An informal conversation on studio culture and research-by-design with professors Prue Chiles (Newcastle) & Lawrence Wallen (UTS)

University of Cyprus, Academia Campus, Rm. A110
Wednesday 5.6.24 at 18:00

Prue Chiles: The work of Professor Chiles seeks to strengthen connections between people and design and on the reciprocal relationships between people, place, teaching, creativity and architectural design. She combines architectural practice with research and teaching. At the core of her work is a conviction that a research attitude to architectural design, combined with strategic sustainability in its widest social and environmental sense, is critical in any successful creative project or beautiful building. In 2002 she initiated the Bureau-design research (Bdr) at the University of Sheffield, a unique research consultancy/project office, designed to raise the profile of architectural design in the building process both within and outside a university context. The team carried out more than 60 funded projects gaining an international reputation for participatory practices, research consultancy and knowledge transfer; particularly for their work on neighbourhood design, designing learning environments, and new futures for the North of England. The same team, Howard Evans and Leo Care herself, with others, forms the architectural practice (Prue Chiles Architects – ruechilesarchitects.co.uk) that has facilitated research-based practice in their built work. They have completed a number of innovative buildings/projects over the last 10 years, including a “Classrooms of the Future” and a bowling pavilion funded by Sport England. The projects have been widely exhibited and published in the Architectural Press and won RIBA Regional Awards including in 2014 the small project of the year award for the Yorkshire region. The practice work was recently profiled in Thames and Hudson’s 2013 “Architects Sketchbook’. Administration and professional roles include Director of Architecture at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture 2008-2010 and a key client role in the highly successful refurbishment of the listed modernist Arts Tower, at the University. She is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary and Inter-institutional Visual Culture Network. She is committed to various advisory roles for both Central Government and Regional Agencies, she is on the faculty of the British School at Rome encouraging young architects to broaden their design and research skills in the heady atmosphere of Rome. She is also Chair of Trustees for the community-led design charity Glass – House.

Lawrence Wallen: Professor Wallen is on the faculty of the School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. He was Educated as an artist at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna and as an interior designer and architect at RMIT in Melbourne). He was Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland (2002 – 2012), Guest Artist at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) and Lecturer in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. He was also Creative Director Artemedia AG Berlin, Founder of maa+c studio, Berlin/Tokyo, Co-Director IKEA x UTS Future Living Lab Sydney, and Bogliasco Fellow. He has served as Head of the Design School at UTS from 2009-2018 and as Director of the Interior Program and Master of Architecture program from 2018 to 2023. With regards to his writing in Research and Praxis, his work explores the cosmopoietic (world-making) and epistemological (knowledge-creating) functions of the physical model in Art, Theatre and Architecture, its virtual equivalence inside dialogical models of interactivity and immersion and its application in terms of performative approaches to interior architecture, exhibition and spatial design. Current research centres on virtual environments and research exhibitions, culminating in the upcoming publications, Staging Climate: Art, Nature, Culture in the Production of Knowledge in the Museum.- Routledge Handbook of Museum and Heritage Education AND The Virtual Model in Theatre, Art and Architecture: Making Worlds London: Bloomsbury; this monograph examines the distinct genealogies and unique properties of virtual models and environments in contemporary expanded practices and their capacity for world-making. In a second ongoing strand of practice, recent exhibitions and residencies in Vilnius, France, Cyprus, Cairo, Amman and Italy operate in dialogue with and underpin his writing and creative production, articulating the role of memory and the persistence of spatiotemporal elements of culturally significant sites, spaces and landscapes. This continuing body of work contributes to a discourse that explores and documents the enduring qualities of specific spaces that resonate beyond their physical site within the broader discourses of rewilding, decolonisation and biodiversity.

Event poster, here