Dalibor Vesely 1934-2015

Late in his career DALIBOR VESELY was Honorary Professorial Fellow at Manchester School of Architecture, during which time he contributed to the MA A+U course. We are therefore saddened to hear of his recent death and as a tribute post below the concluding section of David Leatherbarrow's obituary which has been published in Architectural Research Quarterly and the Journal of Architectural Education.

"When Vesely’s major work, Architecture in an Age of Divided Representation: creativity in the shadow of production was released in 2004, it was announced as a long-awaited book. Its genesis and development were concurrent with the Cambridge teaching and echoed that coupling of the productive and philosophical dimensions of architecture. Many of the book’s key concepts—human situations, the tension between embodiment and articulation, communicative movement, and so on—where equally apposite to project making and historical-philosophical study. It was a well-received book, also widely-read. Vesely was particularly pleased to see it appear in Czech translation.

Among the many awards and honors he received throughout his life a few were personally very significant. In 2005 he was recipient of the Bruno Zevi Book Award granted by the International Committee of Architectural Critics. One year later the Royal Institute of British Architects honored him with the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Architectural Education. And in 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the R.I.B.A.

Vesely expressed pride in the fact that he was raised in a Catholic country, although he never practiced that religion in his adult years. He once asked this note’s author if he believed in God. Limiting the ensuing pause to no more than a few moments he answered his own question with the observation that a world as rich and beautiful as ours makes one wonder. . . While the subject of transcendence, or what he called primary order, occupied his attention for years and was addressed in a number of his writings, he was no less concerned with secularization. The shelves of books in his large personal library that were dedicated to religion and myth were aligned with those that addressed the history of science and the philosophy of technology."

Architecture + Urbanism recommends 'Phenomenologies of the City'

Another volume in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture series (edited by Eamonn Canniffe) has recently been published

PHENOMENOLOGIES OF THE CITY: STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Dr Henriette Steiner (University of Copenhagen) and Dr Maximilian Sternberg (University of Cambridge)

This edited volume volume presents a synthetic overview of recent thinking on architecture, the built environment and urban culture that draws on the insights of phenomenology. It gathers an international group of leading scholars, many of them graduates or former members of the Architecture Department in Cambridge, who have explored the relationship of philosophy and architecture in a wide range of historical and geographic contexts. The book focuses on the new perspectives that may be gained from phenomenology specifically in relation to understanding the cultural and ethical challenges of today’s urban environment.

The most well-known publications on architectural phenomenology remain those of a previous generation of scholars who published their works over thirty years ago, such as Christian Norberg Schulz’s Genius Loci (1980), Gaston Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace (1958) and Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture (1959). The achievement of this first generation of architectural phenomenologists was to bring to the fore the multiplicity of aspects involved in the individual encounter with a particular architectural context, opening the depth of cultural, bodily and imaginary elements. However, these earlier authors have also tended to sanction romanticised preoccupations with individual spiritual experience and personal poetic imagination. As a consequence, phenomenology in architecture has neglected the social and shared aspects of the encounter with the built environment and with the city that are so critical to the discipline of architecture. The focus of this book is therefore exploring how phenomenology can be developed in architectural thinking in relation to the more collective domain of the city, its settings, politics and culture. In this way the essays collected in this book show how architectural thinking transforms phenomenology in order to generate new insights of relevance to ongoing ethical and cultural concerns in architecture and urbanism.

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Identity, Sovereignty, and Global Politics in the Building of Baghdad: From Revolution to the Gulf War and Beyond"

Conference, "Identity, Sovereignty, and Global Politics in the Building of Baghdad: From Revolution to the Gulf War and Beyond"

Harvard University Graduate School of Design 18, 19 and 20 September 2014

Using the history of urban development in Baghdad as a reference point, this conference examines the extent to which interventions intended to modernize and integrate different populations in the city were part of a larger process of negotiating competing visions of political economy, sovereignty, and identity in post-WWII Iraq. By gathering political scientists, architectural and urban historians, and scholars of Iraq and the larger Arab world, the conference engages theoretical and empirical questions about the ruptures and continuities of Baghdad’s urban and political history, using the built environment of the city as a canvas for understanding struggles over Iraq’s position in a global context shaped by ongoing war tensions (from the Cold War to the Gulf War and beyond) to more recent Middle East conflicts. The full day event (September 19) will be preceded by a Keynote Panel held the prior evening, focused on the relationship between war and urbanism, a theme that will re-emerge comparatively and historically in subsequent day’s panels which focus on a range of theoretical, historical, and practical dilemmas facing Baghdad and other cities in the region. The conference ends with a half-day discussion of the urban planning, design, and governance challenges facing the city now and in the near future.


Organised by -
Professor Diane Davis, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Professor of Urban Planning and Design, and Weatherhead Center Associate; Co-organisers: Dr. Łukasz Stanek, University of Manchester, Manchester Architecture Research Centre; Phillip Baker, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Telescopic Urbanism: On Slums"

cities@manchester Inaugural Lecture
Professor Ash Amin University of Cambridge
‘Telescopic urbanism: on slums’
Introduced by Professor Nina Glick Schiller (Director, Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures)

By 2030 between a third and half of the world's population will be leading a precarious, and often abject, life in the neglected urban interstices. Urban scholarship is beginning to turn to this eye-watering problem, and to questions of sustainable urban competitiveness and growth, but interestingly without referencing one to the other.  This paper claims that the 'endless city' is being looked at through the wrong end of the binoculars, with 'business consultancy' urbanism largely disinterested in the city that does not feed international competitiveness and business growth, and 'UN-Habitat' urbanism looking to the settlements where the poor are located for bottom-up solutions to human well-being.  The paper muses on the implications of such an urban optic on the chances of the poor, their areas of settlement, and their expectations of support from others in and beyond the city.  While acknowledging the realism, inventiveness and achievements of effort initiated or led by the poor, the paper laments the disappearance of ideas of mutuality, obligation and commonality that telescopic urbanism has enabled, in the process scripting out both grand designs and the duty of distant others to address the problems of acute inequality and poverty that will continue to plague the majority city.

VENUE
5.00 pm Wednesday 14 March 2012
Samuel Alexander Arts Lecture Theatre, University of Manchester

Professor Ash Amin is the current holder of the 1931 Chair in Geography at Cambridge.  Previously he spent 16 years at Durham University where he was Professor of Geography and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study. He is known for his work on the geographies of modern living, for example thinking urban and regional society as relationally and materially constituted; and globalisation as an everyday process that thoroughly reconstitutes meanings of the local. He has also contributed to thinking on the economy as a cultural entity, while his writings on race and multiculturalism have helped change policy work on the management of ethnic diversity. He has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at a number of European Universities. He has been founding co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and is currently associate editor of City, and on the advisory board of a number of international journals. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the British Academy. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Edward Heath Prize in 1998 for contributions to research on Europe. He has served on the Research Priorities Board of the ESRC and advised international organisations such as the OECD and European Commission.