REMINDER: JRD x Snarkitecture and AAU Anastas Talks

Alexander Buckeridge (Irl) is a Director at Snarkitecture, a collaborative practice made up of 12 designers based in New York City.

Snarkitecture was established to investigate the boundaries between art and architecture. The name is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, a poem describing the “impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature.” In its search for the unknown, Snarkitecture creates architectural-scale projects, installations, and objects.

Snarkitecture’s work focuses on the reinterpretation of everyday materials, structures and programs to new and imaginative effect. With a conceptual approach centred on the importance of experience, the studio creates unexpected and memorable moments that invite people to explore and engage with their surroundings. By transforming the familiar into the extraordinary, Snarkitecture makes architecture perform the unexpected, creating “portals” into the unknown.
 

Jordan Ralph (JRD) is an architectural, interior and product designer.

Working across various scales and formats, Jordan explores memorable ways design can be used to bring a concept to life, and in turn an aliveness to spaces. 
Rethinking materials to create memorable and visceral spacial dialogues is a feature of his work. The JRD studio was established with a focus on creating new and immersive worlds. Jordan seeks to extract the essence of a project or concept's core values, distill them down and translate them into a unique one of a kind experience creating feelings of space, calmness and presence unique to each project.

AAU Anastas is a wholly Palestinian architectural and engineering firm with offices in Bethlehem and Paris engaged in counter hegemonic practice. Founded in 1979, their work combines architecture, furniture making, research and cultural initiatives.

The studio focuses on tying links between crafts and architecture at scales that vary from furniture design to territorial explorations. The studio has been advocating for a contemporary use of structural stone in architecture in Palestine and elsewhere, and has been particularly interested in the politics of stone use for low carbon footprint structures, more resilient cities and more responsible quarries’ exploitation.
Linking hyper contextual conditions that are different a priori to create a new strengthened global critical discourse has been at the intersection of all of their practices.
Qamt, acquired by the V&A, + All Purpose, at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, came out of research projects SCALES (2016), that links scales that are usually opposed, and STONE MATTERS (2017), a reaction to a 1918 British mandate, and an experimental exploration of decolonising architecture at the scale of the construction detail. It examines the potential of structural stone within contemporary architecture + combining traditional craftsmanship with innovative techniques. It challenges the instrumentalisation of architecture for political ends + its complicity in sustaining settler colonialism, made legible by the systemic misuse of stone cladding in Palestine.
In 2020, they co-founded Radio Al Hara, a multifaceted community based online radio that weaves unconventional nets of solidarities through sonic experiences. On the basis that, ‘the asymmetric relationship between those who give orders & those who must obey is always demonstrated by who controls access to the soundscape’, Radio Alhara started The Sonic Liberation Front, an initiative by a group of sound platforms/artists who came together to unify their sound + protest against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
In 2012 they established Local Industries, a community of industrial furniture makers. It reasserts the value of local Palestinian labour without freezing it in an obsolete role or imposing alien standards to its methods. Most recently they have launched the Wonder Cabinet, a space based initiative in Bethlehem for cultural productions that gathers a community of artisans and artists from technical and artistic realms with the aim of producing a culture of global provincialism.

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