Dear all, Please see above an invitation to ‘Social Skills’, an exhibition of the graduation projects of Mark Smyth and Sigrun Sumarlidadottir.

We hope you will join us on Tuesday 29th June 2010

in room 01West290, from 17.00 - 20.00.

Our aim, in presenting our work in this way, is to highlight the importance of student initiative and informal architectural debate.The common themes in our projects will form a backdrop to an evening of drinks and conversation;

Continuity in the built landscape

Cultural spaces that facilitate participation

Everyday spaces, from the familiar proportions of the domestic to the monumental scale of industry

...

City planners versus architects

After visiting the Bo01 'neighborhood of tomorrow' in Malmö, Sweden, my point of contact in the City Development Office sent me the Quality Programme that the City of Malmö used to coordinate their ambitions with the developers. In the first part of the document, they were quite frank to write:

"Architects and builders are not directors but rather propmen and stage designers."

Now, from the perspective of a City Development Office, I can see their point. They have a certain ambition, and they are the directors of the urban development. They see architects as one step down the analogous movie-set food chain as the decorators of their ideas.

How true is this? In Explore Lab it seems that there a number of architects who, in this analogy, would be writers, directors and producers of their own stories.