ISSAP questions - Information Systems Security Architecture Professional (ISSAP) Updated: 2024

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Computer systems are a combination of both hardware and software working together. Hardware is the physical components of a computer and software is the programs that run on a computer.

ALFRED — Alfred State College architecture students in Design Studio 5 presented comprehensive plans to reimagine the village of Angelica.

Two groups of 15 students worked for eight weeks and presented their concepts and ideas to citizens in Angelica.

The groups looked at a variety of different areas around Angelica including Main Street, Park Circle, Joncy Gorge Park and the Allegany County Fairgrounds. The groups showed concepts for economic enhancement, community beautification, rehabilitation and preservation of historical resources, and introduced new business opportunities that would be beneficial to the residents.

Led by professors William Dean and Matt DiRado the students met with groups from the village to learn more about the village, researched the area, and then put together presentations that included vision boards, a formal presentation of their ideas, and an animated walking tour of the concepts proposed.

“Projects like this deliver our students a real-world experience,” commented DiRado. “In eight short weeks, each group worked together to develop plans from what they had learned and seen in Angelica. The students did an excellent job taking what they have learned in the classroom and applying it to a client. Our hope is that the Village will be able to use some of the concepts as they plan for their future.”

Karin Bruton-Winterfeldt was in attendance for the presentation and was impressed.

“From street design, business growth and all the way up to affordable housing, the suggested revitalization of our beautiful village is a hoped-for reachable goal. We were blown away by their professionalism and incredible foresight.” 

The Architecture Department has done similar projects in the past with other villages — Alfred, Andover, Bolivar, Belfast, Belmont, Caneadea and Fillmore.

by James Gorst Architects

Client Private

Awards RIBA East Midlands Award 2019 

This is a wide-open rural setting that asked the architect questions about how the planning of the house can imbue the site with an orientation and sense of place. There is a reference to the contouring of the land that sets up the planning moves, but the house is more painterly in its response and the architect plays around with known pitched forms and traditional materials to quietly subvert and provide a contextual contemporary home.

This is unashamedly a 21st Century country home that reimagines the more ubiquitous vernacular forms of farm buildings into a modern manor house.

The house is not revealed at once. On entry there are glimpses and views to courtyards and gardens beyond that knit the house into the wider landscape, but you must be invited from this fulcrum into the various wings containing spaces for living and entertaining. This aggregated form is connected by a delightfully detailed staircase, rising sculpturally from the ground floor and on the upper floors only lightly touching this lower plinth.

The main structure for this house is from cross laminated timber panels, glulam beams and columns. These are exceptionally well detailed, and all are lime washed to soften the look. There is a constant joinery datum set up which splits the walls to the rooms by approximately two thirds to one that allows all sorts of details of modern life to be neatly handled. This attention to detail is seen in all aspects of the design.

There is no missed opportunity to craft a response to the various aspects of the client brief, both internally and externally. The house is clad in a Cotswold stone that has been chosen for all but one of the wings. The exception being a playful, but fastidiously detailed, stone slate wing where walls and roof merge together. The numerous fireplaces also form rather Scandinavian style chimney stacks that act as strong markers within this overall assured composition.

Although this house is undoubtably a fine modern manor home, it also provides an approach to how more modest new build homes could be informed by an evolving tradition that creates modern vernacular houses in rural settings.

Location Northamptonshire

Contractor Kingerlee Consultants

Quantity Surveyor / Cost Consultant Jackson Coles

Structural Engineers Heyne Tillet Steel

Environmental / M&E Engineers Buro Happold

Garden Designer James Alexander-Sinclair

Internal area 1,512 m²

It sounds like it should be a straightforward question – after all, we know that in 1898 Ethel Charles was the first woman to become a member of the RIBA, and that in 1948 Minnette de Silva was the first Asian woman to join. This Black History Month, our RIBA Collections team shared the process of how we try to answer this question, revealing some of the RIBA Library and Collections sources we refer to along the way, and exploring why some questions remain unanswered.

Nomination papers

The nomination papers in our archive are one of the richest sources of information on the history of RIBA membership. These forms are individual architects’ applications for membership. They can reveal a great deal about the prospective member: their training, their professional experience, and their industry contacts (new members were required to obtain endorsements from existing Associate Members). However, they don’t, of course, record the prospective member’s ethnicity; the collection of this data is a relatively modern concept.

The RIBA Kalendar

We can flip our search, looking among lists of members for the names of known Black architects in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The Kalendar of the Royal Institute of British Architects was published between 1886 and 1966 and contains lists of all RIBA Members for each year. From the 1960s onwards it was replaced with a member directory.

This means we can cross reference names listed in the RIBA Kalendar with those surfaced through other sources. For example, keyword searching for ‘architecture’ under the ‘occupation’ column in national census records reveals individuals such as Norman Alcius Harry, born in 1887 in Kingston, Jamaica, who went on to practice as an architect and surveyor in the UK. However, he does not seem to have joined the RIBA; there is no sign of him among the member lists in the Kalendar.

