Anthony Roberts lectures in architecture.
He has his own architectural practice working on small to mid-scale projects, His diverse interests in art and design methods inform his understanding of architecture as a pattern of thought and process.
Anthony Roberts has his own architectural practice working on small to mid-scale projects.
His architectural life has always been purposely punctuated by extended periods of work in other fields; particularly painting, film work, graphics, design, photography, research, and physically making exhibitions.
This amalgam of architect, photographer, painter, designer, builder brings diversity, difference and pushing at boundaries created by conventional notions of what an architect is. He has always drawn upon the notion of being an ‘architect with ideology’, pushing his architectural ideas into more theoretical and painterly directions. The variety of approaches helps to consolidate the core understanding of architecture as a pattern of thought and of process, re-created and necessarily changed.
1999
Exhibited one composite image (1.2m x 1.8m) in group exhibition “Art / architecture” as part of Southwark Festival (first real moves into dirty marks scudding across the flatness of the printed output of the computer).
Article for ‘Caravan’ : “Architecture from the verandah; languid space”. Essentially a manifesto for “slow space”, an “architecture which thinks ”.
Teaching: 15 years - tutor; bachelor + masters - University of Brighton.
“it’s not enough to have a smooth space.” Gilles Deleuze ; “essays critical and clinical”
Sydney: after graduating, worked with Christo; wrapping one square mile of
Sydney coastline (1970). also, cameraman with film director Philip Noyce
on a series of independent films for the Australian film commission (1971)
Designed and built inflation mechanics, joining interfaces and sets of
inflatable geodesic domes for power institute of fine art; Sydney university.
1995-96
Part of group exhibition “Distant Relations”. Zinc, silkscreen + acrylic marks. Each of these projects entailed the organisation of finances, formulating proposals for funding, designing and making the images as well as designing our catalogue pages (last encounter with old style typography). Also held workshops with photography and architecture students.
1992-93
Gulf war images for Impressions gallery in York. 2.4m x 2.4m polished zinc panels with layers of silk-screened, etched and acrylic marks. (concerns with hand/computer interface - smudging).
1993-94
Design and building of ‘image sets’ for two television films on the Gulf war for Channel 4 (part of active editing techniques).
1990-92
Own exhibition “Shadow Dancers” commissioned by the Arts Council and shown at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery - homelessness, virtual reality and forms of resistance to institutionalised power. Large (2.4m x 2.4m) scanachrome images on cotton. Designed, wrote, and organised all proposals, publicity and graphics associated with the show, and held workshops for local schools in which the pupils produced their own images based on the techniques David and I had developed. Two projects arising from this are currently being formulated; the first is a book on the historical, material and innovative aspects of corrugated iron. Produced with Joe Staines (a writer and editor for the Rough Guides).
The second is a future exhibition, “The flattened gaze” - an investigation into tactility; the image from computer output to painting (“dirty marks”).
1985-1999 : architecture, painting, competition.
Between 1985 and 1996 Collaboration with David Fox, a painter and film-maker on a series of exhibitions and film work predominantly funded by the Arts Council.
1985-86
“Talking to a brick wall” - full colour photographic images + an exhibition on homelessness; working very closely with our commissioners and the group of young homeless people who peopled our constructedspaces. Beginnings of collage within the camera.
1988-89
“Terminal Power” - commissioned by projects UK and the Laing Gallery in Newcastle; large format photographic images and text which extended our “collage in the camera” experiments. This then went to the Stills Gallery in Edinburgh in 1990.
1983 - 1984 : Jan Stroosma/retrospective
Commissioned by museum Dordrecht to work with Stroosma on a large retrospective exhibition of his work; collaborative projects + making maquets, realising the photography, building the exhibition and writing main article for the catalogue.
Began work on a continuing series of paintings - ‘axis drawings’ - two-dimensional constructions based on simple co-ordinate geometries, but with permutations/extensions playing with ‘classic’ De Stijl (modernist) spatial configurations.
1973 - 1982 : Travel, architectural practices and the Netherlands
resisted, and avoided the draft for war in Vietnam: left australia: travelled in South America for six months; extensive photographic documentation of Inca and pre-Inca sites in Colombia, Ecuador,Peru and Bolivia.
1974/84; Dordrecht, The Netherlands. worked with my mentor, the Dutch artist Jan Jelle Stroosma. Our primary collaboration, during this period, being drawn and built extensions of the geometry of his ‘integrated cubes’ project into an evolving ‘eco-huis’ (eco-house) morphology.
1974
Guest lecturer and tutor at London College of Furniture (two terms).
1976-1977
15 months travelling to and within india. worked with the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation on ideas for low cost, self-build shelters which combined local materials and innovative techniques.
One month spent in the antithesis of this notion - Le Corbusier”s Chandigarh.
Worked briefly with an indian architect in Calcutta .
