We are pleased to announce a new online series of talks exploring the ways in which domestic architectural plans give form to underlying power relations, with architect Charles Holland and in partnership with RIBA. 

Running for three weeks from 19 November, Charles will be speaking to architects Ahmed Belkhodja and Sumayya Vally, and Professor Lesley Lokko about how architecture and interiors intersect with a wide range of issues, including race, gender, politics, culture and social relations. 

“Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries,” wrote Robin Evans in Figures, Doors and Passages, an essay describing the evolution of the domestic plan. The plan is the basic currency of architectural drawings, its ground zero. Plans describe buildings. They are technical documents that describe how a building is organised, but they follow aesthetic and compositional criteria too. 

Plans can be beautiful when viewed as abstract compositions, but they also describe real physical and social relationships. Within them, the underlying structures of social organisation can be read: issues of culture, economics, gender, class and power. Plans are both a representation of specific cultural and political ideals and the means through which those ideals are constructed in real life.

This short series of talks will explore the plan and its relationship to these issues. Each week, we will ask an architect to select a plan and explain its importance to them, to architectural culture and to the series’ themes. Read on for the full details, and links below to book tickets. 

Talk 1: Making Plans with Ahmed Belkhodja on Thursday 19 November 
For the first talk, Charles is joined by Ahmed Belkhodja (FALA atelier) to look at how the way we design domestic interiors is affected by marketing, the rise of short-term renting and the dissemination of architectural imagery via social media.

Ahmed Belkhodja is a Swiss architect born in 1990 in Lausanne. After graduating in Zurich in 2013, Ahmed established FALA in Porto, with Ana Luisa Soares and Filipe Magalhães. FALA defends a resolutely optimistic architecture, which has been recognised by numerous prizes, publications and exhibitions, in Portugal and abroad. Ahmed has taught at several institutions in Europe, including the IUAV in Venice, the Royal College of Art in London, and HEAD in Geneva.

Talk 2: Making Plans with Lesley Lokko on Thursday 26 November 
For the second talk, Charles is joined by Professor Lesley Lokko to look at the relationship of the domestic plan to issues of power, gender, race and social relations.

Professor Lesley Lokko trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture and holds a PhD in architecture from the same institution. She is currently Dean of architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, and was the founder and former director of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. From January 2021, she will step down as Dean of Spitzer and begin building the African Futures Institute, an independent postgraduate school of architecture in Accra, Ghana. She has lectured and published widely on the subject of race, identity and architecture, and has served on many international juries and awards over the past decade, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Archiprix, the RIBA President’s Medals, Archmarathon and the Venice Biennale.

Talk 3: Making Plans with Sumayya Vally on Thursday 3 December
For the last talk, Charles is joined by Sumayya Vally (Counterspace) to discuss the role of the plan in the work of her practice, specifically the way that this intersects with issues of politics, gender and cultural distinctions.

Sumayya Vally is the Founder and Principal of Counterspace. Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1.

About Charles Holland
Charles Holland is an architect, teacher and writer. He is the Principal of Charles Holland Architects, a design and research practice based in the UK, Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton and a Visiting Professor at the ABK, Stuttgart.

Talks will be hosted online and available globally. All ticket holders will receive an email with instructions on how to join the event.