Public Lecture Series 2013-14
The School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape's Public Lecture Series showcases inspiring speakers currently researching, writing or practicing within the built environment and related fields.
All lectures are free and open to all but you must register by following the links below. Lectures start at 5.30pm and will be held in the Fine Art Lecture Theatre or the Curtis Auditorium.
If you would like to join our mailing list or require any further information please contact anne.fry@ncl.ac.uk
Thursday 10 October
Danny Dorling : Too many people - too few houses?
(Fine Art Lecture Theatre)
In recent decades, across much of the affluent world, when there were economic good times some benefited much more than others. It may not have been fair but even though the gaps grew, few complained. When the bad times hit, they again hit some harder than others, usually much harder. People complained, but by then it was often too late. At the heart of the current financial crisis are issues of housing. Our fears over not being well-housed and our aspirations to move on up may have been milked by those most interested in making a short term profit; but when did those fears first grow and why were such impossible aspirations stoked? These are aspirations for so many to leap frog over so many others. Only 1% can ever be in the 1%. Using data, stories, and arguments drawn mainly from the UK and USA, but also from countries where many are better housed, this talk will suggest a few answers to what went so wrong and how our children’s generation need not repeat the folly of their parents.
Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford University. He is also a visiting Professor at University of Canterbury NZ, in the School of Social and Community Medicine of the University of Bristol and in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2003 Danny was appointed an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences.
Danny Dorling was educated at Newcastle University in Geography, Mathematics and Statistics leading to a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social Structure (1991). He continued studying in Social Science at Newcastle as a Joseph Rowntree Foundation and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to the University of Bristol to teach Geography there, next being appointed to a Chair of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds and then Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. He has published more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers and his work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty.
Danny's most recent publication is Population 10 Billion (2013), an in depth examination of the impact that a global population of 10 billion will have on the planet and how we will have to adapt to cope with it.
To attend this lecture please complete the registration form.
Thursday 24 October
Paul Emmons : Architectural Encounters between Idea and Material: The Emblematic Frontispiece of Walther Hermann Ryff
(Fine Art Lecture Theatre)
The illustrated architectural frontispiece developed along with the early printed book in the late fifteenth century. During the Renaissance, printers produced only the individual pages of a book and sold them loose leaf which was then taken to a separate artisan for sewing the binding and the leatherwork of the cover. Covers primarily represented books’ owners, oftentimes embossed with their initials or devices, and it was not unusual for more than one book to be combined into a single binding. The stationer began adding a blank top sheet to protect the printed work and then, to distinguish these stacks of paper, eventually information such as the title and the author began to be added on the formerly blank top sheet – becoming the title page. Rather than the cover, the first page represented the interior of the book
The Renaissance frontispiece is simultaneously an encounter between reader and book, inhabitant and building, and self and other. The idea of the book is ‘personified’ into an architectural image. Reader and author are face-to-face where the latter is absent and the book stands as a physical incarnation of the ideas of the author. This paper will examine one notable Renaissance architectural frontispiece in Walther Hermann Ryff’s Architectur (1547) to reconsider the relation between idea and material in architectural theory and practice.
Paul Emmons is a registered architect and an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center in the Washington D.C. area where he is Coordinator of the Ph.D. program in Architecture + Design. Dr. Emmons earned a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Minnesota in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. His research focuses on issues of practice and representation in architectural design. In addition to the volume he co-edited, The Cultural Role of Architecture (Routledge: 2012), he has also published numerous book chapters including most recently: “Performance in the Craft of Architectural Drawing” in Architecture as Performing Art (Ashgate, 2013), “Teaching Drawing and Representation” in Two Centuries of Architecture Education in North America (MIT Press, 2012), and “Drawing Sites : : Site Drawings” in Architecture and Field/Work, (Routledge, 2011). This work has been presented at numerous scholarly conferences, including some held in: Costozza (Italy), Sydney (Australia), ETH (Switzerland), Kyoto (Japan), Mexico City (Mexico), Architectural Association (London), University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Lincoln University, Edinburgh University, Sheffield University, Cardiff University, Oxford Brookes University (Great Britain), Savannah (Georgia), University of California Berkeley, Pennsylvania State University and Harvard University. His work has been presented before the Society of Architectural Historians, the College Art Association, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the Architectural Humanities Research Association. In addition to his scholarship, Emmons maintains a small architectural practice.
To attend this lecture please complete the registration form.
Thursday 7 November
Marion Roberts : Alcohol, Planning and Place: Where, What and How Should People Drink?
