Bartlett Alumni Launch New Urbanogram Journal

The new journal is a platform for architecturally-minded researchers and practitioners to share their unique documentation of the built environment within its historic continuum. Urbanogram is the brainchild of a cohort of Master’s graduates from the Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA and Architectural History MA programmes.

Urbanogram’s authors seek to document specific points in time in different urban environments around the world. Contributors will share pieces from their ongoing research, academic works, professional projects and articles. 

The team is made up of eight 2018 alumni: Cassandra Osterman, Fanny Ciufo, Neha Fatima, Longhua Gu, Lei Jiao, Sophie Schrattenecker and Xin Zheng, who all studied Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA, and Stefan Gruber who studied Architectural History MA.

The inaugural journal is titled ‘Recording and Responding Cities, in the spirit of a memorable module many of the authors took while at The Bartlett – ‘Surveying and Recording Cities’. It speaks to the duality of their work in architecture and urban design, particularly when it is set in historic urban environments. 

They record sites in order to understand what has shaped them – through research, surveys, detailed observation, measuring, sketching and photographing. The act of recording is a profoundly integral part of their architectural practice and, in many of their projects, the bulk of the workload. The first issue of the journal is an homage to the process of understanding the context of a site, in order to discover how to respond to it in the act of building, renovating, or adapting; exploring how to respond to the built environment, and how the built environment responds onto itself - organically shifting and reacting in ways no one person can control. 

These stories are each a reflection of how the contemporary city – the way in which it uniquely functions with its modern systems, lifestyles, and situations – is woven into an already complex and richly defined historic urban fabric.

“Our cohort of Bartlett alumni, before coming together to create this journal, first came together in the studio. We exercised a diverse range of approaches to our work in historic urban environments. Some were research-driven, others practice-driven. We were making, tinkering, exploring, pattern-finding, unearthing, and in one way or another, scrutinizing the built form of cities within a continuum of past-present-future. Looking back on these studios, it is no surprise that we are, in a variety of international professional settings, still pursuing these same areas of architectural inquiry.”

– Cassandra Osterman, Editor

You can read the first issue of Urbanogram on Issuu.

More information

• Read Urbanogram on Issuu Urbanogram
• Follow @urbanogramjournal on Instagram
• Find out more about Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA
• Find out more about Architectural History MA

Image: Cover by Fanny Ciufo, Sophie Schrattenecker and Stefan Gruber