Bartlett PhD Research Projects 2020 by The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL

PhD Research Projects

2020

Contents

6 7

Preface Introduction

Conference Participants 12

William Victor Camilleri The Struggle for Existence

Amr El-Husseiny The Boundaries of Heritage: A Socio-Political Approach to Heritage Spaces in the Egyptian Context

Danielle Hewitt London’s World War II Bombsites: A Neurotic History

Kieran Mahon Reconstructing the Living Society: The Missing Case of C. Winifred Harley and the Dartington Hall Nursery School (1917–1932)

Shneel Malik Prototyping Potential Large-scale Applications of Photosynthetic Membranes: Bioremediation, Biosorption, and Biophotovoltaics

Hamish Muir The Scrapped Script: Reimagining Rubbish in the Theatre

Aisling O’Carroll Reconstructing Reconstructions: A Stratigraphic Practice of Landscape and Historiography

Annarita Papeschi Transindividual Urbanism: Novel Territories of Digital Participatory Practice

Saptarshi Sanyal Not Classifications, not Categories, but Architectures of Connections

Amy Spencer The Architecture of Healthcare and Medical Education at University College Hospital, 1825–1905

Lina Sun The Modernity of Chinese Architectural Drawing’s Subjectivity: From the Representation of Cosmology to the Design of Traditions

Justinien Tribillon Imagining, Designing and Building Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique: Understanding the Périph’s Role in the ‘Production of the Banlieue’ and Paris’s Infrastructural Landscape (1943–1973; 2007–today)

Maria Catalina Venegas Raba Collecting Architectures: The First Colombian Architectural Biennales (1962–1966)

Recent Gr aduates 41

Dr Nerea Amorós Elorduy East African Refugee Camps as Learning Assemblages: The Built Environment as an Educational Resource for Encamped Young Children in the East African Rift

Dr Anna Ulrikke Andersen Ten Windows Following Christian Norberg-Schulz: Framing, Mobility, and Self-reflection Explored through the Fenestral Essay Film

Dr Sabina Andron Graffiti, Street Art, and the Right to the Surface: For a Semiotic, Cultural, and Legal Approach to Urban Surfaces and Inscriptions

Dr Nicola Antaki A Learning Architecture: Developing a Collective Design Pedagogy in Mumbai with Muktangan School Children and the Mariamma Nagar Community

Dr Marcela Aragüez Frameworks of Uncertainty: Architectural Strategies of Control and Change in the Work of Cedric Price and Arata Isozaki (1955–1978)

Dr Tal Bar Digital Architecture and Difference: A Theory of Ethical Transpositions towards Nomadic Embodiments in Digital Architecture

Dr Katy Beinart Détour and Retour: Practices and Poetics of Salt as Narratives of Relation and Re-generation in Brixton

Dr Bernadette Devilat Re-construction and Record: Exploring Alternatives for Heritage Areas after Earthquakes in Chile

Dr Sander Hölsgens A Phenomenology of Skateboarding in Seoul, South Korea: Experiential and Filmic Observations

Dr Nahed Jawad Reviving the Muqarnas in Damascus : A Historical Architectural Form in a Contemporary Discourse

Dr Irene Kelly Peace-process Infrastructure: Constructing Landscapes in-between Irelands

Dr Jeong Hye Kim An Urban Ecology of Seoul’s Nanjido Landfill Park

Dr Hina Lad Surgical Environments and Medical Technologies

Dr Claudio Leoni Exhibition and Cognition: Gottfried Semper’s Strolls in the Crystal Palace

Dr Samar Maqusi Acts of Spatial Violation: Constructing the Political inside the Palestinian Refugee Camp

Dr Luke Caspar Pearson Architecture of the ‘Half-Real’: Exploring the Videogame as a New Medium for Architectural Expression

Dr Mariana Pestana Fictional World Enactments, Curating The Real and Other Fictions at Lisbon Architecture Triennial, 2013

Dr Sophie Read In, Out, and Again: Reading and Drawing John Soane’s Lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1817 and 1820)

Dr Felix Robbins An Architectural Project: Essays in (Re)Construction Some Reflections on Creating Room for Projecting within the Contradictions of Architectural Practice

Dr Natalia Romik (Post-)Jewish Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern European Shtetls

Dr Ro Spankie Drawing Out the Interior: Thinking through Drawing

Dr Huda Tayob Opaque Architectures: Spatial Practices of African Migrant Markets (1990–present)

Participants’ Biographies Recent Graduates’ Biographies Credits

87 92

Preface

Dr Nina Vollenbröker and Dr Sophie Read Co-ordinators, MPhil/PhD Programmes

Prof. Jonathan Hill

Director, MPhil/PhD Architectural Design

Prof. Sophia Psarra and Prof. Ben Campkin Directors, MPhil/PhD Architectural and Urban History & Theory

PhD Research Projects 2020 is the fourteenth annual conference and exhibition related to doctoral research at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The event is open to the public and involves presentations by students undertaking the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design and MPhil/ PhD Architectural and Urban History & Theory. This year, we have also invited contributions by MPhil/PhD students at The UCL Institute of Sustainable Heritage and at The Bartlett School of Planning. Leading to a PhD in Architecture, The Bartlett School of Architecture’s doctoral programmes encourage originality and creativity. Over 90 students are currently enrolled and the range of research subjects undertaken is broad. However, each annual PhD conference and exhibition focuses on a smaller selection of presentations from students who are developing or concluding their research. The purpose of the conference and exhibition is to encourage productive discussions between presenters, exhibitors, staff, students, critics and the audience. Organised and curated by Dr Nina Vollenbröker and Dr Sophie Read, PhD Research Projects 2020 has seven invited critics: Professor Barbara Maria Stafford,

University of Chicago; Professor Adam Sharr; Newcastle University; Professor Christoph Lindner, The Bartlett School of Architecture; Barbara Campbell-Lange, The Bartlett School of Architecture; Dr Max Sternberg, University of Cambridge; Dr Penelope Haralambidou, The Bartlett School of Architecture and Dr Luke Caspar Pearson, The Bartlett School of Architecture. Participating this year are: William Victor Camilleri; Amr El-Husseiny; Danielle Hewitt; Kieran Mahon; Shneel Malik; Hamish Muir; Aisling O’Carroll; Annarita Papeschi; Maria Catalina Venegas Raba; Saptarshi Sanyal; Amy Spencer; Lina Sun and Justinien Tribillon. This publication also includes the research of 22 recent graduates from the MPhil/ PhD Architectural Design and MPhil/ PhD Architectural and Urban History & Theory programmes: Anna Ulrikke Andersen, Sabina Andron, Nicola Antaki, Marcela Aragüez, Tal Bar, Katy Beinart, Bernadette Devilat, Nerea Amorós Elorduy, Sander Hölsgens, Nahed Jawad, Irene Kelly, Jeong Hye Kim, Hina Lad, Claudio Leoni, Samar Maqusi, Luke Caspar Pearson, Mariana Pestana, Sophie Read, Felix Robbins, Natalia Romik, Ro Spankie and Huda Tayob.

Tom Keeley & Aisling O’Carroll

The Cartographer’s Dilemma

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.

They serve as utilitarian devices, as functional tools seemingly without agendas. But maps also chart difficult and contested histories, loaded with arrested moments of knowledge, power, and control. Maps choose what they show to tell the story they want to convey. The editing of the map is as important as the making. While in the history of cartography maps have often served as tools of influence and dominion, they have the potential to connect rather than rule, to offer new ways of understanding and relating to one another rather than determining a given point of view. Maps – and map making – offer a means of searching and speculating, a way of finding order rather than solely dictating. The cartographer is faced with the dilemma of simultaneously reading and charting the map. This perspective between the cartographer and the traveller, the writer and the reader, provides numerous parallels between the worlds of exploration and those of scholarship. The PhD process presents a different kind of map for each of us, often one that is substantially different to the route we have imagined taking. While the map at first appears near blank, it gradually allows both the reader and

‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’ So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, ‘They are merely conventional signs! ‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank’ (So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best— A perfect and absolute blank!’ Lewis Carroll, ‘The Bellman’s Speech’, in The Hunting of the Snark (1876) As instruments of orientation, maps offer a way of locating oneself within a larger territory. They present a terrain – whether topographic or theoretical – for one to explore, revealing possible routes and enabling navigation and wayfinding.

writer to navigate through terrains previously unconnected and invisible. In this process we often find ourselves getting lost. In fact, ‘getting lost’ regularly proves to be the most effective way of finding where it is we really want to go. Diversions and detours along the way force us to question the routes that we follow. How much of PhD research is constructing new maps? Forging new routes and connections between other places and ideas? Is there a plan? What are the practical, methodological, and philosophical questions and processes that carry us from one end of the PhD to another? Perhaps a contribution to knowledge is just making a new kind of map. The Bartlett’s annual exhibition and conference shows the breadth of work that is developing and has developed through the PhD programme. This work cannot be easily defined, and it is this variety that is its strength. Each of the projects presented here offers an individual approach to navigating and mapping the research process. Each project develops its own cartographic language, the conventions of which track, plot, and communicate the course of the work.

Through this process of working – mapping the limits of research and what these landscapes of thought show us – distinct modes of practice develop. The work on display here is testament to this; continuously pondering the cartographer’s dilemma as a way of understanding the world around us.

Ocean Chart [The Bellman’s Map], in Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (New York, 1891). Courtesy of Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography, (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Conference Participants

William Victor Camilleri The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Nat Chard • Dr Chris Leung

The Struggle for Existence

This research sets off from Hortus Eystettensis, a celebrated codex of botanical drawings by Basilius Besler illustrating a lost sixteenth-century garden in Eichstätt, Germany. Illustrated using symbolic taxonomy, the drawings offer testimony to the garden’s existence. They aid in the identification of the garden’s species and, remarkably, enable a reconstruction of the garden – now known as the Bastion Garden – through the knowledge extracted from them. The illustrations, however, present very limited scientific value when likened to today’s most distinguished biological drawings. Scientific representations such as Ernst Haeckel’s plates in Art Forms in Nature (1899) or Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka’s glass models (1863–1880) communicate factual information to their targeted audience, however, in the nature of didactic illustrations and fixed representations, the data is often limited to identification and morphology and is less revealing of lifespan, ecological relationships, and struggles. In natural history, most distinctly in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), we get a sense of a few of these concealed struggles for life, and in their masked quality they constitute the essence of this work.

Thus, approaching nature through botanical illustration, the research attempts to tease out the concealed, often omitted elements that lead to an output. Formalised through a series of made objects, designed to accentuate their inner workings and interactions, the work is concentrated on the design of a garden. Echoing the speculative character of the Bastion Garden in Eichstätt, the work exists through one’s reading of the made objects, providing multiple interpretations and no absolute end. These outputs connect, copulate, and transpose within a domestic garden and through characters that rely on nature and mankind to survive. In employing socio-botanical constructs that unceasingly displace the garden on the wild-domesticated spectrum, the research probes the ontology of nature in the hope for this metaphor to germinate and bloom.

William Victor Camilleri; Object VI: The Gardener’s War and the Seed’s Renunciation of Nature (Photograph by Frederik Petersen)

Conference Participants

Amr El-Husseiny UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage Supervisors: Dr Kalliopi Fouseki • Dr Edward Denison

The Boundaries of Heritage: A Socio-Political Approach to Heritage Spaces in the Egyptian Context

The concept of heritage as a social construct is well established within Western literature, which focuses on the means by which heritage is entangled with conceptions of identity, modernity, and nationalism. While contexts like Egypt may have been at the heart of the institutionalisation of modern heritage practices throughout the nineteenth century, a closer investigation of Egypt’s contemporary conditions may contribute to our understanding of how the travelling concept of heritage may have unfolded in the developing world in relation to global understandings of the notion. The research challenges the universal conception of heritage spaces as necessarily locations of identity and melting pots of culture, positing rather that in some cases they may be perceived as urban frontiers and ‘contact zones’, even in cases of more implicit contestations where conflicts may not be evident. In order to unpack the Egyptian heritage scene, the research proposes the concept of ‘boundaries’ as its point of departure to identify meaning and relationships between heritage discourses and the production of heritage spaces. By doing so, the research shall deal with boundaries of heritage on

three different levels: symbolic, social, and spatial. Each dimension acts as an enabling objective to develop a better understanding and deal with specific tensions of social and political challenges that are common within heritage sites of the developing world. The first level is based upon a qualitative discourse analysis addressing issues of urban heritage focusing on concepts of boundaries and silence as active discursive expressions. The second level involves an anthropological approach including an analysis of lived experiences of local communities along with representations in local culture addressing heritage spaces and objects. The final part brings together qualitative and empirical evidence to analyse the relations between their material spatial manifestations through the boundaries of heritage spaces in various Egyptian contexts.

