Archived Public Lectures

Planning for the people, by the people

Finn Williams and Amy Linford

Killer-Clowns, Techno-Fogies and Neo-reactionary Urban Imaginaries

Professor Roger Burrows

Biotechnology in the Built Environment - Martyn Dade-Robertson

The influential MIT Academic, Nicolas Negroponte, suggested, in his presentation at the 2017 Being Material Conference, that “Biotech is the new digital”. His words are especially pertinent because his group, ‘Architecture and Machines’ (founded in 1967 and which eventually became MIT Media Lab) was pioneering in areas such as Computer-Aided Design and Ubiquitous Computing. In part thanks to this work, Digital Architecture is now a common feature of many Architecture Schools’ research programmes. We believe that, over the next decade Biotechnology will be taught and researched in much the same way.

Over the past decade we have pioneered some of this research at both Newcastle University and Northumbria University, but now we have an opportunity go much further. On the 1^st of August 2019, we launched a research centre called The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE). In this lecture I will introduce the broad idea of the hub as well as some of the early work which we are developing in my lab and through our design studios. 

Martyn is the Professor of Emergent Technology and Co-Director of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment.  Martyn holds degrees in Architecture and Computing from Cambridge University and BA in Architectural Design and MSc in Synthetic Biology from Newcastle University. His research group Synbio Construction is the basis for both his research and teaching and the group's most recent project Thinking Soils has received widespread media coverage in the Times, Daily Mail, Science and Reuters among others. Martyn is the editor of a new book series on Bio Design with Routledge. His book, the first in the series, Biological Construction will be published early 2020.

Recording of lecture

Sitopia: How Food can Save the World by Carolyn Steele

Food shapes our lives in more ways than we realise. Our minds, bodies, habits, homes, cities, landscapes, economics and politics have all been shaped by it. We live in a sitopia (from Greek sitos, food + topos, place), yet our failure to recognise this has created a way of life that threatens us and our planet. Climate change, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, pollution, mass extinction and diet-related disease are just some of the side-effects of our failure to value food. Yet, by valuing food once again, we can reverse these ills and learn how to live well on our crowded, overheating planet.

Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities. Her 2008 book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives won international acclaim and her concept of ‘sitopia’ (food-place) is widely recognised among architects, urban designers, ecologists and food professionals. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, Carolyn has lectured at Cambridge, London Metropolitan and Wageningen Universities and was the inaugural studio director of the LSE Cities Programme. In international demand as a speaker, Carolyn’s 2009 TED talk has received over one million views. Her next book, Sitopia, is due to be published by Chatto & Windus in March 2020.

Unfortunately there is no recording of this lecture available.

Matrix and After: Ways of Working Around Feminism

How was Matrix more than an architectural practice? What did it do, and could this provide insights into how we respond to today’s challenging conditions? Three members of the Matrix collective discuss these questions against a background of change and continuity, as women continue to argue for equity, social justice and for building an environment which is a pleasure for all of us to inhabit.

The feminist architects’ practice Matrix was one of the first worldwide to bring issues of gender centre-stage to the design of the built environment.  Their work was incredibly radical, not only by being a women-led and collaborative platform, but also by integrating new interdisciplinary ways of working across theory and practice. Matrix’s impact is still being felt today.

Forensic Architecture: Contemporary Nature

Historically, nature was understood as a static, eternal backdrop against which human activity unfolded: an immutable category, governed by an eternal and cyclical pattern, lying outside of the civic space of sovereignty, economy and law. Today however, we must understand Nature as a historically situated project. In the era of rapid human-induced climate change, nature is moving at the same speed as human history, racing alongside it, getting entangled and interacting with it in an ever-aggravated feedback loop of cause and effect, with consequences that have spiralled out of control. A large contributor to anthropogenic changes to our environment is conflict. Violence against the environment may be slow, indirect, and diffused but it is enmeshed in colonial and military forms of domination. From the Israeli mass killings in occupied Gaza to a decades-long armed conflict in Colombia nature has been both the cause and the consequence of human conflicts. This entanglement with conflict, defines Forensic Architecture’s approach to environment, and what it refers to as “Contemporary Nature”.

