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American-born Charles Jencks is a landscape architect, theorist and critic best known for his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, Scotland, and his writings on post-modernism. He has designed landscapes projects around the world, including Parco Portello in Milan, Northumberlandia near Newcastle, England and Wu Chi at the Olympic Forest Park in Beijing. Jencks is also co-founder of the Maggie's Centres - a series of cancer care centres designed By leading modern architects, named in honour of his late wife Maggie Keswick. In this talk, Jencks discusses his recent project Holding the Eco-line, a landscape design for the Suncheon Bay expo in 2013. He explains the development of the design and his Korean hosts' reaction to it, as well as the importance of symbolism in his work, and his latest creation the Crawick Multiverse, inspired By cutting edge theories of the origin of the universe.
Martha Schwartz first came to prominence with her Boston bagel garden - a radical manifesto for a more artful approach to landscape design. Her recent projects include Dublin Docklands Grand Canal Square in Dublin, Mesa Arts Centre in Arizona and Jacob Javits Convention Center Plaza, New York. In this talk, she describes her project Fengming Mountain Park in the Chinese city Chongqing for a major Chinese developer. The project is a rectangular section cut through a large construction site designed to showcase the sales centre for a series of forthcoming residential towers. Building on the idea of zigzagging movement of water down a mountain, she has created a processional route across the site, marked by a series of monumental orange cut-steel structures - like origami mountains on legs - that glow at night. This is a truly exciting time to be working in China, she says, with construction taking place on an epic scale and developers just beginning to appreciate landscape architecture as art-form.
Keith Bradley is senior partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio, based in Bath, UK. Bradley led FCBS's best known work, the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia Housing Project in Cambridge. He's also worked on major urban regeneration schemes, public museums, galleries and academic buildings. In this talk, Bradley explores FCBS's Manchester School of Art extension building, completed in April 2013. He discusses the evolution of the design, which includes a vertical gallery space where students can showcase their work, an interactive hybrid studio intended to foster creative collaboration between students from different disciplines and triple height columns with a relief cast decorative detail inspired By the textiles of Lewis Day, who taught at the school a century ago. Manchester School of Art was shortlisted for the 2014 Stirling Prize.
Alistair McAlpine started working for the family building firm Sir Robert McAlpine at the age of sixteen. After his first job on Howard Robinson's Shell Centre on London's South Bank, he want on to work with many of the pre-eminent architects of the post war era: Denis Lasdun, Basil Spence and YRM. His close relationship with Cedric Price spanned many decades, until the latter's death in 2003. In this talk, McAlpine recalls being summoned by Lasdun during building of the National Theatre and his attempt to matchmake Price with Richard Seifert. He discusses commissioning Classical architect Quinlan Terry to design a series of follies for his personal estate, and his concerns about the current London building boom.
James Gowan, best known for the Leicester University Engineering Building, which he designed along with James Stirling, talks here about his life and work. Now in his 80s, Gowan recalls his training at the Glasgow school of art, his early career in London where he met Geoffrey and Philip Powell, his collaboration with Stirling, and the tensions that forced him to go his own way, just as the pair were coming to prominence. Gowan's interest in social housing began with Ham Common - the project which launched his partnership with Stirling - and continued with schemes at Creek Road and Trafalgar Road in Greenwich, London. Other buildings include the Schreiber House in Hampstead, London and the latest addition to his Humanitas Hospital, Milan. Still influenced by his Beaux Arts training, Gowan believes he is an architect in the gothic, as opposed to the classical, tradition.
Iain Borden Machines of Possibility: urban space as social product P1305 Architectural historian Iain Borden is vice dean at the Bartlett school of architecture. His work focuses less on architecture with a capital A, than on everyday spaces and buildings, from bus benches and bill boards to food stalls in Japan. In this talk, Borden discusses urban space as a social product. Applying the theoretical approach of Henri Levebre, he explores how different people experience the city, focusing on skateboarders, car drivers and the French film-maker Jacques Tati.
Veteran Indian architect BV Doshi looks back at the two key influences on his work - his mentor Le Corbusier and his roots in India. Sangath, his studio in Ahmedabad, built after Doshi passed 50, marks the unification of these two strands.
Michael Arad won the 2003 competition to design the World Trade Centre memorial over more than 5,000 other entries. Born in Israel in 1969, Arad was living in New York City on 9/11. His scheme for the memorial, which began as a personal project in the days and weeks following the World Trade Centre attacks, was based on an image of two vast voids in the Hudson river reflecting the absence of the demolished towers. The project, which took seven years to complete and was beset by politics and conflict, opened in September 2011 to critical acclaim. In this talk, Arad, a principle at Handel Architects, describes his ambitions for the project, his determination to protect his original vision in the face of conflicting expectations, and the challenge of winning such a high profile commission so early in his career.
