OPR Event: An Informal Discussion with Claire and her Dad

7.30pm, 13 June 2014
STORE
31-21 Alfred Place
London WC1E 7DP 

Claire will try to facilitate her dad, Professor Peter Blundell Jones (Sheffield University), and his knowledge from 45 years of research and writing about architecture and rituals. They will discuss a variety of subjects including eating a Mars Bar ritually and that a special centre exists in Germany around collecting your new car. Claire will be trying to learn more about what rituals are from her are dad  and try to share this with the audience.

About Peter Blundell Jones

Peter Blundell Jones AA Dipl MA (Cantab) is a British architect, historian, academic and critic. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association school, London and has held academic positions at the University of Cambridge and London South Bank University. He has been Professor of architecture at the University of Sheffield since 1994.

“When I studied architecture in the late 1960s, orthodox modernism had reached a crisis because buildings had become construction-driven, ignoring issues of context and meaning. I discovered that there was an alternative modernist line, deeper and more subtle, headed by architects like Asplund, Häring, and Scharoun. I wrote monographs on these architects, as well as an alternative history: ‘Modern Architecture through Case Studies’. Meanwhile I became increasingly concerned by the way people have been excluded by bureaucracies and specialists from decisions about the buildings they inhabit. This provoked my interest in participation and in the vernacular, which shows how people built for themselves before architects took over.” (from Prof Blundell Jones’ page on School of Architecture website, Sheffield University)

Watch Peter Blundell Jones’ talk ‘On Place and Memory’

“Ritual enactments tie people to places and give places meaning. [referring to slide] And here we have aboringine ceremonies, where there is no architectural space except the space they are creating for the purposes of this ritual, and the spaces that are marked out by their bodies which is for me the beginning of architecture.” [at 27:16-27:40 of the YouTube video]