FYI

Friday 23 October 10.00am - 8.00pm (registration opens at 9:30am)
Room GO2, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Wates House, 22 Gordon St, WC1H 0QB
architecture & travel: perception, attraction, mobility
Organised by Anne Hultzsch, Barbara Penner, Nina Vollenbröker

Addressing issues of perception, attraction and mobility, we have designed a day with two sessions of scholarly paper presentations that each concludes with a response from an expert in the field. Woven around these two fixed sessions, we have a mobile session that will take speakers and the audience onto armchair journeys through film or photography offering spaces to pause and reflect. In addition, in the spirit of a tourist taking away a souvenir or photographing a favourite scene while travelling, we have asked all contributors to bring a material object with them on the day that will be arranged in a display. Jan Birksted will respond to this ad-hoc cabinet of curiosities at the day’s end.

The morning session, Perception, focuses on the modes of architectural perception that are prompted by travel and the language used to mediate it. Why, and how, does ‘being-away’ influence the traveller’s sensitivity of the built environment (or vice-versa)? How are these impressions recorded in succeeding representations? Subjects discussed in this session range from guidebooks to jokes to travel as a metaphor for architectural experience. The speakers, Simon Bradley, Chloe Chard, and Robert Harbison, will take us to places such as Worcestershire, St Peter’s Cathedral, and local trains in Mexico and Burgundy – which will then be revisited by Stephen Bann in his response.

The afternoon session, Attraction, considers the attraction between architecture and travel. What attraction does architecture hold for travellers and travel hold for architects? What is learned, taken or brought back, and what fields of sentiment are opened up before, while and after ‘being away’? Papers by Barbara Penner, Victoria Perry, and Jilly Traganou, will consider the way allegories shaped popular touristic routes, how slavery underwrote the invention of classic British tourist destinations, as well as how a revised notion of travel today can still inform architectural production – issues which Tim Edensor will address in his response.

The mobile session, Armchair Travellers, will break up the day at three points to take the audience away from a strictly scholarly context on 30min-journeys through the speakers’ presentation of creative work. With Lilian Chee, Simon Herron and Susanne Isa, and Tamar Garb, we will travel to Singapore, between South Africa and Paris, and across America through various media of representation. Jane Rendell will respond at the end of the day to this collection of journeys.