Lecture of Lawrence Barth 'On the Move'

Wednesday, 1 March 2017
Dostoevsky library (23, Chistoprudny boulevard)
20:30
Free entrance. Registration for the event is required
Event on Facebook
The lecture will be held in English



Today, everyone is on the move. Mobility resides at the heart of contemporary life, both in an everyday sense of how we use and traverse the city, and also in the sense that the global knowledge economy has given rise to a transnational and metropolitan culture. This lecture focuses on how this is changing both the foundations of transport infrastructure, and how it is also, simultaneously, changing the way we must think about and plan the spatial organization of station districts. There are numerous examples, but if we take the new development of Kings Cross in London, we can see an exciting range of shifts in how we look at these central-city environments. This allows us to imagine new development models for station districts and, perhaps most interestingly, new approaches to residential living in these areas. Similar shifts are taking place in more peripheral environments. The lessons are that when we introduce or upgrade metropolitan connections, we must look at a broader area of change around stations than we did previously, and yet at the same time, explore new approaches to the detail of diverse kinds of residential living.

Lawrence Barth, Professor of Urbanism at the Graduate School of the Architectural Association. Beginning in 2008, Mr. Barth is coordinating a new research cluster he has developed at the school, entitled The Architecture of Innovation. This cluster integrates architectural work at the AA into the multi-disciplinary efforts to develop a dynamic urbanism for today’s knowledge economy. He has collaborated with diverse architects and landscape architects including Zaha Hadid, Future Systems, Gustafson Porter, Balmori Associates, and S333. He has also assumed the lead role in overseeing a multi-disciplinary refinement of the central district within the one-north Masterplan for a next-generation innovation environment in Singapore. He participates in an international research network on the growth of global mega-cities and the urban transformations associated with the knowledge economy. He is a member of the UK’s Academy of Urbanism.