Matthew Barac: Affirmative Irony in City Making
A session, part of the series of talks on “The Living Memory of Cities”, convened on 16 January 2023 in a collaboration with Eric Parry Architects and the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE), London Metropolitan University. With a keynote presentation by Robert Tavernor (Tavernor Consultancy, Architecture + Heritage) entitled “A particular point of view, London and the picturesque”: A session, Part of the series of talks on “The Living Memory of Cities”, convened on 24 April 2023 in collaboration with Eric Parry Architects and the Centre for Urban and Build Ecologies (CUBE), London Metropolitan University. With a keynote presentation by Matthew Barac entitled “Affirmative Irony in City Making”.
00:00:00 José de Paiva
00:01:21 Eric Parry
00:02:13 Matthew Barac – Keynote presentation
00:54:34 Christian Frost
01:01:47 Nicholas Temple
01:07:27 Harriet McKay
01:11:30 Eric Parry
Matthew Barac is Professor of Architecture & Urban Culture at London Metropolitan University. He is a UK-registered architect with professional experience in Britain, South Africa, and the USA. His doctoral research, supervised by Peter Carl, won the RIBA President’s Award for Research (2007) and the International Bauhaus Award (2004). His core interest concerns the play between formal and informal orders of urban change in the global south, with particular attention to questions of orientation. Key academic outputs include “Technologies of Belonging” in Building Owning & Belonging (UN-Habitat/European Union, 2019), “Changing Places” in Phenomenologies of the City (eds Sternberg & Steiner, Routledge, 2015) and “Place Resists: Grounding African Urban Order in an Age of Global Change” (Social Dynamics, 37:1, 24-42, 2011). He also writes about design in the mainstream design media including Icon magazine, Building Design, Architecture Today, Elle Decoration, Il Giornale dell’Architettura, World Architecture, and House & Leisure. Honorary positions include membership of the RIBA Research Development Group and Architecture & Culture editorial board. He was a founding trustee of charity Architecture Sans Frontières-UK, and chaired the board until 2015.
