The Bartlett School of Architecture Launches New Flagship Public Event Series

The Bartlett School of Architecture is pleased to announce CRUNCH, a series of panel discussions applying critical thought to contemporary projects and urgent ecological, social, political, and economic concerns in architecture. 

Curated by the school’s Co-Directors of Public Programming Albert Brenchat-Aguilar and Déborah López Lobato, CRUNCH puts staff, students, and alumni in conversation with designers, architects, planners, artists, thinkers and activists, and will run on Thursday evenings at the school’s Bloomsbury location.

Each year’s CRUNCH series will have a theme, with this year’s being ‘Resource’. Resource responds to the UK’s struggle for housing, food, and energy resources, the North Sea oil and gas licenses, the collapse of the Panama Channel, the fight for resource extraction in Niger and Mali, and renewed global demands to return British spoils. 

The series responds to a context in which businesses struggle to find human resources whilst the cost-of-living crisis has seen workers in education, health, and transport demanding better pay and conditions. Simultaneously, educators feel under-resourced to attend to growing mental health epidemics whilst students struggle to thrive with mounting pressure on their own resources. 

This year’s events will consider:

• To resource: to be resourceful, to provide with resources, to equip. To create resilience and sustainability, to cut down, to consume locally, to build facilities.
• To resource: to rise again, to recover. To grow, to recycle, revamp, and reconstruct. 
• To resource: to go back to the source, origins, heritage, identity, to come back home, to find home. 
• To resource: source again, exploit, extract, exhaust. To store, speculate, and sell.
• To resource: acting in adverse circumstances, contingency in the building site, renunciations in the design. 
• To resource: to provide humans for national (infrastructures), international (warmongering, peace corps, humanitarian, neocolonial), or business enterprise (workers).

CRUNCH launches on Thursday 19 October at 6.30pm in G12, 22 Gordon Street.

The series is one of several public event series at The Bartlett School of Architecture. 

Image: Purple Flows by Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson. Photograph by Johnson Adjorlo with artist Ato Jackson installing the piece.