Royal College of Art School of Architecture

☀️Architecture Summer School - Apply Now! ☀️

Still time to apply!

🍋 Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri, leaders of ADS7 and the duo behind architectural practice Lemonot , will be leading our exciting Architecture Summer School!

Speakers and guests include Eleonora Agostini, Gaia Crocella, Michela Falcone and Marko Milovanovic.

Our teaching and studios are geared toward hands-on learning, lectures and discussions. At the Summer School, you have the opportunity to enter into a space where creativity is pushed and challenged, where new and old materials are examined for reinvention and innovation. Join us and engage in enriching conversation and learning this summer!

For more course info , click on the link in bio.

Summer Course Dates: 14 - 18 July 2025
Campus Location: RCA, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU

For enquiries, please email [email protected].

🌍 Take Back the Land Symposium🌍
🗓️ 14–15–16 May 2025
📍 Senior Common Room, Kensington Campus, Royal College of Art

Join us for a 3-day international symposium marking the culmination of the Take Back the Land event series — a year-long collaborative research programme across the School of Architecture.

Land is central to many struggles in the world today: from urban struggles for housing or against gentrification, to decolonisation struggles, struggles against extractivism and plantation monoculture, to struggles for the return of ancestral First Nation territories against settler colonies.

The Take Back the Land Event Series asks why this is so, what is at stake for those engaged in these processes, and what role architecture can play in these struggles.

Convened by Dubravka Sekulic, Godofredo Enes Pereira & Shehrazade Mahassini

☀️Architecture Summer School - Apply Now! ☀️

🍋 Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri, leaders of ADS7 and the duo behind architectural practice Lemonot , will be leading our exciting Architecture Summer School!

Our teaching and studios are geared toward hands-on learning, lectures and discussions. At the Summer School, you have the opportunity to enter into a space where creativity is pushed and challenged, where new and old materials are examined for reinvention and innovation. Join us and engage in enriching conversation and learning this summer!

For more course info , click on the link in bio.

Summer Course Dates: 14 - 18 July 2025
Campus Location: RCA, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU

For enquiries, please email [email protected].

→ Material Kinship 

🗓 Thursday 10 April 2025
⏰ 4:30-6:30 PM
📍BASE Milano

Join us in Milan from 7 to 13 April for an exhibition with BASE Milano during the Milan Salone del Mobile 2025.

Featuring work from all programmes in the School of Architecture, we will also be holding 4 conversations on 10 April in the Group Hall & Bar.
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Building genealogies and trajectories at multiple scales: the planet, the city, the architecture, the object, and the body.

Last year, the Royal College of Art participated in BASE’s “Convivial Laboratory” exploring the agency of conviviality as an active construct related to the interdependencies between humans, other-than-humans, media, and material objects.

This year, through four conversations with prominent artists, designers, curators, and historians from the Milanese architectural scene, we will expand on the construction of specific convivial dynamics and tangible kinships inside some of RCA’s multiple departments.

The conversations will take place alongside a curated selection of students’ work - highlighting the intersections between design, research, and material practices within the nuanced ecosystems of the College. The whole happening will culminate with an aperitivo at bistroBASE - whose premises have been recently re-designed by Lemonot  () through a series of performative, exceptionally ordinary, interventions, that were developed in collaboration with MA Architecture (.architecture) students.

🔗 Link in bio for more information

🔊✨Paul Purgas: Echoes and Space

🗓 Tuesday 18 March @ 17:00
📍 Lecture Theatre 1, Kensington Campus, Royal College of Art

🎧 Comprising an output that has explored the interconnected histories of design, sound and experimental media, Paul Purgas’ work has built on a background in architecture and an ongoing exploration of the dialogues between the spatial and sonic.

🎧 Through his work with the experimental sound and music project Emptyset he has developed a series of public commissions that have connected architecture and performance, working with spatial recording, feedback, acoustic analysis, radio broadcasting and instrument design, and realised through large scale commissions for the Architecture Foundation, Tate Britain, Roberts Institute of Art, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and Deutschlandradio.

🎧 These projects realised across diverse locations including an underground cave system, former nuclear power station, radio transmission centre, a gothic mansion and institutional galleries, have tested the possibilities of sonic practice, blurring the boundaries between music, performance and installation, whilst considering the porous correspondences between architecture and sound.

📣 JOIN US THIS WEEK!

MA Architecture (.architecture) Work-in-progress Show 2025!

Meet the architects and designers of the future as their newest work comes together, and take a peek 👀 behind the doors of the world’s leading university for art and design...

📍Join us in the Darwin Building at RCA Kensington from 22 to 25 January!

⏰ Open from 12 to 6pm each day.

🔗 Link in the RCA bio for more details.

Dr Emilio Distretti, Tutor (Research) at the School of Architecture, will host the fifth iteration of “Architecture of Repair. In Palestine” on 9 January 2025 at the Birzeit University Museum (West Bank Palestine).

The event is a collaboration with Birzeit University and RIWAQ centre for Architectural Conservation. Architecture of Repair is a nomadic long table that brings together architects, scholars, community members, artists and activists to discuss and imagine visions of repair for the liberation and re-generation of Palestinian living space and heritage.

