With sustainability gaining ground in every area of contemporary life, Design Week has taken a look at the leading campaigners for Green design, all of whom are striving to embed its core principles whenever and wherever they can and our very own Anne Chick has been recognised as being one of the leading practitioners of those championing the sustainable cause.
Postgraduate students from the School of Surveying and Planning attended a Masters Conference where. as part of the assessment for their courses, they delivered presentations to External Assessors and members of the surveying profession. The Masters Conference took place at the headquarters of RIBA (The Royal Institute of British Architects).
Architects’ Journal reviews the School of Architecture and Landscape’s degree show:
It’s the singular subject of the Kingston University School of Architecture and Landscape student exhibition, entitled One/Off, that makes visiting this show so compelling. When Daniel Rosbottom was named head of school last year, he made the decision to have every architecture unit spend at least part of term studying and making proposals for the London borough of Croydon, with a focus on regenerating this unloved ‘city within a city’.
Croydon – notoriously bisected by roads, blighted by ubiquitous multi-storey car parks and shopping malls, and plagued by two recessions that each scuppered imminent plans for its renewal – has plenty of sites on offer for students to study.
And study they have done – from rethinking the use of the local Quaker Hall as an art gallery (second-year student Patricia Assuncao Do Rosario, Studio 2.4), to transforming its multi-storey car parks into lidos (second-year student Hadas Even-Tzur, Studio 2.2), to proposing a row of terraced infill housing which steps up gradually in scale, from the height of a house to the height of the nearby towers (Elena Licci, third-year student, Studio 3.2).
The result is a show with unified purpose, confidence and real weight. It’s also opened the doors of the school to a whole new community. At the exhibition opening, several residents of Croydon popped in to have a look at the students’ proposals – including a contingent of Croydon Quakers, who sought out the second-year students from Unit 4’s work as inspiration regarding the future use of their Quaker Hall.
The exhibition also shows a marked emphasis on making and craft – some of the models on view are exquisite, from Diploma Unit 1 student Charles Szczech’s meticulous plaster casts of the Bank of England and Borromini’s dome to first year student James Taylor’s model of Eames house (Studio 1.3).
Photographs from Demanding Attention are also on view, an exhibition in the style of Thomas Demand which depicts life-like paper models, reviewed in the AJ earlier this year (AJ 11.12.08).
Not having visited Kingston’s show last year, I’m not able to compare this year’s work to its previous offerings. That said, this year’s exhibition was well worth the train journey and reveals an architecture school in excellent health.
Unified, confident and weighty, Kingston packs a refined punch
Christine Murray is deputy editor of the Architects’ Journal
BA Graphic Design won two commendations and two pencils at the prestigious D&AD International Student Awards on 2 July 2009. Please see below for a list of the winners and their work:
Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth — both BA Graphic Design students — won a pencil (second prize) in the open brief 2 category: See their work. Tom Carey, Grace Coughlan and Tara Woolnough — all BA Graphic Design students — won a pencil (second prize) in the interactive installations category: See their work. Ella Collinge, Joanna Harrison and Zoe Barrett — all BA Graphic Design students– won a commendation in the interactive installations category:
See their work.
Lewis Woolner, Elliott Mariess, Laura Bowman, Jamie Breach — all BA Graphic Design students — and Ashley Maine from BA Graphics and Photography, won a commendation in the what else do you do category: See their work.
Bodegas Protos winery project in the Ribera del Duero region of Spain was shortlisted for the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize 2009. The lead director of this project was Senior Director of Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, Graham Stirk. Graduating from Kingston in 1985, Graham joined the practice in 1983 and became a senior director in 1995. Although the Bodegas Protos winery project did not win the Stirling Prize, it did go to Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners for Maggie’s Centre, the first British instalment in a series of new buildings dedicated to Maggie Keswick Jencks. Her idea was to create a humane space for cancer patients that was apart from the hospital. The lead director of this project was Ivan Harbour.
