It's hard to believe we're already at Week 6! Most undergrads have had their interim crits, and design projects are taking shape in every space. This week we also had Brookes alumni from Hawkins/Brown visit us for the penultimate OxArch In Conversation With... Lecture of the year. Don't miss the final OxArch lecture in 2 weeks!
REBEL Article submissions are open! We're partway through the editing process for Issue XII: Rebel, so remember to send us your work if you're interested in getting published!
Getting published in a magazine is a great opportunity to showcase your projects and research, and to engage with potential employers - plus it's a great thing to add to your CV!
Send your submissions to osazine@gmail.com and we'll take it from there!
We're also on the lookout for Editors and Graphics who can help us with organising the REBEL issue over the coming weeks - we're looking for enthusiastic team workers who are happy to lend an hour or so of their time every week. Send us an email, or stop us in studio if you're interested.
Mini Review: The Soane Lecture at Moggerhanger Park, 05/03/2020
Moggerhanger Park, a gorgeous example of Sir John Soane's imaginative work, holds a lecture every year on topics relating to architectural heritage and conservation.
I was lucky enough to visit Moggerhanger for the first time yesterday evening for this year's lecture, where we were joined by Edward Bulmer for a discussion on the history of pigments.
I'm sure to some this lecture topic might have been the equivalent of watching paint dry - why should we care about how pigments for art and design were created years ago? Especially now we have such a staggering variety of colours at our fingertips nowadays - what's the point?
The point that Edward Bulmer made last night was that paint is as much a building material as a visual enhancer - it belongs as much to the built environment as timber and bricks. Using natural pigments and methods enhances our architecture, and especially in the case of buildings which use natural structural methods they help the building to breathe and to last longer.
We were taken through a colourful journey of the history of paint in interior and exterior design, exploring ancient ways of colour-making all the way up to the modern industry's reliance on plastic. We made stops along the way to learn about how the language of colour shaped interior spaces in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, when colour was a status symbol, and each room followed a hierarchy.
Perhaps it is odd that on an architectural blog I am discussing the simplicities of paint - but to me this is a message we could all take on board: architecture is not just in the grand sweeping gestures of high-rise offices, or sprawling public buildings, or rigidly planned streets.
Architecture is in the tiniest details - right down to how a building's paint is mixed. And all we really need are 12 pigments.
What's On:
Oxford Human Rights Festival - 13/03/2020 - 03/04/2020
The 18th Annual Oxford Human Rights Festival (OxHRF) is starting up next week from Friday, with Resilience as the theme for this year. A cross-disciplinary festival, OxHRF looks at wellbeing, design, craft, music, activism and so much more! Events are free, and most of them are on Headington Campus - find info and booking here
She Performs: The Body, An Exhibition of Contemporary Women Artists, The Glass Tank - 20/02/2020 - 08/03/2020
She Performs is a movement of events and exhibitions, connecting art with current issues on feminism and gender relations. It seeks to create a physical and virtual space for female artists and their audiences to come together to engage with and exchange ideas.
The exhibition will present paintings, installations, videos and performances focusing in particular on the corporeal form - exploring how the body - artist’s, female, human - is a site of both conflict and harmony.
Young Rembrandt, Ashmolean - 27/02/2020 - 07/07/2020
Celebrating the Dutch artist Rembrandt von Rijn's early works and rise to artistic stardom in the 17th Century, the Ashmolean has curated the largest collection of Rembrandt's earliest paintings and sketches, with over 90 drawings and prints from the artist on display.