Think critically, design differently
‘Critical Subjects: Architecture & Design Winter School’: Organised by mantownhuman, 17/18 November 2010 Alastair Donald | 23 December 2010 Last month, 26 eager young architecture students from cities across England, Scotland and Wales converged on central London, only to find themselves held in a windowless, basement for 24 hours, where they were engaged in eight consecutive hours of discussion; kept up all night;...
No-one Needs Architecture (or “Knowing Foucault”)
Austin Williams | 2 December 2010 Cidade da Cultura de Galicia is one of the largest projects of Peter Eisenman’s career. Conceived as an opportunistic attempt to attract cultural tourism and gratuitously to capitalise on the Bilbao effect, Eisenman has created what he calls a “magic mountain”, a 150,000m2 citadel, to express “the culture of Galicia, Spain, Europe, Latin America and the World”. Six new buildings have been cut into the...
Taming the Gods
‘Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents’ by Ian Buruma; Princeton University Press, 2010. 142pp Reviewed by Steve Nash | October 2010 Author of the acclaimed ‘Murder in Amsterdam’ an account of the murder of Theo van Gogh, Ian Buruma has followed this up with an attempt to investigate one of the central conundrums of the modern world. What is needed apart from freedom of speech and the right to vote to...
ESSAY: ‘The Big Society’ (or ‘Compulsory Voluntarism’)
Austin Williams | 24 July 2010 | Muslim Institute Summer Conference, Cardiff The Big Society is being promoted as the flagship government policy even though no-one seems to have the first idea what it means. Commentator, Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian has described it as ‘incomprehensibly vague’. Government minister, Francis Maude is quoted as saying that it is “an idea, not a plan” (ref 1); while...
A Return to Critical Thinking
Austin Williams | 7 May 2010 This November will see the inaugural Winter School in London, organised by Mantownhuman to promote critical thinking and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake in architectural education. Here, one of the School’s founders, Austin Williams, explains the inspiration behind the event. Over the last 10 years or so, higher education has come to be seen as a mere route to a job, rather than a worthy thing...
Driving the world to destruction?
‘Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability’ by Daniel Spurling and Deborah Gordon, Oxford University Press, 2010. 322pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 10 April 2010 Musing about Easter Island, Jared Diamond famously asked “what were they thinking when they chopped down the last tree?” Diamond’s polemical book “Collapse”, written five years ago (but based on a 1995 article), argues against the unthinking exploitation...
The mantownhuman debates
Challenging the Orthodoxies 1: ‘Architecture & Climate Change’, 25 March 2010 Reportback by Austin Williams The first in the series of mantownhuman debates – held at BDP and sponsored by BD – got off to a fiery start with a row about “Architecture and Climate Change”. My opening provocation concentrated on the way that the climate change discourse blames humanity for its consumption patterns, leading...
The Mayor who set his sights low
Karl Sharro | 27 February 2010 Boris Johnson has made a virtue of opposing the construction of towers in London. One of his first appointees was former Westminster Council leader Simon Milton, a fierce critic of towers, who was named chief advisor on planning days after Boris took office. The hype that surrounded this appointment and Boris’ anti-tower policy claimed that under Ken Livingstone London was on its way to becoming...
Two Cases for the (Floods) Defence
‘Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line’ (010 Publishers) & ‘Facing up to rising sea levels (Building Futures, RIBA) Reviewed by Austin Williams | February 2010 Contrary to the implication in its title, the Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line has nothing to do with global warming and flood management. The book is a historical assessment of the network of watercourses known as the Nieuwe Hollandse...
Corroding the Curriculum: Sustainability versus Education
Austin Williams | February 2010 (Academic Questions, Springer Link) This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, I suggest that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible because academia has lowered its...
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