Le Corbusier expert joins our Future Cities Forum - 13th June 2017
Professor Flora Samuel will be speaking at our June forum about her role in the new initiative - the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) which will carry out research into the UK's housing system. Flora leads on Humanities in the CaCHE Consortium which is led by the University of Glasgow and funded primarily by the ESRC, AHRC and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The programme will seek to influence future housing policy at all levels.
Flora Samuel is Professor of Architecture in the Built Environment at the new University of Reading School of Architecture and former Head of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture.
She has received over £500K of research funding to study the ways in which architects evidence and communicate the value of what they do. She has now turned her attention to raising the profile of research in the Royal Institute of British Architects where she is an elected national councillor and Chair of the Research and Innovation Group.
Flora trained as an architect at Cambridge University and Princeton and was in housing practice for five years in London before going into teaching. Her aim is to make architectural education more professional, more useful and more inclusive.
She has written several acclaimed books on unrepresented aspects of the modernist architect Le Corbusier but has now turned her attention to public perception of design as she believes that architects need to be able to demonstrate their value to the public and policy makers with clear, convincing evidence. This she feels can only be done by bringing architectural academia and practice closer together.
She is particularly critical about the way architectural history has been written and has written five books on Le Corbusier with the aim of bringing out unrepresented aspects of this key figure of modern architecture, his interest in feminism, sustainability and spirituality.