Negroni Talks

Talking Shit! DRAIN AGE Stone Age... Iron Age... we are now living through the Drain Age... Regular news reports of flash flooding showing homes filled with filthy water suggest that our treatment of water maybe based upon suspect principles. The mounting evidence is that our ‘interventions’ within the natural world are more and more frequently coming back to bite us in our cities, towns and villa...

‘Affordable’ : The Problem With Affordable Housing In the age of austerity 'affordable housing' is heralded as a basic requirement for new build housing schemes, with any project that doesn't deliver at least a small quota being crucified in the press. But when the term affordable is defined as 80% of market value, and an average house costs £484,716 in London, who can even afford the affordable?...

Mind The Gap: The Chasm Between Practice And Education After years spent designing wondrous master-plans for fictional cities, debating the rights and wrongs of the Frankfurt School and churning out thousands of words on the subject - architects leave university to find themselves working on technical details for perfunctory spaces in massive practices. Surely given the length of time needed and t...

Londons Borderlands: Territorial Pissings? (Borderlands: Boundaries Within The City State) London is a wonderful metropolis but those that live and work in the city know that it is really the congregation of many different fiefdoms. Each place abides by its own rules and cherishes its own identity. There is no such things as a Londoner; people identify with their local community, as well as the ph...

I’m So Bored With The RIBA: Irrelevance Institutionalised? Everyone loves taking a swipe at the RIBA. Either it's out of date, too bureaucratic, too ineffective, too expensive, too London centric and lacking diversity or all of the above. Yet with 44,000 members, the RIBA falls into the same difficulty as other British institutions such as the BBC and NHS and being so large that it's an impossible...

Fail Safe, Safe Fail, Fail Better! In engineering and design, a fail-safe is a system that mitigates further harm or failure. Mistakes, bad decisions and a lack of skill can cause great harm to projects at any point in the process and architects often have to step in with their fail-safes. This can involve taking the blame, sorting the problem or even reversing the fail into something positive. Th...

Thick As A Brick: Dis Honesty And Architecture… Over years of architectural and building history, the approach to design has frequently been supported by claims of being honest to material, form and context. This becomes a polemic when encompassed into architectural styles and genres: Hi-Tech wears its heart on its sleeve; Modernism, from the roots of classicism, follows function to a degree; and...

Negroni Talks N°5 Podcast by Fourthspace

Having provoked debates interrogating all things “Architectural” from its base in east London, “Negroni talks…!” is hitting the road to discover how the Politics Of Architecture plays out in other parts of the UK. Heading North, South, East and West, The Negroni Talks On the Road Tour aims to hold ‘4 talks in 4 towns’, taking a look at what’s happening on the ground by focusing on local factors th...

The Recognitions (architecture’s gentrification guilt) Vyner Street is a locus for the shifting identity of London’s East End. Artists and creatives moved into the area and integrated themselves into the local culture and communities. However, their arrival was a catalyst for regenerative change that they didn’t necessarily want. Architects play a key role in this economic shift and are still pres...

What will Brexit actually look like ? The UK is leaving the EU and it seems that some politicians believe in the same kind of economic and cultural self-sufficiency as proposed by the 1930s Italian concept of Autarchia. The truth of the matter is that London’s built environment is about to transform and no one knows what it’s going to end up looking like. The current demographic of European proper...

Beatniks, punks and other countercultures were borne out of a restless discontent with the status quo and a desire to shift ideologies for new generations. These ideas and movements manifested themselves through art, music and literature but architecture has trodden a safer creative path. Rebellious architects appeared from time to time but what is their legacy today? Can the industry shake off it...

Craftwork: Man . Machine _ How Should Architects Be Material Synthesisers In An Electronic Age? In Association With Material Matters: Lots of architects claim that they 'craft' a building. They point at beautiful clay or paper models but in reality architecture is produced through Revit and follows strict rules of compliance and regulation. Materials are a great way to connect buildings and craft...

By The Seat Of Their Pants? Architects Designing Chairs. In Association With Material Matters: The Eames did it, Mies did it, even architecturally-educated fleas did it. Let's do it, let's design a chair. Why do architects think they can dip their toes into furniture design? And, perhaps more interestingly, why do product designers think they can have a pop at architecture? We all agree that inter...

Social housing is incredibly important as one of the sectors where the work of architects and planners can have the most direct impact on cities and their populations. If done properly it should create inclusive, good quality places to live for the more vulnerable and less well off in our society. However, the ideals for post-war inner-city housing moved from utopian vision to dystopia in the publ...

The Picturesque #3: Vernacular Schmernacular What the hell does ‘vernacular’ mean in architecture? The term is defined as "the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region” “architecture concerned with domestic and functional rather than public or monumental buildings”. In today’s planning and design setting, it seems to revolve solely around aesthetics, mate...

In collaboration with Always Thinking & The Festival Of Hospitality The Negroni Talks have partnered up with the Festival of Hospitality as part of their new Devil’s Advocate series. Much like the existing programme, these events are intended to be open, provocative and engaging. Featured expert speakers will tackle difficult subjects head on but we also want to hear from the audience too, as...

Every year, the great and the good of the British architecture scene gather to find out who will be crowned with the award for the best building in the UK. The final shortlist features six projects, which have been whittled down from hundreds of submissions that stretch across the length and breadth of the land, reflecting every scale and type of client. Sometimes it seems like an impossible set o...

The history of architectural image making is ancient and, more often than not, involves a bit of propaganda. Designers have had to communicate their ideas to their paymaster - be they church, state or wealthy individual - and selling your vision comes with the territory. Fast forward to today and we’re reached a point where renders are so convincing that they can be mistaken for photos of a finish...

Bjarking Up The Wrong Tree: STARCHITECTURE And The Role Of The Architect In The C21st The architect as a one-off design genius, an exploder of convention and an instigator of progressive thinking was a character forged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the millennium drew to a close, the personality of the ‘Starchitect’ arose as a provider of headline grabbing architecture that could s...

Many architects and developers talk the talk but can we actually deliver diversity through design? We’re seeing some great new neighbourhoods emerging across both the UK and abroad but the commercial pressures of regeneration tend to steer us towards homogeneity. And how much can the planing process help support the creation of unplanned places, where richness and variety is often found? ‘Branded...

Energy is a consumption that is killing us by degrees. Its production, usage and waste have long been a threat to the natural world and as a commodity it is now being deployed as a weapon of war. Energy has become a battleground between C20th business models and C21st realities. It trades in cynicism, malevolence and greed. Worse still it illustrates our hubris, our impotence, the compromise of ou...

Talking Rubbish! BINS Local authorities have bin going mad! Whilst many architects, urban planners, housing associations and developers try to design the homes, towns and cities of the future, they are frequently hamstrung by the regulatory hurdles that are focused on the accommodation of waste management. Giant wheelie bins fill our pavements, louvered doors dominate pavement frontages, and the s...

Death By Design Construction has always been a dangerous (read: corrupt) game and it seems that the bigger the project, the greater the risks to workers’ safety. Fatalities on building sites were maybe to be expected in the dim and distant past, but in the 21st century haven’t we developed sufficient regulatory control, machinery or digital technologies to rule out death by architecture? This deba...

Architecture: Structuring Segregation? Poor Doors have hit the headlines are once again aimed at escalating levels of outrage, declaring that modern housing developments promote segregation and social cleansing. However, we live in a time when cash-strapped councils can’t deliver their own housing programmes and we rely on private developers to provide housing nationwide. With an emphasis on inves...