Conference Participants

Danielle Hewitt The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Dr Robin Wilson • Professor Jane Rendell

London’s World War II Bombsites: A Neurotic History

During the aerial bombardment of London in the years 1940 to 1945, 116,483 buildings in the London area were ‘totally demolished’ or otherwise ‘damaged beyond repair’ (Knowles, 1948). It fell to the London County Council Architect’s and Surveyor’s Departments to administrate and carry out the operations of demolition, clearance, salvage, and disposal that followed each raid. The materials released from this ruinous landscape did not become waste but entered a ruderal economy of salvage and re-use maintained by central government and contributed to by all bombed parts of the country. Through a practice of expanded writing which manifests in performance, video, sound, and the printed page, my research attempts to locate and recover these displaced materials thereby producing a number of ‘elsewheres’ to the bombed landscape. An aim of this thesis is to acknowledge and address the challenge of writing an architectural historical object of study that is violent and productive of trauma. The displacements followed in this research thus emerge as both physical and mental while the bombsites are rendered as complex spaces productive of both materials and subjectivities. Following research into

war-time medical practices and discourses relating to the psychological impact of aerial bombing on civilians, I argue that as a ‘psychological object’ (Hayward, 2012) the condition of neurosis (at that time used to describe responses to anxiety and trauma) was disallowed during wartime and that this has affected subsequent narratives pertaining to how the British population were affected by aerial bombing. I draw on the term neurosis to propose a neurotic history, learning from the artist Walid Ra’ad’s notion of the ‘hysterical document’ and considering the challenge that trauma presents to narrative, as explored in the work of Cathy Caruth (2016). Thus, the ‘elsewheres’ to the bombsites become locations where the drive of history as an act of recovery is troubled.

Image: © London Metropolitan University Archives

Conference Participants

Kieran Mahon The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Barbara Penner • Professor Jane Rendell

Reconstructing the Living Society: The Missing Case of C. Winifred Harley and the Dartington Hall Nursery School (1917–1932) Between 1889–1945 pioneers across England – working under the diverse, international banner of progressive education – set up a handful of experimental schools that sought to challenge the hegemony of the public-school system. Although each school developed their own localised set of child-centred practices they were also unified by several shared principles, such as tolerant forms of discipline, preference for co-education, and a readiness to take part in curriculum experiments. While historians of education have paid close attention to many of these progressive schools and their networks (Stewart, 1968, 1972; Selleck, 1968; Skidelsky, 1969), they have yet to be placed in a detailed architectural context. To address this gap, my research explores the architectural and educational history of a single progressive, co-educational boarding school at Dartington Hall in Devon for children aged two to eighteen. Set up in 1926 by the millionaire philanthropists Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the School was in operation until 1987 and part of a larger experiment in rural reconstruction and adult education. This paper uncovers the story of how the Estate’s first purpose-built

educational building – the Dartington Hall Nursery School (1931) – came into being. Although officially attributed to the American architectural practice Delano & Aldrich, I argue that a young English educator, Miss C. Winifred Harley, played a pivotal role in developing the concept. To reinstate Harley’s agency in the production of the building, and to reflect the experimental nature of a progressive school, I employ a layered approach to the writing; reconstructing aspects of her experience to better understand how the multifaceted Nursery School was intended to be used. Through this, I also draw attention to the transatlantic debates around emerging forms of early childhood education and the central role women educators played in developing new ways of thinking about educational environments in interwar England.

Grand Piano in the Old Nursery Looking South. Author’s own image (2016)

Conference Participants

Shneel Malik The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Marcos Cruz • Dr Brenda Parker

Prototyping Potential Large-scale Applications of Photosynthetic Membranes: Bioremediation, Biosorption, and Biophotovoltaics Biological structures and their mechanisms are known to be hierarchically constructed over a wide range of molecular scales, allowing them to regulate their systems through constant exchange of energy and information with their surroundings. These structures establish cycles of continuum, of constant learning, adaptation, and transformation. Photosynthesis is one such biological process, central to all life on Earth. This research explores the possibilities of designing and fabricating large-scale photosynthetic membranes for applications in architecture and the built environment. We begin by recognising natural processes as fluid processes – within which constant becoming and decaying actively integrates temporal stabilities. Thereby allowing us to reimagine our building materials as fluid systems assembled across scales of magnitudes. Allowing for a transitory ‘viscous’ medium that encourages a continuum between the object artificial ecosystems (architecture) with the subject of the environment (nature), pairing a reconciliation of the two worlds. Constructed with the viscosity of the material as an important property, this research focuses towards the use of

a water-based polymeric material – hydrogel – that is shown to exhibit ‘cell-friendly’ environments on the microscale while being able to construct a hierarchical composite with structural and chemical stability on the macroscale. A range of hydrogel types have been formulated to demonstrate physical, chemical, and mechanical properties that also support biological activity in the form of large-scale constructions. More specifically, the growth of microalgae within the micro-environment of the hydrogel by performing photosynthesis. The hydrogel’s water component is vital in supporting biological activity, while its viscous properties are crucial for fabrication through techniques of additive manufacturing and casting, generating a state of flux that is complete with textures, surface, and thickness. The exhibited prototypes demonstrate three potential applications of photosynthetic membranes, namely: bioremediation; biosorption; and biophotovoltaics. Each exploring different properties of the algae-laden hydrogel, along with their relative computational and fabrication methods.

Shneel Malik, Anete Salmane, Javier Ruiz, Marcos Cruz and Brenda Parker; Porous Concrete Scaffold Cast with Algae-laden Hydrogel

Conference Participants

Hamish Muir The Bartlett School of Architecture and Central School of Speech and Drama Supervisors: Professor Yeoryia Manolopoulou • Dr Jan Kattein • Dr Simon Donger

The Scrapped Script: Reimagining Rubbish in the Theatre

The research investigates the reciprocal relationship between waste and theatre in order to develop a philosophy or practice of performance that responds to a time of climate crisis. The project explores this relationship through an experimental design method of playwriting; one that reimagines waste as both a conceptual aesthetic object and as an ecological functionalist concern. I start from the provocation whereby theatre productions exploring ethical stances in an imagined space on stage, but manufacturing such a fiction by unethical means off stage, have a disparity between what is communicated and the way in which it is communicated. This takes inspiration from the process art movement where the performative process of manufacturing is a concern of the artist as much as the finished work, as discussed in Robert Morris’ essay ‘Anti-Form’ (1968). I hypothesise that waste can be redefined as a means to imbue stronger spatial and material qualities into the play-script as a directive of the imagined stage, which will induce more ecologically conscious theatre processes, in front of and behind the curtain. Here, the script is considered a site of poetic experimentation and critical analysis, with the writing practice applying

and synthesising multi-disciplinary theories in order to test the hypothesis. I argue that waste is evidence of cultural behaviour, in that it is a substance that signifies a change in values, in form or function. In this sense, waste material can be used as a critical and provocative substance to question assumptions of setting, narrative, character, context, ethics, and aesthetics in theatre. Reciprocally, playwriting and performance are used as the methodology because they invoke an empathetic and critical ‘total art’, which can be employed to elevate, emancipate, repurpose, and commune with the meanings of waste.

‘Echo’ – Extract from a Dialogic Script

Conference Participants

Aisling O’Carroll The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Jonathan Hill • Professor Peg Rawes

Reconstructing Reconstructions: A Stratigraphic Practice of Landscape and Historiography

This research draws on diverse practices of reconstruction in fields from architecture and landscape to geology and archaeology in order to explore the politics, truth, and affective nature of reconstruction and representation in framing knowledge and ideas of landscape. Oscillating between the past and present, original and referent, reconstructions are historiographic representations, yet inevitably also something new. Here, the propositional practice of constructing (and reconstructing) history is intimately linked to how we address challenges of the present (Moore 2015). As such, this work offers an alternative approach to the current environmental crisis through the reconstruction of past and present ideas of landscape. As a primary case study the research examines nineteenth-century French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s radical reconstruction of Mont Blanc. Employing historical research and speculative design studies, the investigation of Viollet-le-Duc’s practice is developed and tested through a series of new reconstructions of his (partially lost) Mont Blanc study. Violletle-Duc’s representations of both observed and synthetically assembled Alpine

landscapes serve as ‘meaning-machines’ (Haraway, 1984) that preserve and convey the complex constructions underpinning the architect’s reading of the topography. The reconstruction of such representations helps to reveal the inherited, epistemic, and historical origins of our perception of the landscape and its limitations. Furthermore, with this design work I develop of my own methodology of reconstruction through (re)representation. Proceeding from Viollet-le-Duc, this work proposes a contemporary practice of reconstruction addressing the Alps and their glaciers today. Through a reading of the topography’s layered histories – including the geological, glacial, and cultural – the research aims to decipher the construction of these ‘time slices’ (Haraway, 1984) in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. This stratigraphic practice offers a critical investigation of how past relations continue to shape our present perception and engagement with landscape, and in doing so, it expands the consideration of our possible futures. Reconstruction of the Grande Salle of La Vedette, Viollet-le-Duc’s home in Lausanne, Switzerland. Photograph by Aisling O’Carroll

Conference Participants

Annarita Papeschi The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Marjan Colletti • Professor Mario Carpo

Transindividual Urbanism: Novel Territories of Digital Participatory Practice

Like an omen, the advent of ubiquitous technologies has carried the general expectation for the emergence of new forms of collective authorship. Drawing on cybernetic theory of communication and on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, this paper builds an ecological and materialist foundation to ideas of digital participation by presenting a review of Simondon’s ‘L’individuation Psychique et Collective’ (1958). Here, the philosopher describes the individuation of the collective subject as an ontogenetic and metastatic process of psychological and affective events producing the Transindividual, thus offering a biological interpretation of the social process of becoming and a reconceptualization of ideas of knowledge and distribution of information. By opening the digital participatory scholarship to ecological and post-humanist theory, the project intends to offer a better understanding of the complex nature of collective feedback, creating the potential for the affirmation of novel mediated urban narratives and aesthetics. These ideas are further explored through a design-research practice that uses biometric sensing, live data visualisation, and generative design to investigate the aesthetical, technological,

and cultural dimensions of Transindividuality as a model for collective authorship. In the series of presented projects, biometric sensing is used as a tool for the systematic deconstruction of human agency and the reimagination of platforms for group knowledge creation and collaborative decision-making with the potential to radically reshape the processes through which culture and places connect locally. The projects presented were developed as piecemeal series of participatory events and appeared as part of larger public events and festivals, including the Tallinn Architecture Biennale (2017) and the London Festival of Architecture (2018).

