The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster would like to announce the launch of two grant funded research projects:

Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo

Professor Susannah Hagan

Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo is supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). The British Council is an institutional partner providing support for the different review stages of the project in both countries.

Monsoon Assemblages

Professor Lindsay Bremner

Monsoon Assemblages has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679873).

* Abstracts ***

Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo

Principle Investigator – Prof Susannah Hagan

Research Associates – Dann Jessen (architect), Dr Neal Shasore

Public Spaces and the Role of the Architect: a comparative study of influential modernist and contemporary examples in London and São Paulo (PS) is a three-year research project in partnership with members of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. It takes advantage of the complex and often spectacular legacy of architectural modernism in both cities as a way of reflecting historically on contemporary public spaces, and on the changing role of the architect in their production. In a context of growing demand for greater democratic authorship and ownership of the public realm, the project examines the role of design, and asks whether designers need a better understanding of what public space means, and whether present procurement processes deliver the highest quality public spaces. If public space is co-constituted, then attention needs to be paid to spaces as well as publics.

Monsoon Assemblages

Principle Investogator – Prof Lindsay Bremner

Research Fellows – Dr. Beth Cullen, Dr. Michele Vianello

Monsoon Assemblages is a five-year interdisciplinary research project running from 2016 to 2021. It is investigating the impacts of changing monsoon climates in three of South Asia’s rapidly growing cities, Chennai, Delhi and Dhaka. This will be undertaken at a time when climate change and urban development conspire to produce unlikely futures for urban survival. Extreme weather events, all attributed to the monsoon’s capricious nature, are resulting with increasing frequency in water shortages, power failures, floods, out-breaks of disease, damage to property and loss of life. In responding to these events, the project challenges the dominant view of the monsoon as a natural meteorological system distinct from society. Instead it proposes that the monsoon is a co-production of physical and social dynamics entangled within historic lived environments that can be analyzed, worked with, shaped and changed. To do so, an interdisciplinary team bringing together the spatial design disciplines with the environmental humanities has been assembled to develop a novel research methodology around the operative concept of Monsoon Assemblages. This aims to produce knowledge of and design strategies for urban environments as more-than-human, monsoonal ecological systems that operate across multiple scales and through media that are indivisibly natural, social, political and technological.

Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo

Professor Susannah Hagan

Monsoon Assemblages

Professor Lindsay Bremner

*********************** Abstracts *************************

Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo

Principle Investigator – Prof Susannah Hagan

Research Associates – Dann Jessen (architect), Dr Neal Shasore

Monsoon Assemblages

Principle Investogator – Prof Lindsay Bremner

Research Fellows – Dr. Beth Cullen, Dr. Michele Vianello

* Abstracts ***

Faculty of Architecture & Built Environment Event, Westminster University