The Bartlett Research Conversations

Research summaries 

Thomas Callan-Riley

“How beautiful it can be”
Exploring collective memory and collective imagination in skateboarding

Thomas' research moves beyond the primacy and the immediacy of the individual body to understand how skateboarding transforms the city. 

Rather than asking how they physically produce space, he explores how skateboarders learn to access a collective memory and collective imagination of skateboarding—how they learn to engage with architecture through others’ bodies, or phantom bodies. Thomas combines the collective approach of these bodies to the concept of super-architectural space, arguing for a ​more than​ bodily or super-bodily experience of skateboarding.

Annarita Papeschi

Transindividual Urbanism
New territories of participatory practices

Annarita's research formulates a design-research practice using historical research, participatory urban analysis and design speculation to explore the aesthetical, technological and cultural dimension of transindividuality as a generative model of collective authorship. 

Drawing on a body of early cybernetic works and recent environmental and biometric sensing projects, Annarita explores trajectories of metastatic materiality, mediality and affectivity. 

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design and MPhil/PhD Architectural and Urban History and Theory. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the programme directors, Professor Jonathan Hill and Professor Ben Campkin, PhD Coordinators, Dr. Nina Vollenbröker and Dr Sophie Read, and other PhD supervisors.

Image credits: Wade Travean and Annarita Papeschi, The HeartBit Walks.