Register - Architecture & Landscape

In this episode Nana Biamah Ofosu and Andrew Clancy interview Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects.

Nana is a tutor in the Kingston School of Art, leading studies into precedent and the lessons found in territorial Ghanaian architecture as part of her Second Year Studio.

Grafton Architects are the current Pritzker Laureates, an accolade that arrives as they appear to be gathering pace with a remarkable series of university buildings completed in the last few years, and more on the way. At the heart of Graftons practice is a concern for the human aspects of architecture - how it is made, how it affects those who use it, and how it speaks to the society that it forms a part of. In this discussion Shelley and Yvonne discuss their education, those critical first few projects, and how they have navigated their career since then. They reflect on the sensibilities that underlie their remarkable buildings, and what they see as key challenges facing the disipline today.

https://www.graftonarchitects.ie/

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Andrew Clancy / Nana Biamah Ofosu

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Andrew Clancy speaks with Simon Henley of Henley Halebrown Architects. Simon is an educator and a practitioner, and has written several books about architecture, most recently ‘Redefining Brutalism’ - which seeks to redefine the subject beyond style, and to capture its sensibility as a living language of architecture -0 encompassing robustness at its core.

Today their explorations into the language of architecture are being teased out via a series of remarkable housing projects, one of which (Chadwick Hall) was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize (the UKs highest award for architecture) last year.

http://henleyhalebrown.com/

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Andrew Clancy

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Andrew Clancy chats with the architect and educator Cathy Hawley.

Cathy Haley started her professional career with the art and architecture collaborative muf, moved on to doing remarkable housing projects as a founding partner of Riches Hawley Mikhail, and now works with Public Practice to embed critical thinking about context and character into the development plans of a series of towns. Wherever she has worked she has brought a clarity of insight, valuing the unseen and the overlooked along with more obvious aspects, to make a singular contribution in each place.

This is true also of her work as an educator - in which she seeks to tease out her students ability to see in an enabling fashion - both for their own careers as architects, and in relation to how they make work.

She is a winner of the RIBA Stirling prize, RIBA Rome prize and numerous other accolades.

http://www.cathyhawley.co.uk/about.php

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Andrew Clancy

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Laura Evans and Matt Wells talk with the Historian and curator Nicholas Olsberg.

Nicholas is a former director of the Canadian Centre of Architecture, and is a prolific writer. He has curated many exhibitions about architects and architecture and in this conversation shares his views about the role of the curator in this context. In particular he speaks about the need to make exhibitions which present those visiting with vivid moments of engagement with the subject - a particular challenge in architecture when by necessity only an alibi for the subject the visitor will be engaging with.

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Laura Evans / Matt Wells

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Mary Vaughan Johnson and Federica Goffi Interview Alba di Lieto and William Whitaker

Mary is the head of our Department of Architecture and Landcape here in Kingston, while Federica is Associate Professor and Co-Chair of the PhD and MAS Program at Carleton University.

Last Summer Mary and Federica hosted the Frascari Symposium at Kingston, and it was at this event this podcast was recorded.

In it Mary and Federica interview Alba diLieto and William Whitaker.

Alba is curator of the archive Carlo Scarpa at the Directorate Civic Art Museums and Monuments of Verona. William Whitaker is the curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

In this conversation Alba and William speak of the nature of their archives, of their inception, management and growth. They also speak eloquently about the nature of these archives as repositories of thinking, offering profound insights into our discipline.

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Mary Vaughan Johnson / Federica Goffi

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this podcast Laura Evans and Matt Wells interview William Burgess and Stephen Davies of 31/44

In the intro I mention our new books project. If you want to support us by pre-ordering copies of our first books please visit the crowdfunding site here https://kubacker.hubbub.net/p/REGISTER-Conversations/

Will is well known to us in Kingston as a studio tutor in third year, where he runs a unit with Kate Micklin also of 31/44.

The work of the unit is a good way to understand some of the interests of 31/44 as a practice. There is a careful approach to understanding and researching context, and using this to inform their projects. This contextual read is not one grounded in a literal formal or material transposition, but in a sensibility which allows contextual work stand in sympathy both with its own time, and the histories of the sites they work on.

