#matrix feminist design co-operative

[notwiselybuttoowell]

By the 1980s, some women had had enough. After decades of struggling with prams and shopping trolleys, navigating dark underpasses, blind alleyways and labyrinthine subways in the urban obstacle course mostly made by men, it was time for a different approach. “Through lived experience,” wrote the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, when they launched their manifesto in 1981, “women have a different perspective of their environment from the men who created it. Because there is no ‘women’s tradition’ in building design, we want to explore the new possibilities that the recent change in women’s lives and expectations have opened up.”

A case in point is the Essex Women’s Refuge. The complex, designed by a male architect, had got basic things wrong, from the shared kitchen, which was far too small, to the location of the children’s play areas, which were completely separate from the main communal areas, with no visual or aural connection for passive supervision. Matrix worked on the centre in 1992. Using what became a regular tactic, they presented the women with big cardboard models of different spaces, which they could rearrange to test out different configurations, along with using ribbon marked like a ruler to measure their existing spaces, which were added to the plans as a comparison.

“These were all simple techniques,” says Jos Boys, a founder member of Matrix, “But they made the women feel part of creating the project. A key part of everything we did was to make the language and practice of architecture more transparent and accessible to non-experts.”

Boys describes what now sounds like an unimaginable heyday of community action, participatory planning, squatting, workers’ co-operatives and technical aid centres, with public money readily available. Much of what Matrix worked on was funded by the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, before it was abolished in 1986 by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Their projects included the groundbreaking Jagonari women’s educational resource centre in Whitechapel, east London. Working for – and with – a group of South Asian women, Matrix ran workshops with demountable models, asked the women to bring pictures of buildings from their home countries that they liked, and took them on a “brick picnic” walk to discuss what building materials and colours they preferred.

The result, completed in 1987 and now home to a childcare centre, incorporated a variety of Asian influences, deliberately not linked to any Hindu or Islamic imagery. It included decorative metal latticework over the windows, to provide both visual interest and security, mosaic patterns around the doors, squat toilets and sit-down sinks for washing large saucepans from communal meals. Every part of the building was fully wheelchair accessible too, a rarity in those days.

“They understood exactly what our requirements were without being patronising or judgmental,” wrote their client, Solma Ahmed, in a glowing tribute written three decades later, in support of an unsuccessful bid for Matrix to be retrospectively awarded the RIBA gold medal. “We said what we needed in that building: safety, security, childcare, sensitive to women’s cultural and religious needs while breaking some myths about Muslim women in particular. They were [the] perfect fit.”

When people have encountered Matrix in the past, they have sometimes asked what exactly feminist design looks like. How would a city designed and built by women be different? But, in Boys’ mind, that misses the point. They weren’t promoting a feminist aesthetic, but a way of looking, listening and designing that takes account of people’s very different needs and desires, one that embodies “the richness of our multiple ways of being in the world”. It’s about who gets to build it, too: a large part of Matrix’s work was devoted to publications, manuals and events, explaining routes into the building trades and running training courses.

As Matrix write: “Consciously or otherwise, designers work in accordance with a set of ideas about how society operates, who or what is valued, who does what and who goes where.” The question is who gets included, whose values we prioritise, and what kind of world we want to create.

[ukrfeminism]

Fed up living in a world designed by and for men, 80s design activists Matrix declared war on every urban obstacle in their way. And their impact is still being felt today

When Le Corbusier developed his proportional system Le Modulor in the 1940s, the great architect had in mind a handsome British policeman. His system would go on to shape the entire postwar world, dictating everything from the height of a door handle to the scale of a staircase, all governed by the need to make everything as convenient as possible for this 6ft-tall ideal man. Its influence even extended to the size of city blocks, since these responded to the size and needs of the car our imaginary hero drove to work. The Swiss-born, Paris-based architect had originally proposed 1.75m, based on the average height of a Frenchman, but it later grew. “In English detective novels,” said Le Corbusier, explaining his change of mind, “the good-looking men, such as policemen, are always 6ft tall!” This may have created a dynamic world for the dashing man, pictured by Corbusier with bulging calves, pinched waist, broad shoulders and a huge lobster claw of a hand raised aloft. But this modernist worldview failed to account for women, as well as children, elderly and disabled people – anyone, in fact, who fell outside the statuesque ideal.

By the 1980s, some women had had enough. After decades of struggling with prams and shopping trolleys, navigating dark underpasses, blind alleyways and labyrinthine subways in the urban obstacle course mostly made by men, it was time for a different approach. “Through lived experience,” wrote the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, when they launched their manifesto in 1981, “women have a different perspective of their environment from the men who created it. Because there is no ‘women’s tradition’ in building design, we want to explore the new possibilities that the recent change in women’s lives and expectations have opened up.” Forty years on and 27 years since they disbanded, the surviving members of Matrix have taken over a corner of the Barbican, as part of the London arts centre’s new Level G programme, an experimental space in the foyer designed to entertain anyone hanging around. Following the recent vigils for Sarah Everard, whose murder prompted a national reckoning over women’s safety, and coming after the Black Lives Matter protests for social and spatial justice, the provocative display couldn’t open at a more fitting time. Called How We Live Now, the exhibition begins with a work by the Birmingham Film and Video Workshop, shown on Channel 4 in 1988, that documented women’s experiences of navigating Paradise Circus, part of the postwar city centre conceived as an island in a gyratory roundabout, hemmed by a ring road and accessed by subways, steps and high-level walkways. A reviewer in the Daily Telegraph, who had been expecting something “amateurish, boring and full of loony leftist women” was instead enraptured by the film’s display of common sense about the ills of car-dominated planning. The makers “did not suggest any wilful discrimination”, the critic wrote, “but simply inability on the part of male architects to envisage what women actually do and need in their buildings”. A case in point, shown in another section of the exhibition, is the Essex Women’s Refuge. The complex, designed by a male architect, had got basic things wrong, from the shared kitchen, which was far too small, to the location of the children’s play areas, which were completely separate from the main communal areas, with no visual or aural connection for passive supervision. Matrix worked on the centre in 1992. Using what became a regular tactic, they presented the women with big cardboard models of different spaces, which they could rearrange to test out different configurations, along with using ribbon marked like a ruler to measure their existing spaces, which were added to the plans as a comparison.