Michael Webb, one of the six members of 1960s collective Archigram, tells the story behind the group behind the visionary designs for Walking City, Plug-in City and a floating city hung from hydrogen balloons built from pins and Evo-stick in Webb's north London garden.
The video is of a lecture given at the New London galleries in the Building Centre by the Danish architect and city planner Jan Gehl, whose career has focused on improving the quality of urban life by re-orienting city design towards the pedestrian and cyclist.
Lord Rogers, Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners provides an introduction.
For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world, including Copenhagen, Melbourne, Sydney and - most recently - New York, with his approach to creating cities for people.
Jan Gehl discusses why looking after people is crucial for the quality of cities in the 21st century, how this can be accomplished and how this has been achieved in more and more projects and cities. The lecture covers the changes in city planning from the 1960s until today, where people - after decades of neglect - have once been again elevated to be a main feature in architecture, urban design and urban planning.
The event marked the UK launch of Jan Gehl's new book Cities for People.
American architect Steven Holl trained at the University of Washington and the Architectural Association, London. He set up his own practice Steven Holl Architects in New York City in 1976. His work includes the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland (1998), Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002) and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City (a collaboration with the artist Vito Acconci, 1993). His recent projects reflect an interest in a phenomenological approach to architecture. In this talk he discusses three buildings: The Bloch addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (2007), his much-praised mixed-use Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing China (2009), and the Horizontal Skyscraper, officially titled the Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China (2009).
Moshe Safdie was born in the then Palestinian city of Haifa in 1938, moving to Montreal with his family at the age of 15. Success came early when his student thesis project was accepted as the principle exhibit in the 1967 Expo in Montreal. Habitat '67, an innovative stacked housing system, remains his most famous building, despite the many prestige commissions that have followed. In this talk, he traces his career from Habitat '67 to the present day. As well as important projects in Israel, including the Yad Vashem Museum and the city of Modi'in, he has completed a string of cultural buildings in Canada and the USA, from the Quebec Museum of Civilization to the recently completed United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC. Much of his work is now large-scale housing projects in the Far East.
Moshe Safdie was born in the then Palestinian city of Haifa in 1938, moving to Montreal with his family at the age of 15. Success came early when his student thesis project was accepted as the principle exhibit in the 1967 Expo in Montreal. Habitat '67, an innovative stacked housing system, remains his most famous building, despite the many prestige commissions that have followed. In this talk, Moshe Safdie discusses Marina Bay Sands - a massive casino complex in Singapore that consists of three towers topped by a daring cantilevered Sky Park, a low-rise conference centre and a museum building inspired by a lotus flower. Marina Bay is Safdie's attempt to humanise a mega-scale project and weave it into the existing urban fabric.
AIA Gold Medalist Peter Bohlin looks back over his career from his breakthrough project, a house for his parents, and the dozens of houses that followed, to the Apple retail stores that have now brought him international recognition.
Charles Renfro joined Diller and Scofidio, founded by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, in 1997. Since Renfro became a partner in 2004, the firm has been known as Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The practice first gained attention for its site-specific, landscape and multi-media work, most notably the Blur Building, a pavilion at the 2002 Swiss Expo. It completed its first major building, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, in 2006. The renovation of the High Line, a formerly disused elevated railway line running along the west side of Manhattan, has become a much loved addition to the city since it opened in summer 2009. The second phase of the High Line opened in summer 2011. In this talk, Renfro discusses the firm's interventions at Lincoln Centre arts complex in Manhattan's Upper West Side. He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the original campus, designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by America's leading architects of the time and outlines Diller Scofidio + Renfro's approach to the refurbishment. He details the various phases of the project, which include opening up the Julliard music school and the Alice Tully concert hall, reworking Dan Kiley's landscape scheme for the North Plaza and re-energising Lincoln Center's front entrance, Robertson Plaza.
Using slides and an overhead projector on which he draws as he talks, Ted Cullinan describes how architecture has developed through the ages. And then he demonstrates how a new architecture can be used to respond to an existing situation.
Dr Dennis Smith, chairman of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Department describes how technology was used to tackle some of London's main social problems. These included providing clean drinking water and main drainage and new systems of transport.
Official British Government film, from the Central Office of Information A remarkable experiment in town planning in Britain in the 50's. Fifteen completely self-sufficient and scientifically planned new towns were designed to help draw people and the industries in which they work from the great metropolitan centres. The new towns are seen in various stages of development.
