Urban Form

Urban Form is a seminar course run in collaboration with Drawing Matter – an organisation that is home to a collection of many thousands of original drawings dating from the 16th century onwards. Drawing Matter has made available a selection from the archive as a prompt for a discussion around the representation of urban form. In response, Ingrid Schroder will be presenting five readings of the city over the duration of the course, framing it as an idea or ideology; a terrain (real and vague); as theatre; as a rhythm or network; and as a lived metabolism. The course will be using the original archival drawings from Drawing Matter as a catalyst for discussion and a means for questioning how the ideas contained in each are amplified or distilled by their representation, from 18th century Paris to the Grunt Group.

Each session will introduce a theme and bring together drawings in new combinations and ask how ideas communicate across centuries and cultural contexts, through their subject matter and the nature of their representation. In our discussions we will be playing with the role of the architect as master planner and provocateur, across these contexts, and examining the impact of the drawn image as an articulation of a set of ideas, and their capacity to speak for themselves. In the later stages of the course, we will table our own draft visions for a new tomorrow that might help us reflect constructively on the tangled today.

Each week Ingrid, and her Master’s students from the AA, will be joined by students from the LSE and a guest specialist to contribute to, enrich, or possibly derail the conversation.

The introductory first session—It Was Just an Idea: Urban Readings and Interventions as Experiment and Ideology—with David Madden, Director of the LSE Cities Programme: Thursday, 3rd October 2024, 3–5pm: LSE, Vera Anstey Room, Old Building, Houghton Street.

The first session is open to all; places for the full seminar series will be allocated to LSE students on a first-come, first-served, basis; please contact: D.J.Madden@lse.ac.uk

Further sessions on each subsequent Thursday until 14th November, 2–5pm: Drawing Matter, 8 Smart’s Place, WC2B 5LW.

Session 1: It Was Just an Idea: Urban Readings and Interventions as Experiment and Ideology

Session 2: Terrain, Real and Vague

Session 3: Serious Play: Theatre Monument and Spectacle

Session 4: Order and Mess: complexity system and network

Session 5: Some Kind of Life: the inhabited city