“These were all simple techniques,” says Jos Boys, a founder member of Matrix, who curated the exhibition with the Barbican’s Jon Astbury. “But they made the women feel part of creating the project. A key part of everything we did was to make the language and practice of architecture more transparent and accessible to non-experts.”

The key was to make the language of architecture more transparent and accessible Boys describes what now sounds like an unimaginable heyday of community action, participatory planning, squatting, workers’ co-operatives and technical aid centres, with public money readily available. Much of what Matrix worked on was funded by the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, before it was abolished in 1986 by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Their projects included the groundbreaking Jagonari women’s educational resource centre in Whitechapel, east London. Working for – and with – a group of South Asian women, Matrix ran workshops with demountable models, asked the women to bring pictures of buildings from their home countries that they liked, and took them on a “brick picnic” walk to discuss what building materials and colours they preferred. The result, completed in 1987 and now home to a childcare centre, incorporated a variety of Asian influences, deliberately not linked to any Hindu or Islamic imagery. It included decorative metal latticework over the windows, to provide both visual interest and security, mosaic patterns around the doors, squat toilets and sit-down sinks for washing large saucepans from communal meals. Every part of the building was fully wheelchair accessible too, a rarity in those days. “They understood exactly what our requirements were without being patronising or judgmental,” wrote their client, Solma Ahmed, in a glowing tribute written three decades later, in support of an unsuccessful bid for Matrix to be retrospectively awarded the RIBA gold medal. “We said what we needed in that building: safety, security, childcare, sensitive to women’s cultural and religious needs while breaking some myths about Muslim women in particular. They were [the] perfect fit.”

When people have encountered Matrix in the past, they have sometimes asked what exactly feminist design looks like. How would a city designed and built by women be different? But, in Boys’ mind, that misses the point. They weren’t promoting a feminist aesthetic, but a way of looking, listening and designing that takes account of people’s very different needs and desires, one that embodies “the richness of our multiple ways of being in the world”. It’s about who gets to build it, too: a large part of Matrix’s work was devoted to publications, manuals and events, explaining routes into the building trades and running training courses. The members of the co-operative, who numbered between 12 and 16, were all paid the same, and, as public sector funding dried up, their model struggled to remain viable. While they went on to many different things – from academia to running restaurants, to setting up their own architecture practices – their short but explosive moment would inspire future generations, particularly in recent years as students have rediscovered their work. The demand is now such that Matrix’s seminal 1984 book, Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment, long out of print, is to be republished by Verso this year.A final section of the exhibition includes architects, artists and film-makers who are keeping the spirit alive, such as Winnie Herbstein. Her 2018 film installation Studwork, which took a wrecking ball to assumptions of gendered roles in construction, featured Glasgow’s Women in Construction course and the Slaghammers feminist welding group. There are the socially driven practices like Muf and Public Works, campaign groups like Part W and Black Females in Architecture, as well as feminist design collective Edit, who designed the clever structure of the exhibition itself. There might no longer be the pots of cash available from the public purse, but these practices are finding ways to carve out space for more excluded, marginal voices. As Matrix write: “Consciously or otherwise, designers work in accordance with a set of ideas about how society operates, who or what is valued, who does what and who goes where.” The question is who gets included, whose values we prioritise, and what kind of world we want to create.How We Live Now is at the Barbican, London, until 23 December.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[ivisitlondon]

iVisit... Barbican announces reopening and new programme for the spring and summer 2021

The Barbican announces an exciting programme of new live events and digital content for spring and summer. In line with the latest government guidance, the Barbican is preparing to reopen its Art Gallery, Cinemas, Shop and Cafes, and welcome back live audiences in the Hall, in the week of 17 May 2021; followed by the Conservatory in late May; and The Curve and The Pit on 17 June. The Barbican Theatre will make its much-anticipated return this summer with a new production of one of the greatest musicals of all time.

Highlights from the spring and summer programme include:

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, the first major UK exhibition of the work of French artist Jean Dubuffet in over 50 years, will open at the Barbican Art Gallery on Monday 17 May and tickets will go on sale from tomorrow (Thursday 11 March).

Tickets go on sale from tomorrow (Thursday 11 March) for Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle, a major exhibition dedicated to the work and activism of Brazilian artist Claudia Andujar, in The Curve, The Pit and Barbican foyers, opening on Thursday 17 June.

Live music and audiences return to the Barbican over the spring and summer with a new Live from the Barbican concert series. This includes 15 livestreamed concerts in the Hall with a digital audience alongside a socially-distanced live audience when permitted. The line-up, announced today, includes Barbican Resident Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Sir Simon Rattle, Paul Weller with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Jules Buckley, Moses Boyd, Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, the 12 Ensemble with Jonny Greenwood and Anna Meredith, George the Poet, and the world premiere of Errollyn Wallen’s new opera Dido’s Ghost.

