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Queering Urbanism - Resistant Materials: Designing in (Queer) Community
06 March 2024, 6:30 pm–8:00 pm
Join us for the next Queering Urbanism hybrid lecture series event with 2023 RIBA Rising Star award winner, Martha Summers. This lecture will explore Martha’s queer approach to design and practice and will be followed by a Q&A chaired by Daniel Ovalle Costal. This is a Hybrid event.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Bartlett School of Architecture
Location
-
Room 1.0222 Gordon StreetLondonWC1H 0QB
Approaches to queer(ing) architectural design and practice vary between people and contexts.
Trained as an architect and working across architecture, art, design, education and activism, Martha Summers has developed a design and making practice across a variety of scales and sites, from domestic space to museums, wearable objects to buildings.
By engaging with architectural design concepts such as adaptive re-use, retrofit first, and circular design through a queer lens, Martha’s work challenges boundaries between design and making, planning and delivery, and embraces unexpected materials and modes of self-fashioning that connect with her butch identity.
In this lecture, Martha will explore her queer approach, with a focus on methodologies that critically engage with intersections between spaces, bodies and cultures and working with unorthodox materials and objects. In doing so, she will discuss projects including the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre in Blackfriars, which was designed and built by an entirely LGBTQ+ team in the space of just five weeks, and the exhibition Out & About! at the Barbican Centre’s Curve Gallery in 2022, which showcased 40 key objects from the Bishopsgate Institute’s LGBTQIA+ Archive. In both projects, and across her portfolio of work as an artist and architect, Martha’s practice expands notions of queer aesthetics and sensibilities, with design languages that move with agility across themes from domesticity to kink.
Find out more about upcoming eventing in the Queering Urbanisms series and watch previous sessions here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/about/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/bqueer-forum
- Additional Information
The room is wheelchair accessible and located on the first floor.
All-gender and accessible toilets are available on the first floor and by the building’s reception.
Personal assistants and assistance dogs are welcome.
Further access information is available at: https://www.accessable.co.uk/venues/gordon-street-22
This event is organised by B. Queer, The Bartlett’s Queer Network, which brings together lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual (LGBTQIA+) students, staff, and allies from across the faculty’s 12 schools, institutes, and departments.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email: d.costal@ucl.ac.uk
About the Speaker
Martha Summers
Architect, Artist and Design Tutor at Architect and Artist living and working in London. She is a 2023 RIBA Rising Star award winner
Martha Summers is an architect and artist working in London. She is a 2023 RIBA Rising Star award winner. Key themes in her artistic and architectural practice include queer domesticity, self-fashioning and butch identity. As an architect, Martha has worked in practice for AOC Architecture and Feilden Fowles Architects in London, and Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland, on a broad range of projects in the UK and elsewhere. Her artistic works have been shown at Space Station 65, SET Gallery Woolwich, and Bermondsey Project Space.
Among her most notable work is the design for the 2022 exhibition Out and About!- a selection of 40 moments from the Bishopsgate Institute, installed at the Curve gallery in the Barbican Centre, London; and her design for the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre, completed in 2021. Martha has spoken at events held by the Architecture Foundation, Open City, the Architecture Club, the AA, The Museum of the Home, and Queer Aided Design. She has been a visiting tutor/critic at Central St Martins, Cambridge, and The Cass, and has co-taught a short Architecture course at the Reach Cambridge Summer School.
Daniel Ovalle Costal is an architect trained between Spain and the UK. He works as a sole practitioner in London where he has led commercial and mixed-use projects across many sectors while working for Wilkinsone Eyre and Acme. Since 2018 he is also a Lecturer (Teaching) at The Bartlett School of Architecture where he co-runs Unit 22 in the Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) and Unit 4 in the Engineering and Architectural Design MEng programmes. He also co-leads the London School of Architecture’s Design Think Tanks.
Daniel’s research interests lay at the intersection of architectural design, domesticity, and queer studies. He has a special interest in forms of making that relate to popular culture, Including dollhouses, miniatures, paper theatres, and pop-up books.