At Forensic Architecture, Samaneh oversees the Centre for Contemporary Nature. Her research is focused on developing new evidentiary techniques for environmental violence. She holds a PhD from The Architectural Association, and a a BA and MA in Architecture from the University of Technology, Sydney. Samaneh’s PhD thesis examined struggle and resistance from the home, with a particular focus on gender and class relations in Iran. Before joining Forensic Architecture in 2015, Samaneh practiced as an architect in Australiaand taught in London and Sydney.

Recording of the lecture. Unfortunately visuals for this recording have been lost due to a fault with the capture card.

Jorn Utzon: Modernism, China and Hybrid Craft by Prof. Wang

In architecture, craft is about construction, material and structure, but above all it is about making, that is to say, how things are made, and how in that making the quality is injected into architecture and human life. As a modern architect, Utzon finds his way of making by using industrial means of production, but also by learning from the Nature as well as from traditional cultures all over the world including China. Utzon’s architecture is hybrid and transcultural. It is rational as well as emotional. It is the presence of the eternal present. 

Wang Jun-Yang was educated as architect at Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University) and received his Ph.D. degree at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. He is now Professor of Architecture at School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Nanjing University, China. He has been published widely in architectural journals and other publications in China and internationally. He is the Chinese translator of Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture by Kenneth Frampton. His recent publications include “The ‘Historical’ and the ‘Non-historical’ — Towards an Epistemological Reflection Eighty Years after the Discovery of Foguang Monastery” in Journal of Architecture, China, 2018, and “The Everyday：A Degree Zero Agenda for Contemporary Chinese Architecture” in Architectural Research Quarterly, UK, 2017.

Recording of the lecture.  This lecture exceeded the recording time.

Thomas Sharp Lecture "Gender Sensitive Cities - why should we care" by Emeritus Prof Marion Roberts

Urban Futures and the Dark Enlightenment: Professor Roger Burrows 8th November 2017

Prof. Roger Burrows (Newcastle), ‘Urban Futures and the Dark Enlightenment’, investigates the question of enlightenment, architecture, the city, and the philosophy of Nick Land, as part of a series of research talks organised by the Philosophy programme at Newcastle. Contact: Dr. Michael Lewis (Philosophical Studies), at michael.lewis@ncl.ac.uk for more information.

Dr Kate Maclean: 'Subaltern Wealth? Cash, Construction and Urban Change in La Paz, Bolivia'. 30th November 2017

In the last decade, many countries in the Global South have experienced a rapid growth in GDP, fuelled by a resource boom, that has expanded the middle class.  In Bolivia, where GDP has tripled in the last ten years, policies based on principles of socialism and decolonisation have actively favoured indigenous people working in the informal economy.  The impact of this increase in wealth has manifested itself in the built environment, as brightly coloured mansions - nicknamed 'Andean Psychedelic Baroque' – have come to dominate the skyline of the informal areas to the North of the city, whereas luxury  properties in the salubrious ‘Zona Sur’ [Southern Zone] are being bought up, and transformed by this emerging ‘Chola Bourgeoisie’.  These developments have provoked responses, documented in the press, popular culture and social media, that demonstrate the huge cultural, social and political upheaval that these changes represent.  One La Paz based newspaper controversially referred to the increasing presence of Aymaran wealth in the elite, Spanish speaking, Zona Sur as a ‘colonisation;’ and it is striking that the image that has emerged to represent these processes is that of a rich Aymaran woman offering cash to residents of areas from which she would have erstwhile been excluded.  This paper considers the cultural, gendered and colonial urban logics that are pivotal to  understanding urban transformation in La Paz over the last ten years, but which urban theories, particularly those developed mostly in reference to post-industrial cities in the Global North, tend to deem as epiphenomenal to underlying movements of capital.  

Recap recording of the lecture.

Dr Simon Parker: Precarious Trajectories. 25th January 2018

Dr Simon Parker from York University will be giving a talk and showing his documentary film Precarious Trajectories.

