Situated just over the road from the Royal Albert Hall we'll be in a part of the capital that we all hold as an image in our heads. This is our greatest city as the home of amazing heritage venues with the V&A, Science and Natural History Museums all a short walk away. All of these are amazing places with one foot in the 19th century and one foot in the 21st - not unlike the RCM itself. And perhaps not unlike your own institution. So many of us work in universities that have buildings from many different eras – estates that mix amazing history with the best of the modern. But we all know this legacy mix can be problematic, even as it creates so much of the character that our staff and students enjoy about our unique campuses. Victorian buildings can create challenges on anything from heating to maintenance costs, while those of us with a medieval heritage or listed status to deal with might face real problems with adaptation to the most current of problems, such as digitisation and decarbonisation. Buildings of the last century ask us to think too. Technologies of the immediate post-war period can feel badly out of date as we position ourselves for a low carbon future.
In the term that we publish an updated version of the 2008 AUDE report on ‘Legacy Buildings’ (now available) we’ll be looking at the overall challenge we face with this mix of the old and the new. How do we celebrate and respect all of our building history and hand it onto the next generation, even as we try to find the right technical answers to what can be problematic spaces? At our Big Conversation event we will have a slightly different format, bringing it closer to the original intention when we first launched it in 2016. Our headline speaker is Amanda Levete CBE, Director, AL_A and then we will have a panel of directors of estates who will share a range of case studies to help us think about different aspects of our theme. And as always there will be time to spend with colleagues in useful conversation. Our host venue itself has fantastic spaces including the most of up-to-date of music production studios, that we’ll enjoy as part of our visit.
The AUDE Big Conversation will be CPD accredited.
