This is website presents the research activities by staff at the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. It is intended to keep students, teachers and scholars updated on research related activities, events and awards by members of the department and to allow them to share their work and achievements with the wider academic and professional community.
Join us for a celebratory event, marking 50 (+) years of the Transport Studies Group (TSG) at Marylebone, reflecting on teaching and research, past, present and future. The event will comprise two distinct segments, the first being an afternoon session with speakers on past development, and current roles, of teaching and research in the Group, together with contributions from alumni who have attained important positions in the transport sector. This will be followed in the evening by an informal reception for past staff colleagues and alumni.
Planetary Assemblages brings together the work of Monsoon Assemblages and the Manifest Data Lab to visualise geophysical and atmospheric data as ways of making climate change perceptible and public. Through drawings, maps, animations and models saturated with data from multiple sources, it proposes a critical engagement with the power of art and design to explore connections with the climate crisis and to motivate awareness of the material, social and cultural ways we are implicated in it.
The University of Westminster and Lund Humphries are delighted to celebrate the launch of Revolution? Architecture and the Anthropocene, a new book by Susannah Hagan hat asks why architecture has lagged behind the environmental curve for the last fifty years. Susannah Hagan will be in conversation with Harry Charrington, University of Westminster; Brian Ford, University of Nottingham; Ricardo de Ostos, NaJa & deOstos and the AA School of Architecture, Marie Braithwaite and Lindsay Bremner, University of Westminster.
The project is initiated by the Emerging Territories Research Group: Krystallia Kamvasinou and Giulio Verdini (Co-Convenors), and Ripin Kalra (Member). We capitalise on previous projects on green space in London and the Covid19 health emergency, and climate urbanism and resilience. Cross-disciplinary co-investigators are: Rachel Aldred (Transport), Nina Smyth (Psychology), Linda Percy (Biological Sciences), Corinna Dean (Architecture).
The exhibition Falling Away brings together Catherine Yass’s vertiginous film installations at Ambika P3. The first retrospective of the artist’s extensive body of film work, it spans the past two decades and includes a new work made in response to the impact of COVID-19 and global warming. Ambika P3’s vast subterranean space engages audiences in the disorientating effects of Yass’s films, which portray architecture in a state of construction, abandonment or demolition. By engaging with our perception of verticality, these works address the relationship between material structures and the powers and institutions that embody them.
The opening of Monsoonal Multiplicities, the online exhibition by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages. Speakers were historian Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons have Shaped South Asia’s History and landscape architect Dilip da Cunha, author of The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent.
In Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Daniel Barber and Anton Vidokle eds. Accumulation: The Art, Architecture and Media of Climate Change, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
In Yangon, Myanmar, displays of conspicuous wealth adorn high-end real estate developments located at strategic downtown intersections and clustered around the city’s famous Kandawgyi and Inya lakes. Research in 2019 exposed the links between much of this high-end real estate and jade extraction in northern Kachen State. The chapter analyses these relations.