Set on location in Libya, Italy and Greece during 2015-2016 at the height of the Mediterranean migration crisis, Precarious Trajectories focuses on the perilous sea crossings that hundreds of thousands of refugees have undertaken in recent years in order to arrive at what they hope will be the safer shores of Europe through the eyes of Ruha from Syria and Ahmed from Somalia.

The tragic loss of life off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013 in a series of shipwrecks forced the Italian government to launch a more effective search and rescue operation ‘Mare Nostrum’. The film explores how when that operation came to an end the death toll rose ten times during ‘Black April’ in 2015 and subsequently how the European Union with the introduction of Operation Triton and Operation Sofia sought to prioritise anti-smuggling and border controls over humanitarian rescue.

The documentary concludes by showing how Angela Merkel’s ‘refugees welcome’ policy and the more humanitarian response of Mayor Leoluca Orlando of Palermo came into conflict with a hostile counter-response by the heads of Europe’s governments as messages of solidarity gave way to razor wire, riot police and the building of ‘hotspot’ detention camps for an increasingly forgotten and desperate people.

Registration for the event will be required and you can book here

Recap recording of the lecture.

Lynsey Hanley "What needs to change? An intimate history of recent British housing policy"

Lynsey Hanley will be speaking at the University as part of the public lecture series run by the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape on 15th February 2018. 

Ten years ago, her first book, Estates: An Intimate History, was published, examining the reputation and realities of living in council housing. A decade on, social housing is being built in ever fewer quantities at a time of urgent need for truly affordable housing. The effects of government housing policy over the last 40 years have made social housing available only to those most desperately in need. Both Conservative and Labour governments have focused their energy and esteem on the home-owning majority, devaluing both the role of social housing and the people who live in it. What has changed, and what needs to change, in British housing policy to ensure that everyone has access to a good home they can afford? 

Lynsey Hanley was born in Birmingham and lives in Liverpool. She is the author of ESTATES: AN INTIMATE HISTORY, and RESPECTABLE: THE EXPERIENCE OF CLASS. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. 

FREE ENTRY

Prof Susan Fainstein: Planning for a Just City. 2nd November 2017

Susan will discuss Neoliberalism approaches to urban development have prioritized economic growth rather than justice. Increased inequality and diminished access to amenities and welfare for the already disadvantaged have resulted. The use of justice as a governing principle—defined by the criteria of equity, diversity, and democracy—would require that policies be evaluated in terms of their consequences for different social groups. Arguments for giving priority to justice in planning are presented, and policy examples from New York, Amsterdam, and Singapore are used to illustrate different planning approaches and their consequences for more just cities.

Susan S. Fainstein is a Senior Research Fellow and formerly Professor of Urban Planning in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She previously taught at Columbia and Rutgers Universities and for seven years as a visiting professor at the LKY School of the National University of Singapore. She received the Distinguished Educator Award for lifetime contributions and the Davidoff Book Award for The Just City, both from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). 

RECAP Recording of the lecture

Patrick Keiller: Screening of the Delapitaed Dwelling + Q&A

Renowned director Patrick Keiller invites discussion of his haunting exploration of why, as a supposedly advanced economy, the UK fails to address the problem of its dilapidated, over-valued housing stock. 

Patrick Keiller studied and practised architecture before studying in the Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art. He has been making films since 1981, which have been widely screened internationally and in the UK.

His first feature length film, ‘London’ (1992) and its sequel, ‘Robinson in Space’, (1997) are narrated by Paul Scofield who accompanies his unseen friend Robinson on excursions around London, researching the problems of London and England. ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ (2000), was made for television but never broadcast and features Tilda Swinton as the voice of another researcher, surveying the dilapidated state of England's housing stock after a twenty-year absence.

The sequel to London and Robinson in Space, ‘Robinson in Ruins’ (2010) was the result of a three-year research project, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave, and focused on the natural world around the South of England.

Professor Prue Chiles: Common Ground and Upward Gaze - Reflecting on the Importance of People in the Design of Architecture 

Professor Chiles combines research and teaching with architectural practice. Through this she investigates the reciprocal relationships between people, place, teaching, creativity and architectural design. Her work is informed by a conviction that a research attitude to architectural design, combined with strategic sustainability in its widest social and environmental sense, is critical in any successful creative project or beautiful building.

