Representations/Investigations: Media in Architecture, the Territory and the Urban

This Symposium aims to bring together researchers, architects and artists to explore the use of media and representation of space as a form of multi-scalar investigation, from architecture to the territory and the urban. From analogue tools, and modelling techniques, to publication, speakers will discuss key projects from their practice that use artistic media beyond the pure representation of architecture but instead as a systematic form of enquiry.

Alessandra Covini (Studio Ossidiana) studied in Milan and Lisbon and received her master’s degree in Architecture at the University of Technology in Delft (NL). She founded Studio Ossidiana in 2015, a Rotterdam-based practice that works at the crossroads of architecture, visual art and design which she leads together with Giovanni Bellotti. She is the winner of the Prix de Rome Architecture 2018, the oldest and most prestigious award for architects under 35 in the Netherlands. Alessandra teaches and heads workshops at the Royal Academy of Arts (Den Haag), Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam), MIARD (Rotterdam), the Rotterdam Academie van Bouwkunst, TU Delft.

Miles Gertler (Common Accounts) studied architecture at the University of Waterloo and Princeton University. In addition to his independent projects in writing, sculpture, and image-making, Gertler is a Director at Common Accounts, an office for design inquiry that he founded with Igor Bragado in 2015. Their work in academia and architectural inquiry, construction, and large-scale art installations examines intersections of the body with spaces both online and IRL* and considers extra-architectural material that often passes below the radar of the discipline. He teaches at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and serves on the Board of Directors at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.

Roosmarijn Pallandt is an Amsterdam-based artist. She builds installations predominantly featuring her photographic prints, but also comprising 16 mm film, sound recordings, and textile objects made in collaboration with local weavers around the world. Pallandt’s work reflects the way landscapes are shaped by the way we cultivate, (inter)act, behave and remember. For her projects she has immersed herself in biotopes as diverse as the deserts, jungles and mountains of Japan, Tibet, Iran, and Mexico, among other places. The small communities in which and with whom Pallandt works seem to seamlessly inhabit the resilience of their environments, in which they know their relative place.

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici (Black Square) is the editor of AA Files and the founder of Black Square, a collective engaged in research-by-design since 2014. Black Square makes projects, installations, books, as well as functioning as educational platform with a yearly summer workshop. Maria is the coordinator of the History and Theory course at the School of Architecture of the Royal College of Art and a Diploma Unit Master at the Architectural Association, London. She earned her PhD from Delft University in 2014; her theoretical research focuses on the construction of modern subjectivity, a topic she has explored in her writings and editorial projects. With Black Square, Maria pursues a trajectory which questions the link between form, image, and use. The first instalment of this research, Black Blocs (2017), has been commissioned by the FRAC Centre-Orléans, and will be followed in 2019 by How to Live in a Jungle, an experiment on the park as civic space exhibited at the Versailles Landscape Biennial.

Zoe Zenghelis is an Athenian artist who has been living and working in London since her student years. After studying painting in Athens she continued her study in stage design and painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic under Frank Auerbach, Lawrence Gowing, and Leon Kossoff. She started her painting career as a founding member of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), whose collaboration with other OMA members has widened their horizons and opened new opportunities for them in painting and architecture. Her paintings for OMA have been exhibited in many museums and galleries. Zenghelis’s independent works as a painter have been widely exhibited and published. The paintings are inspired by metropolitan structure, landform, and abstract tectonics. Yet the imagery is quintessentially modern and modernist: it is an imagery of the fragment, the collage, the assemblage, the parts standing for the whole, and often greater than the whole. From 1982 to 1993, in partnership with Madelon Vriesendorp, she ran the ColourWorkshop at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.