Photograph by Matthew Booth

Conference Participants

Saptarshi Sanyal The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Dr Tania Sengupta • Dr Edward Denison

Not Classifications, not Categories, but Architectures of Connections

In the early decades of the twentieth century neither territoriality nor authority in the British Indian Empire were uniform. As high imperialism in India – and global colonialism generally – waned, the state’s normative arrangements desperately endeavoured to centralise power and order. Meanwhile, certain built environment practices across India’s variegated geography experimented with departures from the state’s order, spanning a myriad of socio-cultural spheres, both public and domestic. This paper focuses on such thinking, discourse, and practice in a specific site, Santiniketan in eastern India, from 1913 to 1942. Santiniketan foregrounds the genesis and development of Visva-Bharati, a project in education, arts, and rural reconstruction. It drew upon interpersonal and intercultural networks and activities of poet, artist, educator Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the first non-European Nobel Laureate. Visva-Bharati – ‘where the world meets in one nest’, in Tagore’s words – grew into a significant locus to critically and inventively thinking through and shape the modern in late-colonial India. Its built architectures were not an end, but modes to socio-spatially propose intellectual, cultural, and pedagogic change in nuanced ways; without resorting

to aggressive or oppositional nationalism. This paper queries if such practices were contingent on reflexive introspections into how indigenous, western, and other cultural values were not irreconcilable but, productive and mutually constitutive. Within a larger, ongoing, project of (re) situating the modern, this paper traces ‘connected histories’, a method and approach developed by historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997). It is distinguished from comparative approaches that presume cultures as neatly separated and hence, comparable. Connected histories complicates totalising narratives through shared historical experiences. It works outwards from situated, subjective, affective relationships or kindred belief, and practices at the interstices of ideology and materiality. Such a mode of historicising architecture critiques preoccupations with ideological categories of form to read built spaces. It renders visible processes and modes of production in constructing architectural spaces as the agent of envisaged social change. Kalo Bari; Black House – A Structure Created by Students and Teachers of the Art School in Visva Bharati. Photograph by Saptarshi Sanyal

Conference Participants

Amy Spencer The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Peter Guillery • Harriet Richardson

The Architecture of Healthcare and Medical Education at University College Hospital, 1825–1905

This research examines the architectural evolution of University College Hospital (UCH) from its earliest beginnings to its formal separation from the institution to which it owes its name and origins. The project forms part of a detailed investigation of University College London (UCL) in Bloomsbury. At its inception in 1825, UCL was projected to be an important centre for medical education. A hospital was envisaged as an integral component of the scheme, providing opportunities for students to gain clinical experience alongside lectures and demonstrations in a range of disciplines related to medicine and surgery. Delayed by financial difficulties, the university did not embark on building a hospital on the west side of Gower Street until 1833. The hospital was constructed in phases to a neoclassical design by the littleknown architect Alfred Ainger. Opening in 1834, the hospital was a charitable institution that provided treatment without any charge to its patients. The charity’s ambitions to serve the population of its wider neighbourhood were signalled by its early name, the North London Hospital. The hospital was extended gradually by the construction of ward wings and

specialised departments to adapt to increasing patient numbers and medical advances, but alterations failed to address concerns that the building was not equal to the demands of ‘modern science’ (UCL Special Collections, 1877). The hospital was reconstructed between 1897 and 1906 to designs by Alfred Waterhouse (and overseen by his son Paul in its final stages), who devised a cruciform plan in collaboration with Dr George Vivian Poore and Newton H. Nixon. By drawing on a wealth of archival records and field investigation, this research addresses significant gaps in knowledge of the architectural history of UCH. The two successive hospitals are examined in connection with philanthropy and finances, progress in medicine and sanitary principles, and the collective nature of architectural work.

Waiting Room in the Cruciform Hospital, c.1930s. © UCL Creative Media Services

Conference Participants

Lina Sun The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Dr Edward Denison • Professor Barbara Penner

The Modernity of Chinese Architectural Drawing’s Subjectivity: From the Representation of Cosmology to the Design of Traditions Chinese architectural drawing underwent profound change around the beginning of the twentieth century, shifting from the traditional tu (the Chinese character for drawing) that possessed a distinctive set of terminologies and geometric principles, to a new form of drawing that incorporated and adopted Western Euclidean geometry and its associated terminologies. Framed by China’s wider programme of modernity at the start of the twentieth century, this thesis explores the expressions of drawing and the projected identity of authorship on drawing (drawing’s subjectivity), and the inheritance and transformation of these factors from ancient tu to ‘modern’ forms of drawing in the Chinese context. Three thematic methodologies are applied for investigation of the changing experience from the ancient tu to the modern drawings: architecturally, sociologically, and historically. Architecturally, the research etymologically analyses the Chinese terminologies of drawing and geometrically deconstructs the composition of drawings, locating them in the visual traditions. Sociologically, this thesis borrows the concepts of tradition and collectivities under the perspective of multiple modernities, interrogating the

nuanced relationship between drawing, its authorship, and traditions. Historically, the thesis argues for an ‘entangled’ history in which Western drawing traditions and Chinese tu traditions were interwoven and resulted in the construction of modern Chinese drawing in multiple ways. This research reveals that both the ancient tu and modern drawing can function as unique architectural sites that express subjective intentions rather than being just representations of buildings. However, in keeping with the consistent expression of subjectivity, ancient tu and modern drawing entailed distinctive modes of constructing the boundaries of collective identities. While ancient tu expresses the philosophy of Chinese cosmology, modern drawing – although expressing the individual subjectivity with the rise of the architect’s identity – constructs a new collective intention of designing the Chinese unique modernity in correlation with traditions.

Liang Sicheng. Elevation of Guang Yin Pavilion, 1932. © Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage Yang Shi Lei Family. Li Yang Tu of Zheng Yang Gate, Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). © The Palace Museum, China

Conference Participants

Justinien Tribillon The Bartlett School of Planning Supervisors: Professor Claire Colomb • Professor Ben Campkin

Imagining, Designing and Building Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique: Understanding the Périph’s Role in the ‘Production of the Banlieue’ and Paris’s Infrastructural Landscape (1943–1973; 2007–today) On 1 January 2016 a new metropolitan government for Paris was created. This new political institution is one of the outcomes of an institutional change starting almost ten years ago, and that has seen the idea of a ‘Greater Paris’ return to the forefront of local and national politics. This impetus led to a wealth of architectural competitions, academic colloquia, and institutional initiatives that sought to imagine and design the Grand Paris. Yet it led to only a timid attempt at reconsidering the relationship between Paris and its banlieue. After almost a decade, the only tangible results of the Greater Paris bonanza are a new metropolitan government and an ambitious public transport scheme. Yet right on the edge of Paris proper an infrastructure embodies the divide between Paris and its banlieue: the Boulevard Périphérique. Completed in 1973, the périphérique has come to symbolise the frontier between the ‘Grande Cité’, and in the words of Baron Haussmann, its ‘adornment’. While the vision of the périphérique as a frontier is now so commonplace it has become a cliché,

in academic and non-academic discourse the role of the périphérique in the spatial, social, and architectural genesis of this divide has barely been explored critically. The aim of this research is to enquire into the social imagination that motivated the start of this major infrastructural endeavour, the process of designing the ring road, and the reception of the Boulevard Périphérique’s construction which took more than fifteen years. Secondly, this research looks at the role of the ring road in today’s Greater Paris project: the way civil servants, politicians, and architects understand the role of the ring road in the divide between Paris and its banlieue, and their vision for the Boulevard Périphérique’s future as an ‘urban boulevard’.

Acoustic Screens on the Boulevard Périphérique next to Porte d’Ivry. Photograph by Justinien Tribillon

Conference Participants

Maria Catalina Venegas Raba The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Dr Robin Wilson • Dr Catalina Ortiz

Collecting Architectures: The First Colombian Architectural Biennales (1962–1966)

Architectural magazines

Curating the local practices presented at the biennales was not an impartial practice, but a politically engaged exercise undertaken by architects. It required the architects to adopt an unprecedented fluidity in their roles and in the social advocacy of the profession. Photographers, curators, editors, critics, and producers formed an unprecedented network of practitioners. Collecting through curating, exhibiting, editing, and printing served a means to link the act of inventorying a historic present to larger intellectual and political projects. The magazines are the entry point to investigate the history of modernist architecture and print cultures, exploring a methodology that integrates oral history and performative writing (Thurston and Bücher, 2004; Allsopp, 2004). This methodology addresses the value of the magazines and their afterlife through performative memory; reflects on the positioning of architectural magazines within specific institutional circuits, social frameworks, and editorial politics; and aims to assess the impact of these aspects in the production of local architectural cultures.

as objects of architectural history, as archival remains, as sites for performative memory, as nodes in the circulation of architectural knowledges, as sites of legitimation of architectural knowledges, as sites where the architectural history of local modernisms delinks from the project of ‘modernisation/colonisation’ (Mignolo, 2001), as operative vehicles for modernism This paper focuses on the possibilities and constraints of architectural magazines as objects for architectural history. Two magazines, Escala and Proa, are used as the departure points to retrieve the history of the first architectural biennales of Colombia. Due to the loss of most of the ephemera and archival materials (Téllez, 2006), these two magazines provide the archival remains of a moment in which architectural knowledges were in dispute. It was a moment in which architectural criticism adopted specific formats (i.e. exhibitions and print) to validate and contest the emergence of a critical regionalist thought.

I Colombian Architectural Biennale Exhibition. Bogotรก, July 1962. Private archive, courtesy of Germรกn Samper Gnecco.

Recent Graduates

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser • Professor Camillo Boano • Dr Tejendra Pheralli

East African Refugee Camps as Learning Assemblages: The Built Environment as an Educational Resource for Encamped Young Children in the East African Rift In 2018, 1.5 million people were hosted in sixty-six long-term refugee camps located along the East African Rift. Many have existed for decades, and their humanitarian assistance is dwindling due to new pressing emergencies elsewhere. Simultaneously, since 2011, Early Childhood Education (ECD) has gained relevance in humanitarian assistance programming, which has resulted in funding for centralised ECD facilities. My research investigates the relationship between the built environment of these longterm refugee camps and young children’s learning. The work has a fourfold aim: to test architecture as a tool to produce novel data about the camps that includes local voices; to understand to what extent encamped children learn from the spaces they inhabit; to understand which actors create and modify such spaces; and, finally, to explore architectural strategies for improving the camps’ learning environments. Using a multi-method qualitative approach including architectural, ethnographic, and Participatory Action Research methods, I mapped and examined the built environment of seven long-term refugee camps in Southwest Uganda, Northwest Kenya, and Rwanda. I collected and analysed the perceptions of children,

parents, caregivers, and NGO members regarding the camps’ built environments as a learning source and co-developed, with refugees and architecture students, design speculations for two Rwandan camps. My findings demonstrate three main conclusions. Firstly, that the whole built environment of a camp is a learning source and its classification into formal, non-formal, and informal learning environments can guide more effective refugee education policies. Secondly, that informal learning environments are paramount for young children and are primarily (re)produced by refugees. However, these environments are unaccounted for in refugee education policies and in refugee camp planning and maintenance programs. And, finally, that architecture and design are useful tools for including long-marginalised voices in knowledge production cycles and for improving the camps’ learning environments.

Recent Graduates

Dr Nerea Amorós Elorduy

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Jane Rendell • Dr Claire Thomson

Ten Windows Following Christian Norberg-Schulz: Framing, Mobility, and Self-reflection Explored through the Fenestral Essay Film This thesis investigates the window in the life and work of Christian NorbergSchulz, aiming at finding new nuances and ambiguities within his existing oeuvre, and questioning my own position as a ‘follower’ of Norberg-Schulz. Taking the window as both literal and figurative, I ask in what ways the window can become a tool for investigating Norberg-Schulz’s concept of mobility and his theory of place through the fenestral essay film – specifically through mobility, framing, and self-reflection. Norberg-Schulz’s theory of genius loci – the spirit of the place – has been widely discussed and critiqued (Loevland et al., 2009; Otero-Pailos, 2010; Wilken, 2013). Yet, no one has yet looked at the role of the windows in his life and work, and specifically in his theory of genius loci: which is surprising because he describes the window as the place where ‘the genius loci is focused and “explained”’(Norberg-Schulz, 1980). I argue therefore that the window plays a vital role both in Norberg-Schulz’s life and work, particularly related to his reading of the work of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Through oral history, site visits, close readings of texts, archival research, filmmaking, and essay writing I follow

Norberg-Schulz’s window on a return journey between Norway and Italy. Building upon existing methodologies of Jane Rendell’s site-writing as a critical spatial practice (Rendell, 2010) combined with the genre of the essay film (Corrigan, 2011; Rascaroli, 2017) and architecture essay film (Haralambidou, 2016), I consider how the window features both literally and figuratively in a series of fenestral essay films which explore mobility, framing, and self-reflection conceptually, visually, and spatially. Introduced through an itinerary, and concluding with a framework and reflections, this thesis is located at the junction between film-making and architectural history, presented through 10 Windows, each one comprising an essay and a film.

