6 Big Things to Talk About in 2022 / 2023

The AJA welcomes everyone to a unique series of talks and discussions about how we can best shape our world, through what we call the 6C’s....Context, Character, Connectivity, Community, Climate and Change (see below for more info)

We are inviting international and local speakers to present their ideas on architecture, engineering, biodiversity, placemaking and identity, story-telling, everyday life, art, happiness and delight...amongst other things.

Held at lunchtimes, or in the evening over a glass of beer or wine, we are hoping to stimulate a forum of discussion between both the community and its stakeholders and our industry members including contractors, developers, planners, architects, engineers, artists, authors and anyone passionate about our environment.

Most importantly, we are inviting you to join in the discussions. Save the date, and see you there!

-------------------------------------------------------------

International speakers (some may be subject to change/availability) are:

Stephen Pimbley, Director of Spark* Architects, Singapore & London (Thursday 28 April 2022 at 5.30pm, St Helier Parish Hall)

Stephen is a British architect based in Singapore and is the founding director of Spark, an architecture firm.

Using the evocation of the studio’s name “spark”; Spark Architects produce stimulating, innovative, award-winning buildings and urban environments that generate significant added value for our clients. Spark’s studios have built a large number of award-winning projects throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Their work is influenced by the constant evolution of contemporary life and the influences upon it that require a fresh approach to urban thinking.

Spark’s work ranges in scale from boutique shops, residential, mixed-use waterfronts, and civic buildings to urban planning. Our projects are enjoyable to use, functional, beautiful to look at and easy to understand.

Spark’s design solutions are an inspired socially and environmentally sensitive alchemy of the traditional ingredients of living, working and leisure designed to seamlessly connect society to an inspiring future.

Spark’s award-winning projects include Clarke Quay in Singapore, the Shanghai International Cruise Terminal (MIPIM Asia awards 2011, “best mixed-use development” award), the Starhill Gallery Kuala Lumpur and the Raffles City Projects in Ningbo and Beijing. Spark’s Homefarm and Beachhut projects are the winners of the future experimental category at the World Architecture Festival in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Roger Madelin CBE, Director British Land (Developers), London (Thursday 6th October 2022 at 5:30pm, St Paul's Centre)

Roger joined Argent in 1987. He became a Director in 1989 and, for the ten years that followed, was responsible for delivering all of Argent’s developments, including Green Park and Thames Valley Park in Reading, Brindleyplace in Birmingham, and Piccadilly in Manchester and office buildings in the City of London.

He became CEO in 1997 after an innovative acquisition by British Telecom Pension Scheme and, due to the dramatic expansion of Argent’s business, his long-term colleague David Partridge joined him as Joint CEO in 2006. At the end of 2012 Argent restructured as a Limited Liability Partnership and Roger stepped back from new Argent business and concentrated on specific delivery aspects of King’s Cross including the design and delivery of 3 major buildings for the Aga Khan Development Network.

In January 2016, after 29 years, Roger formally left Argent and joined British Land as Head of Canada Water, a 46 acre development opportunity in Central London. He will maintain a consultancy role at King’s Cross with Argent in connection with the Aga Khan buildings.

Roger is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA, an Honorary Fellow of the College of Estate Management and was awarded a CBE for ‘services to sustainable development’ in the 2007 Honours List.

Shelley Bontje, Sustainable Mobility Consultant at The Dutch Cycling Embassy (Thursday 1st December 2022 at 5:30pm, St Pauls Centre)

The Dutch Cycling Embassy is a vast network of public and private organisations from the Netherlands who share their expertise on building what supports the Dutch cycling culture to those interested.

The Dutch Cycling Embassy help bring cycling culture and help cities become more cycling-friendly? The say ‘No need to reinvent the wheel!’

