Category Architecture: Politics, Social
What High Schools Look Like and Why
After 1968, James Ackerman, Giancarlo De Carlo and others questioned school design: why? why like this? This post revisits their questions.
Conference: Architecture, Citizenship, Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s
PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS 15th – 16th June 2017 Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane, Oxford How did individuals and groups concerned with architecture and the built environment respond to, and seek to shape, the challenges and opportunities of twentieth-century life? Engaging with themes such as democracy, citizenship, leisure, culture and new subjectivities, and showcasing […]
On Forgetting: Some Similarities between Architecture and Social Media
Architecture and social media share a way of being understood as neutral things – their social production being obscured.
An Interview with Jill Blackmore on space, learning, feminism and the politics of education
Professor Jill Blackmore discusses learning spaces, teachers’ work, feminism and the complexity of education.
Pearson, IBM Watson and cognitive enhancement technologies in education
Originally posted on code acts in education:
Ben Williamson Image: Atomic Taco The world’s largest edu-business, Pearson, partnered with one of the world’s largest computing companies, IBM, at the end of October 2016 to develop new approaches to education in the ‘cognitive era.’ Their partnership was anticipated earlier in the year when both organizations produced…
Interview with Herman Hertzberger
Herman Hertzberger, born in Amsterdam in 1932, is one of the world’s pre-eminent architects. He founded Architectuurstudio HH in 1960 and continues to run this thriving practice in the centre of Amsterdam. Best known for his designs of cultural buildings, housing complexes, offices and schools, he is also a prolific writer and teacher. His books, include […]
Do Buildings: a) dictate b) choreograph… …e) suggest what you do…
You’re in a building. (And if you’re not, just pretend your app/software or whatever is a building anyway, it kind of is.) Does this building you’re in: Dictate what you do Choreograph what you do Shape what you do Influence what you do Suggest what you do Do nothing, I decide what I do None […]
Schools and School Design in Africa: An Interview with Ola Uduku
Ola Uduku (Edinburgh University) speaks about the historical influence of Western pedagogies and architectural traditions and their local adaptation in school design.
Does a School Building need to look like a School?
…is a question posed by the architect of the school where I’m doing my research. It came up in an interview over a year ago and has stuck with me ever since. Neither of us answered his question – the recording of the interview has us both umming and urring for the next 15 seconds. […]
Architecture as a Social Science?
Some ideas for seeing architecture as – amongst other things – a social science. Also a bit on why the social sciences seem to ignore architecture.
Summer Reading – “Seeing Like a State” and the survival of high modernism in school planning
For a book that says almost nothing about Education – no classrooms, no students or teachers, no school architecture – James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is one of the best I’ve read on school design, being in schools and education. He takes a phrase, “high modernism”, and uses it as a way to […]
Interview with Suzi Hall, urban ethnographer and architect
Suzanne (Suzi) Hall is an ethnographer at the LSE, London, where she explores people’s lives in urban spaces. Prior to that she worked as an architect in South Africa. Her 2012 book City, Street and Citizen: the Measure of the Ordinary, published by Routledge, draws on her ethnography of the Walworth Road, a bustling, dynamic […]
Making Spaces, Forgetting Politics
Walls* are breaks (Vesely, 2013). They break into established categories of meaning and space and make new ones. They do that publicly too, so we could also say that walls have a communicative function to orient attention and shout about what it is they’re doing. And a school’s walls are especially powerful since they break […]
“Zigzag, white, no life”: a Martian’s View of Architecture
Our interactions with Google search results appear to contribute to the fetishization of Architecture as big white ribbed structures. This post explores why.
What are schools for? An interview with Gert Biesta on the learnification of school buildings and education.
Gert Biesta on school architecture and democracy, and learnification – a reductive reappraisal of education as learning.
