The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is pleased to announce ‘Making Plans’ - a new season of talks in partnership with The Modern House. The series explores how domestic architectural plans give form to hidden economic, gender, class and cultural power relations.
Co-programmed with architect Charles Holland, each week an architect is asked to select a plan and explain its importance to them and to architectural culture. In November and December, the talks will feature Charles Holland in conversation with Ahmed Belkhodja, FALA Atelier; Professor Lesley Lokko; and Sumayya Vally, Counterspace.
Plans are the basic currency of architecture. They define buildings technically but can also be beautiful as abstract compositions. They describe physical relationships and reveal insights into culture, economics, gender, class, and power. This short series of talks will explore the plan and its relationship to these issues.
Making Plans with Ahmed Belkhodja and Charles Holland
Thursday 19 November 2020 (via Zoom webinar), 6-7pm GMT
Architects Charles Holland and Ahmed Belkhodja discuss how the way we design domestic interiors is affected by marketing, the rise of short-term renting and the dissemination of architectural imagery via social media.
Ahmed Belkhodja is a Swiss architect born in 1990 in Lausanne. After graduating in Zurich in 2013, Ahmed established FALA in Porto, with Ana Luisa Soares and Filipe Magalhães. FALA defends a resolutely optimistic architecture, which has been recognised by numerous prizes, publications and exhibitions, in Portugal and elsewhere. Ahmed has taught at several institutions, including the IUAV in Venice, the Royal College of Art in London, and HEAD in Geneva.
Making Plans with Professor Lesley Lokko and Charles Holland
Thursday 26 November 2020 (via Zoom webinar), 6-7pm GMT
Architect Charles Holland and Professor Lesley Lokko in conversation about the intersecting relationship between the architectural plan of the home and issues of gender and race.
Professor Lesley Lokko trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture and holds a PhD in Architecture from the same institution. She is currently Dean of Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, and was the founder and former director of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. From January 2021, she will step down as Dean of Spitzer and begin building the African Futures Institute, an independent postgraduate school of architecture in Accra, Ghana. She has lectured and published widely on the subject of race, identity and architecture, and has served on many international juries and awards over the past decade, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Archiprix, the RIBA President’s Medals, Archmarathon and the Venice Biennale.
Making Plans with Sumayya Vally and Charles Holland
Thursday 3 December 2020 (via Zoom webinar), 6-7pm GMT
Charles Holland and Sumayya Vally in conversation about the power of the plan to navigate between political, cultural and social relations.
Sumayya Vally is the Founder and Principal of Counterspace. Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. Johannesburg serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1.
Charles Holland is an architect, teacher and writer. He is Principal of Charles Holland Architects, a design and research practice based in the UK, Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton and a Visiting Professor at the ABK, Stuttgart.
ENDS
Notes to editors:
- RIBA press contact: Beatrice Cooke, Beatrice.Cooke@riba.org; 020 7307 3813.
- The Modern House press contact: Ruby Trudgen, rt@themodernhouse.com.
- Images of the speakers can be downloaded here.
- The Modern House is an estate agency that helps people live in more thoughtful and beautiful ways. We believe in design as a powerful force for good – from personal factors such as wealth and wellbeing to more macro themes including community, place-making and architectural preservation. Follow The Modern House on Instagram.
- The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is a global professional membership body that serves its members and society in order to deliver better buildings and places, stronger communities and a sustainable environment. www.architecture.com Follow @RIBA on Twitter for regular updates.
