Walmer Yard’s Keeper Laura Mark recently took part in this event in partnership with The Mosaic Rooms and the Architecture Foundation in which she discussed Walmer Yard in the context of her research on house museums.
This conversation with artist Mahmoud Khaled and researcher Nadine Nour el Din, looks at ongoing research into house museums in London and in Cairo. Mahmoud focuses on his art practice which makes proposals for house museums while Nadine highlights the Mr. & Ms. Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo.
The Architecture of the Bed
On 19 July 2022, the renowned architectural historian Beatriz Colomina gave a talk at Walmer Yard which discussed how our bedroom spaces are evolving and how modern lifestyles and technologies have given the horizontal architecture of the bed a new significance. Followed by a discussion with architectural historian and curator Shumi Bose, it explored the new role of the bed as the epicenter of labour, post-labour and love in the age of social media.
Here we share a recording of that talk and discussion. Click on the image below to play the video.
The way we sleep
and in turn the spaces we use for sleeping has evolved. In pre-industrial
Europe, it was the norm to have two sleep cycles. The time to sleep was not
decided by a specific time but by if there were things to do. People went to
bed after dusk but would wake a few hours later for a couple of hours to read,
do chores or have sex, before sleeping again until dawn. This pattern began to
disappear during the late 17th century. With industrialisation came shift
patterns and a more regimented approach to sleep brought about by the
separation of home and the factory.
But in recent years
this has again changed. Working from home, and even working from bed, has
become the norm. In 2012, Wall Street Journal reported that 80 per cent of New
York city professionals regularly worked from bed and as the pandemic means
more of the population is working from home, the ability to have meetings in
bed with those around the world has again shifted our relationship with the bed
as a place to sleep.
There are many
incidences of working from bed throughout history. Hugh Hefner famously never
left his bed. His office moved into his bed in the Playboy mansion in the
1960s. His bed became the ultimate office with a fridge, hifi, telephone,
filing cabinets, a bar, tv, video cameras, work surfaces and a bedside table.
Truman Capote wrote from his bed. The architect Richard Neutra started working
the moment he woke up with all the equipment needed for designing and writing
in bed. And in his later years, Matisse would draw on his bedroom walls from
his bed with charcoal affixed to a cane.
Bedrooms are
one of the most personal spaces in our homes. They are also synonymous with
sleep. But what happens when they become the host of many other activities?
In
this lecture renowned architectural historian Beatriz Colomina will discuss how
our bedroom spaces are evolving and how modern lifestyles and technologies have
given the horizontal architecture of the bed a new significance. This lecture will
explore the new role of the bed as the epicenter of labour, post-labour and
love in the age of social media.
The talk will be followed by a discussion with architectural historian and curator Shumi Bose.
Beatriz
Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture
at Princeton University and the Founding Director of the Media and Modernity
Program at Princeton University.
She
writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality and media and her
writings have been translated into more than 25 languages. Her books include Sexuality
and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern
Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994), Domesticity at War (MIT Press and
Actar, 2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines
196X–197X (Actar, 2010), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg,
2014) ,The Century of the Bed (Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, 2015) and Are We
Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Lars Muller, 2016). Her latest books are
X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019), and Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press,
2022).
She
has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006-2013), Playboy
Architecture (2012-2016), Radical Pedagogies (2014-2015), Liquid La Habana
(2018), The 24/7 Bed (2018) and Sick Architecture (2022). In 2016 she was chief
curator with Mark Wigley of the third Istanbul Design Biennial.
In 2018
she was mas made Honorary Doctor by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm
and 2020 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her contributions to
the field of architecture.
Back
in 2018, Colomina hosted bed-ins at both the Venice Architecture Biennale and
the Serpentine Pavilion, where she interviewed architects including Farshid
Moussavi, Lesley Lokko and Sam Jacob in bed.
About Shumi Bose
Shumi Bose is an architectural historian, curator and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at UAL Central Saint Martins, and a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. Shumi has worked as curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and at the Venice Biennale; in 2021, she was appointed as a trustee of The Architecture Foundation and in 2020, founded Holdspace Architecture, a platform for architectural discourse outside of the academy. Shumi is interested in narratives of decolonisation and speculation, and likes to share stories from architectural education, publishing and curation.
The Big Sad Talk
Saturday 18 June 2022, 3pm
In partnership with London Contemporary Music Festival
Writing in Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021) Alex Mazey stated that melancholia is now ‘the fundamental passion of the hyperreal order’.
In this talk, held in partnership with London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) we will consider what we gain from relinquishment and ruination and how states of loss and exhaustion can enhance our creativity.
Join us for an afternoon panel discussion in Walmer Yard where we will explore Sad Boys, sweet melancholy and the affective turn with artist Rachel Rose, turntablist composer Mariam Rezaei, choreographer Marikiscrycrycry, author of Sad Boy AestheticsAlex Mazey and LCMF artistic co-director Jack Sheen.
In this special guest lecture, the architect and professor Harry Francis Mallgrave will discuss human experience and how it influences architecture and the way we live.
Mallgrave’s work
explores how newer models of the humanities and social sciences, together with
technology, can help us to explore the nature of architectural experience in
both its emotional and multimodal dimensions.
Setting this in
the context of architectural theory, he will discuss the relationship between neuroscience
and architecture and will reveal the neurological justification for some very
timeless architectural ideas, from the multisensory nature of the
architectural experience to the essential relationship of ambiguity
and metaphor to creative thinking.
