Experiencing Architecture in Landscapes

Hosted by CUBE, this event explored the act of walking through landscape and experiencing architecture in non-urban contexts.

This seminar, chaired by Lucy Pritchard, opened up a space for reflections and discussion, between the research agendas presented by the speakers, about how we relate to the topography and character of both land and buildings in non-urban contexts, with an emphasis on walking.

Territorial Typologies

James Payne’s ongoing research, titled “Territorial Typologies”, concerns the relationship between settlement and territory. The initial work has taken the form of a guide to post-war housing areas in Stockholm’s suburbs, and a study of topographically inflected housing typologies that form communities within landscapes of rock, forest or water. The presentation examined the representation of buildings and landscape, the cartography and format of the guide.

Walking Through Architecture

Helen Thomas discussed her experience of moving from London to the small village of Ennenda in Glarus, Switzerland. “Walking through Architecture” looks for connections between human-made, physical interventions onto and into the landscape, some permanent, some ephemeral, made in service of the human habitat in this place. It considers the influence of topography and the socio-political qualities of the landscape as manifest in human structures over time.

Speakers

James Payne is an architect, writer and Senior Lecturer at London Met. Together with Nina Lundvall, he has taught design studios in the UK and at Swedish Universities. Their research into teaching and learning architecture, developed in the disciplines of design, theory and technology, informs the work of Lundvall Payne: their international architectural practice, currently engaged in a major urban design project in the south of Sweden.

Dr Helen Thomas is an architect, writer and publisher living in Ennenda, Switzerland and now a member of the Bund Schweizer Architekten. She runs the publishing venture womenwritingarchitecture.org, through which an Ennenda-based association, Tisch Zwei Verein, connects the global to the local in projects like Walking Through Architecture. Recent publications include Hinterland, 2024, Architecture in Islamic Countries, 2023; The Hybrid Practitioner, 2022; Drawing Architecture, 2018.

Dr Lucy Pritchard is an architect and lecturer in architecture, history and theory. She trained as an architect at Cambridge, and at London Met with ARU: Architectural Research Unit (Florian Beigel and Philip Christou). She received a PhD (Research by Design) from LondonMet with her thesis “Bastide City Territory: Landscape Infrastructure Design, Monpazier, France”