Mark E Breeze, who teaches Dreaming Domesticity, Sheltering Speculations (EXP 17) has had a film he made selected for screening at the 2021 London Architecture Film Festival, as the closing film of the festival. Mark’s film, Shelter without Shelter, undertaken with Tom Scott-Smith, documents the experience of migrants travelling across Europe in search of shelter in the summer of 2015. Filmed over three years since 2015, this six-part documentary investigates how forced migrants from Syria were sheltered across Europe and the Middle East, ending up in mega-camps, city squats, occupied airports, illegal settlements, requisitioned buildings, flat-pack structures, and enormous architect-designed reception centres. Containing perspectives from the humanitarians who created these shelters as well as the critics who campaigned against them, the documentary reveals the complex dilemmas involved in attempts to house refugees in emergency conditions.

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Earlier this month Mark and co-tutor of EXP 17 Katie Kasabalis joined a live talk exploring AUAR Lab’s House Block in Clapton, Hackney, discussing and challenging the meaning of domesticity & Family with Mollie Claypool, LUCINE and Jasmine Wilson.

House Block is designed and built using Automated Architecture’s Lab (AUAR) Block Type A modular housing system, and demonstrates the potential of participatory approaches to housing, where local communities utilise digital modes of production. In partnership with Hackney Council, House Block will be installed in Clapton, East London from April to May 2021. AUAR is a research laboratory at The Bartlett, directed by Lecturers in Architecture Mollie Claypool, Gilles Retsin, Manuel Jimenez and Senior Research Fellow in Public Engagement Claire McAndrew.

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