As such their works are to an extent a distillation and a refinement of particular observations, a retelling of a story of how the city has been made.

https://www.3144architects.com

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Laura Evans / Matt Wells

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Andrew Clancy interviews Shiela O'Donnell and John Tuomey of O'Donnell and Tuomey.

John and Shiela are as much educators as architects, and this conversation roves freely between conversations about schools, and their own work in practice. It is clear that these two worlds are interconnected and interreliant in a profound way in their lives.

The work in both places has overlaps - not least a concern with close reading of site and context, and an investment in drawing out what the ‘utter’ aspect of a project might be through conversation and drawing.

We talk through their recent retirement from UCD - the school they were taught in and in turn taught into for most of their lives, and how this might mark a new chapter on a number of levels. We also hear what it was like working for Stirling, the humanity of the man, and his insistence on the value of ‘the act itself’ of being an architect.

We do hope you enjoy the conversation.

http://odonnell-tuomey.ie

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Andrew Clancy

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Bruno Silvestre interviews his compatriot Alvaro Siza.

First off an apology - the sound is not as we would like it. Circumstances dictated that the interview had to be recorded in a hotel lobby, and the backgrounders noise is quite distracting - but we felt it was useful to put out anyway.

Bruno is working with Siza on a project here in the UK, and grabbed this time during Sizas most recent visit. In this conversation they talk about practice, Sizes early frustrations with small projects, how current jobs interrelate in the office, and the value of Kenneth Frampton in highlighting work from around the world, including Portugal, which might otherwise have been overlooked.

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Credits

Register is the Reseach Group for the Departmetn of Architecture & landscape. This episode was made in collaboration with the students architecture society K.Arch

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Bruno Silvestre

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Andrew Clancy and Laura Evans interview Alice Casey and Can Deegan of TAKA Architects in Dublin.

Over their 10 years of practice Alice and Cian have designed a series of remarkable buildings, which clearly illustrate the concerns of the office.

Most obvious there is a recurrent engagement with context, making buildings which are grounded in the forms and materials of their physical situation. There is more at work than this - most intriguingly a continual engagement with the potentials for architecture to accrete meaning through its engagement as a protagonist in ritual and habit. Here they draw their references very widely, most particularly from a series of lengthy journeys they made in the first few years of their practice. Here we see a robust territorial architecture engaging with global conversations, making something new and yet of its place.

www.taka.ie

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Register: Christoph Lueder; Matt Wells; Matt Phillips

Interviewer: Andrew Clancy and Laura Evans

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Louise Koopmanns and Andrew Clancy interview Gunter Vogt, the eminent landscape designer, and Chair of Landscape at ETH Zurich.

He views landscape design not as an autonomous totalling discipline, but as a careful reassembly of the world. In his methods he stresses the productive tension between the necessary subjectivity of the human condition, and the availability of scientific analysis and process. In speaking with his students he observes that a field trip can at once be a sensorial immersion and a scientific appraisal, and posits a work method that includes space for digression, memory and dreaming along with rigorous engagement with the realities of contemporary ecology and construction. A detail in this context can speak about both the personal and the political. This ability for multiple scales of thinking to be manifest at once allows space for digression and a radical subjectivity in the design process - resulting in landscapes which are contextual and surreal, robust and intimate.

In the beautiful landscapes he and his practice have made with collaborators such as Herzog deMeuron we can see the results of this humanistic compulsion, and in this conversation we tease out how he developed as a designer, and how he sees this role evolving in the face of contemporary pressures.

https://www.vogt-la.com/en

Kingston is one of the few schools in these islands which offers landscape architecture alongside architecture - we do so because we are keenly aware that the built environment is more than buildings, and believe that students of both disciplines benefit from this context.

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Credits:

Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson

Course Leader Landscape: Kristof Fatsar

Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy

Interviewer: Andrew Clancy and Louise Koopmans

Editor: Andrew Clancy

Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture