Colin O'Brien lecture

Retrospective Images
Thursday 3rd April
6.30pm in the Forum

Colin O’Brien will be presenting his ‘Retrospective Images’: a series of photographs which take a nostalgic look back at life and span a period of over 50 years. The urban landscapes capture people off-guard in run-down buildings and streets, which have long since been cleaned up or demolished. Children play, women chat, men drink and play darts in seedy pubs, couples stroll, arm-in-arm on Sundays in the City.

The commonplace is so often overlooked, but it could be argued that many of O’Brien’s photographs are the most important documentation of a way of life that has long since ceased to exist. For O’Brien, the street becomes his stage and the passing scene is compared to scenes in a play where people talk, dance, mime and perform to an unseen audience.

The ‘Retrospective Images’ are oddly timeless with no sense of place and a telling beauty and eloquence. They encapsulate connections and misconnections between subjects, many of those, societies “outsiders”. O’Brien lives in Hackney and many of his pictures are taken in and around that area.

For more information about Colin O’Brien, see: www.colinobrien.co.uk

Election Results

Easter break is now coming to an end and we all face into the last couple of months with renewed vigour and determination, I’m sure.

MA&DE’s elections before the break have brought a new team together to carry MA&DE on into next year and continue to develop it.

The results are as follows:

Core MA&DE Team -

PG Chair: Caroline Khoo, 4th Year

PG Vice-Chair: Tabitha Pope, 4th Year

UG Chair: Linda Bjorling, 1st Year

PR: Josh Williams, 4th Year

PR/Admin: Emma Ellis, 2nd Year

Admin/Treasurer: Anna Kerrane, 4th Year

Extended MA&DE team -

Vicky Summers, Aasan Abbas, William Fairminer, Arman Borhani, Edourd Rochet, Kevin Ega-Bourgeois, Charlotte Khatso, Zara Agha, Pavol and Luke Royffe.

Raphael

We would like to express our sadness at the tragic death of classmate Raphael Pennekamp, a keen contributor to MA&DE. His enthusiasm and passion were seemingly unending, and MA&DE’s recent discussion series “The interior as background to life” was entirely thanks to him. He will be greatly missed by many throughout the school.

MA&DE, the annual elections and you

MA&DE has grown from a small student initiative, which came into being over a drink in a pub, into an active student architecture society. It has been a brilliant year, but we, that is the people filling the “official” positions as Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and PR, think it’s time to make way for new people. Some of us are leaving architecture education for good this summer to enter the “real world”, whilst some will continue at DASD and may try out a different role with MA&DE…

So, without further ado (and before we drift into deep nostalgia), we’d like to announce the MA&DE elections! If you enjoy organising events, liaising between people and putting on socials, then get involved. You can stand for one of the five “official” positions or propose a new job.

Through being part of the MA&DE team, you will get to meet interesting people from the architecture world, plus any position will look good on your CV – but of course, these should not be the only reasons you sign up to the team. You should also be reasonably committed as the positions need to be filled until the following elections in Celebration Week next year. No worries though - the work that is involved is good fun and definitely rewarding.

If you have any questions regarding the “official” positions, please do contact the relevant person:

Postgraduate chair – Stef Rhodes (stefrhodes [at] gmail.com)
Undergraduate chair
Job: Lectures, coordinating the different events, liaising between the school and the society

Postgraduate secretary – Anna Kerrane (anna.kerrane [at] gmail.com)
Undergraduate secretary – Nicky Bruun-Meyer (nib0200 [at] londonmet.ac.uk)
Job: Organising the society meetings, taking the notes, liaising between the school and the students, writing postings on the MA&DE blog and keeping the Facebook group up-to-date

Treasurer – Christian Dimbleby (cpd0014 [at] londonmet.ac.uk)
Job: Liaising between the university and the society and managing the money

PR - Kat Davis (kat.s.davis [at] gmail.com)
Job: Lectures, posters, getting the MA&DE message out there and writing postings on the MA&DE blog

We’ve actually not stuck to these job descriptions - they are more of a general guidance. MA&DE tends to work as a team, with everyone being involved in pretty much everything at some point!

In addition, there have been many more people beyond these “official roles” that have organised specific events within the MA&DE structure. These have included the cinema nights and the MA&DE public seminars. There have also been an important group of people involved with the lectures, poster making and helping the socials to happen, so you’re not alone.

Please let us know under made.in.spring [at] gmail.com or via the election box on the MA&DE board if you are interested in a position by midday, Tuesday 11th of March. The elections will take place at one o’clock at Spring House (location tbc). Anyone who can’t make it in person but would like to stand for a position can send a representative. And again… if you have any questions, please get in touch with us at made.in.spring [at] gmail.com.

Yours truly,

The MA&DE team 2007/08.

Confusing Celebrations!

MA&DE would like to thank you all for a really great night at BarCosa last Thursday, but also apologise for the confusion surrounding the location…especially if any of you didn’t get the message that it had moved… (we hope not!)

Many of you saw the studios slowly transforming into a party room over the course of the evening, and we hope you were as excited as us about the idea of school not being just about work for an evening!!!

However, communication & bureaucracy let us down, and despite having received permission from all of the University bodies who we were told to, it transpired that there were some outstanding permissions that were necessary in order for us to hold our event in the school…

Unfortunately, it was only during the lecture, when the room was ready, the beer was chilled and the dj’s had begun warming up, that an official from the University arrived unannounced to give us the bad news….