Anna Ulrikke Andersen; The Window and I (Filmstill, 2015, HDV, 03:45)

Recent Graduates

Dr Anna Ulrikke Andersen

Supervisors: Professor Iain Borden â&#x20AC;˘ Professor Ben Campkin

Graffiti, Street Art, and the Right to the Surface: For a Semiotic, Cultural, and Legal Approach to Urban Surfaces and Inscriptions The vertical surfaces of cities are archives of urban identities and contested terrains of occupation and visibility. They provide a location for numerous signs, markings, and inscriptions, whose visual, material, and territorial dynamic is under permanent negotiation. This thesis takes as its subject this dynamic between urban surfaces and inscriptions in order to understand their spatial politics and their impact on urban cultures. The thesis focuses particularly on graffiti and street art as forms of surface inscriptions, and analyses their cultural, legal, and spatial development from New York in the 1970s to contemporary London. The thesis provides a critical reading of the nomenclature of these practices and their institutional appropriations by local administrations, the art market, and urban branding strategies. Graffiti and street art are discussed in relation to neoliberal urban governance agendas, between criminalisation, eradication, and commodification as part of the creative cities paradigm.

Methodologically, the thesis engages with close readings of urban surfaces, as well as the discourses that manage them. I propose surface semiotics as an original method to interpret inscriptions in-situ, which I use as a form of analytical visual method throughout the thesis. Approaches from art sociology, visual culture, and legal geography are also used to address concepts such as the image of the city, urban property regimes, and issues of access and control of urban spaces. This thesis contributes to research on street art, graffiti, and urban studies; and makes a foundational step towards establishing a field of surface studies. Based on a close analysis of city surfaces and inscriptions, the main argument of this project is that urban surfaces are spaces of collective political production and agency and are key sites for the exploration of urgent notions such as the right to the city and the urban commons.

Recent Graduates

Dr Sabina Andron The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Yeoryia Manolopoulou â&#x20AC;˘ Professor Camillo Boano

A Learning Architecture: Developing a Collective Design Pedagogy in Mumbai with Muktangan School Children and the Mariamma Nagar Community This research between the School of Architecture and Development Planning Unit investigates architecture (an activity and a setting) as an educator. It proposes a Collective Design Pedagogy, an idea for a socio-spatial learning practice that involves schoolchildren in the production of their city, to encourage multiple intelligences and develop practices of responsible citizenship. The project was situated in Mumbai, a global city in which the changing population and environment has created a need for more child-centred learning activities and a context for pedagogical innovation. In collaboration with the education NGO Muktangan, the research included a series of pedagogic urban experiments carried out between 2012 and 2017, investigating the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential to house active citizenship practices by children. Four yearly series of workshops were run with the same class of schoolchildren as part of an incremental, experiential, and reflective project to observe, assess, and then transform learning environments. Using activities borrowed from architectural practice, the children became involved in the transformation of their school and local neighbourhood, an informal settlement, by designing

generative and interrogative interventions. Combining critical pedagogical praxis and constructivist theory of education, the development of a collective design practice fused learning with the city. Facilitated by designers, children became active citizens through design and worked with local craft as a political design tool. The local informal settlement, home to the schoolchildren involved in the project, was also home to a large variety of craftspeople and makers. They identified wellbeing as the overarching itinerary for their design projects: They designed responses to problems such as open gutters, mosquitoes, fighting and bad language, lack of green spaces, and insufficient waste management. Drawing from these workshops, the research argues that childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role as architects is pedagogical: they can be involved in the production of their current environment, facilitate their political identity, and foster their ability to communicate ideas. Design allows children to develop empathy, think critically, and learn how to learn.

Recent Graduates

Dr Nicola Antaki The Bartlett School of Architecture

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser• Professor Sophia Psarra

Frameworks of Uncertainty: Architectural Strategies of Control and Change in the Work of Cedric Price and Arata Isozaki (1955–1978) This thesis argues that the creation of buildings with the potential of functional and physical change over time is inextricably linked to what can be labelled as ‘frameworks of uncertainty’ – i.e. those tools of architectural theory and design that predict, enable, and manage the accommodation of controlled changes. To this purpose, the differing contexts of British and Japanese post-war architecture, and more specifically the work of Cedric Price and Arata Isozaki, are investigated as instrumental in understanding this friction between fixity and freedom within architectural design. An interest in systems thinking and a performative conception of built form prompted Price to talk of ‘Calculated Uncertainty’, a phrase that conveys the paradox involved in any attempt to control loosely defined spaces. In Japan, this paradox was culturally longstanding due to a spatio-temporal conception of the built environment as an ever-changing entity. Isozaki, who today is mainly known in Western countries for his postmodernist buildings, in fact founded his first two decades of practice upon the application of cybernetics, interactive artistic/urban

performances, and a profound knowledge of traditional Japanese architecture. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first presents a situated architectural history of the 1960s and 1970s through the clarification of relevant terms in the English and Japanese languages such as flexibility, interaction, ma, and kaiwai. In the second part, Price and Isozaki are individually analysed within this context through their theories, design research, modes of representation, and built projects. The final part offers a critical discourse on ‘frameworks of uncertainty’ based upon a series of arguments extracted from the two case-studies. Thus, the thesis aims to provide a better understanding not only of Price’s and Isozaki’s influential work but also of those significant theoretical and design tools that attempt to balance control and change in today’s architectural practice.

A Typical Set of Lecture Notes Prepared by Cedric Price for a Lecture at the Art Net Gallery. (Cedric Price Archives, DR2004:1429)

Recent Graduates

Dr Marcela Aragüez

Supervisor: Professor Peg Rawes

Digital Architecture and Difference: A Theory of Ethical Transpositions towards Nomadic Embodiments in Digital Architecture This thesis contributes to histories and theories of digital architecture of the past two decades. It sets out to question the field’s novelty narrative – according to which, with the turn to algorithmicbased processes, architect-centred, formal methodologies have given way to generative, posthuman ones. In its place it suggests an alternative novelty theory, which reconceptualises the very notions of complexity, subjectivity and ethics in our algorithmic architectural realms. The following arguments are being unfolded: despite advocacy for a posthuman architectural era, humanism still drives our digital processes and, moreover, it drives our ontologies. It is this very humanism that hinders novelty and shackles digital architecture to neoliberal regimes of sameness. It is this habitual humanism that also prevents our theories and histories from accounting for this position. Lastly, developing a non-humanist, nomadic, embodied architect figuration is a condition for the unfolding of ethical digital practice. The work takes a nomadic methodology to bypass the neoliberal grip. It takes cartographing – across disciplines and times – in order to stir unrest and disrupt digital architecture lineages. Cartographing

undoes formal, axiomatic, and deterministic practices from parametricism and biodigital architecture and then re-relates them with forgotten pre/a-humanist and always affective mathematics and biologies that already underpin both practices. Drawing on Deleuze’s various mathematical mechanisms of differentiation – in his quest to free thought from representation and perception from cognition as a condition to novelty – and on Rosi Braidotti’s rigorous cartographic practices and nomadic theory of the subject, this PhD extends and develops a-subjective notions of perception and differentiation towards a multiple, yet situated, digital practice. Specifically, an ethical architectural (a)persona emerges, that of the digital artisan. The digital artisan expands our perception register to include the imperceptible; infra data, those marginalised zeros and ones that are overlooked in our still humanist digital design processes, towards ethical differentiation of our architectural realms.

Recent Graduates

Dr Tal Bar The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Jane Rendell • Professor Ben Campkin

Détour and Retour: Practices and Poetics of Salt as Narratives of Relation and Re-generation in Brixton

Drawing on the work of Martiniquan poet Édouard Glissant and his ‘poetics of Relation’ (1990), this practice-based PhD explores how salt features in relationships of migration and change in urban places, in particular the context of Brixton, an area of London with a strong migrant identity. Following Glissant’s notion of détour and retour, this thesis moves between geographical locations through a series of four narrative journeys from Brixton, outwards to South Africa, Eastern Europe, Portugal, and Haiti, returning each time to Brixton as a ‘homeplace’. Each chapter is arranged as a détour and retour, developing a practice and poetics of salt that offers a productive reading of Brixton’s current regeneration. The thesis explores salt’s use in offering forms of protection, preservation, and reawakening through re-enacting rituals found in everyday and religious practices from across different diasporas. It engages with auto-ethnographic research into my family history and Jewish cultural customs around salt, as well as engage with others’ stories and salt products that link to specific places through migration. Using practices that performatively engage with the materiality of salt, the research builds

on work by artists including Robert Smithson and Sigalit Landau. Overall, this thesis argues that practices and poetics of salt can be linked to processes of migration and regeneration. The thesis shows how salt practices can be used to understand the particular poetics of salt, and how salt acts as an index in artworks that point to ideas of migration and diaspora. These material and poetic qualities of salt make it a rich vehicle for alternative approaches to regeneration, particularly in sites such as Brixton. The thesis argues for a re-negotiation of the language of regeneration of these sites, instead proposing a ‘poetics of re-generation’ through a re-reading of Glissant’s terms of détour and retour, as well as his poetics of Relation.

Katy Beinart; Saltworks, 2013

Recent Graduates

Dr Katy Beinart The Bartlett School of Architecture

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors : Professor Stephen Gage • Professor Camillo Boano

Re-construction and Record: Exploring Alternatives for Heritage Areas after Earthquakes in Chile

Reconstruction is the ultimate type of intervention a building can experience, usually contested in the context of built heritage. Records and available remains are used as a way to settle debates around it, primarily associated with monuments, leaving aside other types of heritage such as housing in historical areas. When disasters happen regularly – for example earthquakes – reconstruction processes also occur periodically and are unquestioned, due to the necessity to recover the dwelling space for the affected families. I use the case of Chile as a laboratory since earthquakes occur regularly. Even though changes in regulations have led to safer behaviour of buildings in earthquakes, especially in urban areas, built heritage has been significantly affected, mainly because of the age of the buildings, lack of maintenance, poor regulations, accumulated damage, and overall neglect. The pressure for quick reconstruction has led to a superficial understanding of heritage by offering solutions that ‘look like’ the previous houses, but without using actual records; and without considering other important aspects of their historical value, such as building techniques and human occupation.

As a methodology, I surveyed three heritage areas in Chile – San Lorenzo de Tarapacá, Zúñiga, and Lolol – throughout different periods using 3D laser scanning, complemented by photography and interviews. From this, I explore the potential role of accurate records in what is considered heritage and its reconstruction, understanding the capacity of such technologies to be a virtual database for memory, preservation, demolition, intervention, or replica. I also propose a series of alternatives based on using 3D laser scanning as a continuous practice of recording, as a post-earthquake assessment tool, and as a basis for design, which act as a trigger for speculation and questioning over the nature of rebuilding. With this research, I intend to contribute to a much-needed debate in Chile with further implications for other changing historical environments.

Recent Graduates

Dr Bernadette Devilat

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Iain Borden • Professor Michael Stewart

A Phenomenology of Skateboarding in Seoul, South Korea: Experiential and Filmic Observations

My PhD research proposes a phenomenology of skateboarding in Seoul, South Korea. Through a written ethnography and two research films, I point towards my precarious yet alluring encounters with a small group of Seoulbased skaters and their admirable hopes, encouraging desires, uttered worries, emphatic muscular sensations, and delicate everyday praxes and practices. My study treasures interdisciplinary incentives and audiences so as to make room for affective approximations of and responses to a thin spectrum of the everyday, in all of its lived, sociocultural, political, rhythmic, sensory, filmic, and spatiotemporal dimensions.

The research film Reverberations (2017) traces the contours of and temporalities moving through three skateparks in Seoul, positing a filmic contradistinction to the existing corpus of skateboard videography and literature by punctuating stillness and tranquillity. VCR (2017) complicates the relation between technology and lived experience. By amplifying the mediumspecificity of Mini DV tapes and an aesthetic of spectacle, this film recalibrates the images and soundscapes that are at the heart of Seoul’s skateboard videography.

