AArchitecture Issue 15

Issue 15 News from the Architectural Association

AARCHITECTURE

VERSO

AARCHITECTURE

CONTRIBUTORS

News from the Architectural Association Issue 15 / Summer 2011 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Erandi de Silva erandi@thebiblog.net

©2011 All rights reserved Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES Contact: contribute@aaschool.ac.uk Nicola Quinn +44 (0)20 7887 4033 Please send your news items for the next issue to news@aaschool.ac.uk

Eleanor Dodman eleanordodman@gmail.com Hugo Hinsley hinsley@aaschool.ac.uk Emma Letizia Jones emmaletiziajones@gmail.com Naoki Kotaka naokikotaka@googlemail.com Paul McAneary paul@paulmcaneary.com

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jan Nauta jannauta@gmail.com

Alex Lorente, Membership Brett Steele, AA School Director Zak Kyes, AA Art Director

Martin Self martself@googlemail.com

EDITORIAL TEAM

Nicola Quinn, Managing Editor Claire McManus, Graphic Designer Scrap Marshall, Danielle Rago and Manijeh Verghese, Student Editors ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Shumon Basar Valerie Bennett Kathleen Formosa Roz Jackson Joanne McCluskey Esther McLaughlin Roger Mead Charlotte Newman Simon Whittle Printed by Cassochrome, Belgium

Liam Young l.young@tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com

Cover image: The Looking Machine c 1983, Image courtesy of the Cedric Price Estate, London. Two articles celebrating the life and work of Cedric Price appear in this issue on pages 4–7

Architectural Association (Inc.) Registered Charity No. 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No. 171402 Registered office as above

AARCHITECTURE

Issue 15

2 Bedford Square Fundraising Update 3 Building Works Begin in Bedford Square 4 Wish We Were Here 6 The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict 8 Writing as Architecture 10 Projects Review 2011 14 Magic Format 16 New Forms of Practice 18 The Autopoiesis of Architecture 21 Membership Events 24 AA Timeline 2010/11 28 Faceted House 1 30 Honours Students 2011 32 Foster + Partners Award 33 The Dennis Sharp Prize 34 New from AA Publications and Bedford Press 36 Photo Library: Call for Collections 38 Hooke Park Building Begins 40 Spring 2011 School Meetings 41 AA Tohoku Earthquake Action 42 News 1

News

Bedford Square Fundraising Update

AA community relaxes on the terrace. Photo Valerie Bennett

Following last year’s summer announcement of the AA’s receipt of its largest-ever gift in the form of the Norah Garlick bequest established to support the launch of our new rural campus being designed and built by AA students in Hooke Park in Dorset, we have for the second year running another important new gift to announce to the AA.

Thanks to the immense generosity of a long-time and dear friend of the AA who wishes at this point in to remain anonymous until final details are arranged in the coming weeks, I am immensely pleased to announce the AA’s receipt of a pledge for an enormous and extremely generous seven-figure donation that will help launch, in the most important way imaginable the AA’s ambitious new series of building projects in Bedford Square.

As we approach the School’s centenary of being based in Bedford Square we are in the planning stages of a capital campaign. We seek to create better facilities, host the best tutors and revolutionise teaching methods in order to retain our reputation as a world leader in architectural education.

In January 2010, the London based architects Wright & Wright delivered a ten-year masterplan that provides a framework to guide development in the coming years. This includes rebuilding the workshops and improving accessibility around the School’s buildings. From there, major projects include re-

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locating the Library and Archive, building a Lecture Hall and transforming the Main Entrance, Display and Exhibition Spaces of the School.

During the past year students and special projects attracted significant income. The future funding of existing Scholarships and Bursaries continues to be an important focus. A new award will be announced in the Autumn and a further legacy announcement with regard to supporting students later in the year.

All donations enrich the future of the AA and a make a real difference not only to our students, but also to the architectural debate worldwide of which the AA seeks to be an essential part. No matter how large or small the gift, your contribution is highly valued.

Brett Steele, AA Director If you would like to find out more about the AA’s capital campaign and projects currently underway where your donation could make a difference, please use the contact details below.

Esther McLaughlin, Head of Development esther.mclaughlin@aaschool.ac.uk, +44 (0)20 7887 4090

News

Building Works Begin in Bedford Square

Nos. 32–39 Bedford Square. Photo Valerie Bennett

Works have now begun on the first phase of the AA’s Masterplan. This initial phase is primarily related to the workshops and third floor lateral openings, or connections between buildings.

