Creative Arts, Design & Architecture
Nicholas Falk (HF 1967-69) 1960s, All Harkness Stories, Creative Arts, Design & Architecture, Economics, Finance & Business, International Affairs
worked on product development for Ford to learn about successful multi-national companies, after doing PPE at Oxford. His thought that there must be better management techniques to explain why the UK economy lagged behind the USA, took him to Stanford Business School in California. However, he found it was the culture that explained business success at the expense of hollowing out of cities. Actively involved in student politics, he helped the spin off of Stanford Research Institute from the university to cut links with the Defence Department. Returning with an MBA, he spent three years at McKinsey. This was followed by a doctorate at the London School of Economics on how towns and cities develop; an action research project in Rotherhithe in London’s Docklands, tested out ideas for reusing old industrial buildings inspired by what he had seen in San Francisco. Always keen to link academic research to practical applications, in 1976 he founded URBED (Urban and Economic Development), which offers practical solutions to urban regeneration and local economic development. He recently published a report on the application of smart city principles to London. In 2014 URBED won the Wolfson Economics Prize for showing how to build garden cities that were visionary, viable and popular. He is currently focusing on two projects: Oxford Futures on how to double the size of the city maintaining its position as a knowledge hub and applying ‘smarter urbanisation’ principles to the growth of medium sized cities in Tamil Nadu, India.
Last updated: 25th May 2018
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Nigel Hall (HF 1967-69) 1960s, All Harkness Stories, Creative Arts, Design & Architecture
RA was in his final year at the Royal College of Art when he successfully applied for a Harkness Fellowship. Interested in American art and deserts, he wanted to be based in a city relatively close to Mojave Desert. His fellowship to study sculpture took him to LA (1967-69), and although formally connected to UCLA, he spent much of his time based in his studio in East LA, having driven across the country from New York. In fact, the first time he went to UCLA was for the exhibition of British painting and sculpture held at their gallery, in which he participated. During his time in LA he held a solo show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery. This lead directly to further exhibitions at Robert Elkon Gallery in New York, a gallery in Germany and his first London gallery which was interested in West Coast artists. On his return to UK, he set up a studio in London and started teaching part-time at the Royal College of Art, later becoming principal lecturer in charge of MA sculpture at Chelsea School of Art. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Europe, America, Asia and Australia and his work, both sculpture and drawings is held by many public collections around the world including the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and many more. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 2003 and awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts London in 2017.
Last updated: 25th May 2018
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Katrina Porteous (HF 1982-84) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Creative Arts, Design & Architecture, Humanities
, poet, grew up near Consett, Co Durham, and read History at Trinity Hall Cambridge. She was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1982 to study creative writing, and spent her first year at UC Berkeley, where her tutors included Thom Gunn and Robert Pinsky, and her second at Harvard, where her tutor was Seamus Heaney. In the months between she travelled widely, spending formative time in Native American Pueblo and Hopi communities in the South West, and in rural areas of the Southern states. This experience politicised her work, sharpening her sense of the interconnections between people, landscape, history and the natural world. Attempting an academic career after that was a mistake. In 1987 she moved to her grandparents’ house on the Northumberland coast, where she embedded herself in the dwindling traditional fishing community. An awareness of the universal importance of small-scale, sustainable local culture and ecology, which has informed her work ever since, resulted directly from her American travels. Katrina has published several poetry collections with Bloodaxe Books, including The Lost Music, Two Countries and Edge (poems for a planetarium). She received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1989, an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1993 and an Arts Foundation Award in 2002. She is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and an ambassador for New Networks for Nature. In 1999 she accompanied two Northumbrian shepherd poets to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, and in 2014 performed her own work at the Fisher Poets’ Gathering in Oregon.
Last updated: 2nd April 2021
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