Kathleen Marshall’s Tony Award-winning production of the musical Anything Goes comes to the Theatre this summer starring Megan Mullally, Robert Lindsay, Felicity Kendal and Gary Wilmot.

The Barbican’s co-presentation with the Bridge Theatre of Vox Motus’s highly acclaimed theatre installation Flight resumes at the Bridge from Monday 17 May for a limited three-week run, subject to government regulations at the time.

The Barbican’s cinemas, including newly refurbished Cinemas 2&3, will reopen from Monday 17 May with a programme of new releases, as well as the annual Chronic Youth 2021, and the curated film series Return to the City.

How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, an ambitious installation, public programme and publication, will open on Monday 17 May as part of the Barbican’s Level G programme, exploring who are our buildings and shared spaces are designed for, and how they affect us.

Communities in Residence returns to the Barbican from April with a regular programme of small-scale and in-person creative workshops for local community organisations and charities.

Applications for Barbican Creative Learning’s second round of its Open Lab programme launches today, providing grants to commission a further four artists to produce new socially engaged work.

Barbican Box, the Barbican’s flagship schools programme, will be opening applications for secondary schools in Harlow, exploring theatre-making and visual art with students and teachers from May to July 2021.

For children aged five and under, a new Squish Space online group will be offering daily play prompts and activities for parents/carers and their children to enjoy at home.

Barbican Conservatory, home to more than 1,500 species of tropical plants and trees, will reopen to the public for free on select days of the week from late May.

Available now in the online Barbican Shop is a new sustainable living collection, with a range of eco-friendly and ethically sourced products to help lead a more sustainable life.

Full programme information for the above and more is detailed below.

Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director, Barbican said: ‘We’re delighted to finally welcome everyone back to the Barbican to experience the joy of culture and creativity again. When we reopened last year, 96% of our visitors felt safe in the Centre, and we look forward to creating the same level of welcome to ensure another safe return for our audiences, artists and staff.

‘Our reopening programme for the spring and summer is packed with great concerts, inspiring exhibitions, thrilling theatre performances, and thought-provoking film screenings. We’ll also continue running our innovative learning programmes and community work, designed to connect young people, children and local communities with their creativity and provide a supportive, nurturing environment for them to express themselves.

‘We have made great strides in recent times to provide a blended offer of live and digital programming. We’ll continue to develop this for the future to ensure everyone can enjoy our inspiring cross-arts programme while we gradually return to fuller audiences across our building.

‘None of this work would be possible without the continuing support of the City of London Corporation, our founder and principal funder, and the generosity of our individual, business, and trust and foundation supporters.’

The Barbican believes in creating space for people and ideas to connect through its international arts programme, community events and learning activity. To keep its programme accessible to everyone, and to keep investing in the artists it works with, the Barbican needs to raise more than 60% of its income through ticket sales, commercial activities and fundraising every year. Donations can be made here: barbican.org.uk/donate

Visual Arts

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty

Mon 17 May – Sun 22 Aug 2021, Barbican Art Gallery

Media View: details to follow soon

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty is the first major UK exhibition of the work of French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) in over 50 years. One of the most provocative voices in postwar modern art, Dubuffet rebelled against conventional ideas of beauty, hoping to capture the poetry of everyday life in a gritty, more authentic way. Drawn from international public and private collections, Brutal Beauty brings together more than 150 works: from early portraits, lithographs and fantastical statues to enamel paintings, butterfly assemblages and giant colourful canvases.

Spanning four decades in the studio, Brutal Beauty highlights Dubuffet’s endless experimentation with tools and materials, as he blended paint with shards of glass, coal dust, pebbles, slithers of string and gravel. Shown alongside his work are two dedicated rooms from Dubuffet’s collection of Art Brut, acquired throughout his life – shedding light on artists such as Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Gaston Duf., and Laure Pigeon, who profoundly inspired his approach to the making and understanding of art.

Significant works by Dubuffet in the exhibition include the Little Statues of Precarious Life, 1954–59, figures made out of natural sponge, wood charcoal, grapevine and lava stone; and the Texturologies from the late 1950s, inspired by the rich natural surroundings of Vence, Southern France, which pivot between our micro and macro worlds, their delicate speckles having a spellbinding effect. While Paris Circus, 1961, is a series of works drawn from the frenzy of street life bursting with consumerism and featuring a somersault of dense imagery.

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty is sponsored by Sotheby’s with additional support from Waddington Custot.

Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle

Thu 17 Jun – Sun 29 Aug 2021, The Curve / The Pit / Barbican Foyers

Media View: Wed 16 Jun 2021

Barbican Art Gallery presents Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle – an exhibition dedicated to the work and activism of Brazilian artist Claudia Andujar. For over five decades starting in the 1970s, Andujar devoted her life to photographing and defending the Yanomami, one of Brazil’s largest indigenous peoples. At a time when Yanomami territory is threatened more than ever by illegal gold mining, and as Covid-19 continues to sweep the globe, this major exhibition is especially relevant in the context of the humanitarian and environmental crises exacerbated by the pandemic.

Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle is curated by Thyago Nogueira, Head of Contemporary Photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Brazil. Based on years of research into Andujar’s archive, the exhibition explores her extraordinary contribution to the art of photography as well as her major role as a human rights activist defending the Yanomami’s rights. Over 200 photographs, an audio-visual installation, a film and a series of drawings by the Yanomami are brought together in The Curve, The Pit and the Barbican’s foyers. The exhibition will reflect the dual nature of Andujar’s career, committed to both art and activism, as she used photography as a tool for political change.

Tickets for Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle go on sale to Barbican Members on Thursday 11 March and to the general public on Friday 12 March.

Music

Barbican announces line-up details for Live from the Barbican from April 2021

Live music returns to the Barbican over the spring and summer this year with a new edition of its successful concert series Live from the Barbican, including 15 livestreamed concerts featuring the Centre’s resident and associate orchestras and ensembles as well as a hand-picked line-up of artists. The concerts will be performed in the Barbican Hall between 10 April and 18 July 2021 with a live streaming audience online, alongside a socially distanced in-person audience when permitted. The eclectic mix of musicians across many different genres all reflect the wide spectrum of the Barbican’s distinct music offer.

Highlights include:

Pianist Benjamin Grosvenor returns to the Barbican Hall with a vibrant programme including works by Chopin, Ravel, Liszt and Ginastera (Sat 10 Apr).

British artist, composer & songwriter Moses Boyd performs material from his new Mercury nominated album Dark Matter (Sun 18 Apr).

Barbican Associate Orchestra BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Alpesh Chauhan with BBC New Generation Artist, viola player Timothy Ridout with music from across three centuries inspired by Scotland (Sun 25 Apr).

Barbican Resident Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Sir Simon Rattle perform Mahler’s song symphony Das Lied von der Erde with mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená and tenor Andrew Staples (Sun 9 May).

Barbican Associate Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and its Creative Artist in Association Jules Buckley and guest artists will be joined by legendary singer-songwriter Paul Weller for a concert reimagining Weller’s work, including new material, in stunning orchestral settings in what will be Weller’s first live performance in two years (Sat 15 May).

British folk legend Shirley Collins returns to the Centre following the release of her latest album Heart’s Ease (Sun 23 May).

Kate Stables’s band This is The Kit present their new album Off Off On (Sun 30 May).

Errollyn Wallen’s new opera Dido's Ghost – framing Purcell’s original opera Dido and Aeneas within a haunting story from Ovid, with libretto by Wesley Stace – receives its World Premiere performance as part of Live from the Barbican this summer (Sun 6 Jun).

Barbican Associate Ensemble Britten Sinfonia and Thomas Adès present the UK Premiere of Adès’s Shanty to mark the composer’s 50th birthday (Thu 10 Jun).

12 Ensemble are joined on stage by Jonny Greenwood and Anna Meredith, performing in their own works (Sat 19 Jun).

Barbican Associate Ensemble Academy of Ancient Music and Music Director Richard Egarr perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with renowned baroque violinist Rachel Podger (Sun 27 Jun).

Spoken word performer George the Poet presents his innovative brand of musical poetry (Thu 1 Jul).

A duo recital from Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason featuring music by Bridge, Britten and Rachmaninov (Sun 4 Jul).

GoGo Penguin present material from their 2020 self-titled album, and back-catalogue (Sat 10 Jul).

English singer, songwriter and musician Nadine Shah and band perform material from her new, critically acclaimed album Kitchen Sink (Sun 18 Jul).

All concerts as part of Live from the Barbican in summer 2021 will be streamed live from the Barbican Hall on a pay-per-view basis, with live audiences in the Hall from Mon 17 May, if permitted by official government guidance.

Tickets to access the livestreams or to re-watch within a 48 hour-window, are £12.50 and will be on sale from Wed 10 March 2021. In-person tickets for events taking place after 17 May 2021 will go on sale in April 2021. Please find information about how to book tickets here.

Discounted tickets at £5 are available to 14 – 25-year-olds through Young Barbican and over 1000 free stream passes are being offered to schools and community groups in London, Manchester, Harlow and Norfolk, through Barbican Creative Learning.

The Barbican’s resident orchestra the London Symphony Orchestra continues to present weekly digital concerts on a range of platforms. All information can be found here.

Theatre and Dance

Anything Goes

Summer 2021, Barbican Theatre

One of the all-time great musicals Anything Goes makes a welcome return to the London stage this summer, starring Emmy & SAG Award Winner Megan Mullally (Will & Grace) making her West End musical debut as Reno Sweeney, and Tony, Olivier & BAFTA Award-Winner Robert Lindsay as Moonface Martin. Evening Standard Theatre Award Winner Felicity Kendal (The Good Life) will make her West End musical debut starring as Evangeline Harcourt, alongside leading West End actor Gary Wilmot (Chicago / Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) as Elisha Whitney.

This joyous new production of Cole Porter & P.G. Wodehouse’s classic musical will be directed and choreographed by three-time Tony Award-Winner Kathleen Marshall. Marshall’s Broadway production of Anything Goes was a major smash hit and received huge critical acclaim. The revival was nominated for nine Tony Awards and 10 Drama Desk Awards, winning Best Musical Revival and Best Choreography at both ceremonies. Now Marshall, in her West End directing debut, will reinvent this glorious musical for London audiences this summer.

Tickets for Anything Goes are on sale now.

Vox Motus – Flight Mon 17 May – Sun 6 Jun 2021, performance times TBC, Bridge Theatre

From a private booth, audiences are drawn into this tale of orphaned brothers and their desperate odyssey across Europe, the action unfolding in a ‘genuinely magical’ [The Stage] world of moving miniatures.

