This evening brings together writer Geoff Manaugh, of BLDGBLOG, in conversation with architects Mark Smout and Laura Allen, of Smout Allen. They will discuss their work exploring borders, tectonics, and other long-term landscape processes. Their collaborative projects engage with cartography and measurement in unstable terrains.
Manaugh and Smout Allen have catalogued and interrogated the British landscape with survey instruments created for the British Exploratory Land Archive, first exhibited at the Venice Biennale. For L.A. Recalculated – a cartographic drawing part map, part plan, part section – they diagnosed Los Angeles as “less a city, in some ways, than a matrix of seismic equipment and geological survey tools used for locating, mapping, and mitigating the effects of tectonic faults.”
Focusing on the dynamic relationship between the natural and the man-made, Manaugh and Smout Allen will consider boundaries in technology, theory and practice as they unpack collaborative projects that document human-altered landscapes of Britain and abroad.
Geoff Manaugh is author of BLDGBLOG and A Burglar’s Guide to the City. bldgblog.com
Laura Allen professor of Architecture and Augmented Landscapes and Mark Smout is professor of Architecture and Landscape Futures, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Their project Liquid Kingdom will be on display as part of the Building Centre’s Contemporary Cartography exhibition. smoutallen.com
The Contemporary Cartography exhibition and events programme is curated by the Building Centre and supported by the Built Environment Trust. It forms part of the 2019 London Festival of Architecture.
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