Phase 1, known as The Essential Works phase has been further broken down into Phase 1A and Phase 1B.

Phase 1A is the works undertaken during the summer period from 18 July to 18 September 2011 and consists of the following:

16 Morwell Street Stripping out of finishes and services to the basement of 16 Morwell Street, installation of new services, structural screed and partitions to form the new Model Making area. New ventilation services are being provided to serve a new paint spray booth.

This requires a new service duct to be formed through the existing floors from ground floor up to the roof.

Data and services diversions are underway, together with the installation of temporary partitions at each level to screen off the work area. Cutting through the concrete floors, to form the new ducts commenced on 1 August.

Nos. 39 to 32 Bedford Square A new service riser will be formed through the roof of No. 39, which will provide extraction services to Digital Prototyping as part of Phase 1B works.

Structural opening will be formed through party walls of Nos. 39 to 38, 38 to 37, 34–36 to 33 and 33 to 32 at third floor level. Additionally openings will be formed

at basement level between Nos. 38 to 37 and from the old bookshop to the corridor adjacent to the restaurant. Services diversion works commenced on Monday 1 August, to clear the areas in preparation for the structural works.

Phase 1B is the works to be undertaken from 19 September 2011 to July 2012 and consists of the following:

Nos. 39 to 37 Structural alteration works to the basements of Nos. 39 to 37 to form the new Digital Prototyping area.

Forming of the new service duct from the basement of No. 39 to the roof, demolition of the rear extensions to Nos. 38 and 37, replacing the structural floor slabs in the basements of Nos. 39 and 37, upgrading the pavement vault areas to serve as new plant rooms including new boilers serving Nos. 39 and 37 and the installation of services and finishes to complete Digital Prototyping.

Works to risers in all three buildings will necessitate data and services works to all floor levels, which will be carried out in a phased approach to reduce the disruption to school operations The existing yard area to the rear of Nos. 38 and 37, once enlarged with the removal of the rear extensions, will be excavated to increase the usable area.

Building Works, AA, July 2011 – July 2012

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Events

Wish We Were Here

By Scrap Marshall and Jan Nauta

A wall of Cedric Price’s sketches with remakes of his furniture designs. Photo Sue Barr

‘I have a soft spot for human beings – Cedric Price’ read the text on the hundreds of badges given away free as part of the exhibition Wish We Were Here – The Mental Notes of Cedric Price. Occupying the Front Members’ Room for the month of March, the badges were but one of many fragments that were brought together to present the thoughts and ideas of architect, thinker and badge aficionado Cedric Price.

The exhibition assembled three bodies of current research: a project for publication entitled Cedric Price – Complete Works by Samantha Hardingham, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Conversation Series archive and an interactive online project conceived at the Department for Exhibition Design and Curatorial Practice at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG) by students Kilian Fabich and Stella-Sophie Seroglou, supervised by Wilfried Kühn, Armin Linke and Markus Miessen.

In addition, newly commissioned for the exhibition was the remaking of a range of furniture designed by Cedric Price for the Robert Fraser Gallery, Duke Street, London (1961–66), selected pieces of ephemera retrieved from the AA Archive and the Cedric Price Estate by the Public Occasion Agency

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(POA), the aforementioned badges, and last but by no means least... the first public tasting of the CPSavoury, a lamb and rosemary bun, devised by chef and friend of Cedric Price, Fergus Henderson, that ‘was inspired

by Cedric’s cheeks’.

Rather than a formal showing of completed projects, the reproduced furniture displayed the work and research as ongoing and incomplete; drawings, films, excerpts of lectures and conversations, books and an interactive portal, all in a fragmented manner.

With a thick black carpet, the Front Members’ Room became part study, part lounge – creating an informal atmosphere to navigate leisurely through the varying forms of the mental notes of Cedric Price.

Scrap Marshall is a Fourth Year AA Student and Student Editor of AArchitecture.

Jan Nauta is a Fifth Year AA Student.

Wish We Were Here – The Mental Notes of Cedric Price, Exhibition, 5–26 March 2011, AA Front Members’ Room

Ephemera sourced from both the Cedric Price Archive

A student engages with HfG’s interactive online

and the AA Archive.

archive.

The Cedric Price badge was a popular souvenir from

Students pore over material from the archive.

the exhibition.