With their small inheritance stitched into their clothes, young Aryan and Kabir set off on an epic journey by foot from Kabul to London. Braving bustling train stations, hazardous sea crossings, menacing strangers and threats of violence, their heart-wrenching story speaks of terror, hope and survival. Based on Caroline Brothers’ novel Hinterland, Flight combines timely themes with engrossing images to honour the resilience of refugee children adrift in dangerous lands.

At the Bridge Theatre audiences are seated individually and given headphones for this intimate experience staged by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison (magic and illusions designer, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). Like a 3-D graphic novel brought to life, the revolving scenes contain detailed sets and figures, accompanied by binaural sound and narration.

Tickets for Flight go on sale in the spring. The on-sale date will be announced soon.

Diverse City – Mid Life: The Skin We’re In

Mon 22–Sun 28 Mar 2021, online

The team behind OFFIE-nominated play Mid Life, the last show to be performed in The Pit before the country went into lockdown a year ago, presents Mid Life: The Skin We're In. This vital, uplifting short film is available to stream for free for one week.

Mid Life: The Skin We’re In is a poetic look at how to celebrate, survive and thrive in your own skin. It explores the expectations that are placed on women’s bodies and suggests how we can rise to a deeper appreciation of ourselves. The short film was created by Jacqui Beckford, Claire Hodgson and Karen Spicer, and directed by Lucy Richardson. The cinematography is by Monika Davies and the original music by Kandaka Moore.

Cinema

Barbican Cinema will reopen on Monday 17 May, welcoming audiences back to enjoy the much-missed big screen experience. Highlights from the spring/summer programme include the annual Chronic Youth 2021, the Return to the City season and the best in new release titles. The Barbican is also pleased to announce that Cinemas 2&3 will reopen, having recently undergone a refurbishment, with new seating and an improved layout in the foyer. Barbican Cinema 1’s foyer has also been redesigned, creating a contemporary space for audiences to enjoy. Chronic Youth 2021 Barbican Cinema will present the sixth edition of the Chronic Youth, which is curated by the Barbican Young Film Programmers (aged 16-25). With one film programme a month – between April and May on Cinema On Demand and one screening in venue in June – this year’s cohort have chosen films that explore the themes of self-definition, community and chosen family, from filmmakers across the globe. From the gripping story of a dislocated Romanian family in Acasa, My Home (Dir Radu Ciorniciuc), to the heart-warming and rhythm-fuelled shorts programme, Chronic Youth offers moving stories of people uniting through a shared desire to choose their own path, and connect with the world around them. Return to the City After a year when travel has been denied for most people, leaving bustling urban centres deserted, Return to the City – screening throughout June 2021 – visits destinations around the globe, showing unique perspectives of major world cities.

This season re-discovers Paris, Lima, Las Vegas and Kaili City, with a diversity of storytellers as our guide. Some celebrate the majesty and excitement of the metropolis, while others consider the hardships faced by marginalised communities within them. Programme highlights include: Nationalité immigré (France 1976, Dir Sidney Sokhona), which explores the racism faced by immigrants in 1970s Paris; Lima Screams (Peru 2018, Dir Dana Bonilla), a modern day city symphony dedicated to Peru’s capital city; and Queen of Diamonds (USA 1991, Dir Nina Menkes), which shows the more mundane side of Las Vegas, away from the glitz and glamour, through the eyes of a casino croupier getting through yet another day’s work. Tickets for Return to the City are available to book from Thursday 22 April. From Monday 17 May, audiences will also be able to enjoy the best new release titles. Barbican Cinema has been supported by the Culture Recovery Fund for Independent Cinemas in England which is administered by the BFI, as part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund supporting arts and cultural organisations in England affected by the impact of Covid-19. #HereForCulture.

Level G Programme

How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

Mon 17 May – Thu 23 Dec 2021, Level G & online

Through an ambitious installation, public programme and publication, How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative invites the public to explore an important social question: who are our buildings and shared spaces designed for, and how do they affect us? After a sustained period of lockdown and increased time spent in domestic spaces, these questions feel more relevant than ever.

The jumping-off point for considering these questions is a previously unseen archive of work by the radical 1980s feminist architecture cooperative Matrix, who addressed the ways in which the design of the built environment excludes particular groups, particularly in relation to gender, race and disability.

The hybrid programme, co-curated with Matrix founding member Jos Boys, will consist of an installation on Level G of the Barbican Centre featuring rare films, drawings, photos and architectural models from the Matrix archive; as well as a series of online talks, workshops, film screenings and walking tours. The accompanying exhibition book, Revealing Objects, is an experimental publication that combines archival reproductions of Matrix materials with contemporary responses to the key themes of the project.

How We Live Now is made possible with Art Fund support.

Creative Learning

Young Visual Arts Group 2021 Online Exhibition

Available online from May 2021

In May 2021, the Barbican will launch a free online group exhibition featuring newly created works from 14 emerging visual artists between the age of 17-25 on Barbican Creative Learning’s Young Visual Arts Group programme.

Produced remotely and entirely online by the group and the Barbican, the exhibition will showcase a variety of artworks spanning media including painting, drawing, photography, film and performance. The exhibition will feature work from artists Gibril Adam, Fikayo Adebajo, Sally Barton, L U C I N E, J Frank, Ayodeji Akinlabi Fatimilehin Hayes, Nefeli Kentoni, Siavash Minoukadeh, Emariamhe Obemeata, Ioana Simion, Asako Ujita, Tegan Wilson, Zhilin Xu and Jiawen Zhao.