Recent Graduates

Dr Sander Hölsgens

Supervisors: Professor Marjan Colletti • Professor Jonathan Hill

Reviving the Muqarnas in Damascus : A Historical Architectural Form in a Contemporary Discourse

This research provides a study of traditional muqarnas – three-dimensional patterns that usually occupy domes, half-domes, and vaults – and re-envisions these Islamic architectural forms in a contemporary setting in Damascus. The thesis endeavours to revive an old craft using new technologies and techniques. The thesis first examines the origins of muqarnas: their geometrical and architectural definitions; their various styles; the reasons why they were created; how they were inclusive of different religions, sects, and ethnicities; and how they became functional in the way that they responded to the local environment, the culture, and social setting. It then documents the development and decline of muqarnas in Damascus during different epochs. An enquiry into the total disregard of Islamic heritage in architecture and urban spaces in Damascus in the early twentieth century reveals how muqarnas, together with other traditional features of the Old City, were abandoned. The Old City was left to decay, and it was not until the 1990s that its previously abandoned vernacular dwellings again became popular when they were remodelled to function as restaurants and boutique hotels. The renovation of

Old Damascene houses highlighted the aesthetic features of those historical spaces. This research attempts to revive muqarnas and re-interpret them within existing vaults and domes in hammams (public bathhouses). Focusing on digital computational tools and techniques, it discusses the possibilities provided by advanced technologies to imagine them within a contemporary discourse. Inspired by the skills of Damascene craftsmen and ancient manuscripts devoted to the craft, it attempts to design and fabricate contemporary muqarnas that differ from traditional forms in that they form selfstanding double-curvature vaults with larger spans, that respond to the environment and allow light to enter. These contemporary muqarnas might serve architecture in the Old City both aesthetically and functionally.

Recent Graduates

Dr Nahed Jawad The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Barbara Penner • Professor Iain Borden

Peace-process Infrastructure: Constructing Landscapes in-between Irelands

Over the course of thirty years ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland led to the rupturing of physical sites from people’s everyday environment. In a post-‘Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’ era, this thesis considers the construction of common ground and the space of encounter as an instrument in peace-making. The research investigates how both the physical and the imagined landscape work together to form what the thesis calls ‘peace-process infrastructure’: landscapes that bolster a peace-process by being re-appropriated for civilian purposes and knit back into their surroundings. The practice strand of this study uses movement as a tactic by choosing a series of traverses that were not possible to undertake as a civilian during the conflict: Divis Mountain next to Belfast City which changed hands from military zone to nature reserve; the now navigable ShannonErne Waterway; and the borderline hills between Ireland/European Union and Northern Ireland/United Kingdom where the watchtowers once stood. The garnered film footage works as testimony to a fragile peace-process, which in turn becomes an active archive that generates text. Specific tools that were used at each

site to overcome topographical distance – limelight, lock, and lens – are deployed once more to make what is considered remote and out of touch, close and tangible. At its heart, this project builds a multitiered rendering of particular landscapes – drawing on Hannah Arendt and Edmund Burke, amongst other political, landscape, and feminism theorists – but it is motivated by the larger desire to contribute to worldwide discussion about peace-process situations from a spatial perspective. People’s reactions to the constructed encounter in the world around them are a direct consequence to the architectural systems that command our surroundings. Landscapes hold potential to deconstruct toxic territorial organisation leading to creative production – this work creates a cultural milieu about the peace process that gathers strength for its advancement.

Recent Graduates

Dr Irene Kelly The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Peg Rawes • Professor Murray Fraser

An Urban Ecology of Seoul’s Nanjido Landfill Park

This thesis examines the Nanjido region in Seoul, the site’s transformation from Nanjido Landfill (1978–1992) to the World Cup Park (2002–present) and its relation to the urban ecology within the context of the city’s urban development during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The empirical field work on Nanjido’s post-landfill park constitutes the structure of the research, and the study analyses the urban ecological meanings of the site’s two distinct forms by consolidating them with key theories: the Lefebvrian urban theory developed by Andy Merrifield; the relational ecological theory of Félix Guattari; and Lorraine Code’s epistemological approach to ecology. Throughout the thesis, Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of waste in a global era – originally drawn from Mary Douglas’s discourse on purity-dirt – provides the essential ground. The research, consisting of five chapters, explores how a set of relational environmental and social ecological factors constituted the governing power’s sanitary management of Nanjido Landfill and Landfill Park and, thus, in reverse, determined the site’s urban ecology. First, the study examines Nanjido’s environmental transformations in association with South

Korea’s shifting political and economic situations. Second, it delineates how Seoul City had controlled wasted populations and the sanitary environment by means of DDT during its urbanisation processes. Third, it investigates the inhabited landfill of Nanjido and illuminates the borderline characteristics of the landfill habitat. Fourth, it examines the regeneration of the landfill into the Landfill Park within globalised environmentalist discourses. Fifth, it analyses site-specific works of art, which made disruptive attempts to explore the conflict between the historical presence of the landfill’s garbage and the Korean society’s attempt to obscure that past. As the first account of a landfill and landfill-turned-park of South Korea, this study demonstrates that the modern norm of sanitisation is still applied to urban re/development.

Morning Cleaning in Downtown Seoul. 1964 © Seoul Museum of History

Recent Graduates

Dr Jeong Hye Kim The Bartlett School of Architecture

UCL Medical School Institute for Women’s Health Supervisors: Professor Stephen Gage • Professor Anne David • Professor Barbara Penner

Surgical Environments and Medical Technologies

The birth of modern surgery in Western medicine began in the 1800s with the introduction of pain control, aseptic and antiseptic methods, and an understanding of the human anatomy. By the 1920s antibodies, x-ray imaging, and aesthetic machines were in use. These inventions dramatically changed how patients were diagnosed and treated for disease, injuries, and deformities. The first dedicated room for surgery in England was built in 1822 at St Thomas’ Hospital. Based on the American Ether Dome model, the room had a centrally located wooden butcher’s table surrounded with tiered benching creating a performance space. The modern operating room design developed in the early 1950s. In 1948 the National Health Service was set up in the UK to provide free healthcare to people. At the same time the Ministry of Health commissioned a survey of the healthcare facilities in the UK which paved the way for the new Hospital Building Program in the 1960s. At this time, pioneering research into the design and development of hospital planning was done by the government Hospital Building Division and the Nuffield Provincial Hospital Trust. Led by architects William Tatton-Brown,

Richard Llewelyn-Davies, and John Weeks, the concepts of indeterminate architecture, long life-loose fit, and standardisation of one size fits all were developed. This resulted in a series of systemised approaches to hospital design such as: Nucleus and Best-Buy; the development of the District General Hospital; and a series of Department of Health guidelines, known as the Health Building Notes (HBN). Over the last fifty years the developments in surgery, radiology, and medical technology have progressed at a rapid pace. Current techniques using interventional radiology and robotic assisted surgery are radically changing surgical services. Yet the operating suite remains as it was laid out in the 1950s. This research investigates the developments of surgical specialism and medical technologies and questions the spatial design of an operating environment.

Hina Lad; Spatial Activity Mapping of Specialist Surgical Procedure Using Dual Robotic Assisted System

Recent Graduates

Dr Hina Lad The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser • Professor Peg Rawes

Exhibition and Cognition: Gottfried Semper’s Strolls in the Crystal Palace

This doctoral thesis examines the theoretical and practical work of the German architect Gottfried Semper during the Great Exhibition of 1851, and discusses how his work came to be influenced by imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. The celebrated event in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park coincided with Semper’s growing interest in the four essential crafts (weaving, pottery, carpentry, masonry) that he believed formed the basis from which architecture had originated. To this end, the Great Exhibition furnished Semper’s theoretical endeavours with a plethora of material objects he could study from all around the world. The thesis first analyses and partly reconstructs Semper’s own designs for some national sections within the Crystal Palace. It then follows the walks through the exhibition that Semper undertook with his friend – Lothar Bucher – as a means to look at the ethnographic material they encountered. Behind all of Semper’s reflections upon the displayed objects was a concept of cultural development rooted in German Idealist thought, Semper’s observations also instigated a profound critique of contemporary modes of production in industrialised societies. The thesis

therefore shows how Semper redirects anthropological ideas about object fetishism in earlier societies towards an analysis of the world of capitalist commodities and their representations. In this regard, the thesis sketches out a shift in Semper’s thought from a critique of religion to a critique of capitalism, with similarities to another German émigré in London at the time, Karl Marx. Yet, in the end Semper refrained from Marxist theory and instead carried out investigations into the production of artistic objects. Accordingly, the thesis discusses Semper’s plan for an ideal museum which he hoped could overcome the crisis of production and representation within capitalism by looking for universal principles of design.

‘Canada’ in Dikinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of The Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Dickinson Brothers, 1852), p. 71.

Recent Graduates

Dr Claudio Leoni The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser • Professor Adrian Lahoud • Professor Camillo Boano

Acts of Spatial Violation: Constructing the Political inside the Palestinian Refugee Camp

Palestinian refugee camps have been thoroughly established in scholarly work as sites of exceptional political practice (Agamben, Agier, Khalili, Hanafi). While this existing scholarship establishes an intellectual basis for this argument, a spatial understanding of how the camps operate the political exception of spatially maintaining a protracted displacement they reside within remains missing. My PhD research directly tackles the politics of architecture and spatial practices – exercised by both the refugees and their host governments – inside two specific Palestinian refugee camps, one each in Jordan and Lebanon. Ambitious fieldwork and critical mapping of the spatial chronology in each camp has been conducted throughout the PhD process. The fieldwork also included spatial interventions which directly addressed the factors and decisions that shaped the Palestinian camp beginning from what I term, the relief-scale – a defined 96–100 m2 rectangle, being the UN’s official standard for individual housing plots within the camps, and the first comprehensive spatial layout the camps underwent – tracing its transformation over 71 years of protracted displacement into a scale

which transgresses the 100m2 plot boundary, stripping the camp from its relief scale and re-appropriating it as a truly Palestinian one. It is in this, beyond the 100 m2, where I claim the political resides in the camp as form, scale, and practice, which is termed in Arabic as ta’addi (encroach, exceed, violate), and which I reinterpret here as spatial violation. My thesis aims to unravel the impact of host-government policies on the physical form of these camps, examining in particular the issues of control and vulnerability. Furthermore, it proposes an alternative method for analysing these Palestinian camp-spaces based on spatial mappings and suggests new tools for designing and creating the spatial interventions necessary for enhancing the self-determination of refugees and the potential of their camp-spaces to offer resistance.

Recent Graduates

Dr Samar Maqusi The Bartlett School of Architecture

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Dr Penelope Haralambidou • Professor Jonathan Hill

Architecture of the ‘Half-Real’: Exploring the Videogame as a New Medium for Architectural Expression

Millions regularly dive into the virtual worlds of videogames, exploring fictional spaces through controllers and screens. They occupy worlds structured by both rules and fiction, ‘half-real’ according to games theorist Jesper Juul. This thesis draws from Juul’s definition to explore the reciprocal relationship between architecture and videogame worlds. By framing games as a meeting point between both computational and visual arts culture, which I term ‘ironic computation’, I establish a methodology for examining games that reframes previous studies into the effects of pop culture on architecture. The thesis explores game spaces in three ways, firstly by using traditional architectural tools of analysis such as drawings, models, cartographic studies, and critical writing to elucidate their logics by ‘distancing’ myself from the videogame form. This culminates in ‘Learning from Los Santos’, a chapter studying Los Santos—the city backdrop to Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013) – through a variety of techniques. In the second stage of the thesis I move into designing videogames, exploring how their aesthetic form can communicate architecture differently from other media. I focus on the London Developers Toolkit,

my satirical architectural game based around London’s housing crisis, examining how the game is designed to communicate architectural messages to users playing it. The final stage of the thesis applies game principles into speculative architectural projects using real sites and programmes. Tokyo IRTBBC is an urban design project for an emergency ‘backup’ Tokyo that draws from the logics of Japanese arcade ‘medal game’ cabinets. Here I question how the interplay between computation and symbolism that is key to the videogame form might integrate with smart technologies to create a playful public realm. Following these design projects, I conclude that videogame technologies will not only offer new representational tools for architects, but also constitute new ways of realising architecture that enmesh rules and representation into virtual, inhabitable environments.

