Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures
Abstract
Panel: Dr. Gul Kacmaz Erk, Prof. Gary Boyd and Dr. Agustina Martire
The discussion responds to the theme of set by Queen’s University Belfast, “Lived Space, Past and Present”:
German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim coined the term “lived space” (der gelebte Raum) in 1932 to refer to the experiential and perceptual characteristics of space rather than its visuality and physicality. It has recently been popularised by Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa who encourages us to think about space in terms of atmosphere and sensation, and the design of spaces from the perspective of how they will be “lived” and perceived. In many ways, he captures ideas relevant across multiple disciplines.
Narrative practices and memory-making processes in art and cultural projects help us signify the implications of “lived space” in physical settings. Mediated arrangements of space through the visual arts abstract lived experience, bringing it to our attention but also inviting us to question our relationship to various spaces. Installation art has, from its inception, blurred the boundary between art as an object and the live experience of art as a spatial entity. As Pallasmaa identifies, filmic representations of space generate lived images for the imagination of cinemagoers and experts alike.
Picking up on these current themes and “historic” practices, this conference call invites artists, designers and theorists to reinvent and reconsider the 90-year-old concept of “lived space.” As a concept that has morphed in terms of meaning, application and presentation over the decades we are open to a discussion of where it might take new theories of space, spatial practices, art, design and representation in the future. Particular areas of interest include:
– Lived Space in the Past and Present: Did Pallasmaa Get It Right? (architectural histories and theories, cultural histories, urban studies, psychology of space)
– The Role of Lived Space in Storytelling and/or Memory-making Processes: From Art Practices to Cultural Constructs in the Past and Present (creative arts, memory studies, visual and sonic arts)
– Histories of Representation: Looking at Lived Space through Multimedia (film, painting, drawing, architecture, design, the digital arts)
– If Film Spaces could Talk: Cinema and Architecture in and out of the City in the Past and Present (film histories and theories, filmmaking, creative arts, architectural theories, urban studies)
Dr Gul Kacmaz Erk
Gul Kacmaz Erk is a senior lecturer (assoc. prof. dr.) in Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, UK. She received BArch and MArch degrees at Middle East Technical University, and PhD degree at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. She has worked professionally as a licensed architect in the Netherlands and Turkey (Is Bank Headquarters Construction, Atelier T Architects, among others) and researched at University of Pennsylvania, USA, University College Dublin, Ireland and ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanism in Berlin, Germany. She has conducted several urban filmmaking workshops, attended international conferences, published widely, and taught at Philadelphia University, USA, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands and Izmir University of Economics, Turkey, before coming to Queen’s in 2011.
Prof Gary Boyd
Gary A. Boyd is Professor of Architecture at Queen’s University, Belfast. Graduating from the University of Strathclyde in 1997, he took academic posts in University College, Dublin and University College, Cork, before joining Queen’s in September 2013. He was Head of Architecture at Queen’s from 2016-2019. In 2018, he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for his proposal Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain. This investigates the production of enlightened and humane approaches to architecture throughout the twentieth century as a response to the extreme conditions associated with coal mining, a critical and strategic facet of the British economy.
He was also project-leader on a Getty Foundation Keeping it Modern grant (2018-21) which investigated approaches to conservation and energy use in the award-winning St Brendan’s Community School, Birr, designed by Peter and Mary Doyle in the 1970s. In 2014, he was appointed joint curator/commissioner/designer of the Irish Pavilion, for the 14th Architecture Biennale, Venice 2014. Following this, he assumed a similar role for Making Ireland Modern, a major exhibition touring the Republic of Ireland in 2016 as one of the key strands in the Irish Arts Council’s 1916-2016 cultural programme. In 2021 he was invited to serve on the council of Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
Dr Agustina Martire
Agustina Martire is a senior lecturer in architecture specialised in the study of everyday streets, their fabric, histories and experiences, through the StreetSpace project. She isespecially interested in the way people experience the built environment, and how design can enable a more inclusive and just urban space. She has worked in schools of architecture in Buenos Aires, Delft, Dublin and Belfast and collaborate with a range of government and non government organisations to explore ways in which housing, mixed use and mobility can provide better cities for all. StreetSpace is a collaborative studio unit in the Masters of Architecture, funded by the Department for Communities and supported by Belfast City Council. Each year the studio takes on a street or neighbourhood in Belfast and spend a year engaging with local communities, studying the morphology and uses of the area and later proposing built interventions that will respond to the community’s needs.
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Thursday 1st December, 2022