Two enterprises (Prue Chiles Architects, established in 1999, now Chiles, Evans and Care Architects, CE+CA, and Bureau-design+research) she set up at the University of Sheffield, have participated in regeneration of the North of England and beyond. Projects from both have been exhibited and published and the practice work has won a number of regional awards and was recently profiled in Thames and Hudson’s 2013 'Architects’ Sketchbook’.

20 years of working with communities and strategic partners in Yorkshire and the North of England, on neighbourhood design, school building and new futures are fertile ground for research. Her recently published book 'School building – key issues for contemporary design' describes this work through the themes that can make one of our most important civic buildings, schools, better for all the people involved.

Professor Ash Amin: On Urban Failure

With the dangers of risk society escalating by the day, cities find themselves especially vulnerable to the challenges of climate change, economic instability, ontological complexity, and social fracture. They face and suffer devastation, but also survive. This lecture considers the usefulness of seeing cities through the lens of 'failure': what comes into view, what can be learned, and how 'smartness' is redefined.

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography at Cambridge University.  He is known for his work on cities, race and multiculture, the social economy, and progressive politics. His most recent books include Land of Strangers (2012, Polity) and Arts of the Political (with Nigel Thrift, 2013, Duke).  His new book with Nigel Thrift on cities as machines will be published by Polity in 2016.

Professor Lindsay Bremner: Folded Ocean: The Maldives. Thinking Design with an Indian Ocean Archipelago 

Since the 1970’s, the archipelago has been used by a number of architectural theorists as a metaphoric trope for portraying architecture’s autonomy from the urban conditions that surround it. This is based on a binary conception of the relation between land and sea that is arguably Eurocentric or at least Mediterranean: of solid, stable, rocky outcrops pitted against the dynamic forces of the sea. This presentation will undertake a critique of this from an Indian Ocean perspective by thinking with one of its central island formations, the Maldives archipelago.

The Maldives was the central fold line in the cartographic device with which I started my project on the Indian Ocean, Folded Ocean, but, more importantly, because it is a territory whose area is comprised 99.66% of water, it provides an apt place to reconsider or even overturn the idea of the world as human and terra-centric and to reconsider what it means to live on a terraqueous globe. The presentation will lay out a new epistemology of the archipelago as a hybrid assemblage of dynamic socio-ecological relations. This will serve as a template for thinking about a world characterised by radical fluidity, uncertainty and flux and lay out an alternative role for design within it.

Richard Harral: Big Brother? Why and How Government Regulates Buildings

The Building Regulations in England have evolved over many centuries to deliver societal objectives ranging from fire prevention and life safety to reducing carbon emissions. As the scope and complexity of regulation has increased, more is demanded from designers in balancing competing objectives and synthesising technical requirements with spatial and aesthetic considerations. This lecture will seek to provide insight into why Government chooses to regulate (or not regulate); who decides on what regulation is passed; and how regulatory requirements are evaluated.

Richard Harral is an architect and the Head of Technical Policy within DCLG’s Building Regulations and Standards Division with responsibility for development of regulations including energy efficiency, fire safety, accessibility and public health in buildings in England. He is a graduate of Newcastle University and worked as an architect in private practice as an associate for Kathryn Findlay and Buschow Henley and then as a partner in small practice before joining Government. 

Professor Michael Hebbert: The Anatomy of the Street

Seventy years from the publication of Thomas Sharp's classic Anatomy of a Village, Michael Hebbert considers the importance attached by Sharp to the shaping of street-space through built form, whether in rural or urban settings. The lecture applies an anatomical approach to the street canyon, showing how its component elements of facade, frontage, pavement, furniture, lighting, planting, carriageway and microclimate have fared in intervening decades. It is a narrative of gloom lightened by hints of revival - as Sharp put it, in poetic mode, "such / Wealth as sometimes a lone prospector found / When after barren years he came on golden ground." 