Hanif Kara OBE, Structural Engineer and Co-Founder of AKTII, London (Thursday 23rd February 2023 at 5:30pm, St Helier Parish Hall)

Hanif Mohamed Kara OBE is a structural engineer and is design director and co-founder of London- based structural engineering practice AKT II (previously Adams Kara Taylor). He has taught design internationally, is a member of the board of trustees for the Architecture Foundation and was a commissioner for CABE from 2008 to 2011 (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment). He is currently Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also taught as professor of Architectural Technology at KTH Royal Institute ofTechnology in Stockholm from 2009 until 2012. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

Simon Allford, RIBA President and Co-Founder AHHM Architects, London (Tuesday 28 February 2023 at 5.30pm, St Helier Parish Town Hall)

“Constructing the Idea: A Low Carbon Future”

Simon Allford (born July 1961) is a British architect, co-founder and director of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), chair of the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation, and current president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The son of an architect, Simon Allford was born in July 1961. He attended the University of Sheffield and the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he has since worked as a lecturer. In 1989, with Jonathan Hall, Paul Monaghan and Peter Morris, he established AHMM. The practice today employs over 500 people working on projects in education, healthcare, housing, arts and offices. In 2017, it became majority employee-owned through an employee ownership trust. In November 2013, it was announced that Allford would be the new chair of the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation.

Bill Price, Structural Engineer and Director at WSP, Strategic Growth, London (Thursday 18th May 2023 at 5:30pm, Jersey Museum)

Bill also runs ‘Construction Rocks’ which is a music competition event and has raised over £40,000 for various charities in 4 years.

Bill is a structural engineer, and travels all over the globe, designing high rise buildings and other projects for WSP’s clients. He is based in London and helps run the structural engineering team. They design structures for all kinds of buildings and structures ranging from high rise, railway stations, airports, hospitals and schools to bridges, sports stadia and museums. We have projects in Africa, India, USA, China and closer to home in Denmark. WSP use Building Information Modelling (BIM) software on most projects and have lots of partners including architects, project managers, cost consultants and contractors.

Christophe Egret, Co-Founder of Studio Egret West, London (Thursday 20 July 2023 at 5:30pm, Jersey Library)

As a co-founding partner of Studio Egret West, Christophe has the privilege of nurturing and galvanising the pursuit of passion of a large group of talented creatives. As if that was not fulfilment enough, Christophe also loves discovering the qualities of places and buildings through painting and drawing and sharing this visual communication with colleagues and clients, testing through these the design principles that SEW establish on every project. This is a skill Christophe learnt and cultivated while working with Will Alsop when he completed, amongst other projects, the Peckham Library, winner of the Stirling Prize in 2000.

When Christophe set up Studio Egret West back in 2004, he and David West had an ambition to re-unite urban design and architecture. This has led them to a path that is less concerned with aesthetics for their own sake, and more so with the qualities of place. Be it as an experience of social cohesion or memorable spaces that lift the spirit.

Emily Allchurch, Internationally acclaimed artist (Thursday 28 September 2023 at 5:30pm, St Helier Parish Hall)

Emily Allchurch, born 1974 in Jersey, Channel Islands, trained as a sculptor, receiving a First Class (Hons.) degree in Fine Art from the Kent Institute of Art & Design – Canterbury in 1996, and an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1999, where she began working with photography as a material. Since then, she has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the UK and internationally.

Emily sources and photographs buildings and urban landscapes, which she then uses to recreate old master scenes from a contemporary perspective.

As befitting a former sculptor, Allchurch uses the historic artwork as armature on which to build her collages. Meticulously splicing together hundreds of photographs, she creates an immensely detailed new fictional space underpinned by a strong social narrative.

Jacob Kirkegaard, Sound Artist, Denmark “Waste” (5:45pm, Tuesday 12 December 2023, Jersey Museum)

Jacob Kirkegaard is both a visual artist and a composer who works with recordings of sounds that we rarely hear in our daily lives, taken from spaces loaded with meaning and tied to the conversations about our world today.

