Welcome to Bergen School of Architecture

Based on the lived experiences of two bondings with a roof beam during a temporary residency in Brussels and a stray dog at an archaeological site Aşağıpınar Höyük, I look into possibilities of bonding as a practice through drawing. Both bondings describe each particular process through which I gradually meet the surroundings in tactile proximities. I discuss that these processes suggest an interplay between emotive and material aspects of bonding. Evolving through a series of experiments of drawing, writing, and three-dimensional studies, this lecture presents three sets of explorations: textual (experiences), material (preparations), and spatio-temporal (narrations). These works elaborate on this interplay by seeking embodied relations between materials, tools and techniques of drawing with regard to tactile proximities, suggesting embodied spatio-temporalities and in-between spaces. I discuss that each individual work reconfigures the space of the drawing, as well as the experience of drawing, engaging in a discussion on matter, materiality and corpo­reality. Through the experiments, I argue that this drawing practice offers a liminal space of possibilities within the artefactual works by which a drafter finds a way to approach space by desire for an embodied materiality. With methodological explorations of drawing, writing, and three-dimensional studies, I reconfigure embodied rituals of drawing as a practice allowing the drafter to encounter the autonomous spaces within drawing, inquiring there on interspaces between bodies and places.

Short bio| İpek Avanoğlu

İpek Avanoğlu is an architect-researcher based in Istanbul. Her research practice pursues drawing in exploration of spatial possibilities orienting towards personalized spatial design methodologies. She received her M.Arch.II degree from The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, M.Sci. and B.Arch. degrees from the Department of Architecture, ITU. As part of her PhD studies, she has been a visiting scholar at KU Leuven through the Erasmus+ program and International Scholar program. She has co-instructed the workshop ‘A Feast on Tableness and Visceral Hands’ at the 17^th Venice Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion curated by Arts, Letters & Numbers, with Bahar Avanoğlu (2021). She is the co-organizer of the group exhibition Unbuildings: Remnants, Devicings, Chancings, Hollowings, Leaving at Versus Art Project (2024). Her PhD research on ‘bonding-practices’ has been exhibited and published internationally in curated exhibitions, journals, and design-research symposiums. Her work has been recently exhibited at Angels & Angles Pavilion in Copenhagen (2024). She is a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Architecture, ITU, Istanbul, Turkey.

this lecture is aimed at the diploma students, but is open for all interested!

Welcome!

Professor Penelope Haralambidou will present her cross-disciplinary and design-led research project City of Ladies is which aims to introduce and promote the work of medieval author Christine de Pizan to an architectural audience for the first time. In her celebrated text, The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, Christine describes the construction of an imaginary city, a female utopia built and inhabited by women. Her work has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto, conflating the act of building with collecting stories of notable female figures from fiction and history and erecting a thesis against misogyny. Haralambidou’s research together with research assistant John Cruwys, builds upon existing scholarship on the relationship between image and text in Christine’s work. It proposes an innovative, design-led analysis of the architectural and urban allegory in her text and a spatial remodelling of the accompanying illuminations (miniature illustrations). Performing history and theory through design, the research aims to establish Christine as the first speculative female architect and to project the powerful message of her allegorical city into the future.

https://www.cityofladies.org

Bio

Penelope Haralambidou is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Together with Dr Luke Pearson she initiated, developed and co-directs Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch, the first master’s programme using this innovative pedagogical model in the UK. She was the first candidate to start a PhD Architectural Design thesis at the Bartlett in 1996; coordinator of PhD Programmes 2011–2016; and supervisor of artistic and design research PhDs since 2004. Her research employs architectural drawing, model-making and digital film as investigatory tools to analyse ideas and work, not only in architecture, but also visual representation, the politics of vision, art and cinema. Her work has been exhibited internationally, she is the author of the monograph Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2013), and she has contributed writing on themes, such as architectural representation, allegory, figural theory, stereoscopy and film to a wide range of publications. Her solo show ‘City of Ladies’, presenting her recent practice-led research on Christine de Pizan’s proto-feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, was hosted at DomoBaal Gallery in 2020.