Barbican launches Open Lab call-out to commission four artists to produce new socially engaged work

Barbican Creative Learning’s Open Lab programme will open for a second round of applications from Wednesday 10 March.

The Barbican is supporting the work of eight early to mid-career artists in total. Four artists have been be selected from the first round of applications last year and are creating work between January and June 2021 and another four artists will be selected from this round of applications.

Open Lab supports artists to experiment in any artform with no expectation of delivering a final artistic product. It accepts proposals from artists who are at the beginning of a cross arts or participatory idea or question or would like to explore the creative process with new collaborators.

Interested applicants’ practice should be socially engaged. Work should explore how people’s mental, physical and social wellbeing is improved by participation in and enjoyment of the arts, be inclusive, rooted in community and respond to the uniquely challenging times we find ourselves in today.

Successful applicants will receive £2,000 to develop their idea, have access to bespoke guidance and advice by Barbican staff members and a selected mentor. Applicants should document their process and will have the opportunity to showcase their work on the Barbican’s website and social channels.

Disabled people, those from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds and people under 30 are under-represented in the arts sector, so the Barbican is particularly encouraging applications to Open Lab from people in these groups. More information about the programme and how to apply can be found here.

Barbican Box is coming to Harlow in 2021

Barbican Creative Learning and Harlow Playhouse are excited to bring Barbican Box, the Barbican's flagship schools programme, to schools in Harlow and the surrounding area from May to July 2021. The programme is open to secondary schools, as well as Year 6 primary groups.

Now in its tenth year, Barbican Box ignites and supports creative arts practice in schools and colleges through a guided process of making new artistic work.

This year’s Box is designed and curated by Coney, award-winning creators of interactive experiences, and explores themes of games, adventures and play. Recognising the importance of supporting wellbeing at this time, the Box will encourage students and teachers to celebrate kindness, empathy and connection, through engagement with theatre and visual art.

Designed to be accessible to all schools, including specialist providers, the programme introduces young people to imaginative and adventurous approaches to the arts and enriches the school curriculum by connecting schools to professional arts programmes and venues. The Barbican’s National Development Programme is supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

Squish Space: Online Group

The Barbican has launched a new digital season of Squish Space, the Barbican’s multi-sensory adventure for children aged five and under. A series of play prompts will inspire creative activity and exploration of everyday objects by engaging with families in their own homes over the coming months. Designed by Squish Space creators India Harvey and Lisa Marie Bengtsson, new play prompts and activities will be shared via the new Barbican Families: Squish Space Activities Facebook Group. This Facebook group will bring together the families and carers digitally who usually get the chance to connect onsite.

Communities in Residence

Communities in Residence is a responsive programme that provides free space at the Barbican to local community partners including Accumulate, an ‘art school for the homeless’; Key Changes, a mental health recovery charity for musicians; and City of London Age UK which offers support and services to older people.

Communities in Residence offers a collaborative space for valuable face-to-face interaction and is helping to foster feelings of connection and creativity.

All three community groups will return to the Barbican from Easter this year with a regular programme of small-scale, socially distanced and in-person activities. These activities will be connected to the Barbican programme and involve creative workshops, film viewings and visits to the Barbican Art Gallery (once it reopens on Monday 17 May).

Barbican Conservatory

The Barbican Conservatory will reopen to the public on select days of the week from late May. A hidden oasis in the city, the Barbican Conservatory is home to more than 1,500 species of tropical plants and trees, as well as three indoor ponds for exotic fish and terrapins. Entry is free, but tickets must be booked in advance with available dates and times listed on the Barbican website.

Architecture Tours

Starting again on Monday 17 May, Barbican Architecture Tours are a 90-minute walking tour of the Barbican Centre and surrounding Brutalist estate led by an expert guide. The tour ventures through criss-crossing highwalks, leafy courts and sweeping crescents, and visits key points of architectural interest including the tranquil Lakeside Terrace, the striking form of the Sculpture Court and the trio of soaring residential towers. Tours will be available 7 days a week and will run at reduced capacity to allow for safe social distancing.

Barbican Business Events

From Monday 8 March, Barbican Business Events will start facilitating commercial filming and photoshoots, as well as essential business events up to 30 people, on a case by case basis in line with government guidance. Weddings up to 30 people, along with venue hire for larger groups of people, will resume no sooner than Monday 17 May.

Barbican Shop

The Barbican Shop will reopen its physical stores on Level G and at Barbican Art Gallery from Monday 17 May, featuring an exciting selection of design-led gifts. The Barbican Shop also continues to take orders through its online store at shop.barbican.org.uk

New additions to the Barbican Shop include the exhibition book for Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, now available as an exclusive pre-order for delivery from the 1 April. This fully illustrated 288 page book published by Prestel and designed by the Bon Ton features an introductory text written by the exhibition curator, Eleanor Nairne, alongside rich and insightful thematic essays by Kent Mitchell Minturn, Rachel E. Perry, Sarah Wilson, Sarah Lombardi, Sophie Berrebi and Camille Houzé.

Also now available is the Barbican Shop’s Sustainable Living collection, with a range of eco-friendly and ethically sourced products to help lead a more sustainable life, including water bottles, reusable snack boxes, flower and vegetable seeds, and fashion accessories made using sustainable methods and materials.