Photos Sue Barr

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Events

The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict

By Manijeh Verghese

Armin Linke, Samantha Hardingham, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Markus Miessen discuss the spatiality of archival practice. Photo Scrap Marshall

Cedric Price at the AA c 1990. Photo Valerie Bennett

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Wish You Were Here – Cedric Price Mental Notes was an exhibition in the Front Members’ Room documenting the ideas of the renowned architect through a variety of media, each of which contributed to our understanding of his body of work and thought processes.

During this exhibition, a panel discussion was organised by the Public Occasion Agency (POA) with regards to understanding this body of work within the context of the archive.

Wish You Were Here had originally been staged as part of the Venice Biennale last summer, where it was encountered by POA. It was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Samantha Hardingham with the involvement of an ongoing research project based at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG) headed by Markus Miessen and Armin Linke. The panel was initially planned as a trialogue to discuss Markus’s and Armin’s research project, The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, which focuses on the archive compiled within Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Berlin apartment. Subsequently, to underline the emphasis on Cedric Price as the subject matter of the exhibition as well as the portion of the archive being researched, Samantha Hardingham joined the discussion. She came to the surprising realisation that despite having organised two exhibitions together, the foursome had never been in a room together until that evening!

The research project and the discussion focused on the spatiality of archival practice, and how to shift the concept of archiving away from a view of storage towards a productive dialogue between constituent elements. Varied readings of the archive ranged from Samantha’s analogue interpretation of associations with the weight of material and endless lists of numbers to index objects, to the digital processes of Armin’s Phenotype project whereby objects are catalogued through reference IDs and reordered according to use and experience. Markus outlined various known archives within the world ranging from the ‘clean’ in the case of libraries and museums to the ‘dirty’ in the case of industrial facilities and material workshops.

Hans Ulrich discussed his own archive, a seeming mass of chaotic information that he easily navigates through a ‘structured logic’. He uses interviews as a necessary research tool for exhibitions yet, until this project, only the written transcripts were used while the 2,000 hours of moving images remained dormant within the archive.

By no longer conceiving of the archive as a means of storage, it is transformed into an opportunity for serendipitous, arbitrary conversations. If the video-clips within the archive are shuffled and played at random as if by a DJ in a nightclub they produce a wholly different type of dialogue between different time periods, themes and audiences. The listener starts to create connections between clips, and the juxtaposition of these elements creates a fictional

conversation as a space of productive conflict. Hans Ulrich suggested a new way of approaching the Cedric Price archive would be to tag information according to topics, for example, the Fun Palace, so that the interview would become a polyphonic archive.

Different interviews with Cedric Price mentioning the Fun Palace would converse with one another, alongside any other interviews by Hans Ulrich where the Fun Palace as an influence or precedent is cited.

The choice of Cedric Price as the focus for this discussion about the archive was not by chance. He provides the perfect example to explain the concept of the archive within an archive. Since Hans Ulrich had interviewed him several times, each interview forms a chapter in a dialogue built up over time.

Using words and drawings, he often flipped through his sketchbooks while on camera or drew while talking to illustrate a specific idea, allowing the audience to engage with the material in different ways. Yet how accessible is this dialogue between Cedric Price and Hans Ulrich to the average user? Without the archivist would it still be possible to navigate the archive as a complex collection of data? How much of the logic of collecting and organising material is locked up within the individual who performs these functions? Is the new (mis)use or reinterpretation of the archive, through the creation of user-defined connections between data, a way for the archive to exist beyond the lifetime of the archivist? In this way, the archive becomes not only a productive space of conflict in terms of how it is conceived but also in terms of its legacy and continued relevance to the user and archivist alike.

Manijeh Verghese is a Fourth Year AA Student and Student Editor of AArchitecture.

The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, Discussion, 22 March 2011, AA Lecture Hall, Markus Miessen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Armin Linke, Samantha Hardingham

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Events

Writing as Architecture

By Danielle Rago and Emma Letizia Jones

The Writing and Critical Thinking symposium.

