Forum Lecture: STREET…who owns the city?

2023-2024 FORUM LECTURE SERIES

Title: STREET…who owns the city?

Date: Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 6:00 p.m.

Location: The Pit, Architecture Building, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive

Speakers: Peter Barber

Free and open to the public 

Topic

The theme of British architect Peter Barber’s talk is social and affordable housing. He will discuss the political and architectural ideas that underpin the work of his London-based firm, Peter Barber Architects, and show images of built projects. He will also present speculative and theoretical ideas from his sketchbooks.

Images of affordable housing projects by Peter Barber Architects: Courtesy of Peter Barber Architects

SPEAKER

Architect Peter Barber worked with Richard Rogers and Will Alsop before establishing his award-winning practice in 1980.

His work has won numerous RIBA and housing design awards. It has twice been mid-listed for the Stirling Prize and twice shortlisted for the international Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Barber won the Soane Medal in 2022 for having “devoted his life” to helping to resolve the UK’s housing crisis. The Independent newspaper has described him as “one of the UK’s leading urbanists.”

His award-winning practice has a portfolio of projects in Europe and the Middle East including groundbreaking mixed-use and residential schemes, planning studies across the UK, and individual buildings such as the Villa Anbar, short-listed for the international Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

A series of radical urban housing projects have won Housing Design Awards, RIBA Awards, and AIA Awards.

The London Design Museum featured Barber’s work in 2019 in a major retrospective exhibition, 100 Mile City and Other Stories.

In 2019, his work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition entitled “100 Mile City and Other Stories” at the London Design Museum.

In 2023, Barber was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts. That year, he curated the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Architecture Room with a show called “Making is Thinking.

In 2021 he was given an OBE, won the AJ Contribution to the Profession Award, and was awarded the RIBA Neave Brown Prize for architecture.

Barber has lectured about the work of the practice at many institutions, including the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architectural League in New York, and numerous university schools of architecture including Helsinki, Pretoria, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Burma, Munich, Genoa, Istanbul, and Colombo as well as Oxford University and The Bartlett – University College London.

He is currently a lecturer and reader in architecture at the University of Westminster.