Thinking about Architecture

Abstract

Architecture is, like all areas of the arts and humanities, a complex affair, and involves a very wide range of people and personalities, ideas and philosophies, theories and actions. But, more than any other artistic endeavour, architecture is also an inherently interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary practice, and is inextricably linked to our everyday world of business, work, leisure, health, environment and social life. We can do almost nothing in our lives without encountering architecture, whether as offices, housing, hotels, sports facilities, hospitals, train and bus stations, or architecture in drawings, fi lms and video-games, or architecture as part of the hidden world of communications and virtual technologies. For this reason, the UK's research into architecture must -and does -deal with a wide spectrum of concerns, all of which have the potential to impact directly on our lives today.

Robin Hood Gardens and the Brutalist Image

“…88 This has been achieved through an examination of different representational practices, design choices, artwork and interpretations, and how they are enacted around a specific building event to reproduce and reinterpret architectural space. 89 At the same time, this paper evidences the liveliness of different forms of representation by capturing the changing relationship between different images of RHG and Brutalism and how the two are interwoven and have been reinvented by different audiences over the last seventy years. What emerges is a critical engagement with the multiple narratives, temporalities, experiences and practices that unravel the voices and politics surrounding what aspects of RHG are made visible and which are absent, highlighting a split between those that choose to humanise the lived aspects of the estate in contrast to those who focus on its design and ruination.…”