Baan Chang Town hall, Thailand by Bangkok Project Studio
In this workshop, run in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts, architect and founder of Bangkok Project Studio Boonserm Premthada will lead a workshop exploring the sounds of Walmer Yard.
Premthada received the 2019 Royal Academy Dorfman Award for his unique, deeply contextual approach to architecture. Many of his buildings consider sound equally important to light, shadow, wind, sound and smell – all elements he considers essential in creating architecture that serves to heighten its inhabitant’s awareness of their natural environments.
In this two-hour workshop Premthada will share his research gathered at sites around the world exploring how sound reacts with space.
Japanese architect Akihisa Hirata will join the architect of Walmer Yard Peter Salter and the London-based practice OMMX for a discussion looking at how the architecture of Japan has influenced their work.
Each of the speakers
will talk about one of their own housing projects in relation to craft,
materiality and the interpretation of home.
Hirata’s futuristic Tree-ness House – a complex stack of concrete boxes containing living and gallery spaces – will contrast with the materiality and textures of Walmer Yard, which will be discussed by Salter.
The discussion will be chaired by Walmer Yard’s Keeper Laura Mark.
‘Assemblage: art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects.’
Named an assemblage to reflect the
gathering of many different speakers, participants and formats taking place
during the day, this event will launch the new season at Walmer Yard and will
take the form of a series of encounters and events held across the homes and
centred around the theme of the Lesser Senses.
Following a key note presentation in Walmer Yard’s ‘coats-on lecture theatre’ by neuroscientist Danny Ball, a series of workshops, smaller talks, performances and film screenings will take place across the four houses, exploring how our senses affect our perception of architecture.
Guests will be encouraged to explore the homes throughout the afternoon while the interventions happen in tandem across the spaces. These include screenings of a new short film by Jim Stephenson on the sensory experience of Walmer Yard, a sound piece by Simon James, and spatial listening workshops led by Alex de Little.
Performances developed by designer and creative technologist Ava Aghakouchakwill explore the synesthetic experience of Walmer Yard using an active wearable called ‘Sovar’. The tactile-visual amplifier aims to raise the wearer’s attention towards the more unnoticeable qualities of a space and help deepen their sense of presence within it.
Across the bedrooms Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, architecture curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, will host a series of conversations with artists, scientists and architects. While in the kitchens, conversations around the dinner tables with architects Alan Dunlop and Niall McLaughlin will discuss how we design for those with different sensory needs.
The day will conclude with a panel discussion and a
drinks.
Smell is rarely used to discuss
architecture. Smells form part of our memories and our present engagement with
spaces and surroundings but they are often elusive – disappearing before they
can be described or pinned down.
Designer and researcher Kate McLean is one of a small but growing number of innovative practitioners dedicated to the study and capture of this highly nuanced field.
She will lead a sensory walk around
Walmer Yard and the surrounding streets of Notting Hill.
Forum is Walmer Yard’s
reading group. Each month a figure from the world of art, architecture, or
science will choose a text which participants are encouraged to read. We will
then join together to discuss the ideas and issues raised in the text over a glass
of wine in one of the living rooms at Walmer Yard.
For this edition architect Ian Ritchie will select a text based around our second season’s theme of the Lesser Senses.
He will then join Walmer
Yard’s Keeper Laura Mark in
conversation as we open up the discussion around this critical reader.
His chosen text, The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett, explores the brain’s imperfections and the impact these quirks have on our daily lives.
Neuroscientist Burnett, who
also has a sideline as a stand-up comedian, tackles the brains effects on behaviour,
memory, fear, intelligence and sociability.
The renowned author of Eyes of the SkinJuhani Pallasmaa will join the architect of Walmer Yard Peter Salter and architectural photographer Hélène Binet for an unmissable discussion on the multi-sensory experience of architecture.
Using the architecture of Salter’s Walmer Yard as a backdrop for the discussion, the speakers, recognised for their architectural teaching and influential ideas and award-winning work, will use the theme of Walmer Yard’s second season – The Lesser Senses – to discuss the existential experience of architecture and its influence on our appreciation of spaces.
The discussion will be chaired by writer and curator Vicky Richardson.
Organised in collaboration with Architectural Design (AD) and in partnership with Arup.
We have launched a new book on Walmer Yard which has just been published by Circa.
This book documents the evolution of the project through Peter Salter’s pen-and-ink drawings and Hélène Binet’s remarkable photographs combined with essays by key members of the team and others close to the project.
The meaning
of domesticity can shift from person to person, but what happens when we
compare the definition of home in contexts as different as Mexico and the UK?
In this conversation with Keeper of Walmer Yard Laura Mark, the Mexican architect and Royal Academy Dorfman Award finalist Fernanda Canales will explore topics of domesticity and housing through examples of her own work.
From
projects such as Béstegui Housing (2019) to Bruma House (2017), her work
focusses on the in-between spaces that are neither public nor private.
Canales will also reflect on the architecture and experiences of Walmer Yard within this context and take a closer look at whether an invitation to slow down and contemplate our surroundings is one of the answers to how we ought to live together.
We are constantly bombarded with signs, messages and orders; we are told not to cross the yellow line when a train is coming, not to step on the grass or touch an artwork, we are taught to follow rules. We abide by social values to create societal norms, utilise shame and punishment as a tool to discipline people who step out of line. We have been designed to conform. Everything around us, and within us, exists in a predetermined order. Nothing is new.
For their final show, students from the Royal College of Arts’ Design Without elective are conducting an experiment into the preoccupation of control in our lives and its unnoticed manifestations. Using one of the houses of Walmer Yard as the setting, the students aim to highlight and unsettle subconscious behavioural cycles through a journey of subversions and controlled simulations.
Our Keeper Laura Mark was interviewed by the Architects’ Journal about her new role at the houses and her plans for Walmer Yard.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Where have you come from and what is your role at Walmer Yard? I was previously the architecture projects manager at the Royal Academy of Arts and before that I’d held many different roles at the AJ from intern to Architecture Editor. I’m now the keeper at Walmer Yard. It’s a slightly odd title which is more common in arts institutions where historically the keeper would be a curator looking after a specific area. At Walmer Yard I look after the building and its day-to-day running and I am also responsible for curating the public programme that will happen there and running the Baylight Foundation – the charity which is now based at Walmer Yard.
When did you start in the role and what have you been up to since you started? I joined Walmer Yard in October and I’ve spent the last few months really getting to understand the spaces and working out what we might do in them. It’s been great getting to know the whole team, too, from Peter Salter to the contractor Daren Shaw and Fenella Collingridge, who worked with Peter on the design of the houses. Fenella is a real fount of knowledge on anything about Walmer Yard. Since I started I’ve been working on a book telling the story of the project from start to completion, giving tours of the buildings to architects and students, working on our public programme and developing the direction we will take all the things we do at Walmer Yard – from rentals to film location shoots.
What are you hoping to achieve? It’s a unique place to work. It’s a real privilege to be given the opportunity to put my own stamp on what will happen at Walmer Yard and to be somewhere right from the beginning. I hope to develop an interesting programme which challenges the perception of architecture while opening up conversations about how we live and allowing the public to experience something different.