In his film presents a video and sound installation, where you can get really close to and listen to waste. He records the sounds by burying vibration sensors in the piles of waste at a dumping site in Kenya and lowers a hydrophone into pools of wastewater from a processing plant in Denmark. The listener is immersed in very detailed and rich recordings of waste. You really hear the metal, the plastic, and the glass moving in the polluted water.

“.... When I was 17, I worked for the summer as an assistant to archaeologists who were excavating a graveyard. I was very interested in what they found in the earth: pearls and all kinds of beautiful old things. I wondered what people in the future would find from our generation. It probably won’t be gold or ceramics. It’s going to be plastics and radioactive material. Our waste is a testimonium of our time....” Jacob Kirkegaard

Elspeth Beard, The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World, and an Author and Architect (Date & venue TBC)

Elspeth Beard is one of a select band of bold women to ride a motorcycle around the world. She left in October 1982, in the days before sat-nav, internet, email and mobile phones. The bike she chose for the trip was a second hand 1974 BMW R 60/6 flat-twin, costing £900 in 1979. This was a substantial sum at the time, especially for a machine that already had 30,000 miles on the clock.

On returning to England, Elspeth completed here architectural studies and bought and renovated a water tower to live in. She eventually wrote her book, Lone Rider, and it was published to much acclaim in July 2017.

Abir Mukherjee, Best Selling Author of the Wyndham & Banerjee series of crime novels (Date & venue TBC)

Abir Mukherjee is the British writer of the Wyndham and Bannerjee crime novels. Mukherjee graduated from the London School of Economics and has, by his own admission, pursued ‘a spectacularly dull career in finance’ for the past twenty years. To alleviate the tedium of his day-job, Mukherjee began writing a historical crime novel set in Raj-era India. The result was published to widespread acclaim in 2016 and introduced the reading public to the crime fighting duo of Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant ‘Surrender-Not’ Bannerjee.

The book’s success spawned a sequel, A Necessary Evil, three years later and a third instalment, Smoke and Ashes, published in November 2018. The fourth book in the series, Rising Man A Death in the East, was published in November 2019.

----------------------------------------------------

The 6C’s in more detail....

Context

  • Investigating and referencing physical and historical context, memory and past eras
  • Interpreting materials, styles and detailing in a contemporary context that can reinforce local distinctiveness and sense of place
  • Responding to the existing urban fabric, landscape, topography, building typologies and the receiving streetscape
  • Embracing appropriate modern materials, details and contemporary ideas

Character

  • Creating memorable places, distinctive identity, landscape and materials
  • Responding appropriately to grain, massing, density and building forms and proportions
  • Respecting listed buildings, settings and places
  • Enriching public realm spaces through public art

Connectivity

  • Creating permeability for pedestrians, cyclists, scooters and other transport modes
  • Connecting people through technology, like urban wi-fi
  • Promoting safe thoroughfares
  • Understanding local destinations and movement patterns

Community

  • Promoting community engagement and co-design, and so designing homes that people want to live in and places they will be proud of
  • Mixing of people of all ages, in mixed home types
  • Following a street-based design approach, with social public and circulation spaces, easily identifiable front doors and private places to ‘watch the world go by’
  • Reflecting ‘Island Identity’ in architecture and placemaking

Climate

  • Prioritising retrofit and re-use if it enhances local character and identity
  • Integrating biodiversity and landscape design for placemaking and well-being
  • Considering water conservation, SUDS, carbon reduction and embodied energy from the start
  • Dealing with cars, tidying up waste and storing bike

Change

  • Recognising St Helier’s heritage of ‘constant change’ by adapting and responding to changing times by challenging and exploring new approaches and embracing reinvention
  • Integrating adaptability, flexibility, technology and resilience into the earliest design proposals
  • Avoiding mimicking what has been done before and exploring new approaches to integrating old and new
  • Responding to change in a creative and future-proof manner, while respecting to the existing site context and character of the surroundings