Recent Graduates

Dr Luke Caspar Pearson

The Bartlett School of Architecture Supervisors: Professor Jane Rendell • Professor Sophia Psarra

Fictional World Enactments, Curating The Real and Other Fictions at Lisbon Architecture Triennial, 2013

This thesis explores through fiction how curatorial practice can critically assess the actual world and enact alternative possibilities, through the formulation of spatial constructions composed of physical scenarios and programmes of use collectively imagined and performed. The research examines and reflects upon my own curatorial practice in the exhibition The Real and Other Fictions (2013), comprising the project element of this practice-led thesis. The term ‘fictional world enactments’ is developed in relation to literary theories of fiction, particularly those concerning the construction of fictional worlds, known as ‘possible worlds theories’ (Doležel, Eco, Maître, Ryan). The thesis asks how fictional worlds can be constructed by human minds and hands (Doležel, 1988), and what role curators, designers, users, and visitors of architectural exhibitions play in the making of worlds other than the actual. In bringing theories from literature into the field of architectural design and curation, I seek both to re-conceptualise the curation of architecture through fiction, but also to critically re-evaluate how fiction operates as an aspect of literary theory.

This thesis proposes that one role of fiction in the curation of architecture is as a tool for social transformation. This understanding is conveyed in the formulation of a theoretical framework resulting from the intersections of three conceptual maps: the critical (Dunne and Raby, Rendell), the imaginative (Appadurai), and the utopic (Marin). Overlaying these maps, the thesis aims to theorize a curatorial practice informed by what I call a ‘radical hospitality policy’, one that embraces use and participation in collective enactments of fictional worlds. These ‘fictional world enactments’ take their point of departure from the material presented at the exhibition, The Real and Other Fictions, and the thesis takes the six-room spatial organisation of the exhibition as its structure.

Paulo Moreira and Kiluanji Kia Henda; The Nation Room: Embassy of No Land (For The Real and Other Fictions, 2013).

Recent Graduates

Dr Mariana Pestana

Supervisors: Professor Jane Rendell • Professor Peg Rawes

In, Out, and Again: Reading and Drawing John Soane’s Lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1817 and 1820) In 1817 and 1820, John Soane delivered six popular lectures on architecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI) in London. These lectures occurred halfway through the architect’s more famous and previously studied lectures, given at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) between 1809–1836. This research shows how Soane’s RI lectures – which have been almost completely neglected and never academically studied by other scholars – reveal a new side of the existing known story of this important British architect’s lecturing practice; shifted from their existing interpretation as a form of textual knowledge (Watkin, 2000, 1996; Bolton, 1929), into a completely new, early nineteenth-century performance and performative discipline. Through study of lecture manuscripts and large lecture drawings, new empirical evidence is uncovered about the Soane office’s practical, performance-related processes and material culture of lecturing architecture. This evidence is read for Soane’s performance practice in relation to the broader oral and performance culture of literary lectures, scientific demonstration and rhetoric from the same period.

An important part of this work has been to intensely explore the implications and significance of turning to theatre and performance history and theory (Jones 2007; Roach, 1996; Schneider, 2009, 2014) to practise architectural history and to read design practices from the past. What does this epistemological and methodological context offer for accessing and engaging with new dimensions of the history and for activating, reading and writing the evidence in new ways? With reference to existing work in the field (Bonnevier, 2007; Grillner, 2012; Hammond, 2012; Rendell, 2010), I also make the case for architectural history itself as a contemporary practice (Rendell, 1996) that is performative. The structure of the thesis, which combines the terms ‘reading’ and ‘drawing’, with ‘in’, ‘out’, ‘and again’, becomes a way to compare different actions of reading evidence (directly, contextually, and repeatedly) and to facilitate and demonstrate to the reader further reflections on architectural historiographical process. Detail of RI lecture manuscript (2017). [Soane Museum Archives, Soane Case 157, Lecture 2, Royal Institution Lectures (1817), p. 37. Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.] Photograph by Sophie Read

Recent Graduates

Dr Sophie Read The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Neil Spiller • Professor Jonathan Hill • Professor Ranulph Glanville

An Architectural Project: Essays in (Re)Construction Some Reflections on Creating Room for Projecting within the Contradictions of Architectural Practice The research investigates the construction of an architectural project, both the intellectual framework for projecting, and the processes of production. This construction is explored through design research and epistemological enquiry to test ways of working that might enable an approach to a problematic discipline. By working across and between a mixture of sceptical, pragmatic, and post-structuralist positions, the opportunities for responding to this problematic situation are considered as an ongoing process of questioning. Architecture has an inherently problematic relationship with its foundations, which, when considered in a broader context of a general relativity of cultural production, leaves the discipline exposed. The construction of an architectural project becomes incapable of defining a ground, whilst forever seeking a ground within which a product might be founded. The research responds to this predicament with two thematic preoccupations. Firstly, by developing an understanding of the unstable foundations through a questioning of the preconceptions and parameters of a project. This begins with a sceptical position as the basis for enquiry, investigates the crisis

and terms of the construction, and elaborates on contradictions which are revealed through this enquiry. Secondly, by developing an approach to ways of working within this predicament and creating room for architecture. This explores the use of a fiction as a reconstructed ground, develops contingent methods for designing within this fiction, and proposes strategies for projection which paradoxically both require construction and the dissolution of construction to project (or reconstruct). Through these thematic preoccupations the work ‘essays’ as an ongoing questioning within the contradictions of the construction. Projecting that acknowledges the futility in any resolution but suggests potential in a relocation of the emphasis away from the object of architecture and towards processes for architecture. The research reflects on these questions, and the reframing of them by design.

Situated projections of dissolving Palladian construction, 30 Great Burlington Street

Recent Graduates

Dr Felix Robbins The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser • Professor Jonathan Hill • Dr François Guesnet

(Post-)Jewish Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern European Shtetls

This thesis confronts the ‘present absence’ of former shtetls, the predominantly Jewish towns that were dotted throughout Eastern Europe before the Second World War, afterwards repopulated by people of other nationalities. Bridging from theory to practice, and from engagement in the actual terrain of Poland through to spectral lost Jewish communities, the work offers an interdisciplinary fusion between architectural design research and Jewish studies. As an application of open, fluid, experimental design research, the originality of this study comes from its embrace of creative possibilities to bring fresh insights to the seemingly intractable social issues presented today by these former shtetls; a situation made worse by the politicised atmosphere created by the authoritarian turn within Polish politics and recurring anti-Semitism. The thesis (inspired by the graphic layout of the classic Jewish Talmud) adopts a polyphonic structure to give space for the projects to unfold – sometimes by means of images, other times through texts. The use of a Talmudic format also facilitates dialogue with my associates, fellow travellers, the people with whom I spoke face-to-face with in Poland, and others

whom I have never met and will never meet, whose voices or faces I know only from memory books or archival records. Emphasising the role of creative intuition, I therefore address through a range of ‘nomadic’ projects the processes of architectural disappearance, urban remembrance, and functional change in the context of dramatic social upheaval. In alliance with other enthusiasts, NGOs, and institutions, my projects span from subtle mirror-clad interventions – the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and HurdyGurdy – through to renovation schemes that turn derelict synagogues and Jewish preburial houses into historical museums and cultural centres. My projects are intended as positive contributions that avoid direct confrontation, which I find politically unproductive in addressing the complexities of former shtetls.

Recent Graduates

Dr Natalia Romik The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Philip Steadman • Dr Penelope Haralambidou

Drawing Out the Interior: Thinking through Drawing

in·te·ri·or·ism, noun. Philosophy: a theory that truth is discovered by introspection rather than by examination of the outside world.

the slippery relationship between the interior and interiority, that is to say between the physical and the perceived, I borrow Josef Albers method of ‘thinking in situations’ that he used to explore relativity in colour. Thus, I observed, drew, studied, and analysed three case study interiors; namely Sigmund Freud’s study and consulting room, the Censors’ Room – a seventeenth-century panelled room in Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians – and the first cinema auditorium in Britain. Each of these interiors can be understood as a prototype for a new interior typology, each was designed to offer a specific atmosphere or effect, and each was capable of re-location while retaining function. The thesis draws out the three case studies from an interior sensibility. Interdisciplinary by nature, the work refers to a range of fields beyond architecture including: object biography, social history, film theory, and visual culture, as well as story-telling, narrative environments, and scenography.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English, 2019 An architect by background, my thesis concerns the role of drawing as an investigative tool in the construction of interior space. While acknowledging the relationship to architecture, that there can be no inside without an outside and vice versa, my objective is to establish the viability of interiors as a discipline in its own right – one that can offer an interior-specific knowledge base – as well as looking to identify what that knowledge base might be. I began with the premise that interior space is object-based, i.e. constructed in material form, yet at the same time concerned with the effect of that object on a subject. My investigations are framed through psychoanalysis, in particular Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘Objektvorstellung’ or object representation. In order to pin down

Recent Graduates

Dr Ro Spankie The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Iain Borden â&#x20AC;˘ Dr Tania Sengupta

Opaque Architectures: Spatial Practices of African Migrant Markets (1990â&#x20AC;&#x201C;present)

My dissertation explored the spatial practices of African migrant markets in post-apartheid Cape Town. The research is framed by the fields of everyday architectures and subaltern studies; and argues that while the former field has expanded the understanding of architecture by recognising the ordinary spaces of everyday life, the latter field offers a critical reading in relation to marginal populations and contested sites. As a whole the thesis therefore suggests that beyond understanding these markets as everyday architectures, they should be understood as minor or marginal architectures, where their subordinate position is understood as a relative and contingent construct. Drawing on the dual framework of everyday architectures and subaltern studies, the research shows how these marginal architectures are rendered opaque as a result of spatial and political processes within the city, country, and continent. This framework enables a recognition of the inventive micro-spatial practices of the markets, while simultaneously pointing to the broader context within which these markets are situated. The primary research methods employed

are a combination of ethnographic research, interviews, observations, and drawings. The dissertation is structured according to decreasing spatial scales from the spatial stories and spatial practices found in the acts of border crossing, to public spaces, home making and unmaking, and crossborder trading. Through these practices and spaces, they point to questions of national belonging, infrastructures, migration, gender, and race as having spatial, material, and embodied expressions. The conceptual framing of the markets enables a view of these spaces beyond a topographical reading as sites of informality, deprivation, and poverty, to understand the complexity of the spatial and material processes which underpin these sites.

Recent Graduates

Dr Huda Tayob The Bartlett School of Architecture

Conference Participants’ Biographies

William Victor Camilleri is an architectural

at the Institute for Sustainable Heritage,

designer, artist, maker, and Teaching Fellow at

The Bartlett, UCL.

The Bartlett School of Architecture. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and

Danielle Hewitt studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths

Civil Engineering from the University of Malta,

College and Architectural History at The Bartlett

practiced in Switzerland, and subsequently

School of Architecture, UCL. She is a Lecturer in

attained a Masters in Architectural Design from

Critical and Contextual Studies at the Cass (LMU)

The Bartlett, UCL, where he is currently pursuing

where she has taught on programmes across

a doctoral degree. William Victor’s research and

architecture, design, and fine art. She is a PhD

expertise in and around digital manufacturing

candidate at The Bartlett where her research

and film – frequently originating from the

is supported by the Society of Architectural

contentious idea of natural splendour – has

Historians of Great Britain through a scholarship

been featured in publications and exhibited

funded by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation.

in venues such as Ars Electronica (Austria)

Kieran Mahon is Senior Lecturer at University

and the Vitra Design Museum (Germany).

of the Arts London and PhD candidate in

Amr El-Husseiny holds a BArch and an MSc

Architectural History and Theory at The Bartlett

in History and Theories of Architecture from

School of Architecture, UCL. His teaching

the Department of Architecture at Cairo

interests lie between architectural history,

University and has been a Teaching Assistant

spatial writing practice, and collaborative,

and an Assistant Lecturer at the university

multidisciplinary curriculum design. His PhD

since 2012. Primarily a full-time educator

research, which was supported by an SAHGB

and researcher in architecture, Amr has also

scholarship in 2017, investigates how histories

contributed through part-time and private

of progressive education, pedagogy, and

practice in local and international architectural

architecture can shape how we think about

design projects. His fields of interest include

teaching and learning in the present. He holds

photography, architectural design pedagogy,

degrees in History and Architectural History

and urban heritage, motivated by the notions

from Queen Mary University of London and UCL.

of identification and representation. Amr is an Egyptian scholar, currently carrying out his PhD

Shneel Malik is an architect and an

Annarita Papeschi is a practising architect

interdisciplinary bio-design researcher. She is

(ARB, RIBA) and an educator, with a Laurea in

currently a design tutor and PhD candidate at

Architettura (UniFi, Florence, 2003) and a MArch

the Bio-Integrated Design (Bio-ID) Lab at The

in Architecture and Urbanism (AA, London,

Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her research

2007). She was previously a Lead Architect at

work, based at the intersection of architecture

Zaha Hadid Architects and co-founded in 2013

and biochemical engineering, explores the

FLOW Architecture. Working at the intersection of

potentials of designing and fabricating large-

architecture and urban research, FLOW explores

scale photosynthetic membranes from water-

the radical potential of ubiquitous technologies

based biological materials. Her research work

to develop collectively crafted experiences and

has been exhibited internationally, including at

spaces. Annarita is also currently a Design Tutor

the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the London Design

at the London School of Architecture and a

Festival, and the BioTallinn Biennale in Estonia.

