Centre for Research Architecture Goldsmiths

25/05/2021

We, in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, stand with Palestine. We stand in solidarity with our Palestinian students who come to work with us each year despite the considerable difficulties they face in simply trying to continue their education. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people who are rising up against seventy-three years of Israeli settler colonial violence in all its supposedly legal and illegal forms. These are many and include dispossession, eviction, racism, police and settler brutality, arbitrary arrest, house demolition, bombardment, massacre. We fully support the right of Palestinians to actively resist such ongoing violence, state aggression and apartheid, and its destruction of indigenous Palestinian lands and livelihoods by the means they deem necessary.

We, like our colleagues and comrades elsewhere, reject the term conflict and opt instead for what these forms of aggression under the guise of self-defence mean. According to international law these are ethnic cleansing and genocide, and amount to war crimes.

We are committed to decolonial, anti-capitalist work. This commitment lies at the core of our post-graduate programme and guides our pedagogy. As such, we make vocal our stance with BDS and other forms of actionable and conscionable solidarity with Palestine. We urge academic programmes and departments as well as cultural organisations, museums, activist collectives, and others to join us in issuing statements to take a stand against ongoing and historical Israeli state violence and act in accord with the Palestinian struggle for life in dignity and for freedom.

--Centre for Research Architecture

The Centre for Research Architecture emerged out of an urgent necessity to open an alternative to, perhaps even a refuge from, architectural education constrained by a limiting conception of its practice and by the way its pedagogy was organised. Instead, it aimed to enable spatial practitioners to....

17/09/2019

We hope you can join us for the Lines of Inquiry Book Launch and opening reception of Common Sensing, Thursday 26 September from 6-9pm.

Full details here: Centre for Research Architecture 2018/19 MA Degree Show

04/08/2019

CRA is hiring!

"The Lecturer/Senior Lecturer will work at the Centre for Research Architecture, which is based within the Department of Visual Cultures. The Centre is organised around projects that investigate contemporary political conditions. Our goal is to provide practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds with practical and theoretical tools for undertaking spatial research and critical analysis.

The role holder will be expected to teach the core MA theory module “Conflicts & Negotiations” (15 weeks) as well as a 3rd BA year “Special Topics in Research Architecture” (10 weeks). In addition they will supervise some MA dissertations, offer tutorials, and participate in the culture of the Centre more broadly.

You will be someone whose core values parallel those of the Centre, who thrives in a dynamic learning environment in which students are highly motivated and politically engaged."

https://jobs.gold.ac.uk/vacancy/lecturer-senior-lecturer-research-architecture-395061.html

16/01/2019

Please join us for the first event of the Hostile Environments public program, a roundtable discussion with Nadine El-Enany and Yasmin Gunaratnam. Tomorrow 5-7pm, Professor Stuart Hall Building LG02, Goldsmiths.

HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS

"In May 2012, the then UK Home Secretary Theresa May announced in an interview the introduction of new legislation in the field of immigration control aiming to "create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration. […] Work is under way”, she further explained, “to deny illegal immigrants access to work, housing and services, even bank accounts”.
The aim of this public program is not so much to discuss the horrific effects of that specific piece of legislation (even if we want to touch upon that too), but rather to ask more generally the question of what happens when the environment, understood here more as a political-economic effect rather than a simple "natural" background to human action, starts to become not only a site of power, but rather one of its mode of operations.

Here we are interested, for instance, in how certain terrains are being weaponised by border controllers: not only the space of the city or that of the nation (as in the UK example), but also the deserts, oceans and mountain ranges across which migrants are forced to travel often at the cost of their lives. It is not only that the weather itself is being weaponised, as migrants are made to die of cold or heat; but that forms of racialised violence have become, in a certain sense, as pervasive as the climate.

This atmospheric condition of power affects multiple modes of existence (human as well as more-than-human), particularly those that are classified as alien rather than native. We want to try to attune our senses and sensibilities to forms of suffering and dying that are ordinary rather than catastrophic; forms of violence that are invisible not because hidden, but because constructed by powerful actors as legitimate through relentless exposure. What forms of radical hospitality might still exist when all refugia are in the process of being destroyed?"

07/01/2019

Great to see the work of the Centre featured on the Guardian. As we prepare to celebrate 15 years of CRA next year, it's impressive to look back at how many incredible thinkers, practitioners and activists have shaped its trajectory in fundamental ways. And to see how new generations continue to do so in unexpected and exciting ways.

Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, Goldsmiths, University of London

In the 1990s, Goldsmiths college in London spawned the YBAs. Now, it has incubated a very different group – whose work is as likely to turn up in an international court as in a gallery

21/10/2018

https://972mag.com/in-khan-al-ahmar-i-found-renewed-hope-for-resisting-the-occupation/138289/

Important article by former MA graduate Oren Ziv.

You can read more about Oren's experience at the CRA here: https://www.gold.ac.uk/architecture/spotlight/

Over the last four months I have spent most of my time in Khan al-Ahmar, watching young Palestinians resist, day after day, the Israeli authorities’ attempts to demolish the village. On Saturday night, their struggle finally bore…

14/09/2018

Great event organised by CRA's MA graduates coming up tomorrow at the London Design Biennale:

"This talk presents a series of fictional images through which Londoners can understand the conditions of an occupied city and its inhabitants and put themselves in their shoes.

Starting from familiar visual elements of the city of London, the panel will employ dark humour to address a series of scenarios to show how design can respond to them and create practical tools that can improve people’s lives and experiences under extreme political conditions.

LDB LAB is a series of talks curated by Greg McLaren that aims to bring the hidden stories of unrepresented countries and peoples to the London Design Biennale."

This talk presents a series of fictional images through which Londoners can understand the conditions of an occupied city and its inhabitants and put themselves in their shoes. Starting from familiar visual elements of the city of London, the panel will employ dark humour to address a series of scen...