Michael Hebbert is Professor of Town Planning in the Bartlett at UCL, and Emeritus Professor of the University of Manchester. Beginning at Merton College as an Oxford historian, he pursued his doctorate under (Sir) Peter Hall in Geography at the University of Reading and developed wide-ranging interests in the history of city planning. Among other topics, his writings have explored the planning histories of London and Manchester, regionalism and regional planning, evolving theories of urban landscape and highway design, railway stations in cities, and the application of scientific climatology to urban design. He has taught at Oxford Brookes and the London School of Economics as well as the University of Manchester. He has been active in community initiatives and building trusts in London and Manchester and chaired the design review panel for the London Crossrail project. In 2002-10 he edited the Elsevier journal Progress in Planning and now edits Planning Perspectives, the leading international forum for scholarship in the history of town planning.

Trevor Paglen in conversation with Professor Stephen Graham

Trevor Paglen is an artist, author and experimental geographer. His work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us.

He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His most recent book, The Last Pictures is a meditation on the intersections of deep-time, politics, and art

Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. His research addresses links between urban places and mobilities, infrastructures, militarization, surveillance, security, war and verticality. His books include Telecommunications and the City, Splintering Urbanism (both with Simon Marvin), Cities, War and Terrorism, Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail and Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso). His next books, Infrastructural Lives (with Colin McFarlane; Earthscan) and Vertical: The Politics of Up and Down (Verso), are currently in preparation.

Trevor Paglen will be joined by Professor of Cities and Society Stephen Graham to discuss their shared interest in surveillance, militarisation and urban life.

Spaces of Production: Special Event and the Tyneside Cinema

Dr Gail Day & Film Screenings : Amber Collective Glassworks + Harun Farocki In Comparison.

Gail Day teaches at University of Leeds, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, where she is Programme Director for the MA History of Art. She is a co-organiser of the London-based seminar Marxism in Culture and author of 'Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory' (2010).

Spaces of Production explores film’s capacity to document changes and to bring to visibility the processes, labour and places of industrial production that are all too often overlooked. Filmmaker Peter Robinson introduces Amber Collective’s visually stunning Glassworks (1978). Dr Gail Day discusses extracts from Allan Sekula’s haunting work on sea transportation. We close with Harun Farocki’s extraordinary exploration of brick-making around the world In Comparison (2009). The event was part of Industries of Architecture (13-15 November, Newcastle University).

Emeritus Professor Patsy Healey OBE: Creating Public Value Through Place-Shaping 

"In this talk, I reflect on the past century of planning ideas and practices, focusing on the public value emphasised by different ideas. I take planning to be about efforts to shape how places evolve, in order to achieve particular values for some collectivity or ‘public’. Implicitly and explicitly, planning ideas carry different notions of what these values should be and how they could be articulated. The interaction of such ideas with the governance practices through which planning work is performed, and with the design and operation of planning systems, are never straightforward, as these are intensely political, and hence contested, processes. Many ideas are translated into practices informed by quite different conceptions of value. I will review the planning ideas with which we are most familiar in the UK, and how they have influenced practices. I will then consider the relevance of such ideas to 21st century challenges, suggest values which should underpin collective place-shaping efforts in the present period and comment on what it might mean to translate these into planning practices, and the design of a formal planning system." Professor Patsy Healey.

Professor Gert de Roo: Social Complexity and Urban Development

Imagine today’s world is an exception to the rule...We have a linear understanding of today’s world, which is functional, minimal and standardised. Planners, urban designers and architects adore it as it relates strongly with certainty and with controlling our environment. The result of controlled interventions are spaces and places with well-defined and stand-alone objects surrounded by open spaces and well connected by an infrastructure existing of straight lines. It’s a modernist design, representing the ideals of certainty, efficiency and equality. The world is considered to be a tabula rasa, an empty sheet, a plain level field. And the ideal proportion is the cube: right angles only.

This has not always been the most prominent world view. Vitruvius, Filarete, Alberti, de Pacioli, Palladio, all were looking for ideal rhythms of nature and divine proportions. Ideal cities were designed and even made real: Ville de Richelieu by Lemercier in the 16th century was structured according to the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence and its golden ratio were considered to represent divine rhythms to which nature responds.

