In collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, contributors will examine different aspects of the challenge faced by architects through history when confronted with a difficult site.
This three-week in-person course explores the creativity and ingenuity needed to create buildings in all manner of environments where the conditions are not forthcoming to ease of design. We will be joined by architectural historians, academics, and the curators of the exhibition ‘Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds’ in a series of focused presentations and discussions, including a chance to view and discuss RIBA Collections material.
The course is inspired by RIBA's current exhibition ‘Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds’ and is aimed at adults who have a general interest in architecture. A reading list will accompany the course, but advanced reading will not be required before the sessions.
Sessions
Session one - Historical sites Tuesday 28 January 2025
Charles Hind and Elizabeth Deans
Session two - A site to call home Tuesday 4 February 2025
Rosamund West and Elizabeth Darling
Session three - Public spaces and debate Tuesday 11 February 2025
Pete Collard and Otto Saumarez-Smith
Contributors
Charles Hind, FSA, is Chief Curator Emeritus at RIBA in London. A Palladio specialist, he was with Sotheby's, 1986-93, as an expert in British watercolours and architectural and design drawings and joined the RIBA in 1996 after three years as Architecture Editor for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art.
Elizabeth Deans is an architectural historian of seventeenth-century Europe and specialises in architecture of the post-Restoration period in Britain. She is currently is Assistant Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at the University of Cambridge and lectures in the Faculty of History of Art.
Otto Saumarez Smith is assistant professor of art history at Warwick University and the author of Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain.
Pete Collard has been Exhibitions Curator at the RIBA since 2017, curating exhibitions on a variety of architectural themes and histories including the centenary of the Becontree Estate, the legacy of the Bauhaus movement and Britain, and the potential for creating net/carbon zero architecture via the circular economy.
Rosamund Lily West is a Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her current research looks at the post-war housing estates of the London County Council and the public sculpture installed within these estates. She is interested in the layers of memory and emotion within urban spaces, particularly in relation to planning, relocation, communities and public art.
Elizabeth Darling is an architectural historian specialising in histories of modernist cultures in Britain, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. She is an expert on women and architecture from the 1890s to the present day, curator and author and currently Chair of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
A collaboration between the RIBA and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB).
