Online seminar: William Mann – Untimely Buildings

This is the fourth in a new seminar series The Living Memory of Cities, convened in collaboration with Eric Parry Architects and CUBE.

About this event

Join us for The Living Memory of Cities, a project originally conceived by Dr José de Paiva as an international symposium, and convened thereafter as a collaboration between Eric Parry Architects and research group Ecological, Architectural and Civic Humanities in Design (EACHiD) at CUBE: the Centre for Urban & Built Ecologies. The series continues with William Mann's presentation entitled "Untimely Buildings: Difficult Translations from Culture to Matter".

Building for the theatre involves exchanges of energy between often short-lived theatre companies and their more durable structures, and back again. My four examples, The Young Vic, the sixteenth century theatre in Shoreditch, Nevill Holt Opera and the Albany, Deptford (the latter two by Witherford Watson Mann Architects) have used leftover and provisional buildings, and mis-remembered forms, in the translation from the most ephemeral form of culture to the most durable. As such, these theatres are emblematic of broader mismatches and slippages between buildings and the life that shapes them – which make building a consistently "untimely" activity.

William Mann studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and Harvard, graduating in 1991. After working on archaeological sites in Rome and Egypt, he gained professional experience in London and Flanders. Since establishing Witherford Watson Mann Architects, he has contributed to all the studio’s projects and led the design of the Upper Lea Valley Landscape Strategy, Gistel social housing, Walthamstow Wetlands nature reserve and Brickfields small business centre. He has written on London’s edge landscapes, social engineering, self-build, buildings’ nicknames, and the hybrid urbanism of Flanders for Archis, OASE and other magazines, as well as contributing chapters to several books on the relation between urban regeneration and social change. He was visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen in 2014.

 

A close up portrait of a man who is talking and with his arm outstretched pointing to some diagrams

Details

Date/time Online: Tuesday 16 February 2021, from 5pm to 6.30pm
Book ticket William Mann – Untimely Buildings
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William Mann “Untimely Buildings“

This was the fourth in The Living Memory of Cities, a seminar series convened in collaboration with Eric Parry Architects and the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE), London Metropolitan University. The series continues with William Mann's presentation entitled "Untimely Buildings: Difficult Translations from Culture to Matter".

The Living Memory of Cities – Seminar series

 
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