Reimagining Social Housing: Dunlop Lecture with Peter Barber

Location: Piper Auditorium, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Online

Speaker(s): Peter Barber

Peter Barber is the founder of Peter Barber Architects, an award-winning practice based in London known for its radical approach to social housing and urban planning. He and his firm have won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Neave Brown Award for Housing and the Royal Academy’s Grand Prize for Housing. In 2022, he received the Soane Medal, which recognizes architects, educators, and critics who have enriched the public understanding of architecture. He was also awarded an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) for his services to architecture.

In the 24th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture, Barber will highlight some of the firm’s award-winning social housing projects, such as Donnybrook Quarter, a 40-unit, high-density, low-rise, mixed-use project near Victoria Park in London and Edgewood Mews, a 97-unit urban block arranged around a pedestrianized street near the North Circular Road in Barnet. He will review the political and ideological context in which these and other projects were conceived, and describe his firm’s analog design process, which makes extensive use of hand sketches and hand-made models.

The John T. Dunlop Lecture honors a labor economist who played a central role in the creation of our Center. A longtime member of the Harvard faculty, Dunlop was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973, served as US Secretary of Labor in the Ford administration, and worked for every US president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He was also a mediator in numerous labor-management disputes, where he was known for developing innovative, multi-party agreements.

REGISTER TO ATTEND IN PERSON

This event will also be livestreamed; advance registration is not required.

 

Donnybrook and Edgewood Mews photos © Morley von Sternberg

Peter Barber and two of his social housing projects.