Architecture: Spaces of Information / Part 1

Please note that Architecture: Spaces of Information will run from 11.15am–4pm including a break for participants. 

This one-day symposium accompanies the ICA Fox Reading Room exhibition Everything is Architecture: Bau Magazine from the 60s and 70s. With reference to Bau and Viennese convergences of architecture, art and politics during the 1960s and 70s, contributing speakers will more broadly examine the role of the magazine in the development of critical and theoretical architectural discourse through experimental and playful approaches to editorial strategy and document layout.

Organised by Dr. Ruth Blacksell from the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading and Dr. Stephen Walker from Sheffield School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. 

A second symposium event, Architecture and the Spaces of Information / Part 2, will coincide with the launch of a special issue of the journal Architecture & Culture, 4.1 in early 2016 (guest edited by Ruth Blacksell and Stephen Walker). This event will look at the way shifts in practice, material, production and media environment across the disciplines of architecture, art, editorial design have advanced the relationship between audience/ user/ reader and architectural space.

Programme:

11.15 Introductions
11.30 Juliette Desorgues
11.50 Eva Branscome
12.40 Lunch
1.30 Steve Parnell
2.20 Carlo Menon
3.15 Panel discussion

Speakers:

Juliette Desorgues is curator of the ICA’s current exhibition Everything is Architecture: Bau Magazine from the 60s and 70s. Her talk will introduce the exhibition, the magazine and its editors, and discuss the curatorial practice involved in the show’s presentation and research.

Eva Branscome is an architectural historian and writer based in London. Her research centres on the history and theory of European modern architecture, looking especially at the intersections with other creative disciplines and with culture generally. She is currently preparing a book for Ashgate, which evaluates the oeuvre of Hans Hollein within the post-war Austrian art and architectural scene. Her talk will consider how Bau magazine is understood as a postmodern phenomenon through its adoption of the media of conventional architectural communication whilst simultaneously promoting subversive content.

Steve Parnell is a lecturer in Architecture at the University of Newcastle. His talk will discuss the idea of Brutalism: how it became normalised by the architectural press in the 1950s and 60s, and how its ethic lost out to its aesthetic on the seductive black and white pages of the architectural magazine.

Carlo Menon is a PhD researcher at the Bartlett School of Architecture. His talk will consider how editorial devices can express 'critical' approaches to architectural debate through an examination of contemporary independent magazines.