Marina Lathouri addresses the symposium audience. Photos Valerie Bennett

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The Writing and Critical Thinking in Architecture Symposium, organised by Marina Lathouri, Director of the History & Critical Thinking MA Programme, brought together a group of academics, practitioners, writers, curators and editors from within contemporary architectural discourse, including: Jane Rendell, Mario Carpo, Yve Lomax, Nasrine Seraji, Giovanna Borasi and Hannes Mayer. It addressed the role of writing within the realm of contemporary architecture and culture and reflected on the role of criticism within new modes of production of architectural knowledge. The topic of conversation in many ways relates to the reformulation and renaming of the school’s History & Critical Thinking Programme, which is structured around writing as a critical practice as well as a form of architectural practice.

Marina began the discussion with a commentary on writing as an operation enmeshed within the processes of both making and theorising architecture. Using Alberti’s Treatise on Architecture and modernist manifestos as forms of writing that engage critically with architecture, and in turn influence its evolution, she illustrated that the act of writing, along with the act of designing, gives ongoing validity to history by constantly reformulating and recreating it. This idea of writing (and design) as ‘narrative’, a trend which has once more found favour as a working method for many of the design units at the AA, was also explored by Jane Rendell, art critic and writer, who staged a reading of one of her very public site-writings, in which writing becomes a form of spatial practice. Exploring the coupling of Moss Green (an abandoned cottage) with iconic modernist buildings through recited narratives and photographs, she demonstrated how the written word has the potential to actively ‘remake’ these derelict buildings by placing them within a new context. Following the narrative thread, writer Yve Lomax reinforced the civic function of writing through her performative readings in which she proposed writing as generative, non-linear and inventive – making it an ideal tool in the design process.

Mario Carpo presented us with arguments in favour of the demise of the image in the transmission of the architectural project to the public, offering the catchphrase ‘tell, don’t show’. He asserted that the confusion of authorship with respect to the digital image negates the ‘truth’ of the image as a document.

We might suggest, as did Giovanna Borasi, Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), that it is in the interaction between the text and the image that the ‘true’ story is told. For her, it is the relationship between writing and image that successfully develops a language of transmission of current architectural discourse, as demonstrated by previous CCA exhibitions.

However, architect Nasrine Seraji, offered us the supposition that an architectural exhibition transmitted by writing is better able to engage with the public than the architectural drawing.

She presented writing not only as a form of critical practice but also as a means of translating architectural ideas to the public. Atelier Seraji’s exhibition dazibao d’architectures, borrows from the ancient Chinese method of civic communication through writing – the dazibao, or ‘big-character poster.’ By omitting the architectural drawing in exhibiting architecture, Nasrine believes we can engage the public, who are better equipped to relate to the written word. There is a tendency, both within the profession and without, only to legitimise architecture if it is built, but as Atelier Seraji’s exhibition demonstrates, an unbuilt work, of which writing is a part, can be just as powerful as a built one; it can go on to influence discourses that shape architecture, both built and unbuilt.

The discussion resulting from the symposium reinforced the notion that the monopoly over ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in the publication of architecture either written or visual is an ongoing concern, especially with the introduction of new online and digital platforms with which to transmit architecture, as well as existing hard-copy architectural publications, like architheses, edited by final speaker Hannes Mayer.

The process of writing constantly redefines our boundaries of truth, which are temporal and shifting.

There is no doubt that writing contributes to the construction of architectural discourses which are transmitted through publication to the public, and that these discourses can be just as powerful as the construction of a building.

The importance of writing to further architectural discourse and to inform the production of built design was the overall theme that ran throughout the symposium. The speakers invited us to think about writing as an important form of architectural practice, as much as other modes of production, such as drawing. The role of criticality in every architect’s practice is essential, and writing plays an important role in this reflection process. As John Hejduk commented, ‘every architect needs to have a dual practice, one that allows for questioning, and another that allows for implementation’.

Danielle Rago is a Graduate MA Student in the History & Critical Thinking Programme and Student Editor of AArchitecture. Emma Letizia Jones is an MA Student in the History & Critical Thinking Programme.

Writing and Critical Thinking in Architecture Symposium, 25 March 2011, AA Lecture Hall.

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Events

AA Projects Review 2011

Diploma 3

DRL and AAIS

The AA’s Projects Review summer exhibition offered a chance to see the past year’s work of 650 students.