The Fibonacci sequence has a fractal structure. Fractals represent a multi-level, self-similar, emergent and non-linear understanding of evolving space. The urban is one of the examples resonating a fractal structure. What if the urban relates more a fractal structure than the right angled cube positioned within empty space? With the idea of urban space full of fractal structures we are entering the world of complexity thinking and non-linearity. Here we will find processes of self-organisation, within which urban systems and subsystems adapt continuously to their changing environments. It’s also an environment that allows sudden transitions and processes of co-evolution to happen. It is an exciting world, full of options, with the planner becoming a manager of change.

Professor Rachel Armstrong: Experimental Architecture

For the first time in two millennia the way that we imagine the world is changing. The ordering systems that defined the Industrial Age and gave rise to the modern world are dovetailing with a world in continual flux, which characterizes an emerging Ecological Era. This talk explored how experimental architecture may help develop design practices that navigate the spaces in between these concurrent paradigms. This is so that we may imagine, produce and inhabit qualitatively different kinds of living spaces - with the potential to augment the vibrancy of the natural realm.

Dr Colin McFarlane: The Politics of Density

How do people cope with, learn from, and tackle the politics of urban density? As the urban world, especially informal settlements, increasingly densify, the experience and politics of density will become more and more pressing for research, policy and practice. Density is a keyword in the history of how the city has been conceived and understood. This paper takes a topological approach to urban density, and examines some of the key ways in which urban density has been understood, especially in relation to central geographic forms like the:

• slum
• suburb
• socially mixed public space

It identifies some of the contemporary preoccupations with urban density, especially in different visions the integrated urban totality, such as in ‘New Urbanism’ or ‘Smart Urbanism’ initiatives. The final section of the paper examines an emerging research area which understands the life and politics of density through analysis of ‘intensive heterogeneities’. It draws on fieldwork in Mumbai and Cape Town, especially research on the politics of sanitation in dense informal settlements.

Seif El Rashidi: World Heritage Listing and What it Actually Means?

The lecture explored the notion of World Heritage Status in the two cities of Cairo and Durham – both united on the World Heritage List, but hugely different in terms of scale and state of conservation. Initially, the comparison reveals a striking polarity between Durham’s pristine state, and Cairo, always losing historic buildings to development pressure. Intimate knowledge of both cities demonstrates that in fact the forces at play within a historic environment are often the same. This exploration begs the question of what World Heritage Listing actually means on a practical level. How does an international distinction have a bearing on national preservation systems, if at all? What does World Heritage Status mean for the cities that have it?

Professor Ole B Jensen: Mobilities Design

This lecture introduced the contemporary city and its relationship to mobility and design. The lecture presented the key dimensions of the ‘mobility turn’ as well as it will link this to urban design and the design of infrastructures. The lecture focused on the nexus between mobility, infrastructure, and design arguing for the establishment of a new cross-disciplinary perspective termed ‘mobilities design’. The theoretical perspective is articulated within the book ‘Staging Mobilities’ (Jensen, Routledge, 2013), and the empirical material and design examples are from the book ‘Designing Mobilities’ (Jensen, Aalborg University Press, 2014).

Liza Fior: Fabric and Use 

muf architecture/art attempt to make sure that they continue to work in a public realm however they have to contrive it - a continual negotiation and sometimes a strategic sellout.

Liza Fior was born in London where she continues to practise as founding partner of muf architecture/art with Katherine Clarke. muf design shared public spaces from urban design schemes to small-scale temporary interventions , landscapes and buildings—a continual dialogue between detail and strategy. muf are currently part of All This Belongs to You at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were the creative directors of the British Pavilion in Venice at the Architecture Biennale 2010 and again exhibited in 2012.

Awards for muf projects include the European Prize for Public Space (a first for the UK) for a new ‘town square’ for Barking, East London.

Liza is co author of “This is What We Do: a muf manual” and the upcoming More than One Thing at a Time supported by the Graham Foundation - research continues to be intwined into every project.