other-events-pamphlet-9

Invited by EUSAS, James A. Craig + Matt Ozga-Lawn (of STASUS) return to their Alma Mater to launch the recently published Resilience: Pamphlet Architecture 32 (Princeton Architectural Press 2012). Their talk was introduced by Mark Dorrian, Professor of Research Architecture at Newcastle University. Matt and James studied under Mark Dorrian in 2007-2009, in the M Arch Programme at University of Edinburgh with design tutors Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie, and cultural context tutor Ella Chmielewska.

Stasus's project, "Animate Landscapes", which Pamphlet documents, emerged out of an academic studio that approached Warsaw under the title of the "postsocialist city and its material pre-histories." This project for an experimental film institute mediates between its postindustrial site in Warsaw and the Edinburgh studio. By identifying, interrogating and ultimately reinforcing the physical and immaterial conditions of both landscape and studio, the project generates a new space from an attention to remnants, silence and the complex temporality of anachronistic things.

In his essay, "The Resilience of Ruins" which introduces the pamphlet, Mark Dorrian writes, "Stasus's project makes and holds a clearing in the contemporary city that allows the resounding of something simultaneously opaque and of starling clarity, whose instruments are these obsolescent and anachronistic things that are charged with the future and imbued with the resilience of ruins." The volume also features an essay by Ella Chmielewska entitled "Stillness" and the afterward by Andrew Benjamin, "Designing Around Remnants".

"Founded in 1977 as an alternative to mainstream architectural publishing, Pamphlet Architecture encourages architects and writers to put forth their ideas, theories and designs in modest, affordable booklets. Its success is legendary: Pamphlet Architecture helped launch the careers of architects from Steven Holl and Lebbeus Woods to Zaha Hadid, and has had influence far exceeding the ad-hoc nature of these humble books." pamphletarchitecture.org