It was an opportunity to see architecture’s future in its most compelling and unexpected form – in the designs and minds of an emerging generation today. Hundreds of drawings, models, installations and photographs were on display alongside large 1:1 working prototypes, interactive media and even performances; all of which provided a snapshot of the latest thinking, experimentation and invention underway within the AA. The accompanying AA Book: Projects Review 2011 was also launched at the exhibition opening and is available from the AA Bookshop aabookshop.net Projects Review, Exhibition, 18 June – 9 July 2011, AA, 34–36 Bedford Square

Foundation

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Orientation Room

Media Studies and PhD

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Emergent Technologies

Intermediate 5

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First Year

Intermediate 6

Intermediate 9. All photos Sue Barr

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Events

Magic Format

By Erandi de Silva FORMAT is a new ‘live summer magazine’ dedicated to the shapes that discourse takes, organised

by Shumon Basar. Topics included Philosophy, the Lecture, Library classifications, and historical Anniversaries. Here Erandi de Silva recounts what she saw – and didn’t see – at the inaugural Magic Format.

Acts of levitation, central to both magic and architecture, were a recurrent motif throughout the evening’s presentation. A prelude included a YouTube clip of famed 1980s magician David Copperfield. The audience witnesses the realisation of his childhood dream of flying (as confided to real-time ex-fiancé Claudia Schiffer). Copperfield invokes the grammar of theatrics and the theatrics of melodrama, to manipulate the viewer: has he indeed escaped the bonds of gravity?

When Copperfield takes the stage, there is an unspoken understanding between the performer and his audience, acknowledging that the ‘magic’ is in fact a trick. The evening’s first speaker, artist and writer Jonathan Allen, explored the limits of how magic is used to mislead audiences by drawing attention to how the joy of being entertained veils the act of crossing into deceptive territory. Magicians often subscribe to particular agendas and have historically used the format of magic for the purposes of branding, propaganda and political manoeuvering, thus performing persuasive acts in the service of corporate entities, the Church, and even the nation state. In this context, innocent entertainment becomes secondary to the premeditated communication of an ideology.

Jonathan Allen offered various examples demonstrating the magician’s shifting priorities beginning with a clip featuring Mark Wilson, a magician and host of the 1960s CBS show The Magic Land of Allakazam. A corporate sponsorship from cereal giant Kellogg’s ensured that literally every aspect of his routine was heavily branded. Showcasing a more extreme use of magic, Scott Sforza’s political agenda was then introduced. As Deputy Communications Director for George W. Bush’s administration, Sforza carefully constructed the President’s public image, staging idealised visual scenarios for the cameras. These images referenced established symbols of power, solidifying Bush’s authoritative position through magical association.

Building on Jonathan Allen’s retrospective exploration of magic’s capacity to present arguments,

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the architect, critic and AA Intermediate 12 Unit Master Sam Jacob moved the discussion to the junction between architecture and magic. Formlessness, inter-penetration, disappearance, and levitation: just a few of the ‘tricks’ modernist architecture has striven to achieve.

Creating a parallel with Copperfield’s vanishing of the Statue of Liberty in 1983, Sam pointed to Adolf Loos’ reductionist 1908 essay, Ornament and Crime, which manifests in the austere Villa Müller. And as Kalanag’s (Hitler’s go-to magician) arrow passes through his assistant’s vanished mid-section, Mies’s curtain-walls invoke the penetration of space. From Le Corbusier’s chapter in Towards a New Architecture devoted to aeroplanes, to the ubiquity of the ‘shadow gap’ detail, architects, like magicians, dream of their subjects/objects levitating.

Punctuating the evening in a final act of spectacular persuasion, Scott Penrose, an ex-architect now turned magician, performed a live levitation trick in the AA Gallery. Jonathan Allen was plucked from the audience and amidst a fog of smoke ‘floated’ for a few incomprehensible seconds in mid air. The crowd cheered wildly.

Architects, like magicians, are specialists in the art of manipulating reality, constructing seemingly impossible scenarios through various methods of trickery. Both formats use illusions to defy physics, for rhetorical ends, with their own kind of potent persuasive power.

Erandi de Silva is an alumnus of the AA To watch video recordings of the events, visit: http://format.aaschool.ac.uk Magic Format, Lecture, AA Gallery, 28 June 2011, Jonathan Allen, Scott Penrose and Sam Jacob

Jonathan Allen being levitated by Scott Penrose

Magic Format in the AA Gallery. Photos Valerie Bennett

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Events

New Forms of Practice

By Manijeh Verghese, transcription by Eleanor Dodman

Anton Garcia Abril constructs his practice from stones and beams. Photo Scrap Marshall

Temporary exhibition space for Schunck*. Design: Rococo Relevance. Luc Merx and Sven Walter. 2010

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In February and March 2011, Oliver Domeisen, Unit Master, Diploma 13 and HTS tutor, organised a series of three lectures to show how an emerging generation of architects are constructing new forms of practice.

