The Showroom | [POSTPONED] In-conversation: Affection As Subversive Architecture

Join us for a conversation with Spanish architecture collective Recetas Urbanas (Santiago Cirugeda and Alice Attout) and architects Jeremy Till and Blanca Pujals who will discuss self-construction and collective building practices.

The conversation will explore the various ways in which Recetas Urbanas encourage new forms of self-governance and active participation. Their ethos of collective learning and sustainable building practices extends to creating alternative architectural and educational spaces. Case studies of their previous projects show how self-construction can build both physical and communal infrastructures, allowing architecture to be more than just an aesthetic or formal experience.

There will be opportunities to think collectively about the strategies and techniques in Recetas Urbanas’s projects, and to spend time with the current project at The Showroom which explores a range of case studies and publications from past projects.

All the urban prescriptions shown below are for public use, and may be used in their entire strategic and juridical development by anyone who feels like it.

We would recommend an exhaustive study of the different urban locations and situations on which people wish to act.

Any physical or intellectual risk caused by the use thereof shall be borne by the person in question.

- Santiago Cirugeda

Recetas Urbanas is a design and advocacy collective of architects, lawyers and social workers led by Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda and Alice Attout, who joined in 2008. The collective is based in Seville, Spain and brings to life self-built projects that rely on local participation to realise mobile structures using locally sourced, second and third-hand materials. Their work activates different areas of urban reality globally, from creating temporary sites for community discussion with shipping containers and architectural prostheses, to implementing new social housing models in collaboration with local governments. These projects are highly functional yet legally provocative, often challenging the lawfulness surrounding the occupation of public space.

Image: Recetas Urbanas project work poster. Courtesy of the Studio

Jeremy Till is an architect, writer and education. He is currently the Head of Central Saint Martins and the Pro Vice-Chancellor of University of the Arts London, and also a trustee of the New Economics Foundation. He was previously Dean of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster, and Professor of Architecture and Head of School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. His written work includes Flexible Housing (with Tatjana Schneider, 2007), Architecture Depends (2009) and Spatial Agency (with Nishat Awan and Tatjana Schneider, 2011), all three of which won the RIBA Presidents Award for Outstanding Research.

Blanca Pujals is an architect, spatial researcher and critical writer. Blanca’s cross-disciplinary practice is based on spatial research and critical analysis to engage with questions of contemporary culture, philosophy of science and transnational politics, developing tools for undertaking analysis through different visual and sonic devices. She approaches geographies of power on bodies and territories and the material conditions of regimes of representation through a wide approach to the idea of architecture. Her work encompasses film, architecture, lecturing, curatorial projects, teaching and critical writing. Blanca has a BA in Architecture from Barcelona School of Architecture, and an MA in Critical Theory and Museum Studies from the Independent Studies Program at MACBA, Barcelona.