The School of Art and Design’s Anne Massey appears on Glamour’s Golden Age, BBC4 9-10 giving her expert advice on Art Deco design and architecture. Also on the programme was Kingston University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor Penny Sparke.
The programme was reviewed by the Independent’s TV critic Brian Viner 20 October:
“Anyway, from intelligent, original drama to intelligent, original documentary: Monday evenings are suddenly a counterblast to the oft-heard lament that there’s simply nothing on the telly worth watching, and I haven’t even started on Sir David Attenborough yet. The first programme of another three-parter, Glamour’s Golden Age, was fascinating, with nicely scripted and perfectly delivered narration from Hermione Norris, whose very name could be a throwback to a more stylish era. If the Prince of Wales’s set in 1933 didn’t include a Lady Hermione Norris, it really should have done.
The thesis of the series is that glamour’s golden age was the period between the wars. The Jarrow marchers might have taken some convincing of this, although even they were touched by the democratisation of glamour, exemplified by Art Deco picture palaces.
Last night’s programme focused on architecture and design, and was enhanced by just the right number of talking heads, all of them making eloquent and pertinent contributions, which is not always the case. One of the heads even suggested that the notion of “streamlining”, an offshoot of Art Deco and increasingly evident through the 1930s in buildings, furniture, planes, trains and automobiles, was eventually applied to the human body itself. The theory went that the eugenics movement, founded in Britain but embraced most wholeheartedly in the United States, and essentially adopted as a creed by the Nazis, represented an attempt to streamline humanity. It was provocative stuff, connecting Busby Berkeley to Adolf Hitler. And apparently the perfect product of 1930s streamlining was the Spitfire, although by the time the Spitfire enjoyed its finest hour, Art Deco was discredited as a decadent, failing architecture. I hope I’ve got that right. If I haven’t, it’s not for the want of trying. In 20-odd years as a TV reviewer, I’ve never scribbled quite so many notes.”
Kingston’s School of Communication graduate Fleur Watson is the Managing Curator of the current State of Design Festival running this month in Melbourne.This cultural festival is now a landmark on the Australian design map with over 100 events planned for July. Fleur is a graduate of one of FADA’s flagship courses, MA Curating Contemporary Design and has established herself as one of Australia’s emerging new design curators. Fleur’s more personal project within the Melbourne Festival is entitled ‘After Dark’ – an interactive late night discussion club held at the Aesop headquarters in Melbourne. After Dark also includes a purpose-built installation produced out of 1.6km of yellow trace by March Studio in collaboration with curatorial practice ‘somethingtogether’.
Jake Abrams, Principal Lecturer in Illustration has been named Kingston University’s Teacher of the Year. Staff and students described Jake as ‘an exceptional teacher who continues to inspire and innovate’; ‘the best teacher I have ever met’; someone who ‘gives his students the feeling that he really cares for them.’ A postgraduate student said Jake dragged his students ‘out of the comfortable cosy corner of your current work and off into new and uncharted territory’. Jake first arrived at Kingston as a student more than 20 years ago, later returning as a tutor. He teaches the renowned BA Illustration & Animation, is active in bringing publishers and arts organisations to the University, and is a strong advocate of event-based learning. This work has seen recent collaborations with the London Symphonietta Orchestra, the Science Museum and GlaxoSmithKline.
The photographs collected within the book, Pioneer, are by the first cohort of students on the new BA Photography coruse at Kingston University. If ‘their tracks can be traced’ as Flusser suggests, the photographs that form the main body of the book reflect very varying positions and intentions, but are united as a collection by the fact that they are all taken by pioneers of a new course and at pretty much the same moment, which is half-way through their degree – one and a half years into the life of the course. The character of this course has been shaped in response to the specific interests and enthusiasms of the students, and is reflected in the selection of the visiting lecturer corps and the development of specific theoretical, contextual and technical photography teaching programmes.