Barbican Kitchen, Cinema Cafe and Bar

From Monday 17 May, the Barbican Kitchen, Cinema Cafe and Bar will reopen to the public offering a selection of light snacks, cakes, treats and hot and cold drinks to eat in and take out. Detailed visitor information will be available on the Barbican’s website.

[dorcasrempel]

Design, power, and justice

When Sasha Costanza-Chock goes through airport security, it is an unusually uncomfortable experience.

Costanza-Chock, an MIT associate professor, is transgender and nonbinary. They use the pronouns they/them, and their body does not match binary norms. But airport security millimeter wave scanners are set up with binary, male/female configurations. To operate the machine, agents press a button based on their assumptions about the person entering the scanner: blue for “boy,” or pink for “girl.”  The machine nearly always flags Costanza-Chock for a hands-on check by security officials.

“I know I’m almost certainly about to experience an embarrassing, uncomfortable, and perhaps humiliating search … after my body is flagged as anomalous by the millimeter wave scanner,” they write, recounting one such episode, in a new book about technology, design, and social justice.

This is an experience familiar to many who fall outside the system’s norms, Costanza-Chock explains: Trans and gender nonconforming people’s bodies, black women’s hair, head wraps, and assistive devices are regularly flagged as “risky.”

The airport security scanner is just one type of problem that emerges when technology does not match social reality. There are biases built into everyday objects, including software interfaces, medical devices, social media, and the built environment, and these biases reflect existing power structures in society.

The new book — “Design Justice: Community Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need,” published by the MIT Press — looks broadly at such shortcomings and offers a framework for fixing them while lifting up methods of technology design that can be used to help build a more inclusive future.

“Design justice is both a community of practice, and a framework for analysis,” says Costanza-Chock, who is the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. “In the book I’m trying to both narrate the emergence of this community, based on my own participation in it, and rethink some of the core concepts from design theory through this lens.”

Who designs?

The book has its roots in the activities of the Design Justice Network (DJN), founded in 2016 with the aim of “rethinking design processes so they center people who are often marginalized by design,” in the organization’s own description. (Costanza-Chock sits on the DJN’s steering committee.) The book draws on the concepts of intersectional feminism and the idea that technologies, and society more broadly, are structured by what the black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins calls a “matrix of domination” in the form of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism.

The book also looks at the issue of who designs technology, a subject Costanza-Chock has examined extensively — for instance in the 2018 report “#MoreThanCode,” which pointed out the need for more systematic inclusion and equity efforts in the emerging field of public interest technology.

“There is a growing conversation about the lack of intersectional racial and gender diversity in the tech sector,” notes Costanza-Chock. “Many Silicon Valley firms are now producing diversity statistics every year. …  But just because it’s being recognized doesn’t mean it’s going to be solved any time soon.”

The problem of designing fairly for society is not as simple as diversifying that workforce, however.

“Design justice goes farther,” Costanza-Chock says. “Even if we had extremely diverse teams of people working inside Silicon Valley, they would by and large still be mostly organizing their time and energy around producing products that would be attractive to a very thin slice of the global population — people who have disposable income, always-on internet connectivity, and broadband.”

Still, the two problems are related, and “Design Justice” references a wide range of innovation areas where a lack of design inclusivity generates problematic products. Many product users have long had to devise ad-hoc improvements to technology themselves. For instance, nurses have often been prolific innovators, tinkering with medical devices — a phenomenon partly unearthed, the book notes, by Jose Gomez-Marquez, co-director of MIT’s Little Devices Lab.

“Every day, all around us, people are innovating in small and large ways, based on everyday needs,” Costanza-Chock reflects. Although that’s not what we hear from tech firms, which often circulate narratives “about a lone genius inventor, who had a ‘eureka’ moment and created a product and brought it into the world.”

For instance, in one widely circulated story, Twitter’s origins flow from a flash of insight by co-founder Jack Dorsey. Another version assigns its beginnings to hackers and activists of the Indymedia network and to then-MIT researcher Tad Hirsch, who in 2004 created a tool for protestors called TXTMob, which served as the demo design for the first Twitter prototype.

“I’m not making a claim in the book for the one true origin story,” explains Costanza-Chock. “I’m emphasizing that technological innovation and design processes are quite messy, and that people are often marginalized from the stories we hear about the creation of new tools. Social movements are often hotbeds of innovation, but their contributions aren’t always recognized.”

Better hackathons and more collaboration

Costanza-Chock does believe that design processes can be made more inclusive. In the book, they draw on years of experience teaching the MIT Collaborative Design Studio to synthesize lessons for inclusive innovation. For example: Try staging a hackathon that is more inclusive than the usual format of marathon sessions catered only to twenty-something coders.

“I really enjoy hackathons, and I have participated in many of them myself,” Costanza-Chock says. “That said, hackathons … tend to be dominated by certain kinds of people. They tend to be gendered, more accessible to younger people who don’t have kids, can take an entire day or weekend for free labor, and who can survive on pizza and soda.”

Whether designing a hackathon or building a long-term design team, “There are many ways to be better and more inclusive,” Costanza-Chock adds. “You need people with domain experience in the areas you’re working on, personal experience, or deep knowledge from study. If you’re working on Boston’s urban transit systems, you need to have people from different places in those systems on your designs teams, from the MBTA [Boston’s transit authority] to people that ride transit on a daily basis.”

Scholars who examine the social dimension of innovation have praised “Design Justice.” Princeton University sociologist Ruha Benjamin has said the book “offers essential tools for rethinking and reimagining the social infrastructure of tech design.”