The earliest Black architects to have qualified in North America are better documented. But although American architects were eligible to join the RIBA as Honorary Corresponding members, searching for names such as Robert Robinson Taylor (1868-1942) and Julien Abele (1881-1950) among the Honorary Corresponding members listed in the Kalendars does not surface any matches.

Passenger lists

Another possible avenue for approaching the question is to look at the passenger lists of ships arriving in the UK from the Caribbean in the late 1940s, carrying what was to become known as the Windrush Generation. But although there were engineers, builders, and draughtsmen among the passengers of HMT Empire Windrush, none of the passengers’ professions are listed as architect. Keyword searches across online passenger lists for other ships that made similar journeys are complicated by the fact that there was a ship, launched in 1957 named (interestingly) the British Architect.

Courage Togobo and Rory Westmaas

Courage Togobo (below left) and Richard Owen ‘Rory’ Westmaas (centre) were part of a team of three who won a student ideas competition for Piccadilly Circus in 1961. Togobo was born in Ghana and won a scholarship to study architecture in 1954, beginning with a year in Ibadan, Nigeria, before moving to England to train at the Oxford School of Architecture and the Brixton School of Building, where he was studying when he won the competition.

Membership lists reveal that Togobo became a student member of RIBA in 1961, before upgrading to RIBA Associate membership in 1969. By now he was back in Ghana, working for the Planning and Design Office in Accra. Westmaas and Soo were also RIBA Members, initially as students before becoming associates in 1964 and 1961 respectively. As well as Westmaas' career in architecture, he campaigned against colonialism with the People’s Progressive Party in Guyana in the 1950s and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain after moving to the UK.

The third member of the competition team was Kuok Choo Soo (right) from what was then Malaya (now Malaysia). The Architect and Building News reflected, revealingly, “it is appropriate that the competition for what used to be known as the ‘hub of the Empire’ should have been won by three commonwealth students”.

Archivists are well familiar with the challenges of answering questions like these. In even the best-organised archives, we rely on catalogue data that may have been applied in line with earlier cataloguing practises, anticipated research areas, and values. This means that it is frequently chance encounters, rather than systematic searches, that reveal the stories of underrepresented figures in history. Often, it is personal researchers looking into their family history that ‘uncover’ these stories.

That's how we heard about Ransford Jarrett-Yaskey MBE (1924-2000), Chief Architect to the Sierra Leone Ministry of Works. Family research led his niece to our archives, where she found that Jarrett-Yaskey was elected an Associate Member of the RIBA in 1958.

But while looking into Jarrett-Yaskey, we came across an obituary he wrote for his colleague, a fellow architect from Sierra Leone named Reuben Johnson Oluwole Wright (1914-1990). In RIBA membership lists, we find that Wright became an associate in 1950. His obituary, published in the RIBA Journal, recognises him as “the first Sierra Leonean to be fully qualified under the RIBA Conditions and registered as an architect”.

Wright moved to Edinburgh in the 1940s to train, before returning to Sierra Leone where he worked for the Civil Service as an architect, and eventually became President of the Sierra Leone Institute of Architects. The date of his election to the RIBA membership makes him the earliest Black RIBA Member we have come across so far, but it's more than likely there are others who came before him, whom we don’t yet know about.

But by focusing on looking for the ‘first’ Black RIBA Member we risk ignoring those that came after them, and underplaying the structural barriers that remain in place. While ‘pioneering’ individuals like Ethel Charles can serve to inspire later generations of architects, not every ‘first’ would have wanted to present themselves this way - or even known they represented such a first.

On the other hand, searching for 'firsts’ (whether we find them or not) can also reveal the stories of individuals, like Courage Togobo and Rory Westmaas, who may not have come first, but should still be recognised in their own right.

We're always looking to share stories that tell the history of our profession. Hundreds of researchers pass through our library and study rooms every year and are constantly illuminating new things. If you’ve come across a previously unheard story in our collections that you think more people should hear about, get in touch. We want to keep learning.

Update: We were delighted to hear from Audley English, who responded to our call for stories with this video discussing his work and life as the UK's first West Indian architect.

Videos

While exploring the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, the ArchDaily team had a chance to engage in conversation with several curators of the national pavilions, along with Lesley Lokko, the curator of the entire exhibition. The discussions delved into the unique character of this year’s edition focused on an understanding of Africa as a “Laboratory of the Future.” Through this lens, the biennale became “a healing experience,” in the words of Lesley Lokko, reinterpreting and deconstructing the meaning behind ideas such as decolonization, decarbonization, resource management, or finding the hidden potential in vernacular forms of practice.

Following Lokko’s curatorial direction, the exhibitions presented at the national pavilions explored the specific conditions of their territories, striving to uncover and highlight the unique challenges and opportunities faced by their local cultural landscapes. During the interviews, the curators opened up in regard to their personal inspirations and the drive behind the choice of program, the messages embedded in the displays, and their hopes for the future of the profession.

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https://www.archdaily.com/1006110/on-site-in-venice-9-interviews-with-curators-discussing-the-impact-of-the-2023-venice-architecture-biennaleMaria-Cristina Florian