Geoff Manaugh in conversation with Smout Allen

This evening brings together writer Geoff Manaugh, of BLDGBLOG, in conversation with architects Mark Smout and Laura Allen, of Smout Allen. They will discuss their work exploring borders, tectonics, and other long-term landscape processes. Their collaborative projects engage with cartography and measurement in unstable terrains.

Manaugh and Smout Allen have catalogued and interrogated the British landscape with survey instruments created for the British Exploratory Land Archive, first exhibited at the Venice Biennale. For L.A. Recalculated – a cartographic drawing part map, part plan, part section – they diagnosed Los Angeles as “less a city, in some ways, than a matrix of seismic equipment and geological survey tools used for locating, mapping, and mitigating the effects of tectonic faults.”

Focusing on the dynamic relationship between the natural and the man-made, Manaugh and Smout Allen will consider boundaries in technology, theory and practice as they unpack collaborative projects that document human-altered landscapes of Britain and abroad.