We are delighted to announce that Professor Robert Mull, Dean and Director of Architecture, The Cass, will chair urban innovator Liz Obgu in conversation in The Skyroom, 23 July, 7pm.
Liz Ogbu has long been at the leading edge of conversations around sustainability, human-centred design and innovative urbanism, exploring the intersection between social issues and design, and engaging it in practice. Joining us from California, where she is serving as the first ever Scholar in Residence at the Center for Art and Public Life, California College of the Arts, Liz will present her work, research and thinking in the rare UK lecture investigating how design can impact upon social change, and how architecture as a discipline might further broaden its boundaries.
Following her presentation, Mull will chair Ogbu in conversation drawing upon his expertise in socially engaged design practice and his belief that architects, designers and artists must generate and sustain social as well as physical structures, engaging with and learning to shape the political, social and economic reality around them.
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Food and drink from current Skyroom tenants Platterform will be available throughout the evening and following the talk.
Image: Professor Robert Mull. Photograph courtesy James Bolton
Following his establishment of the School of Architecture's influential live research practice ASD Projects in 2004 (now renamed CASSprojects), in 2011 Professor Robert Mull was appointed conjoint Dean of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Media and Design and the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Design. In 2012 he brought these together to form a new Faculty – The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design. Mull begun his teaching career at the Architectural Association in the 1980's and has since taught in many contexts, including holding visiting professorships at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna and the Technical Universities in Vienna and Innsbruck. A continuous theme of Mull's teaching has been to work in areas of political change and social deprivation. Projects in West Belfast during the early stages of the peace process, in Beijing immediately after Tiananmen Square and in Moscow soon after the wall came down helped him to develop methods of teaching whereby students could become directly involved in the situation they were studying. In recent years Mull has lead the Free Unit in the School of Architecture, which invites final year students to generate live thesis, projects that act as the first stage of their future practice.
Throughout his career Mull has remained an active practitioner, as well as becoming chair of SCHOSA and a columnist for Building Design and regular contributor to the Architects Journal and Architecture Today.