The series was aimed at AA students today and the architectural practitioner of the future, providing helpful advice especially for those nearing the end of their academic careers and contemplating what lies beyond the AA.

Each lecture encompassed a different form of practice, ranging from Swiss architects HHF whose stated aim is to progress through pragmatic building – erecting 20 buildings over eight years – to Spanish firm, Ensamble Studio, who have found ways to engage directly and creatively with the construction process itself and Dutch architects, Luc Merx and Christian Holl, who combine historical research with the newest digital technology as part of their Rococo Relevance project. The only things that all three offices have in common are that they are the product of a European context and they are in their late 30s or early 40s. Otherwise, their ambitions, their working methods and indeed their architectures are very different.

The idea behind the lecture series was to show that despite the apparent monopoly of mega-offices like Foster and SOM, and after a generation of famehungry starchitects and their iconic styles, a new generation of young architects are finding ways of operating smaller offices. They not only survive, but also succeed in making their mark on the profession as a whole. The following excerpts from the lectures show how in a rapidly changing profession you cannot ‘rely on establishing models of practice but that you have to adapt your metier to changing contexts’.

Stones and Beams

Anton Garcia Abril, Ensamble Studio,

2 March 2011 The Truffle is an experiment: a prototypical experiment of mass construction that extracts all of the earth’s properties in order to become part of nature. It does not want to be architecture; it wants nature to cut, cover and give it form in the same way that it gives form to a truffle. The programme that was used for scale was the Cabanon of Le Corbusier.

We tried to convert a thick shell of concrete into the same scale and shape as the Cabanon and to break different parts of the Cabanon into a new composition – our cabanon of béton. The process was to dig a hole in the ground and to insert air, as materialised by hay bales, to pour concrete into the space in between these two spaces and to allow time to play its role by leaving nature to react with the concrete. After that, we cut into the concrete with quarry machinery but we did not yet have the space. The next step was to borrow

a cow from our neighbour so it could eat the compressed hay that he had lent us. This was part of the constructive and intellectual process, the relationship of time and architecture and the way we could materialise all of these different states of concrete: from the liquid to the stringy to the smooth cut of the exterior – all from the same poured material, all producing a different materiality. We discovered, after cleaning, how this wrinkled cave would react extremely well with the only focal and perspective element that opened onto the horizon – the window. We also discovered how the different elements of contact: the earth, the hay, the horizontal and the vertical, with the same liquid concrete, could generate such different results. This was all part of the experiment to show how the building materialises nature.

Opulent Decay: The Contingency of Design

Luc Merx and Christian Holl,

14 March 2011 With this research we tried to discover the potential of architecture in cultural discussions and the power that architecture can have, especially in the use of historic references. The project was initiated with the need to understand what history could mean in architecture. We noticed that there are only a few forms, a few buildings or a few elements that are normally used as historical references in architecture.

But with the richness of historical architecture in mind, this is unsatisfactory and we wondered what potential could be discovered if we were free from the restrictions that determine what architectural forms are recognised. In other words, we noticed that there are many taboos that stop us from using the forms history can offer us. Our idea is not only to offer solutions, or to tell other people how to work or to design, but to instigate discussions and find ways and terms that might result in more precise questions.

The most important question to ask is what is the possibility of architecture?

Manijeh Verghese is a Fourth Year AA Student and Student Editor of AArchitecture. Eleanor Dodman is a Third Year AA Student.

New Forms of Practice Lecture Series, 28 February 2011, 2 March 2011, 14 March 2011, AA Lecture Hall, Oliver Domeisen, HHF Architects, Anton Garcia Abril, Luc Merx and Christian Holl

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Events

The Autopoiesis of Architecture: A Book Examined through Propaganda, Hearsay, Gossip and Conspiracy Theory

By Liam Young and the Debating Fundamentals Symposium Audience On the 11 March 2011 witnesses tell of a rare and extraordinary event at the Architectural Association.

Wow. The parametricists are queuing round Bedford Square this morning.

‘I honestly read enough of the book that I thought I would understand what autopoiesis is and I don’t but after eight hours in this room I realise I don’t have to, because Patrik does.’

