Building Beyond - The Bartlett International Lectures

About

Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, this event will be a discussion between Programme Director, Luke Olsen, current students Ralf Saade and Emma Temm, and speakers Dr Barbara Imhof and Dr Sonya Dyer. 

This event forms part of The Bartlett International Lectures Spring 2022.

This spring, each of the International Lectures will be curated by one of the school's programmes to inspire, invent, imagine, and provoke. This event is curated by Engineering & Architectural Design MEng.

Abstract

Building Beyond

‘Building Beyond’ integrates two lectures and a dialogue by Barbara Imhof, space architect and design researcher and Sonya Dyer, artist and writer, exploring extreme realities and fictions of living in deep space.

Barbara designs for extreme environments. Pioneering projects comprise SHEE - a Self-deployable Habitat for Extreme Environments and RegoLight, a 3D-printed moon base made solely from sintering the local resource lunar dust with concentrated solar beams. Design strategies include transformable spaces, water and air regeneration and the recycling of waste for a self-sustaining architecture.

Sonya’s work investigates notions of identity, social justice, politics, exploration, community, race and dark fecundity, a new term which seeks to describe and integrate the radical potentiality of repositioning Darkness as a synonym for Blackness within constructions of the future.  Ideas of the Greek myth of Andromeda intersect with the dubious legacy of HeLa cells that translate growth principles in nature into suggestions for self-growing, self-sustaining architecture. 

Speaker biography

Dr. Barbara Imhof is an internationally active space architect, design researcher and educator. Her projects deal with the parameters of spaceflight such as living with limited resources; minimal and transformable spaces; and resource-conserving systems. Barbara Imhof is the co-founder and CEO of LIQUIFER Vienna-Bremen, an interdisciplinary team comprising engineers, architects, designers and scientists. As project lead Barbara currently works on the Gateway project, designing the habitat module for the next International Space Station in lunar orbit. 
 
Dr. Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London. A Somerset House Studios Resident, she was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021, and a UK Associate Artist at the Delfina Foundation in 2020. She is an alumnus of Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program and obtained a PhD from Middlesex University in 2021. Dyer’s practice reimagines where the centre is located in fictional narratives of the future. She explores how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities, creating radical futures through unexpected connections.  

Image: SHEE - Self deployable habitat for off-earth applications and terrestrial utilisation in remote areas, SHEE is being tested in Rio Tinto, Spain in a Mars mission simulation ©Bruno Stubenrauch