History and Theory Tutor at The Bartlett School

She has also recently won an international design

of Architecture, within the BPro Urban Design

competition, ‘Water Futures’, organised by

MArch program.

A/D/O, BMW, Mini.

Saptarshi Sanyal is an educator in Hamish Muir studied civil engineering and

architecture, its histories and visual storytelling,

history of art. In both degrees he developed

currently on research leave from School of

a research interest in the intersection between

Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where he

theatre and environmentalism. Hamish has

is full-time Assistant Professor of Architecture

worked in the commercial and public art

since 2013. Since 2019 he teaches at history and

industry in London and Edinburgh. He is also a

theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture. He

self-taught artist and creative writer; producing

has contributed through tutorials and workshops

plays, film, short fiction, set designs, paintings,

in over twenty institutes in India, publishing

and comic art. In 2017 he founded Arctic Lion,

internationally on architectural knowledge

an arts lab that produces radio plays and

systems, history and theory, and modern

articles about art and the environment.

heritage. As part of the Archaeological Survey of India (2010–13) he was involved in heritage

Aisling O’Carroll is a registered landscape

conservation and management in over fifteen

architect, trained in both architecture and

states in India. An independent photographer his

landscape architecture. Her work addresses

work has been exhibited both across India and

the relationship between history, narrative,

internationally. His present research (2018–21) is

and representation in landscape, architecture,

funded by the UK government’s Commonwealth

geology, and hybrids of the three; examining,

Scholarship Commission.

in particular, critical approaches to reconstruction as design. She has previously

Amy Spencer is a historian in the Survey

taught design studios at Harvard Graduate

of London, part of The Bartlett School of

School of Design and The Bartlett School of

Architecture. Amy studied English Literature

Architecture, and has practiced internationally

at Durham University and History of Art at

in architecture and landscape architecture.

the Courtauld Institute of Art. Since joining

Her work has been funded by Harvard University,

the Survey in 2015, Amy has researched the

the Canada Council for the Arts, the Danish Arts

Royal London Hospital for the forthcoming

Foundation, the Landscape Research Group,

Whitechapel volumes, and assisted with

and UCL, among others. She is co-founder and

preparing the next volume on Oxford Street for

co-editor in chief of The Site Magazine.

publication this spring. The focus of her doctoral research is the architectural history of University

College London and its teaching hospital

DC, the Milano Triennale. Justinien is currently

between 1825 and 1939. The study will contribute

a PhD candidate at The Bartlett, UCL, where

to a future Survey of London monograph.

he is also a tutor in urban studies.

Lina Sun is a PhD Candidate at The Bartlett

Maria Catalina Venegas Raba is a Colombian-born and London-based architectural historian and curator working with photography, film, text-based performances, and publications to address questions of how we access the past. In her practice she investigates the complexities of memory, fact and fiction, the possibilities of tracing absences, and imagining the past. She is currently a PhD candidate exploring modernist architecture, focusing on the overlooked case of Colombian modernist architectural history and its spaces of mediation. Her research sits at the intersection between the printed matter and the built environment, considering their roles in shaping architectural cultures in the midtwentieth century, and draws on questions of the circulation, power relations, and legitimation of architectural knowledges.

School of Architecture where she conducts her research on Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s architectural modernity entangled with the Westâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s influence and Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s building traditions. Lina was trained as an architect and architectural historian at Tianjin University China. Afterwards she worked as a research and teaching assistant at Tianjin University, where she participated in government-funded research projects working on traditional buildings and engaged in several conservation projects for architectural heritage in China. Lina has interdisciplinary research experience in archaeology. She has publications in journals and conferences both in Chinese and English.

Justinien Tribillon is a researcher, writer, editor, and curator. Justinien co-founded and is an editor of Migrant Journal, a six-issue publication looking at migration in all its forms and its impact on space. He is Associate Director for Europe at Theatrum Mundi, and has written for The Guardian or MONU among others. He is regularly invited to give talks, recently at Tate Britain in London, Proyector gallery in Mexico

Recent Graduates’ Biographies

Dr Nerea Amorós Elorduy is an architect with

Biennale, Oslo School of Architecture and

extensive experience in education and health

Design, University of San Juan, Piloto University

architecture, urban informality, and forced

Colombia, the 2017 Essay Film Festival, and

migration. She has taught architecture at the

Harvard Film Archive, amongst others. Funded

University of Rwanda (2011–2014), co-founded

by Viken Filmsenter she was a 2018/2019

ASA Studio based in Kigali which coordinated

Fellow at Harvard Film Study Center.

the construction of over thiry educational and health facilities (2012–2014), and recently

Dr Sabina Andron is a London-based

founded the design collaborative Creative

architectural historian and urban scholar. Her

Assemblages based in Kampala. Her PhD

research interests focus on the right to the city,

research (2015–2018) focused on the impact

urban surface inscriptions and materialities,

of the built environment on the education of

crime and transgression, and urban semiotics.

young children living in long-term refugee camps

She currently lectures across London, on

in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. Her academic

modules which include the history of London

and professional work has been recognized

architecture, the history of the home and interior

internationally with publications, exhibitions,

design, neoliberal urbanism and city cultures,

and awards.

and graffiti, spatial justice, and the right to the city. She was a UCL Grand Challenges grantee,

Dr Anna Ulrikke Andersen is a Norwegian

organiser of the international Graffiti Sessions

filmmaker and architectural historian, and a

conference in 2014, and was a British Council

post-doctoral researcher at the Disobedient

fellow at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Buildings Project at the University of Oxford.

in 2016. https://sabinaandron.com/

Her work has focused on the way essay filmmaking could be used as a method in

Dr Nicola Antaki is an architect working

architectural history, discussing themes such as

between London and Mumbai, combining

windows, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and more

education and design practices to develop

recently chronic illness. Her work has been

collective design approaches. After studying

published in journals such as Architectural

at the Royal College of Art, Nicola worked at

Research Quarterly and Informa Journal,

Cottrell & Vermeulen Architecture, where she

and presented at 2014 Venice Architecture

developed participatory practices of design

for learning spaces, taught architecture at the

architecture at The Bartlett and Oxford Brookes.

University of Nottingham, and worked at We

Many of her artistic projects are grounded in

Made That as project architect. Between 2011

socially engaged practice and she has recently

and 2018 she lived and worked in Mumbai,

been awarded funding from the University of

developing participatory practices with local

Brighton, where she lectures in architecture and

makers. She formed Collective Design Practice

spatial practice, for a research project on the

that explores involving people in the production

spaces of social practice.

of space and activating their right to the city through interdisciplinary means.

Dr Bernadette Devilat is a practising

www.nicolaantaki.com

architect and Master in Architecture from the Catholic University of Chile. She holds a

Dr Marcela Aragüez is Adjunct Professor at

PhD in Architectural Design from the Bartlett

IE University, Research Fellow at the Lucerne

School of Architecture, UCL, where she leads

University of Applied Sciences, and editor of

BScan teaching 3D laser scanning workshops.

InForma. She holds a MArch from the University

Bernadette is the co-founder of the Tarapacá

of Granada and a PhD in Architectural History

Project, created after the 2005 earthquake in

& Theory from The Bartlett, UCL. Marcela is

Chile; and DLA Scan, an architectural studio

currently coordinating the joint research project

focused on the critical understanding of built

‘The Culture of Water’ with the Kyoto Institute of

environment recording technologies, such

Technology in Japan. She has lectured widely

as 3D laser scanning and photography. Her

in Europe and Japan, and her work has been

research interests include their application for

acknowledged by grants and awards from

heritage intervention and reconstruction after

institutions such as the Japan Foundation and

earthquakes in Chilean heritage areas. Her

the Sasakawa Foundation. She is a licensed

design and research work has received several

practitioner with professional experience

awards and has been exhibited internationally.

in Spain and Switzerland.

www.devilat-lanuza.com

Dr Tal Bar has recently completed her PhD

Dr Sander Hölsgens is a filmmaker who recently

research at The Bartlett School of Architecture.

finished his PhD research on skateboarding in

Her work explores an expansion of digital

South Korea. He now works at the University

architecture practices along embodied

of Groningen as a postdoctoral researcher,

and nomadic paths, to allow for an ethical

researching documentary film and activism. He

reconceptualisation of the field by inserting

co-founded Pushing Boarders to create better

it with post-human subject positions. She is

relationships between academia, skate charities,

in process of publishing her thesis as a book.

and the skate industry. Sander is currently

Tal holds an MA in Histories and Theories of

working on a documentary about Candy Jacobs

Architecture from The Architectural Association

and curates the film festival Field Recordings in

School of Architecture, London.

Rotterdam.

Dr Katy Beinart is an artist and academic. Her

Dr Nahed Jawad moved to London from her

research and practice explore links between

home in Damascus in 2006, where she worked

material culture, migration and diaspora,

at Zaha Hadid Architects for four years; gained

memory, identity, and place. She has exhibited

a Masters degree in Architecture and Urbanism

internationally and created public realm

from the Architectural Association School of

projects for a range of private and public clients.

Architecture in 2010; taught at the Bartlett

She completed her practice-based PhD at the

School of Architecture; attended countless

Bartlett in 2019, having originally trained in

critiquing sessions, whether at The Bartlett,

University of Westminster or London South Bank

complex tertiary care hospitals and specialist

University. Nahed has been a Visiting Lecturer

centres. The PhD, titled ‘Surgical Environments

at the UAL since 2014, and in 2019 has been

and Medical Technologies’, was funded by

awarded the PhD in Architecture from The

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research

Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Nahed now

Council, and supported by Llewelyn Davies

runs her own architectural practice in London,

Weeks Architects. Hina was awarded the

Nahed Jawad Architects.

PhD in February 2018.

Dr Irene Kelly is a practising architect (RIAI/

Dr Claudio Leoni studied urban planning

RIBA), researcher, and educator, who gained

and subsequently obtained a BA in art history,

her first class BArch at University College

musicology, and philosophy from the University

Dublin, Ireland. She has worked both in public

of Zurich. He then graduated with an MA in

and private practice in Paris and Dublin and

architectural history from The Bartlett, where

has taught in South Africa. As a Fulbright

he recently finished his PhD on the German

Scholar, she subsequently obtained a MSc in

architect Gottfried Semper’s practical

Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia

involvement and theoretical deliberations on

University, New York, where she was also

the Great Exhibition of 1851. He currently holds

appointed as a teaching assistant. She holds a

a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Federal

PhD in Architectural Design and History from The

Institute of Technology ETH Zurich.

Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, funded by the EPSRC. On returning to Dublin, she currently

Dr Samar Maqusi is a postdoctoral researcher

works both with Public Works and teaches in

at Department of Civil, Environmental &

University College Dublin.