In this season of talks, neuroscientists, environmental
psychologists, geographers, and anthropologists will talk about their work and
how it relates to the field of architecture.
This series of
talks will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a
link to join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold
on a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the
work of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public
understanding of experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard
and a cultural programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists,
and other practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Harry Francis Mallgrave is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Illinois Institute of Technology and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He received his PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has enjoyed a career as a scholar, translator, editor, and architect. In 1996 he won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for his intellectual biography of Gottfried Semper, and for more than fifteen years he served as the architecture editor of the Texts & Documents Series at the Getty Research Institute. He has published more than a dozen books on architectural history and theory, including three considering the relevance of the new humanistic and biological models for the practice of design. His most recent book, Building Paradise: Episodes in Paradisiacal Thinking, is currently in press with Routledge Publications. Drawing upon a theme first raised by Alvar Aalto, it offers both a selected history of the idea of paradise as well as a ‘garden ethic’ for the ecological practice of design.
From our experiences
of ruins, to shopping centres or our own homes, Ellard’s writing looks at how these
elements of urban design have influenced us throughout history, and how are brains
and bodies respond to these different types of spaces.
The book investigates
the influence new technologies will also have on our evolving cities, and what world
we are, and should be, creating.
Ellard will be in conversation
with Walmer Yard’s keeper Laura Mark, and this will be followed by an audience
discussion.
In this season of
talks, neuroscientists, environmental psychologists, geographers, and
anthropologists will talk about their work and how it relates to the field of
architecture.
This series of talks will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a link to join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold on a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the work of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public understanding of experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard and a cultural programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists, and other practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Colin Ellard is a
neuroscientist, author and design consultant who works at the intersection of
psychology and architectural and urban design. Ellard is a professor of
psychology, specializing in cognitive neuroscience, at the University of
Waterloo in Canada, where he also runs the Urban Realities Lab. After spending
the early part of his career working on basic problems in visual neuroscience
related to spatial function in animals, he later turned his attention to
exploration of the human relationship with built settings. He is particularly
interested in understanding the emotional effects of architecture, which he
explores in both field settings and in synthetic environments using immersive
virtual reality. Ellard’s current projects include exploration of the
contribution of peripheral vision to architectural atmosphere, architectural
contributions to the emotion of awe, and physiological stress in high-density
urban environments.
In this edition of Walmer Yard’s reading group, Forum, the anthropologist Tim Ingold will discuss the ideas and concepts within his book The Life of Lines.
In The Life of Lines, Ingold argues that our world is woven from knots, and that this principle of knotting underlies both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings, and bodies, and the composition of the knowledge embedded there.
His writings take in life, atmosphere, movement, surfaces, and what it means to be human from a perspective grounded in anthropology but weaving in interdisciplinary thoughts from the fields of philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.
Ingold will give a short presentation, and this will be followed by a discussion led by Walmer Yard’s keeper Laura Mark.
In this season of
talks, neuroscientists, environmental psychologists, geographers, and
anthropologists will talk about their work and how it relates to the field of
architecture.
This series of talks will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a link to join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold on a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the work of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public understanding of experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard and a cultural programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists, and other practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018) and Correspondences (2020).
In the third of our upcoming talks, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture Anjan Chatterjee will take us on a journey through the beauty, pleasure and art.
His book, The Aesthetic Brain, uses neuroscience and psychology to explain why we are so concerned with aesthetics.
We’ll look at why we
find art, buildings, and places beautiful and question what part our brain
plays in deciding what we find aesthetically pleasing.
Chatterjee will give
a short presentation, and this will be followed by a discussion led by Walmer
Yard’s keeper Laura Mark.
In this season of
talks, neuroscientists, environmental psychologists, geographers, and
anthropologists will talk about their work and how it relates to the field of
architecture.
This series of talks
will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a link to
join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold on
a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the work
of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public understanding of
experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard and a cultural
programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists, and other
practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Anjan Chatterjee is
Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of
Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. The
past Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital, Chatterjee’s clinical
practice focuses on patients with cognitive disorders. His research addresses neuroaesthetics,
spatial cognition, language, and neuroethics. He wrote The Aesthetic Brain: How
we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art and co-edited: Neuroethics in
Practice: Mind, medicine, and society, The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral
neurology and neuropsychology and the forthcoming Brain, Beauty, and Art:
Bringing neuroaesthetics into focus. He received the Norman Geschwind Prize in
Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology and the
Rudolph Arnheim Prize for contributions to Psychology and the Arts by the
American Psychological Association.
Open House 2020
Saturday 19 September, 11am – 5pm
We’ll be opening our doors to the public for the first time since February as part of next weekend’s Open House festival.
Join us to see inside House 1 of Peter Salter’s award-winning housing project. One of the largest houses on the site, House 1 displays many of the key features of the scheme and allows you to experience the rich textural qualities that the houses offer – from the reverberative black steel of the staircases to the softer clay and straw walls of the upstairs yurt.
Bring your own headphones and mobile phone to access our specially-created audio tour in which our Keeper Laura Mark describes the ideas behind the spaces and materials at Walmer Yard.
Please note: We will only be able to admit six visitors into the building at any one time and those waiting will be asked to form a socially-distanced queue on the street outside. When inside the house we ask that you wear a mask and stay 2m apart from other visitors wherever possible.
Open House 2020: Virtual Tour
Friday 18 September, 4pm
Walmer Yard’s Keeper Laura Mark will give a virtual tour of the houses and courtyard as part of Open House 2020.
