London Architecture Foundation: Turncoats: Vanity Publishing

Is community consultation a con? Is architecture too posh? Should architects quit the profession and apply their creativity elsewhere? A new series of innovative events; Turncoats, created by Phineas Harper, Maria Smith and Robert Mull, and supported by Second Home, are challenging mainstream consensus with a set of provocative debates bringing together leading figures from across the profession and beyond.

Framed by incendiary opening propositions, each event mixes critical argument with theatrical twists to create a permissive but combative atmosphere. For this special event hosted at Second Home, Turncoats takes aim at the design media with a panel of critics and journalistic veterans.

The Proposition
The design media is little more than a sycophantic vapid and naval gazing extension of the PR industry. Our monographs
magazines and museums feed a cycle of shallow celebratory hysterics with little to no investigative or critical practice. Awards programmes lurch between jacking off the already engorged egos of starchitects or chasing the virginal myth of untainted emerging designers preying simultaneously on the young's insecurity and the old's fear of death in the name of profit for disconnected share holders. Cosy relationships between judges and judged editors and edited amount to mild corruption – unsubscribe now.

The Debaters:

• Oliver Wainwright (Architecture Critic at the Guardian and former Features Editor of Building Design Magazine)
• Cath Slessor (Critic-at-Large of the Architecture Foundation and the former editor of the Architectural Review)

VS

• Jack Self (Co-founder of the new crowd-funded magazine the Real Review and Contributing Editor for the Architectural Review)
• Hana Loftus (Director of HAT Projects and writes for Building Design magazine Architecture Today and Icon magazine)

Chair:
Marcus Fairs (Editor-in-Chief of Dezeen and founder of ICON magazine)

Limited spots for Second Home members.