Geomatic Engineering, UCL, working with the RELIEF centre. She is an architect and urban

Dr Jeong Hye Kim is currently visiting professor

specialist with over eleven years of experience

of Seoul National University of Science and

in international development, including urban

Technology with a primary research focus

design and development in conflict areas. In

on architectural design and art in urban

2008, Samar moved to Jordan to work with the

settings. Her research interests include the

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)

political and socio-economic relationships

for Palestine Refugees in the Near East where

within urban environments, post-traumatic

she held the post of Architect/Physical Planner.

historical spaces, sense of place[less]ness, and

Samar completed her PhD at The Bartlett

ecological equilibrium. She signed a contract

School of Architecture in London. She is also

with Taylor & Francis for the publishing of her

involved in documentary filmmaking and spatial

PhD thesis monograph. Translations include Hal

installations and has exhibited her photography

Foster’s The Art-Architecture Complex (Verso,

in the United States. http://samarmaqusi.com/

2011/2013) and Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s Adhocism (MIT Press, expanded and

Dr Luke Caspar Pearson is a Lecturer

updated edition 2013/2016).

in Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he is also Co-Director

Dr Hina Lad is a practicing British architect and

of the BSc Architecture programme. He is the

researcher, specialised in the design, medical

co-founder of the design research practice

planning, and delivery of healthcare facilities

You+Pea with Sandra Youkhana. Together

internationally. Hina has worked in the UK,

they run the Videogame Urbanism lab at The

Middle East, Russia, United States, and Australia.

Bartlett where their research operates at the

Her PhD research draws from twenty years of

intersection of architecture and game design.

experience and knowledge in designing large

You+Pea have exhibited commissioned game-

based works at venues including Now Play

Dr Felix Robbins is a qualified architect with

This 2018, the Victoria and Albert Museum,

extensive experience of practice and speculative

and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

research. Felix gained a Diploma in Architectural

Luke has written for publications such as eflux

Design from the Bartlett, UCL in 2002, an MArch

Architecture, FRAME, Thresholds, The Journal

in 2003, and qualified professionally in 2006.

of Architectural Education, and ARQ and is co-

Felix has worked for dECOi architects in Paris

editor of Architectural Design: Re-Imagining the

and oceanD in London developing innovative

Avant-Garde (Wiley, 2019) and Drawing Futures

approaches to digital design practice. From

(UCL Press, 2016).

2006–2013 Felix worked at Make, delivering large-scale commercial and urban regeneration

Dr Mariana Pestana is an architect and

projects. In 2018–19 he completed his PhD by

curator interested in critical social practice and

Design supervised by Neil Spiller and the late

the role of fiction in design for an age marked

Ranulph Glanville. Felix established a-project in

by technological progress and an ecological

December 2013 to explore new ways of working

crisis. She co-founded the collective The

and producing architecture.

Decorators, an interdisciplinary practice that makes collaborative public realm interventions

Dr Natalia Romik is an architect, designer,

and cultural programmes. Previously Mariana

and artist. She has a degree in political science

worked as a curator at the Department of

and, in 2018, was awarded a PhD at The Bartlett

Architecture Design and Digital at the V&A

School of Architecture for her thesis Post-Jewish

Museum and lectured at Central Saint Martins,

Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern

Chelsea College of Arts, and Royal College of Art.

European Shtetls. Natalia has been awarded

She co-curated The Future Starts Here at the V&A

numerous grants, including the London Arts and

(2018) and Eco Visionaries: Art and Architecture

Humanities Partnership and the Scholarship of

After the Anthropocene at MAAT (2018).

the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland. From 2007 to 2014, she collaborated

Dr Sophie Read is an interdisciplinary historian

with the Nizio Design studio, co-authored of

and artist whose research addresses objects

the revitalization of a synagogue in Chmielnik,

and practices at the intersection between

and served as consultant for several exhibition

architectural and performance history. She was

designs, including at the POLIN Museum.

trained in the practice of drawing at Camberwell

Natalia is a member of the SENNA architecture

School of Art, before studying architectural

collective, responsible for designs including the

history at The Bartlett. She is a Teaching Fellow

exhibition at the Museum of Jews in Upper Silesia

at The Bartlett and completed her doctorate

in Gliwice. In Warsaw in 2018 she co-curated the

in 2017. Her most recent research is published

exhibition Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath.

in collections by Routledge (‘Overpainting that

She is currently completing a postdoctoral

Jostles’, Stevanović and Read, 2018) and Lund

fellowship funded by the Gerta Henkel Stiftung.

Humphries (‘Limits of Drawing’, Forty and Read, 2019). Sophie is fascinated by the significance

Dr Ro Spankie is Principal Lecturer and Course

that approaching historical enquiry through the

Leader for BA Interior Architecture at the

eyes of the practitioner, makes to the questions

University of Westminster. She is Associate Editor

one asks, the evidence that one in turn notices

of the journal: Interiors: Design, Architecture,

and uncovers, and the ways in which the history

Culture (Taylor & Francis). Recent publications

can be accessed, written, imaged

include An Anecdotal Guide to Sigmund Freud’s

and communicated.

Desk (Freud Museum, London, 2015, 2017, 2019) and ‘Revisiting Sigmund Freud’s Diagrams of the Mind’ in Social Analysis, The International Journal

of Anthropology special issue entitled Working with Diagrams (2019). She is currently curating Travelling Companions, an exhibition of the work of artists Judy Goldhill and Fay Ballard at the ARB Building, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Spring 2020.

Dr Huda Tayob is currently a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. She completed a PhD at The Bartlett in 2018. Her research interests include a focus on minor and subaltern architectures, race and architecture, the politics of invisibility, and the potential of literature to respond to archival silences in architectural research. Her recent publications include ‘Subaltern Architectures: Can Drawing “tell” a different story?’ (Architecture and Culture, 2018), ‘Architectureby-migrants: The Porous Infrastructures of Bellville’ (Anthropology Southern Africa, 2019) and the open-access curriculum designed with Suzanne Hall, ‘Race, Space and Architecture’ (LSE, 2019).

Credits

MPhil/PhD supervisors:

Dr Tania Sengupta (Bartlett), Professor Bob

Professor Nadia Luisa Berthouze (UCL

Sheil (Bartlett), Professor Mark Smout (Bartlett),

Interaction Centre), Professor Peter Bishop

Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology and

(Bartlett), Professor Camillo Boano (Bartlett),

Language Sciences), Professor Neil Spiller,

Professor Iain Borden (Bartlett), Professor

Professor Michael Stewart (UCL Anthropology),

Victor Buchli (UCL Anthropology), Professor

Dr Nina Vollenbröker (Bartlett), Dr Robin

Ben Campkin (Bartlett), Professor Mario Carpo

Wilson (Bartlett).

(Bartlett), Professor Nat Chard (Bartlett), Professor Marjan Colletti (Bartlett), Professor

MPhil/PhD Architectural Design Students

Clare Colomb (Bartlett), Professor Marc-

Abdullah Al-Dabbous, Ava Aghakouchak, Lena

Olivier Coppens (UCL Chemical Engineering),

Asai, Paul Bavister, Richard Beckett, Olivier

Professor Marcos Cruz (Bartlett), Dr Edward

Bellflamme, Giulio Brugnaro, Matthew Butcher,

Denison (Bartlett), Dr Simon Donger (Royal

William Victor Camilleri, Niccolo Casas, Ines

Central School of Speech and Drama), Professor

Dantas Ribeiro Bernardes, Ting Ding, Killian

Adrian Forty (Bartlett), Professor Murray Fraser

Doherty, Daniyal Farhani, Judit Ferencz, Pavlos

(Bartlett), Professor Stephen Gage (Bartlett),

Fereos, Fernando P. Ferreira, Susan Fitzgerald,

Professor Jeremy Gilbert (University of East

Naomi Gibson, Isabel Gutierrez Sanchez, Felix

London), Dr Ruairi Glynn (Bartlett), Dr François

Graf, Colin Herperger, Danielle Hewitt, Bill

Guesnet (UCL Department of Hebrew and

Hodgson, Christiana Ioannou, Nina Jotanovic,

Jewish Studies), Peter Guillery (Bartlett), Dr Sean

Paul King, Dionysia Kypraiou, Ifigeneia Liangi,

Hanna (Bartlett), Dr Penelope Haralambidou

Rebecca Loewen, Elin Eyborg Lund, Shneel

(Bartlett), Professor Neil Heyde (Royal Academy

Malik, Emma Kate Matthews, Hamish Muir, Chi

of Music), Professor Jonathan Hill (Bartlett),

Nguyen, Phuong-Trâm Nguyen, Aisling O’Carroll,

Dr Jan Kattein (Bartlett), Professor Susanne

Annarita Papeschi, Thomas Pearce, Arthur Prior,

Kuechler (UCL Anthropology), Dr Guan Lee

Zoe Quick, Sarah Riviere, Sayan Sakandarajah,

(Bartlett), Dr Chris Leung (Bartlett), Dr Jerome

Alexandru Senciuc, Ramandeep Shergill, Wiltrud

Lewis (UCL Anthropology), Professor CJ Lim

Simbuerger, Eva Sopeoglou, Johan Steenberg,

(Bartlett), Professor Yeoryia Manolopoulou

Dimitrie Stefanescu, Quynh Vantu, Cindy Walters,

(Bartlett), Professor Timothy Mathews (UCL

Anna Wild, Daniel Wilkinson, Henrietta Williams,

French Department), Dr Clare Melhuish (UCL

Seda Zirek, Fiona Zisch.

Urban Lab), Professor Mark Miodownik (UCL Mechanical Engineering), Professor Raf Orlowski (Bartlett), Professor Sebastian Ourselin (UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing), Dr Brenda Parker (UCL Biochemical Engineering), Professor Alan Penn (Bartlett), Professor Barbara Penner (Bartlett), Professor Sophia Psarra (Bartlett), Dr Caroline Rabourdin (Bartlett), Professor Peg Rawes (Bartlett), Professor Jane Rendell (Bartlett), Dr Stephanie Schwartz (UCL History of Art), Harriet Richardson (Bartlett),

MPhil/PhD History & Theory Students

This catalogue has been produced in an edition

Vasileios Aronidis, Ruth Bernatek, Sebastian

of 500 to accompany PhD Research Projects 2020,

Buser, Thomas Callan, Paola Camasso, Chin-Wei

the fourteenth annual conference and exhibition

Chang, Mollie Claypool, Miranda Critchley,

devoted to doctoral research at The Bartlett School

Kerri Culhane, Sevcan Ercan, Pol Esteve,

of Architecture, UCL, Tuesday, 18 February 2020.

Stephanie Fell, Clemency Gibbs, Nadia Gobova, Sheng-Yang Huang, Thomas Keeley,

Edited by Nina Vollenbröker,

Marc Levinson, Kieran Mahon, Ana Mayoral

Aisling O’Carroll and Tom Keeley.

Moratilla, Carlo Menon, Soledad Perez

Martinez, Ana Mayoral Moratilla, Matthew

Printed in England by Pureprint Ltd.

Poulter, Anthony Presland, Diana Paola Salazar Morales, Saptarshi Sanyal, Amy Spencer, Lina

Sun, Alessandro Toti, Claire Tunnacliffe, Maria

of Architecture, UCL.

Catalina Venegas Raba, Adam Walls, Azadeh Zaferani, Katerina Zaharopoulou.

Submitted and/or completed doctorates 2019

or by any means, electronic or mechanic, including

Yota Adilenidou, Maria Luísa Silva Alpalhão,

and retrieval system without permission in writing

Bihter Almac, Nicola Antaki, Gregorio

from the publisher.

Astengo, Hina Lad, Thandiwe Loewenson,

ucl.ac.uk/architecture

photocopy, recording, or any information storage

Ruairi Glynn, Christos Papastergiou and Merijn Royaards.

PhD Research Projects 2020 is supported by The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL.

PhD Research Projects Conference and Exhibition 2019

William Victor Camilleri Amr El-husseiny Danielle Hewitt Kieran Mahon Shneel Malik Hamish Muir Aisling O’Carroll Annarita Papeschi Maria Catalina Venegas Raba Saptarshi Sanyal Amy Spencer Lina Sun Justinien Tribillon

Cover: William Victor Camilleri; Object VI: The Gardener’s War and the Seed’s Renunciation of Nature (Photograph by Frederik Petersen)