An interesting first session of the day covering the evolution of architectural practice.

Simon Pepper opened his presentation “Rise and Fall: A long century of changing public sector practice” with a graph showing the drastic decline in the proportion of architects employed in the public sector over the last 50 years. Colour coding the graph with socialist red and capitalist blue, the red shrinking to less than 10% in 2005. The public sector no longer has the draw to architecture students it once did - the images in journals and books now promote the exploits of star architects in private practice, not the new towns and council housing of the early and mid 20th century which inspired a generation of local authority architects.
http://tulip.liv.ac.uk/

Tatjana Schneider challenges the view of architects that expects the production of an object in her presentation “What architects also do”. WIth examples from MOM, Elemental, the Centre for Pedagogy and Rural Architecture Studio, she discusses the role of the architect as someone who “affects change for the empowerment of others”. I would definitely agree with the conclusion that architects need to extend their role to include the consequences of the architecture as well as the creation of the object.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/architecture/people/staffpages/t_schneider.html

Albena Yaneva presents her research into “Reconnecting Practice and Meaning” with a discussion of the design process of Rem Koolhaas and OMA. She discusses how architecture is a cooperative activity and to be understood fully, the design process needs to be examined rather than the external culture and context of the building. Surprising untold story of the process behind Koolhaas’ Casa da Musica, the form of which apparently evolved from a dusty model of a private house, taken from the storage shelves and adapted for the winning competition scheme.
http://www.msa.ac.uk/staff/profile/ayaneva

Sunand Prasad closes the session with the question of whether we wish to encourage the joining of alternative architectural practice and theory with the mainstream. Break for coffee.

Full transcripts will be available on the web in the future, and we also hope to upload Jonathan Charley’s film presentation to our YouTube channel.

Albena Yaneva presenting