(Fine Art Lecture Theatre)
This public lecture takes as its starting point the role of alcohol as a social lubricant, deeply embedded in British culture. The closure of local pubs, the expansion of late night entertainment, home entertainment and the proliferation of coffee shops have changed the spaces and places where we meet and socialize. New rituals, such as the hen party have come into public view. As well as considering the resultant benefits and issues, this lecture will consider how planning and urban design can help to create a healthier relationship with alcohol in our changing multicultural society.
Marion Roberts is Professor of Urban Design at the University of Westminster. After training as an architect at UCL and Cardiff, followed by a brief period in practice, her interest in policy and politics took her back into academia. She has over twenty years experience of teaching and research in urban design and has authored or co-authored six books and numerous articles and reports. Professor Roberts’ research has incorporated a diverse range of topics, from gender and housing design to public art, mixed-income housing and mixed-use streets. For the last decade she has carried out funded research on alcohol, planning and licensing. In 2009 she co-authored Planning the Night time City (Routledge). She has advised the UK government, is on the board of Purple Flag and has just taken up the Chair of a working group on the night-time economy for London’s West End Partnership. Her most recent research project was on local variations in young people’s drinking cultures and was carried out with Tim Townshend, Newcastle University.
Thursday 16 January **APL Annual Lecture 2013**
Eyal Weizman : Forensic Architecture
(Curtis Auditorium)
Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett UCL in London and the Staedel School in Frankfurt. He has lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press, 2012), Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books.
Eyal Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Inflexions and Cabinet where he has edited a special issue on forensics (issue 43, 2011). He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide and was member of B’Tselem board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Institue of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York, and of other academic and cultural institutions. Professor Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (for DAAR) and was invited to deliver the Rusty Bernstein, Paul Hirst, Nelson Mandela, Mansour Armaly and the Edward Said Memorial Lectures amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College.
Thursday 13 March 2014
Katja Grillner : Design Research and Critical Transformations: Situating Thought, Projecting Action
(Fine Art Lecture Theatre)
Katja Grillner is an architect and critic based in Stockholm, Sweden. She is Professor of Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH in Sweden and Director of Architecture in Effect, a national initiative for a strong research environment funded by Formas 2011-2016. Her research on architecture and landscape combines theoretical, historical and literary strategies for spatial exploration. Among her book publications are her PhD-dissertation Ramble, linger and gaze – philosophical dialogues in the landscape garden (Stockholm: KTH 2000), as main-editor 01-AKAD – Experimental Research in Architecture and Design (Stockholm: AxlBooks, 2005), and, as co-editor, Architecture and Authorship (London: Black Dog, 2007). She is co-founder of the feminist architecture teaching and research group FATALE.
Thursday 22 May **Thomas Sharp Lecture**
Sir Peter Hall : Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism
(Curtis Auditorium)
In this lecture Professor Hall will present the key arguments from his new book, which has one central theme: how, in the United Kingdom, can we create better cities and towns in which to live and work and play? What can we learn from other countries, especially our near neighbours in Europe? And, in turn, can we provide lessons for other countries facing similar dilemmas?
Urban Britain is not functioning as it should. Social inequalities and regional disparities show little sign of going away. Efforts to generate growth, and spread it to the poorer areas of cities, have failed dismally. Much new urban development and redevelopment is not up to standard. Yet there are cities in mainland Europe, which have set new standards of high-quality sustainable urban development. The lecture will look at these best-practice examples - in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Scandinavia - and suggest ways in which the UK and other countries could do the same.
Sir Peter Hall is the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London, and President of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association.
Internationally renowned for his work on the economic, demographic, cultural and management issues that face cities around the globe, Professor Hall introduced the concept of the industrial enterprise zone to the UK, and has been a planning and regeneration adviser to successive UK governments. After receiving his Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge, Professor Hall began his academic career at Birkbeck in 1957 as a lecturer in Geography. He taught at the London School of Economics before joining the University of Reading, where he became Dean of the Faculty of Urban and Regional Studies, latterly also becoming Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He took up the Chair of Planning at The Bartlett in 1989, where he remains today.
Knighted in 1998 for services to the Town and Country Planning Association, Professor Hall received the Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize in 2001 and in 2003 was awarded the Royal Town Planning Institute Gold Medal along with the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for distinction in research. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Academia Europea, and holds honorary doctorates from universities in the UK, Sweden and Canada.
A founding editor of the international academic journal Regional Studies, Professor Hall has written extensively in his field; his first major book was The World Cities, published in six languages simultaneously in 1966. Other prominent publications include Cities in Civilization, a comparative cultural history of cities ranging from ancient Athens to late 20th century London. He has written a number of groundbreaking books on London.