Bartlett Research Conversations: Ben Spong

A hybrid Teams link is available – please contact Emmy Thittanond, g.thittanond@ucl.ac.uk, to request access to the link by midday, Tuesday 29 April 2025.

Engaging the Plausible Realm – Disturbing Temporalities across Architectural Production

Speaker: Ben Spong
UCL Supervisor: Prof Nat Chard & Prof Penelope Haralambidou 

Abstract

This presentation will follow a body of research that is concerned with the plausible realm - a space of measured uncertainty, suspended across worlds one holds to be true and those that lie just beyond. Oscillating between notions of truth and time, it emerges as a space of projected experience that draws together spatio-temporal and epistemic distinctions, allowing one to be drawn from the other in ways that challenge dominant vectors of time and forms of knowledge production.

Moving through an assemblage of material images, devices, and their digitally calibrated counterparts, the conversation will explore what potential the plausible holds for reconsidering the terms of architectural production. By disturbing the synchronicity of natural and artificial temporalities at the points of perception and production, this work seeks to establish an active, expansive role for the plausible realm – positing it as a means of production and a mechanism of architecture’s attuned to the unknown and uncertain.

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 Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. 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 Sophia Psarra, Dr Tania Sengupta and Dr Nina Vollenbröker; PhD Coordinators, Dr Stamatis Zografos and Dr Stelios Giamarelos; and other PhD supervisors.

Image: Durational Vase No.3 – Blossoming Surfaces. Objects and Photo by Ben Spong