Frieze Academy presents: Can Self-Build Save Us All?

Join for a half-day symposium inviting leading architects, designers and critics to address the history and promise of self-build strategies.

The concept of self-build has a long and varied history, across centuries and cultures, of autonomous construction.

Self-building has recently been brought to centre stage: it featured as a theme in the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale and is proposed as an answer to housing crises all over the globe, including those related to emergency accommodation, long-term homes and the grey area in between.

This event will explore alternative models of property and self-build strategies through a full afternoon of discussion and presentation.

Can Self-Build Save Us All? is part of a new series on Art, Design and the City hosted by design historian Emily King.

Emily King

Emily King is a London-based design historian, writer and curator.

Emily has written monographs on Peter Saville, M/M Paris and the 1950s art director Robert Brownjohn, and is a contributor to frieze, The Gentlewoman and Harvard Design Magazine.

She curated the well-received exhibition ‘Quick, Quick, Slow: graphic design and time’ for the Lisbon design biennial Experimenta, as well as monographic shows on Alan Fletcher and Richard Hollis.

Schedule

2-3pm

The legacy of Walter's Way: Alice Grahame (Walter's Way resident and curator of a the RIBA exhibition ‘Walter’s Way: the self-build revolution') and James Langdon (designer)

3.30-4pm

Presentation by Thomas Lommee (Open Structures)

4-4.30pm

Is Fixing the Future of Design? Presentation by Daniel Charny (Fixperts)

5-6pm

Panel: Can Self-Build Save us All? Paloma Strelitz(Assemble) and Jack Self (Curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale), chaired by Alice Rawsthorn (design critic)