13th Feb 2013 1:00pm-5:00pm
Board Room, Grand Parade.
Following on from the conceptual and interdisciplinary examination of notions of urban ecology at CUE1 and CUE2, the third CUE.
Speakers will explore the political, cultural and natural ecologies of expanded urban territories in the United States, South Africa, and South America. The event is part of the MArch course in the Architecture programme and open to the public.
Programme
Boardroom Grand Parade
1-5pm
Introduction and welcome by Karin Jaschke
Lindsay Bremner | Dissident Water: Acid Mining in Johannesburg
Louise Purbrick | Mining Chile: Traces of Nitrate
Panel / Q&A chaired by Jon Goodbun
3pm
Mark Campbell | Detroit: Arcadia Exhausted
Andre Viljoen | Politics of the Productive Urban Landscape in the United States
Panel / Q&A chaired by Jon Goodbun
Contributors and abstracts
Lindsay Bremner
Dr Lindsay Bremner is an award-winning architect and writer and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. Her work includes the book Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998 – 2008 (2010). Her current research projects, Geo-Architecture and Folded Ocean are investigating the relationships between architecture, geology and politics, and the impact ofglobal mobility, trans-nationalism and environmental change on the Indian Ocean world.
She was previously the head of architecture departments in Philadelphia (USA) and Johannesburg (South Africa).
Dissident Water: Acid Mining in Johannesburg
In 2002, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, highly toxic water erupted from a disused mineshaft and flowed across the surface of the earth. This made geology - metals, salts, oxides, radio-active compounds - visible and knowable, not as hidden abstractions or scientific facts, but as above-ground experience and matters of concern. In this presentation, I discuss the water as an agent of political and spatial dissent, that has set up unprecedented associations of academics, activists, artists, hippo, politicians, newly floated companies, scientists and shack dwellers in a rowdy assembly working towards the possibility of the composition of a common world.
Mark Campbell
Mark Campbell has taught at the Architectural Association, London, since 2005. Currently he is the Director of the Paradise Lost Research Cluster, unit master for Intermediate 1, and is a member of the Histories & Theories Faculty. A graduate of Princeton University, he has previously taught at the Cooper Union, New York, Princeton University, New Jersey, and Auckland University, New Zealand.
Detroit: Arcadia Exhausted
If the United States is the “original version of modernity”, as Jean Baudrillard believed, then the post-industrial collapse of cities like Detroit, Michigan, provides us a vision of what the end of modernity might look like. Once the second most affluent city in the UnitedStates, Detroit now relies on Federal life support, has enough vacant land to accommodate Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco combined, and is so synonymous with architectural ruin that theimages of its civic decay are as clichéd as they are poignant.
In late-2012 the Paradise Lost research cluster & Intermediate 1 of the Architectural Association travelled to Detroit. We worked as ‘archaeologists of the immediate future’ in the hope of exploring the notion of architectural obsolescence. This talk will present and discuss our investigations.
Jon Goodbun
Dr Jon Goodbun is an architect, theorist and writer. His work focuses on the role of systems thinking in architecture and more broadly within modern culture, drawing upon disciplines such as aesthetics, ecology, cybernetics and cognitive science, as well as the role of future scenario planning in design, and design as a form of activism within the environmental movement. Goodbun teaches at the RCA, the Bartlett, and the University of Westminster. He is a director of the architectural practice WAG, co-founder of the Polytechnic research group at Westminster, and founder of rheomode at: jongoodbun.wordpress.com.
Karin Jaschke
Dr Karin Jaschke is an architectural historian and theorist and teaches at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include modern architecture's links to ethnography, ludic environments, and ecological historiography. She is co-editor of Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino Resort Architecture and author of various essays and book chapter. She is currently working on the publication of herdoctoral dissertation Mythical Journeys: Ethnography, Archaeology and the Attraction of Tribal Cultures in the Work of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan.
Louise Purbrick
Dr Louise Purbrick is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her work encompasses publications on the industrial and material culture of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a monograph on the use, preservation and valuing of objects given and received upon marriage (The Wedding Present, 2007), and a history on the Long Kesh/Maze prison site in Northern Ireland. Purbrick is engaged in activist work that includes community work and the curation of exhibitions such Rattling the Cage, an archive of materials used in a local anti-Guantánamo campaign.
Mining Chile: Traces of Nitrate
Traces of Nitrate explores the histories and legacies of British investment in Chilean nitrate mines and involvement in its global trafficking. Through an examination of sites, artefacts and images, the project will trace nitrate’s route from natural mineral state processed in the oficinas of the Atacama desert through transported commodity and stock market exchange value to become, ultimately, part of the material and symbolic inheritances of London mansions and of estates in the capital’s surrounding countryside.
Andre Viljoen
Andre Viljoen is an architect and principal lecturer in architecture at the University of Brighton and with Katrin Bohn contributes to the work of Bohn&Viljoen Architects. The publication in 2005 of their book CPULs Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: designing urban agriculture for sustainable cities consolidated a body of research underpinning the case for urban agriculture as an essential element of sustainable urban infrastructure. This book and the associated design concept has had a significant international impact, resulting in invitations to exhibit, advise and lecture widely.
Politics of the Productive Urban Landscape in the United States
This presentation reflects on findings of Bohn & Viljoen’s on-going investigations into the evolving practice of urbanagriculture. Under the umbrella of their “Laboratories for Urban Agriculture” project, results from field work in Milwaukee, Madison and Detroit will be presented and compared to contemporary examples from New York City and Rotterdam. The developing urban typology of the Productive urban landscape will be discussed in relation to top down and bottom up initiatives and the environmental and social capacities that underpin them.
The CUE series is organised by Karin Jaschke and the MArch Programme in Architecture at the University of Brighton in association with Office for Spatial Research. Contact: k.jaschke@brighton.ac.uk
