Register - Architecture & Landscape Architecture & Landscape Kingston University London

In this episode Andrew Clancy interviews Shiela O'Donnell and John Tuomey of O'Donnell and Tuomey.

John and Shiela are as much educators as architects, and this conversation roves freely between conversations about schools, and their own work in practice. It is clear that these two worlds are interconnected and interreliant in a profound way in their lives.
The work in both places has overlaps - not least a concern with close reading of site and context, and an investment in drawing out what the ‘utter’ aspect of a project might be through conversation and drawing.

We talk through their recent retirement from UCD - the school they were taught in and in turn taught into for most of their lives, and how this might mark a new chapter on a number of levels. We also hear what it was like working for Stirling, the humanity of the man, and his insistence on the value of ‘the act itself’ of being an architect.

We do hope you enjoy the conversation.

http://odonnell-tuomey.ie

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Credits:
Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson
Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy
Interviewer: Andrew Clancy
Editor: Andrew Clancy
Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Bruno Silvestre interviews his compatriot Alvaro Siza.

First off an apology - the sound is not as we would like it. Circumstances dictated that the interview had to be recorded in a hotel lobby, and the backgrounders noise is quite distracting - but we felt it was useful to put out anyway.

Bruno is working with Siza on a project here in the UK, and grabbed this time during Sizas most recent visit. In this conversation they talk about practice, Sizes early frustrations with small projects, how current jobs interrelate in the office, and the value of Kenneth Frampton in highlighting work from around the world, including Portugal, which might otherwise have been overlooked.


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Credits

Register is the Reseach Group for the Departmetn of Architecture & landscape. This episode was made in collaboration with the students architecture society K.Arch

Head of Department: Mary Johnson
Producer: Andrew Clancy
Interviewer: Bruno Silvestre
Editor: Andrew Clancy
Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Andrew Clancy and Laura Evans interview Alice Casey and Can Deegan of TAKA Architects in Dublin.

Over their 10 years of practice Alice and Cian have designed a series of remarkable buildings, which clearly illustrate the concerns of the office.
Most obvious there is a recurrent engagement with context, making buildings which are grounded in the forms and materials of their physical situation. There is more at work than this - most intriguingly a continual engagement with the potentials for architecture to accrete meaning through its engagement as a protagonist in ritual and habit. Here they draw their references very widely, most particularly from a series of lengthy journeys they made in the first few years of their practice. Here we see a robust territorial architecture engaging with global conversations, making something new and yet of its place.

www.taka.ie

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Credits:
Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson
Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy
Register: Christoph Lueder; Matt Wells; Matt Phillips
Interviewer: Andrew Clancy and Laura Evans
Editor: Andrew Clancy
Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Louise Koopmanns and Andrew Clancy interview Gunter Vogt, the eminent landscape designer, and Chair of Landscape at ETH Zurich.

He views landscape design not as an autonomous totalling discipline, but as a careful reassembly of the world. In his methods he stresses the productive tension between the necessary subjectivity of the human condition, and the availability of scientific analysis and process. In speaking with his students he observes that a field trip can at once be a sensorial immersion and a scientific appraisal, and posits a work method that includes space for digression, memory and dreaming along with rigorous engagement with the realities of contemporary ecology and construction. A detail in this context can speak about both the personal and the political. This ability for multiple scales of thinking to be manifest at once allows space for digression and a radical subjectivity in the design process - resulting in landscapes which are contextual and surreal, robust and intimate.

In the beautiful landscapes he and his practice have made with collaborators such as Herzog deMeuron we can see the results of this humanistic compulsion, and in this conversation we tease out how he developed as a designer, and how he sees this role evolving in the face of contemporary pressures.

https://www.vogt-la.com/en

Kingston is one of the few schools in these islands which offers landscape architecture alongside architecture - we do so because we are keenly aware that the built environment is more than buildings, and believe that students of both disciplines benefit from this context.

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Credits:
Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson
Course Leader Landscape: Kristof Fatsar
Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy
Interviewer: Andrew Clancy and Louise Koopmans
Editor: Andrew Clancy
Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Kate Ivinson and Dan Ryder-Cook both interview the London architect Amin Taha.

Amin’s work, and that of the practice he established (Groupwork) is heavily invested in exploring the potentials for contemporary technology to allow a re-engagement with materiality, ornament and civic expression - particularly in the making of facades.

This approach, at once playful and rigorous, has resulted in work which is beautifully detailed, robustly made and historically situated.

In this conversation Amin teases out the underlying ideas of the practice, including the way that memory, and misremembering, have always been the way our cities have been made - placing his work in this tradition of continuity.

Kate and Dan were both students of the course when they made this interview, and they bring an incisive lens on the work which makes for enjoyable listening.

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Credits

Register is the Reseach Group for the Departmetn of Architecture & landscape. This episode was made in collaboration with the students architecture society K.Arch

Head of Department: Mary Johnson
Producer: Kate Ivinson / Dan Ryder-Cook
Interviewer: Kate Ivinson / Dan Ryder-Cook
Editor: Andrew Clancy
Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture

In this episode Andrew Clancy interviews Edwin Heathcote, the critic and writer.

Edwin is the architecture critic for the FT, and an author of several books as well as the curator of an online resource celebrating the value of the written word in architecture (Reading Design).

In this conversation we tease out the particular pressures on critics and discuss whether the golden age of architecture criticism may have passed.

https://www.readingdesign.org/

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Credits:
Register is the Research Centre in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London kingstonarchitecture.london

Head of Department: Mary Johnson
Producer: Laura Evans / Andrew Clancy
Register: Christoph Lueder; Matt Wells; Matt Phillips
Interviewer: Andrew Clancy and Matt Phillips
Editor: Andrew Clancy
Music: Poddington Bear - Rainbow Architecture