– Brett Steele, Director of the AA

@anothersam, Sam Jacob

Patrik Schumacher had gathered together a collection of the architectural world’s renowned critical minds to discuss and challenge his new book The Autopoiesis of Architecture.

Is anyone at this #autopoiesis bonanza?

‘Can you imagine the time the doorknob broke?

– This describes my impressions when I tried to read your book.’

– Wolf Prix, Director of Coop Himmeblau It is an amazingly ambitious project, an arduous read, a dense book organised into an astonishing 250 chapters.

Are people wearing aprons and doing the parametric handshake? @ollywainwright, Oliver Wainwright

It was a talk show from the self-declared avant-garde, with Schumacher its host and a procession of luminous guests invited to share their reactions.

I’m starting a new hash tag, for the AA symposium going on today: ‘debating fundamentals’ #aadebfun @Jack_Self, Jack Self @Jack_Self I first thought #aadebfun was about rich female students and white gloves.

Disappointed. @entschwindet, Douglas Murphy

We all gathered together to hear people discuss a book that for the most part they hadn’t really read, or if they had done, they didn’t necessarily understand.

‘In a way I didn’t really read the book, I scanned it, did things with it.’

– Alejandro Zaera Polo, Director of Foreign Office Architects

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‘At 450 pages (and with only 18 images) it’s the first of a proposed two-volume work, making it surely the longest and, quite possibly, the most opaque manifesto in architectural historiography.’

– Steve Parnel, Critic with the Architects Journal The book is a sweeping universal appeal for architecture as a system of ideas. Reverse engineering his parametric experiments in Hadid’s practice, the AA DRL and his reading of systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, Patrik defines an agenda for how an architect can act in an increasingly complex world.

It is a book formed as a prop for a conversation and an anchor for a body of architecture that has done and continues to present itself as the leading edge of the profession.

‘The effort to make the book has galvanised a very substantial, important, essential, critical and fundamental discussion in the academy which hasn’t taken place in a hell of a long time.’

– Eric Owen Moss, Architect and Director of SCI-Arc School

The book is dogmatic, relentless, but most importantly it is a provocation, at a time when provocation is one of the rarest qualities in architectural culture.

‘The book is ‘a hammer with which to shape reality’ a weapon for a style war.’

– Bertolt Brecht via Patrick Schumacher ‘You don’t have to go into this book ten seconds before thinking of counter argument after counter argument.’

– Jeff Kipnis, Architecture critic In an era so bereft of ideology the very act of declaring a new unifying theory, the ambition to do so and the mythology of manifesto making is perhaps more important than the substance of any particular claims it may actually make.

‘The more I read the text the less it is about the text.’

– Theo Spyropoulos, Programme Director of AA DRL ‘More than anything AoA seeks unification: of architecture – not (merely) its theories. At some point all theories of unification eventually lead to the same thing: conspiracy theories’ – Brett Steele, Director of the AA

Just like the conspiracy theory, the book finds traction in the world through the narrative that is generated around it rather than the intricacies of its argument.

The typical account of conspiracy theories, in which governments and the military are concealing extraordinary technologies, extra-terrestrials and black operations, is actually the opposite of the truth.

‘In fact the only active and important kind of theory in the world that we live in today is the conspiracy theory. Born out of a deep scepticism for how the world appears, an unfounded and ungrounded unification of all actions and events becomes the basis for us understanding the world as it operates.’

– Brett Steele, Director of the AA ‘The gospel answers all of the questions it asks.

It acts as solid justification for its own system of beliefs, bringing further clarification to the new orthodox through deliberate obfuscation.’

– David Greene, Co Founder of Archigram The world we inhabit today is really just formed through the managing of perceptions. Patrik’s book, and the event he has organised around it is evidence of the ways a book can become useful and important in the world separate from any particular act or notion of actually reading it. A form of weaponised folklore, the mythology of a unifying theory, worthwhile not necessarily for the specifics of the system presented but for the audacity that someone would attempt to do it in the first place. @liam_young I haven’t read it. But I’ve heard him speak and I’d say that I’m more on his side than the fucking throwbacks who attack him. @timabrahams, Tim Abrahams @liam_young no one who talks about it has read it... for long, anyway, for my part, hats off to anyone manic enough to say, “HERE’S HOW...” @tonita00, Shumi Bose @tonita00 there was some interference on the live feed caused by Alvin Boyarsky spinning. @knight_david, David Knight

To point out that the AA of recent years has founded itself upon such a treaty on architectural production serves to crystallise the reactions against it as much as it does its supporters.