Costanza-Chock, for one, hopes the book will interest people not only for the criticism it offers, but as a way of moving forward and deploying better practices.

“My book is not primarily or only critique,” Costanza-Chock says. “One of the things about the Design Justice Network is that we try to spend more time building than tearing down. I think design justice is about articulating a critique, while constantly trying to point toward ways of doing things better.”

Design, power, and justice syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[homedevises]

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[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition

The pioneering work of 1980s group the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is the subject of How We Live Now, an exhibition at The Barbican that looks at the biases in architecture and the built environment.

Active in London from 1981 to 1994, Matrix were a non-hierarchical collective of female architects, designers, builders and activists who empowered marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces.

How We Live Now is a free exhibition at The Barbican

Their work saw them collaborate with Black and Asian women's organisations, childcare providers, and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives to build several projects in the UK, while also publishing manuals and running educational outreach.

Renewed recognition of Matrix's work came last year, when Part W chose the group as its 1985 winner in The Alternative List, which addressed the male dominance of the RIBA awards year by year.

It celebrates the London-based '80s feminist cooperative called Matrix

In the months after, Matrix founding member Jos Boys, an academic at The Bartlett architecture school, received seed funding to build the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive, and Barbican assistant curator and Dezeen contributor Jon Astbury set out to create an exhibition based on the group's work.

The two ended up co-curating How We Live Now, which is subtitled "Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative". The free exhibition will run in The Barbican's ground-level foyer until 23 December 2021.

The exhibition shows ways that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral

Astbury and Boys aim to both introduce new audiences to the concept that the built environment can be gendered, not neutral, and to allow more seasoned viewers to understand Matrix within the broader context of activism then and now.

Boys said that many of the group's members were driven to start a feminist practice after experiencing discrimination at architecture school or in the workplace.

Matrix worked to empower marginalised communities to participate in the creation of spaces

"We were part of the New Architecture Movement, which was a radical movement kind of unionising architects, and yet even within that space, it was assumed that women should make the tea," Boys told Dezeen.

"For some of the women, their experience in architecture school had been pretty miserable. There were still very few women studying architecture, and they tended not to be taken very seriously. We all had comments that were like, 'at least you'll be able to design kitchens' or 'you'll go off and get married, so we're wasting our time educating you'."

They used tools like demountable models in projects such as the Jagonari Women's Centre

The work they made did not share a common aesthetic; rather, it was about developing inclusive, participatory processes that would properly meet the needs of a building's users.

How We Live Now attempts to convey this focus on process and conversation. So for its display on Matrix's best known work, the Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre, a hub for South Asian women in London's Whitechapel, the documents displayed include a photograph of the group's "brick picnic".

There is also a photo of their "brick picnic" initiative

On this outing, the Jagonari women walked the area discussing brick colours and textures, and were also prompted to bring photos of buildings they liked.

The building ended up being made with metal latticework windows and an ornate mosaic door — two features that were meant to remind the women of home, without arousing the racial harassment they feared from outsiders.

The exhibition also displays demountable scale models, another tool Matrix used to bring users into the conversation by making ideas visual and interactive.

Most of these objects haven't survived the intervening decades. Astbury was keen to highlight and celebrate these "gaps in the archive" rather than papering over them.

The cooperative also published manuals and ran educational outreach

For that reason, there is a colourful newly commissioned demountable model of one of Matrix's projects, the Dalston Children's Centre, created by the contemporary feminist design collective Edit.

Edit also did the exhibition design, which is based on a wooden structure created by set builder Elouise Farley, the founder of education project Lady Wood.

The curators wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation

Both Astubry and Boys wanted the exhibition to feel like an ongoing conversation rather than a relic of the past.

"We wanted to present the exhibition in a way that makes the ideas in it feel accessible and kind of active and ongoing rather than looking into a time that doesn't exist anymore," Astbury told Dezeen.

"Because yes, a lot has changed and the context has changed, but the ideas in the work and the kind of messages we wanted to pick up on are still incredibly relevant."

The exhibition includes contemporary projects that carry on Matrix's ideas

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary projects that pick up on some of the ideas in Matrix's work.

There is also a zine-like experimental exhibition catalogue, Revealing Objects, which brings together responses such as a map of women-designed London buildings produced by Part W, writing by the group Decosm (Decolonise Space Making) and an activity sheet by disability activists DisOrdinary Architecture for experiencing spaces with senses other the visual.

The exhibition design is by the new feminist collective Edit

Boys is keen to both celebrate Matrix and recognise its limitations, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded people's understanding of what a truly inclusive society should look like.

"Part of what Black Lives Matter did is really making white people understand that we are part of the problem," said Boys. "Second-wave feminism suffered from being centred on middle-class white women's problem of being the housewife, the Betty Friedan thing of the problem that has no name."

"So in terms of getting to grips with how space matters in terms of race, gender, class, disability, there were some things that Matrix and all the different women in it individually did that was really important, but I think there's lots of things that weren't done so well."

The exhibition is on in the ground floor foyer of The Barbican

Astbury describes the most important legacy of Matrix as the idea that design is not neutral or passive.

"That combined with an emphasis on looking at the process of design rather than the end product," he said.

"And that the methods Matrix used in order to make the process of building and design more transparent and to reveal that lack of neutrality are incredibly straightforward. It's kind of depressing that we don't do it more, because it is so simple."

Photography is by Thomas Adank.

The post Barbican celebrates Matrix feminist design group in How We Live Now exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.