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Senior Lecturer

0161 247 6953


I am a Manchester graduate and Registered Architect who has worked in practice for 10 years prior to a career in architectural education at Liverpool University, NCUK Malaysia, MMU and the MSA. I have previously been part of the course team of the MA Arts as Environments postgraduate degree within the Department of Fine Arts.

My teaching and research interests are phenomenology and architecture. This concerns culture in its widest sense - the situational contexts of everyday life, and is about how we as humans identify with our natural and built environment and how we orient ourselves meaningfully within it in time and space. This interest is interdisciplinary in nature and draws upon the social sciences, archaeology, geology, philosophy and the arts to inform the context from which architectural propositions are developed.

These interests inform the architectural position and character of 'Material-Space' and 'Emergent Topographies' Studio Units that I coordinate within the Bachelor of Architecture degree programme. Critical themes have emerged that explore the material, cultural and topographical conditions through which architectural strategies can be developed and realised. The themes of ‘matter’, ‘culture’, ‘topographies’ and ‘time’ provide an interconnected research and educational structure for considering and realizing architectural propositions in a range of physical, climatic and cultural situations and at a range of physical and time scales.

A fascination with modernist, abstract and contemporary art practice provides a complimentary research interest that informs compositional, material, and spatial, processes of architectural exploration and representation. Recent research has investigated the compositional structures of he paintings of the Italian modernist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964).

Projects

Buildings Without Roofs

Poetic analysis of the Leadbetter House by Bruce Goff

Giorgio Morandi

Compositiional analysis and other speculations regarding the landscape oil paintings of Giorgio Morandi

Research

A selection of recent research outputs.

Exhibitions

Dargavel, R. and Tim Dunbar, 2007. giorgio Morandi - Geometry Proportion Interval, TBC, 2007.

Book Chapters

Dargavel, R., 2003. 'Sverre Fehn Architect, Norway'. In Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture, Taylor and Francis-Routledge, New York.

Journal Articles

Dargavel, R., 2007. 'Buildings Without Roofs - Ledbetter House, Bruce Goff 1947', TBC.

Presentations

Dargavel, R., 2008. 'Human Nature, Society, Culture and Architecture', EAAE-ENHSA Sub-network on Architectural Theory, Lisbon, Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 28-30 April 2008, in awaiting publication.

Dargavel, R., 2007. 'The Charged Void - after Alison and Peter Smithson', EAAE-ENHSA Sub-network on Architectural Theory, Norway, University of Trondheim, June 2007, in awaiting publication.

Dargavel, R., 2002. 'Contemporary Phenomenology and the Constructed Site', Constructing Place, Auckland Castle, 12.04.02 - 14.04.02.

Dargavel, R., 1999. 'Considering Stone and the 'Other' Concrete', To See, To Touch, To Comprehend, Kuopio, Finland, 1999.