Monday, September 21, 2009

Short European Tour


I'll be making a couple of public appearances in the next month or so. First up, I'm speaking at this, a symposium on the suburbs, initially at University College London and then later at the Royal Academy of Arts. I will be talking specifically about the role of suburbia in sit-coms, with some observations about The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin chucked in. I have posted about Perrin before on this site so the talk is likely to be a reprise of some of the ideas in that together with some new and improved observations.

I'll be in Nuremberg on October 23rd to speak at the Architecture without Architecture symposium at the splendid sounding Academy of Fine Arts too. I'm hoping to talk about DIY and various other kinds of non-high architecture at this including, quite possibly, the recent climate camp on Blackheath (very well described here). In a funny sort of way, climate camp was an alternative, temporary suburb - particularly given its choice of location - a (somewhat) politicised version of Archigram's Instant Cities, which always had an element of the suburban street party about them.

Issues of social organisation, ad-hoc-ism and non-architecture (or non-urbanism) run through these otherwise disparate themes which I might try and join up here at some point.

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