Tag Archives: Architecture

You Are Where You Are: Sarah Robinson’s ‘Architecture is a Verb’.

In this article, artist and writer Taney Roniger, reviews Sarah Robinson’s recent book, ‘Architecture is a Verb’, which outlines an approach that shifts the fundamental premises of architectural design and practice in several important ways. First, it acknowledges the centrality of the human organism as an active participant interdependent in its environment. Second, it understands human action in terms of radical embodiment―grounding the range of human activities traditionally attributed to mind and cognition: imagining, thinking, remembering―in the body. Third, it asks what a building does―that is, extends the performative functional interpretation of design to interrogate how buildings move and in turn move us, how they shape thought and action. Finally, it is committed to articulating concrete situations by developing a taxonomy of human/building interactions.

Reminders of a past

“The main focus of my work is the exploration of manmade forms, many of which have been gradually superseded, forgotten or abandoned. They were at the forefront of technology for their time but technology and purpose have left some of these structures behind and they have become architectural metaphors or reminders of a past. The work also looks at the idea of permanence and impermanence.”

Ian Chamberlain is a Senior Lecturer in MA Printmaking and Drawing and Print at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His work takes its influence from man-made structures. Reinterpreting them as monuments placed within the landscape, these objects in turn become landmarks of their time.

Living Architecture

Rachel Armstrong takes an alternative approach to environmental design that couples the computational properties of the natural world with the technology of liquids and productivity of soils. She calls the synthesis that occurs between these systems and their inhabitants “living” architecture.

She is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. She is a Rising Waters II Fellow with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016), TWOTY futurist 2015, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a 2010 Senior TED Fellow.

In this exclusive interview she discusses her ideas and work.