Outopia: The real and the ideal in the architecture of John Outram

An AAD Books event hosted by CUBE.

This event discusses the book John Outram by Geraint Franklin (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and explores the dichotomy between the real and the ideal as a defining aspect of John Outram’s architecture.

In a literal sense there is the important status of the unbuilt project in Outram’s oeuvre. There is also a more subjective interpretation in which the built works represent a provisional or metonymic realisation of an imaginary (and unbuildable) ideal. The notion of the imaginary ‘other place’ is a way of thinking about meaning and identity which can be set alongside Aldo Rossi’s notion of the analogous city or Foucault’s Heterotopia.

In Outram’s work, embedded meanings, conveyed via iconography, provide a bridge that connects and delineates boundaries between these dual domains. Symbolic schema – such as the ‘empire of the forest’ and the ‘republic of the valley’ – are related to planning or compositional strategies. Finally, to what extent would it be desirable – or even possible – to ‘restore’ unrealised elements, or would the reestablishment of authorial intent come at the expense of material authenticity?

In an effort to address the book’s publication in the round, the event brings together the author with a series of interlocutors who have engaged with Outram’s oeuvre in different and complementary ways. Geraint Franklin opens with a presentation of the content of the monograph, addressing the theme of a reciprocity between the real and the ideal. Thereafter three invited discussants respond from their own perspectives: David Bass, Gordana Fontana Giusti, and Peter St John. The session is chaired by Matthew Barac.

Speakers

Geraint Franklin is a historian specialising in British architecture after 1945. He is the author of Howell Killick Partridge & Amis (2017), Post-Modern Buildings in Britain (2017, co-authored with Elain Harwood) and John Outram (2022).

David Bass was an Associate at John Outram Associates until 1993, when he took up a Scholarship in Architecture at the British School at Rome to research the relationships between film, architecture and urbanism. He has lectured widely, and has run design studios at Cambridge, the Architectural Association and the University of East London, where he was a Senior Lecturer until 2014. David is a non-executive Director at Marcus Beale Architects. His independent design work includes projects in Ghana, as well as a number of projects in the residential and retail sectors in Britain.

Gordana Fontana-Giusti is an architect, architectural theorist and Professor of Architecture and Urban Regeneration at University of Kent. Her research focuses on the genealogy of architectural knowledge, urban landscape in visual arts, the role of perspective in representation of space, mapping and digitalisation of urban landscape. In addition to teaching and lecturing, she has been involved in urban design projects and in designing urban installations for public spaces. She is the author of Foucault for Architects, co-editor/co-author of Scale: Imagination, Perception and Practice and of Complete Works of Zaha Hadid.

Peter St John is Professor of Architecture at LondonMet and leads Unit 12, a postgraduate design studio. He is a partner at Caruso St John Architects, a RIBA Stirling prize-winning practice, and was commissioned to design the British Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale in collaboration with artist Marcus Taylor. He has taught architecture throughout his career, both in the UK and abroad, and is currently an external examiner at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen.

Chair

Matthew Barac is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at LondonMet and a UK-registered architect. He leads Postgraduate Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, and is a member of CUBE, the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies. In the summer of 1987 he worked for John Outram Associates where his first assignment was to draw up the steel gates for the Docklands Pumping Station.

Image credit: Black Attic Eagle, John Outram