism, yet without any quite seeming definitive. This talk from Professor Mark Crinson (Manchester) sifts through them, and attempts to separate what they say about our present preoccupations from what they say about the past. What was Brutalism? Why does it still seem to separate us into either ardent advocates or angry critics? This public talk looks ahead to Professor Crinson joining History of Art at Birkbeck.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/brutalism-from-new-to-neo-tickets-24343471980
. . Category: Archived Reading Groups . Tags: ASSC, Reading Group, The Architecture Space and Society Centre (ASSC)