The Cladding Crisis: going beyond the layers of the façade
24 February 2023
The Architectural Association, AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square, London
The Symposium brings together different voices to discuss one of the most tragic failures of the built environment: the Grenfell Tower fire. Organised by Giulia Rosa and Liam Ross.
Constance Smith is speaking as part of the opening panel, ‘The politics of the facade’, with Peter Apps (Deputy Editor, Inside Housing) and Prof José Torero (Head of UCL Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering, UCL, and Grenfell Inquiry Expert Witness), chaired by Giulia Rosa.
The politics of the facade: Grenfell’s story sits between a social and relational problematic of governing public housing and a tragic performance of deceitful layers that escape their performative original nature. In this chapter we delve into the material and architectural composition of the facade in order to display layer after layer meanings, materials and motions.
Starting from the materiality of the combustible elements of the cladding, this symposium examines what took place behind Grenfell’s facade to then scale out again into the city context. The twelve centimetres of plastic-based insulation protected by composite panels in the Tower brings us beyond the problematics of combustibility and toxicity and instead reveals systematic injustices and ignored cycles of failure. In cases like Grenfell, the material disintegration of the facade becomes the metaphor for the immaterial disintegration of the notion of care in housing.
The Symposium does not claim to instruct or find solutions but values the occasion to generate a set of conversations throughout and beyond the AA. We understand the Grenfell Tower incident and tragedy as the starting point in a conversation that seeks to question a much larger national crisis.
If in architecture schools we are instructed through exemplary projects that have traced our past and present times, should we not also discuss and learn from the failures that have scarred the very histories we place under our architectural lens? During the Symposium, we will metaphorically cross the strata of Grenfell’s building to learn from what happened in and behind its section.
The day brings together resident groups, technical experts, journalists, architects, writers and members of local authorities to come together and discuss what can be learnt from Grenfell and how we can prevent the layering of time to obfuscate our view on the tragedy. The day will be structured in three parts. The first part of the day will revolve around the physical and material aspects of the fire, the second will aim to give voice to community members and those working first-hand at Grenfell and the final part of the day will return to the scale of the city and approaches the fire from a wider perspective. With round-table discussions concluding every session, we encourage audience participation to share, question and discuss diverse experiences and perspectives.