FlatScreen Talks: Home
Saturday 25 April at 2pm
Gallery 2
Beaconsfield
22 Newport Street, London SE11 6AY
Monica Ross in conversation with Ann Bodkin and Naomi Siderfin on housing, shifting communities and social power.
Architecture and urban planning - be it at macro or micro level, a private villa or an office block - must not only be a showpiece of design and technology, but also give expression to those democratic ideals of respect for human dignity, equality and freedom that are fostered in our society.
Ralph Erkskine, Times Online, 2005.
Fallen idyll - the end of a perspective is "a home movie" made by Monica Ross over two years: in 2003 while living in a council flat on Erskine's 1970s Byker estate (which had become a 'no-go' area in Newcastle upon Tyne) and then in 2005, as a document of its demolition.
Rather than presenting usual images of "failed" social housing, the video presents only the idyllic views afforded it from spring - winter, selectively presenting an aspect of the design whose utopian intent continued to survive the processes of social and physical decay. The demolition was the last step in economic and social policies that achieved the reconfiguring of this undesirable worker's housing as desirable riverside real estate.
Taking this single unit of social housing as a metaphor for the changed ideals and values about housing in the UK since the 1970s, the talk on Saturday will focus on the transformation of the Home into a primary commodity of financial markets. What implications might the post-war obsession with house-prices have for social equality, freedom and creativity?
Ann Bodkin is a sustainability consultant and architect based in Kennington.
Ralph Erskine became a member of Team X, founded in 1956, with people like Giancarlo De Carlo and Aldo Van Eyck, to counter the increasing bureaucratization of the Modern Movement, and to make human values the universal concept that preserves and enhances Homo Sapiens as a species. This applies to every human being and anything against these values brings the consequence of a Self Species Extermination Event (SSEE) like hate, racism or war...
In the last ten years council estates have been demolished or sold off to be replaced by 'so called' affordable housing- which, given house price inflation, no one can afford. Major and Blair alike have honoured Margaret Thatcher's mission to privatise the remains of the welfare state commons and impose 'consumer choice' on an increasingly impoverished majority too poor to exercise the inalienable 'right to buy' when it comes to the basic need for shelter. Benedict Seymour. Shoreditch and the creative destruction of the inner city. Variant 34 Spring 2009
To book, please email info@beaconsfield.ltd.uk
The Ragged Canteen will be open throughout the talk.
Also exhibiting:
Gallery 1 - Bob and Roberta Smith, Factory: artist in residence
Gallery 3 - 15mm, The Way Out.
Galleries 2 and 3 are accessible to wheelchair users.
Beaconsfield
22 Newport Street
London SE11 6AY
www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk
info@beaconsfield.ltd.uk
+44 (0)20 7582 6465
Please call in advance for wheelchair access.
Saturday 25 April at 2pm
Gallery 2
Beaconsfield
22 Newport Street, London SE11 6AY
Monica Ross in conversation with Ann Bodkin and Naomi Siderfin on housing, shifting communities and social power.
Architecture and urban planning - be it at macro or micro level, a private villa or an office block - must not only be a showpiece of design and technology, but also give expression to those democratic ideals of respect for human dignity, equality and freedom that are fostered in our society.
Ralph Erkskine, Times Online, 2005.
Fallen idyll - the end of a perspective is "a home movie" made by Monica Ross over two years: in 2003 while living in a council flat on Erskine's 1970s Byker estate (which had become a 'no-go' area in Newcastle upon Tyne) and then in 2005, as a document of its demolition.
Rather than presenting usual images of "failed" social housing, the video presents only the idyllic views afforded it from spring - winter, selectively presenting an aspect of the design whose utopian intent continued to survive the processes of social and physical decay. The demolition was the last step in economic and social policies that achieved the reconfiguring of this undesirable worker's housing as desirable riverside real estate.
Taking this single unit of social housing as a metaphor for the changed ideals and values about housing in the UK since the 1970s, the talk on Saturday will focus on the transformation of the Home into a primary commodity of financial markets. What implications might the post-war obsession with house-prices have for social equality, freedom and creativity?
Ann Bodkin is a sustainability consultant and architect based in Kennington.
Ralph Erskine became a member of Team X, founded in 1956, with people like Giancarlo De Carlo and Aldo Van Eyck, to counter the increasing bureaucratization of the Modern Movement, and to make human values the universal concept that preserves and enhances Homo Sapiens as a species. This applies to every human being and anything against these values brings the consequence of a Self Species Extermination Event (SSEE) like hate, racism or war...
In the last ten years council estates have been demolished or sold off to be replaced by 'so called' affordable housing- which, given house price inflation, no one can afford. Major and Blair alike have honoured Margaret Thatcher's mission to privatise the remains of the welfare state commons and impose 'consumer choice' on an increasingly impoverished majority too poor to exercise the inalienable 'right to buy' when it comes to the basic need for shelter. Benedict Seymour. Shoreditch and the creative destruction of the inner city. Variant 34 Spring 2009
To book, please email info@beaconsfield.ltd.uk
The Ragged Canteen will be open throughout the talk.
Also exhibiting:
Gallery 1 - Bob and Roberta Smith, Factory: artist in residence
Gallery 3 - 15mm, The Way Out.
Galleries 2 and 3 are accessible to wheelchair users.
Beaconsfield
22 Newport Street
London SE11 6AY
www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk
info@beaconsfield.ltd.uk
+44 (0)20 7582 6465
Please call in advance for wheelchair access.
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