Conversations between Charles Holland, Lesley Lokko and Sumayya Vally
November 26–December 3, 2020
Join RIBA for two talks exploring the ways domestic architectural plans give form to underlying power relations, with architect Charles Holland and in partnership with The Modern House.
“Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries” wrote Robin Evans in “Figures, Doors and Passages,” an essay describing the evolution of the domestic plan. The plan is the basic currency of architectural drawings, its ground zero. Plans describe buildings. They are technical documents that describe how a building is organised, but they follow aesthetic and compositional criteria too.
Plans can be beautiful when viewed as abstract compositions, but they also describe real physical and social relationships. Within them, the underlying structures of social organisation can be read: issues of culture, economics, gender, class and power. Plans are both a representation of specific cultural and political ideals and the means through which those ideals are constructed in real life.
These talks will explore the plan and its relationship to these issues. Lesley Lokko and Sumayya Vally, Counterspace, will select a plan and explain its importance to them, to architectural culture and to the series’ themes.
These lectures will be online and available globally. Start times are in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Register for Lesley Lokko & Charles Holland talk here
Register for Sumayya Vally & Charles Holland talk here
