The Sir Terry Farrell Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RD
UK
hello@farrellcentre.org.uk
It is now 100 years since the first essays that would later form Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture were published in the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. “A great new epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit,” Le Corbusier observed, which, he went on to argue, demanded an architecture that did not just adopt but revelled in the possibilities of industry and mass production. “Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.”
Today, we live at another pivotal moment for architecture and for the wider world. Few, however, would now advocate for the type of messianic vision that Le Corbusier put forward. Yet, as he himself recognised, moments of crisis and transformation are also opportunities for overturning conventions, facing uncomfortable truths and forcing disciplinary and societal “reset.” What we need is not a new architecture, as Le Corbusier was popularly mistranslated as advocating, but another one: an architecture that is not bound to a single vision or future, but is diverse, pluralist and sustains multiple conversations about the active role that architects might play in the world.
This series of events invites practitioners and thinkers working in a range of fields and geographies to reflect on this pivotal moment and advocate their vision(s) for another architecture.
Lectures take place via Zoom and are posted afterwards on our YouTube channel. Registration is required.
Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti / Studio Ossidiana
Studio Ossidiana is an award-winning architecture, design and research practice which works across scales, blurring the boundary between architecture, design, art, landscape, and urban strategies.
December 9, 2021
Gonzalo Herrero Delicado
Based in London, Gonzalo Herrero Delicado is an architect, curator and educator whose work explores ecology and digital culture through the lens of design, architecture and art.
January 26, 2022
Ruth Morrow
Professor of Biological Architecture at Newcastle University, and Co-Head of interdisciplinary School X, Ruth Morrow’s research encompasses the material, the social and the ecological.
February 2, 2022
Paradigma Ariadné
Founded in 2016, Paradigma Ariadné is a Budapest-based design studio which creates extraordinary architecture and related contents, through applying theory, imagination and narration-based design processes.
February 10, 2022
Anab Jain and Jon Ardern / Superflux
Superflux is an Anglo-Indian studio which creates worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world.
February 16, 2022
Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell
Artist and designer, Adam Nathaniel Furman, and architectural historian, Joshua Mardell, are editors of Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories (forthcoming, 2022).
March 15, 2022
Further events will be added to the series over the next few weeks.
The series is organised in collaboration with the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University.
