For the last two years, t-sa forum has investigated the concept of ‘renewal’ in the architecture of London as examples of how history can be updated. This year, in parallel to the visiting school at the AA, t-sa forum is organising a series of two conversations between practitioners and recent AA graduates, to discuss the relationships between themes of renewal, structure and emotion.
In this first lecture, architecture practice OMMX will be in conversation with AA graduate Summer Islam to discuss emotional value in architecture. OMMX is concerned with architecture’s capacity to hold the collective and individual rituals of everyday life. Through projects, they seek to measure and intensify the psychology of spaces, challenging the dogma of the metric system. This same interest was explored by Summer Islam in her 5th year project, Objects of Nostalgia. Here, she distributed the bulk of the British Museum’s collection across terraced houses in Bloomsbury as a way to display the museum’s entire archive within the city and simultaneously store elements of the terraced houses to be preserved within the now empty archive.
OMMX was founded in 2010. The practice has worked on social housing, private residences, offices, public spaces, festivals, exhibitions, shops, furniture and fittings, with recent successes in high profile competitions organised by both the American Institute of Architects and Royal Institute of British Architects, and were placed in the final shortlist to curate and design the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016. The directors are Design Fellows at Cambridge University and regularly contribute to critique and discourse at schools of art and architecture across Europe.
Summer Islam studied architecture at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and the Architectural Association, from which she graduated with honours in 2014. She worked at Caruso St John Architects, and is currently in practice at 6a architects. Summer taught at the AA Jeddah Visiting School in 2015 and 2016.
Images:
OMMX, Mirrored Oculus. Canonbury, 2015
Summer Islam, Objects of Nostalgia, 2014