So, a special thank you to Abby at BarCosa for accommodating us at such short notice (and yes, we were all very impressed with that final blast of the speakers at the end of the night!)

A big thank you also to Tabitha and Matt for the music, and to xxxx who became our official paparazzo for the night!

We do still hope to hold a party in school for you at some stage towards the end of the year, now that we’re fully aware of the requirements… So dj’s and party planners… keep coming forward!!

Celebration Week is all over now, and it’s heads down for the next few weeks before the Easter Crits that so many of us have looming… but don’t forget the Elections coming up on Tuesday the 11th…

MA&DE PUBLIC - seminar 4

"The Interior as a Background for Life".
Raphael Pennekamp : Kettle’s Yard. A way of life.
Monday, the 3rd of March.
Studio North (E105, on the first floor)
6:30pm. (not 6:00 pm as printed on the posters!)

“Kettle’s Yard is in no way meant to be an art gallery or museum, nor is it simply a collection of works of art… It is, rather, a continuing way of life from these last 50 years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognize if we are not to be swamped by all that is so rapidly opening up before us.” –Jim Ede.

Raphael Pennekamp will introduce the idea that art, as a vital part of our everyday lives, can root us in the world around us and inform an understanding of ourselves in it. A setting where one can ‘be with’ works of art, seen next to more ordinary things, can allow us to develop a more personal relationship.

The Interior as a Background for Life. A continuous dialogue between Martina Geccelli, Florian Beigel, John Glew and Raphael Pennekamp.
In order to encourage a culture of open academic exchange in our department, MA&DE has established the format of the ‘public seminar’. A first series of events on four consecutive Tuesdays will address the topic of “The Interior as a Background for Life”. At any one time, one of the four guests will introduce an individually chosen topic, to be followed by a chaired dialog amongst the seminar group. Students are very much encouraged to enter into these dialogs.

MA&DE on Real Time

We wrote an article 'about us' - hopefully if you're reading this, it means you followed the link from Real Time.

It's the stepping up to be part of MA&DE time of year... here's what we said on Real Time:

The Metropolitan Architecture and Design Exchange, the Department of Architecture and Spatial Design Student Society, is now a proud one and half years old. We’ve had a lot of fun, but are thinking the time has come to pass the baton of great extra-curricular activity and antics on to some fresher-faced folks. There’ll shortly be elections in the school to which you can nominate people and/or stand for the couple of official job titles at MA&DE, but there is also loads more we do that you can do too. So, here’s a bit more about us…

MA&DE holds events for and by students - educational, recreational and social. We seek to encourage contact between units, years and courses and support student initiatives.

Last year we ran the ‘MA&DE-up cities’ cinema season, organised ‘MA&DE at night’ socials (we have a soft-spot for puns) and facilitated collecting your feedback on life at DASD to share with the RIBA, when last Autumn, they turned up in their white coats at Spring House.

So far this year, we have set up a tasty range of public ‘freshly MA&DE’ lectures, there has been more of ‘MA&DE at night’ and most recently, ‘MA&DE public’, a series of open seminar debates. We’ve also represented student concerns at meetings – the recycling boxes are here (hoorah) and we’re still working on introducing power-napping sofas as well as a mentoring system between postgraduate and undergraduate students.

You have ideas of other things that can be MA&DE, we hear you say? Whether that be to get a whole school 5-aside football league together, life drawing classes or a photography exhibition, MA&DE can support you. Not an organizer? Have no fear, ideas-people are needed too –there are jobs and roles of all sizes and responsibility.

So don’t sit in the wings, the hard bit is done – MA&DE is up, running and ready for more people and more ideas and initiative. In the meantime, if you feel like flexing your DJing muscles at the ‘MA&DE at night’ party in Celebration Week, then e-mail us at made.in.spring[at]gmail.com

You can also find us on Facebook, see what’s on next on the yellow board in department or via the web at the MA&DE blog.

...the 'celebration' in the week. For all ASD students.

MA&DE PUBLIC - seminar 3

"The Interior as a Background for Life".
John Glew : Making good things happen.
Tuesday, the 26th of February.
The forum
6:30pm. (not 6:00 pm as printed on the posters!)

“The known potential of the found rather than the ego of the new can enable a familiar, ‘Background-Presence’ - the character of the physical (and cultural) setting of a place - to flourish; Architecture can be as much about interpretation as the production of form with it’s appropriateness to empower others. Thus all that is not architecture is respected - one rich in social importance. These virtues, some pictured and some imagined can be viewed as available resources to the city, as a kind of visual registry, harnessed and deployed they have much imaginative design potential if recognised; an Architecture of the emotions and the intellect - for all the senses…”

Tales told by lamplight

We thought we'd get some special MA&DE lamps, to draw your attention to MA&DE events going on in Spring House - like bees to a honeypot. The lamps embarked upon their MA&DEn voyage and docked in (well, more precisely were plugged in at) the second 'MA&DE public: the Interior as Background for Life' seminar, given by DASD's own esteemed Monsieur Beigel. There was a rather touching moment during the talk, when M. Beigel took a seat by one of the little yellow glowing wonders, to share with the audience some big ideas. The seminar was packed and MA&DE would like to give Raphael Pennekamp a shiny gold star for showing the initiative to start up this successful discussion series.