Writing Buildings (Canterbury, 14-17 Jul 16)

 

Canterbury, UK, July 14 – 17, 2016
Registration deadline: Jun 30, 2016

Registration has now opened for the Writing Buildings conference at the University of Kent, 14th-16th July 2016:
Only 100 places will be available at this extraordinary interdisciplinary event. The full programme is below.
– Iain Sinclair will be the opening speaker at our conference on Thursday 15th July

– Oliver Wainwright (The Guardian), Shumi Bose (co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale), Rob Wilson (former editor of Uncube), and Catherine Slessor, architectural critic and journalist, will speak at an event earlier the same evening chaired by Tom Wilkinson, history editor of the Architectural Review

– On the afternoon of Thursday 15th, we will hold a special showing of Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark at the Curzon Cinema in Canterbury and afterwards hold our first panel session.

– Jonathan Meades will close our conference on the evening of Saturday 16th July with a discussion on his work on architecture, chaired by Tom Wilkinson.

– Our keynote speakers Matthew Beaumont, Ian Dungavell, Alexandra Harris, Ben Campkin and Barbara Penner have all confirmed their attendance.

Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Catherine Richardson and Tom Wilkinson, directors Christina Chatzipoulka, conference administrator

Enquiries to: WritingBuildings@kent.ac.uk
PROGRAMME (subject, as always, to any unavoidable last minute
changes)
Thursday 14th July
14.00: Film screening at the Curzon Cinema, Canterbury: Russian Ark
16:00-17.30: Session

Buildings and Film:
– Veronique Proteau. Russian Ark: A walk through Sokurov’s historical consciousness in the Hermitage
– Semra Horuz and Godze Sarlak. More than one ‘traveled’ for: Mobility experiences within Istanbul.
– Ben Liat Savin Shoshan. Brutalism in Israeli cinema in the 1960s
– Adam Nadolny. Modern architecture of the 1960s recorded in the film image as an element of creation of the architectural culture in Poland

18:00-19:00: Digital Architecture: with Oliver Wainwright, Shumi Bose and Catherine Slessor. On the University Campus in the Grimond Building
19.00: Iain Sinclair (keynote speaker).
Friday 15th July
10.00 – 12.00: Parallel sessions
1: The Recreation of Lost Spaces
– Charlotte Berry. Domestic buildings and domestic space in the records of fifteenth-century London
– Iuliana Gavril. Architectural criticism before an ‘era of criticism’: ‘The Voice’ Byzantine
– Sheila Sweetinburgh. ‘Going to visit’: An imaginary tour of Sir Peter Buck’s house in seventeenth-century Rochester
– Alan Wadsworth. Writing farm buildings: Preservation through archives
2: Writing by Practitioners
– Otto Saumarez Smith. Modernism in an Old Country: Lionel Brett as architect author
– Jon Wood. The story from within
– Xiang Ren. A right to write: Textual practice of buildings by a carpenter-architect and a barefoot-architect
– Gillian Lambert. The messy bits of architecture

3: The Experience of the User
– Matt Demers. Contestation and extension: ANT analysis of Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh
– Claire Dwyer; Nazneen Ahmed; Stephen Foley; David Gilbert. Inventing a space for faith: experiments from West London
– Raúl Martínez. A space-time glance at Gaudi’s Palau Güell: Diagrams of architectural experience
– Edwina Attlee. Writing reading: articulating value

12.00: Matthew Beaumont, UCL: keynote address.
13.00: Lunch break
14.00 – 16.00: Parallel Sessions
4: Photography and Buildings
– Michael Abrahamson. ‘From Latourette to Neiman Marcus’: On the disuse of images in architectural criticism
– Ashley Mason. A coincidental plot: absent/present
– Andy Lock. Writing buildings through and in response to photography : history and affect in autoethnographic responses to the architectural legacy of modern-movement churches by Gratton and McLean and Gillespie, Kidd and Coia.
5: Professional Critiques of Architecture
– Philip Allin. Visual and textual clues to the architecture crisis: A metacritical analysis of Dutch architectural journals, 1966-2008.
– Gabriele Neri. When satire meets architecture
– Hans Ibelings. The marriage of building & writing
6: Spaces of Writing
– Henriette Steiner. H.C. ANDERSEN WAS (not) HERE
– Carolin Vogel. Letters from a Poet’s House: Rediscovering a forgotten place
– Lauren Elkin. Insider/outsider modernism: women ‘write’ the Parisian maison
17.00: Ian Dungavell, former director.
18.00: Alexandra Harris, University of Liverpool: keynote address.
19.00: Conference dinner (to be confirmed)
Saturday 16th July
10.00 – 12.00: Parallel sessions

7: The Traveller
– Adler, Gerry. ‘Wien schreiben – Writing Vienna’
– Martin Beattie. Temple tours and Daddie: The letters and architectural writings of John Stapylton Grey Pemberton from Sri Lanka and India
– Emma Cheatle. Architecture, lying-in and literature: writing maternal building histories
– Elena Chestnova. Architectural History and the Travelogue: Semper’s history writing and the ‘manners and customs’ genre.

8: Literary Representations
– Sandra Al-Saleh. Disappearances: Literary reactions to Kuwait’s built environment in the twentieth century
– Esen Kara. The right to the city and the transnational American novel: LA riots and beyond
– Jessica Kelly; Jason Finch. Voices from inside: Alternative perspectives and narratives of slum clearance in 1930s East London.
– Angeliki Sioli. The bleeding Palace: a literary depiction of Hermitage over time
9: Site and Survey
– Simon Bradley. Writing architecture: Pevsner and the Buildings of England
– Samantha Martin-McAuliffe. Stone watching, wall gazing: architectural stories from the field
– Julian Williams. Reconceptualising the estate
– Alison Charles. Circumventing the invisible: Tracing the untold story of the ‘Dutch houses’ of east Kent
12.00: Ben Campkin, Urban Lab, UCL: keynote address.
13.00: Lunch break
14.00 – 16.00: Parallel sessions
10: Stones
– Ross Anderson. On writings about the drawing out of stone: German late gothic Werkmeisterbücher and Baumeisterbücher in dialogue
– Marina A. L. Mengali. The medieval invisible town: external wooden structures, balconies and footbridges of the stone façades in central Italy between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
– Owen Hopkins. The afterlives of architecture

11: Performance
– Rosa Ainley. From experiment to application in Writing Alexandra Palace: Plurivocity as a method of cultural recovery of buildings
– Ed Frith; Caroline Salem. Dancing about architecture is like writing about music
– Peter Koch Gelshøj.  Composing buildings: Sonorous cathedrals, castles and chaos
– Conor McCafferty. Writing the sound of the city: Analysing crowdsourced writing from urban sound maps

12: Creative Responses
– Alex Selenitsch. Writing new spaces
– Nora Wendl. Pages Have a Limiting Finality: The Poetry of Dr. Edith Farnsworth
– Hila Zaban. Once upon a time in Jerusalem: Real-data and real-fiction in the story of the former Palestinian Baka neighbourhood in Jerusalem
17.00: Barbara Penner, UCL: keynote address.
18.00: A discussion with Jonathan Meades, writer and Film Maker.