A sphere one mile in diameter, reaching above, below, and outward from the roundtable of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London          







          A matrix of conditions emanate and infiltrate: student housing markets, agri-business, financialization, entanglement within imperial legacies, mobility management, securitization, and the privatization of space.







For the past two years, the incoming Masters students at the Centre for Research Architecture have embarked on their academic year with a five-week intensive investigation called the “Live Project”. This ongoing pedagogical exercise allowed us to dive headlong into conducting spatial research and modes of presentation that convey the complex spatial, material, political, and historical terrains uncovered.  

This year’s cohort set out with only a predetermined site–a sphere defined by a one-mile radius with its center in the middle of CRA’s anchor, its round-table. We collectively dispatched into the surrounding area, including the neighborhoods of New Cross, Deptford, Brockley, and Peckham in Lewisham, Southwark, and Greenwich boroughs. Concerns around regeneration, surveillance, air quality, infrastructure, and the origins of our college quickly became evident; it also became clear that our position as students required a particular level of critical engagement, and so we inverted the investigative lens and used what we had learned of the area to focus our analysis on Goldsmiths itself.


The concept of a spatial investigation rapidly expanded from the surface of Goldsmiths’ campus into geologic, atmospheric, technological, and financial domains revealing that no single object or site could be contained or analyzed without exponential complexities, from its material qualities to its embodied implications. What daily material experiences embed themselves within the life of a student and how can rigorously considering objects such as coffee cups, beds, ID cards, campus green space, and a coat of arms reveal the larger conditions in which they are enfolded?
Starting from a loose framework of cognitive mapping, the groups generated a methodological heterotopia: walking tours, site visits, interviews, site surveying, archival research, and a wide range of mapping techniques including counter-, data-, and cognitive mapping.

The picture of studentification began to emerge, revealing the production of a specific subject-position of the university student constituted by their place within a matrix of conditions such as student housing markets, agri-business, financialization, entanglement within imperial legacies, mobility management and securitization, and the privatization of space.

What resulted was “Goldsmiths as Method,” a series of investigations into the phase shifts that higher education is undergoing today: Bed Assets: Disassembly Manual, Notice of Proposed Development, What is the Cost?, “It’s not Big Brother stuff”, Geese Will Still a Common Lack, and Day62/.

In making our research public, we seek to problematize what it means to be a student at Goldsmiths in 2018, as well as to produce a resource that can be mobilized in higher education struggles and activism.

Come here and use this!
MA STUDENTS
Sasha Alekseeva
Clémence Althabegoïty
Dimitra Andritsou
Tim Brouwer
Manuel Correa
Erica Deluchi
Lodovica Guarnieri
Rebecca Huxley
Carol Iglesias
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Romy Kiessling
Phoevos Kororos Simeonidis
Victoria Mckenzie
Christopher Oliver
Tiago Patatas
Tara Plath
Santiago Rivas Sola
Mohamad Safa
William Scarfone
Luke Starr
Asli Uludag
Avi Varma
Sarah Vowden


TUTORS
Lorenzo Pezzani
Susan Schuppli

ASSISTANTS
Faiza Ahmad Khan
Liza Walling


GUEST CRITICS
Ramon Amaro
Nishat Awan
Janna Graham
Luis Moreno
Emily Rosamond
Christina Varvia
Eyal Weizman