Join us for this new three part season of talks exploring the ways in which domestic architectural plans give form to underlying power relations, with architect Charles Holland and in partnership with The Modern House.
For this first talk, Charles Holland is joined by Ahmed Belkhodja (FALA atelier) to look at how the dynamic relationship between economics and housing has changed the way our homes are designed.
“Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries,” wrote Robin Evans in Figures, Doors and Passages, an essay describing the evolution of the domestic plan. The plan is the basic currency of architectural drawings, its ground zero. Plans describe buildings. They are technical documents that describe how a building is organised, but they follow aesthetic and compositional criteria too.
Plans can be beautiful when viewed as abstract compositions, but they also describe real physical and social relationships. Within them, the underlying structures of social organisation can be read: issues of culture, economics, gender, class and power. Plans are both a representation of specific cultural and political ideals and the means through which those ideals are constructed in real life.
This short series of talks will explore the plan and its relationship to these issues. Each week, we will ask an architect to select a plan and explain its importance to them, to architectural culture and to the series’ themes.
About the speakers
Ahmed Belkhodja is a Swiss architect born in 1990 in Lausanne. After graduating in Zurich in 2013, Ahmed established FALA in Porto, with Ana Luisa Soares and Filipe Magalhães. FALA defends a resolutely optimistic architecture, which has been recognised by numerous prizes, publications and exhibitions, in Portugal and abroad. Ahmed has taught at several institutions in Europe, including the IUAV in Venice, the Royal College of Art in London, and HEAD in Geneva.
Charles Holland is an architect, teacher and writer. He is the Principal of Charles Holland Architects, a design and research practice based in the UK, Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton and a Visiting Professor at the ABK, Stuttgart.
Making Plans is a RIBA talks series in partnership with The Modern House. The series has been co-programmed with Charles Holland.
Other events in this series
- Making Plans with Lesley Lokko and Charles Holland (26 November 2020)
- Making Plans with Summaya Vally and Charles Holland (3 December 2020)