📢 Gascia Ouzounian and Mhamad Safa: Counter-Listening

🗓️ Thursday 12 December 2024, 6:30pm
📍Lecture Theatre 1, Darwin Building, Kensington Campus
➡️RSVP link in bio

In this talk, interdisciplinary researchers Mhamad Safa (Royal College of Art) and Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford) discuss different approaches to ‘counterlistening’: listening against official and hegemonic narratives of contested events, including in the contexts of war and genocide; and listening for sounds and voices that have been occluded and erased, particularly in the aftermath of mass violence. They discuss different approaches to listening as a tactics and mode of resistance in their own work and others, drawing attention to forensic listening projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and others; analyzing earwitness testimonies; ‘speculative listening’ (Hartman) to denialist and colonialist archives; and ‘urgent listening’ (Kurda) in times of crisis. The conversation will also reflect on critical approaches to sonic architecture and sonic urbanism, understanding the sonic city as a site of political and social contests and a field in which power relations are expressed and manifested, including in the cases of sonic warfare and atmospheric violence.

Spectral Labours: Architecture for whom?

🗓️ Tuesday 3 December 2024, 5:30pm
📍Senior Common Room, Frayling Building, Kensington Campus
➡️ RSVP link in bio

This seminar will examine the experiences of migrant workers through the lens of Marxist political economy, offering a deeper understanding of migration in the 21st century while reflecting on the lived realities of migrant workers in the UK.Every year, millions of migrants arrive in the UK to work, study, join their families, or seek refuge. In 2024 alone, the UK government issued 1.16 million visas, positioning migrants as both a source of highly skilled labour and cheap labour, enabling the British ruling class to extract super-profits from the crisis of overproduction.

In London, the epicentre of financial capital, migrant workers face the oppressive realities of the Hostile Environment, which restricts access to basic rights, transforms institutions into border zones, and enforces surveillance based on visa status. These policies create significant barriers for migrants as they navigate the spaces where they live and work. Migrants are often confined to isolated environments such as care homes on city outskirts, factories segregated from local communities, or private households. This neoliberal approach has accelerated the privatisation of society, prioritising profit over collective well-being. Such a model stands in stark contrast to a people-centred, community-based framework for development, prompting a critical reflection on the question: “Architecture for whom?”

This is part of SoA’s Annual Research Programme.

🎨 Post design by

🔊🔊🔊 TODAY @ 2PM IN STE 138 🔊🔊🔊

Collateral Listening at the Limits of Legal Restraints

This workshop will explore sound at the intersection between urban environments and conflict, specifically extracted from a particular case of aerial bombardment that occurred during the 2006 war on Lebanon. To formulate an argument on the long-lasting and traumatic sonic repercussions during military operations; sound studies and architectural environments would coalesce to unearth the unseen, yet extremely sensed assaults during this war. Here, Mhamad Safa will look at Reverberations as the product of both sound and the built surrounding, where it operates as a method to read the subtle, extended yet affective impacts of contemporary military conflict. He will argue that the initial impact’s sound is rather bypassed, and the auditory focus shifted on its tail as a sonic phenomenon that is amplified and channelled by the urban morphology. This research relies on multiple analytical, theoretical, and practical resources spanning from spectrograms to sonic mapping. Those means serve to illustrate the behaviour of sound during conflict in a compressed urban environment. Paired with its cognitive and visceral responses, this method offers greater accounts on the victims that weren’t directly targeted by aerial assaults.

Mhamad Safa is a London-basedsound artist and architect whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. His practice addresses the aurallegacies of traditional subcultures, occultism, armed conflicts, shock and theaftermath of violence. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University in 2019 and received his PhD in Law from the University of Westminster in 2024. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architectureand Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London.

This event is part of the Sonic Architectures.

🏡Ascensions VII: Saving Skins with Clementine Blakemore and Stephanie Crombie

✨Following on from last year’s Ascensions series, where inspiring RCA Alumni discussed how the RCA has informed and inspired their ongoing and future practice, on 21 November we will be taking a deeper look into how the RCA ethos contributes to the architectural profession, shaping approaches to design and construction. We will be joined by Clementine Blakemore, retrofit expert who runs her own practice whose practice has worked on a range of retrofit projects and Stephanie Crombie, Passivhaus specialist at Supernatural studio. They will outline their development since graduation and discuss how this grounding gave way to their ongoing and expanding horizons, and how we as a school, particularly through our new Design Practice MArch, can further foster these trajectories.

🗓️ Thursday 21 November 2024, 6:30pm
📍Art Lounge, Frayling Building, Kensington Campus

🏡 Housing Standardisation: Who Designs Our Homes and How Do We Live?

📍The Building Centre, Window Gallery, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT
🗓️ Exhibition opening: 14 November 2024 at 18:30

This exhibition is a study of recently built subsidised housing, examining the differences in design governance and regulatory approaches in England, Chile, China, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Spain. It explores what typical homes look like in these countries, how they are designed, and what it is like to live in them. Since subsidised housing is frequently built at scale using standardised dwelling types and construction methods, it is often more ‘designed’ by regulations and standards than by architects.

The exhibition shows how regulatory cultures, housing systems, and housing markets – along with social expectations and cultural norms – shape the governance of housing design, determining the type and quality of housing built and influencing perceptions of housing quality. It presents 37 detailed case studies of homes and the lived experiences of their residents through models, drawings, photographs, videos, 3D scans, interviews, and home-use studies.

The exhibition questions what ‘well-designed’ and ‘housing quality’ mean to various housing stakeholders, but more importantly, to the residents themselves – highlighting how these definitions and perceptions are highly contextual.

The exhibition is curated by Sam Jacoby, Lucia Alonso and Seyithan Özer from the . The project is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Project website: https://housingstandardisation.com (link in bio)

The exhibition is open until 31st January 2025 at
Opening hours: Monday-Friday: 9am-6pm.