Thursday September 2 2022, 19:00-21:00
Uí Chadhain Lecture Theatre, Arts Block, Trinity College Dublin
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, an urban designer, a scholar and an educator. Her strategic practice produces outputs of various forms; studios and seminars, readings, publications, drawings, comic books, exhibitions, installations, podcasts, videos, curation, pamphlets, talks and lectures, excel sheets and poetry, interiors and architecture projects.
For her, architecture is a discipline that thrives by borrowing and learning from other fields, as well as a unique tool to understand and design our world, a prerogative that comes with a responsibility embedded in the current state of the Earth. Against a backdrop of unprecedented environmental degradation, geopolitical insecurities and growing social and spatial injustice, architecture and urbanism must address and confront these urgencies in the face of an uncertain future.
Malterre-Barthes’ research is centered around untangling the political economy of space production. Her interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction and climate emergency, and how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, the mainstream economy, better governance, and ecological/social justice, as well maintaining an active and intersectional feminist practice, engaging in parity and diversity works.
Charlotte will present current and recent research projects, including; ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction’, an initiative that argues a drastic change to construction protocols is necessary; the suspension of new building activity must be enforced, and a provocation to think about the reality of the extractivist practices on which we rely.
And also ‘Eileen Gray; A House Under the Sun’, a graphic novel published in 2019 with Nobrow London. Sparked by a reading of Beatriz Colomina’s contentious paper ‘Battle Lines: E1027′, the desire to illuminate the architecture of Gray, the project fits into pursuing a political agenda of exposing female designers’ work and doing justice to their overlooked careers. First envisioned as an opera libretto, then as a script, the format of a graphic novel imposed itself as the right media to convey a story accessible to non-architects and professionals alike.
Charlotte holds a PhD in Architecture from ETH Zurich, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Architecture from the National School of Architecture of Marseille (ENSAM). She also studied at TU Vienna and graduated with a MAS in Urban Design from ETH Zurich. She is also co-founder of OMNIBUS with Noboru Kawagishi, an urban design laboratory focused on interdisciplinary exploration of community-building factors in various metropolitan contexts.
In addition to over two dozen papers, essays, and articles published in a variety of media, she has produced five book-length publications; Eileen Gray- A house under the Sun, with Z. Dzierzawaska, 2019; Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore, with M. Jaeggi, 2018; Cairo Desert Cities, 2017; Housing Cairo – The Informal Response, 2016; and Migrant Marseille: Architecture of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity, 2020, with M. Angelil. Several others are underway.
Charlotte co-curated the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo on ‘Everyday’ (Sep-Dec. 2019) and was research fellow at Future Cities Laboratory-Singapore in 2012-2013.
Charlotte has lectured at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the AA, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Hong-Kong University, among others. Her works and writings have been published in several magazines (AD, Architectural Review, the Avery Review, San Rocco, TRANS, Tracés, etc.) and exhibited (n.b.k Berlin, Architekturforum Zürich, Swiss and Egyptian Pavilions at the Venice Biennales, at the Bi-City Shenzhen Biennale, Institut du Monde Arabe, IFPO Cairo, Seoul Architecture and Urbanism Biennale).