The Debating Fundamentals symposium.

Photo Valerie Bennett

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Events

Patrik Schumacher with Zaha Hadid. Photo Scrap Marshall

@knight-david @anothersam They shld all wear Mao uniforms, whilst chanting aphorisms from his book & occasionally banging their heads with it. @Furmadamadam, Adam Nathaniel Furman God – there is so much shit being spoken there, I can smell it in Yorkshire. Is the whole of the AA

hearsay, assumptions and predictions; the overheard, eavesdropped, microphone amplified and publicly web streamed; the conversation it promotes, the rumours it generates, the aggravation it causes, the brows it furrows and the debate it propels; the rally cries of the believers and the deniers and the people who attempt to distance themselves from it in the hope that it will all just go away.

like that, or is it just these people? @steveparnell, Steve Parnell

‘Caressing with guiltiness the sweet drama of geometry addiction – Algorithm and mathematics have a place in design, but to think that mathematics can actually describe or code our world is a mistake, or more an illusion.’

– Francois Roche, Director R&Sie(n). Excerpt from ‘Postcard to Patrik’ www.aaschool.ac.uk/downloads/aarchitecture/ postcardtopatrikschumacher.pdf

Liam Young is AA Diploma 6 Unit Master Debating Fundamentals; Probing the Autopoiesis of Architecture, AA Symposium, Friday 11 March 2011, AA Lecture Hall, Patrik Schumacher with Jeff Kipnis, Greg Lynn, Rem Koolhaas, Lars Spuybroek, Charles Jencks, Eric Owen Moss, Wolf Prix, Alejandro Zaera Polo, Mark Wigley, Mark Cousins, Brett Steele, Zaha Hadid..

The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 1 by Patrik Schumacher, Wiley, 2010 is available in the AA

It is this debate around the book that makes it compelling. As a book, it is an immense project but it is perhaps best described through the rumours and discussion that exist around it; collections of solicited and unsolicited comments, gossip and

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Bookshop, who are also taking pre-orders for Volume 2. aabookshop.net

Events

AA Membership Events

Breathtaking view of the city’s skyline from AHMM’s Angel Building, tour led by Berta Willisch, 24 March 2011. Photo Sue Barr

AA Members’ Building Visits

Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

Thursday 24 March 2011 AHMM took our group of AA Members through three projects where the practice has incorporated existing concrete structures into the design. Each of the site visits was led by a member of the design team for that project. The highlight of the visit, for AA SED students in particular, was the tour of the Angel Building, in Angel, Islington which had recently won a Civic Trust Award for AHMM’s impressive project planning that incorporated the re-use of an in-situ concrete structural frame from the original 1980s building. To further compliment the impressive design behind this project the fifth floor offered a breathtaking panoramic view of central London.

Zaha Hadid Architects

Thursday 14 April 2011 Zaha Hadid Architects’ first completed project in England, the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, forms part of the local community urban regeneration process.

Both passionate and dedicated to this project, architect Lars Teichmann from the ZHA team behind the school led this Members’ visit along with representatives from EGA, including the knowledgeable Oliver James-Parr, who introduced the group to the educational side of the project which is integral to the design.

Saturday Brunches & Private Talks: Meet the Curators

AA Archives: Projects, Personalities & Publics and

Wish We Were Here: Cedric Price Mental Notes

Saturday 26 March 2011 AA Archivist Edward Bottoms took the group on a guided tour of AA Archives: Projects, Personalities & Publics. Following on from this, Cedric Price biographer and AA Tutor, Samantha Hardingham, led a talk on the Wish We Were Here exhibition. From there the group was then served brunch in the Back Members’ Room.

Beyond Entropy and Concrete Geometries

Saturday 21 May 2011 Stefano Rabolli Pansera took visitors through a guided tour of Beyond Entropy while Marianne Mueller and Olaf Kneer led a talk on Concrete Geometries.

Following on from these talks, a brunch catered by Arnold & Henderson was served.

Membership Events, Private Talks, 26 March 2011 and 21 May 2011, AA Gallery and AA Front Members’ Room. Building Visits, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, 24 March 2011, Zaha Hadid Architects, 14 April 2011

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The Angel Building, Islington by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, 24 March 2011

Zaha Hadid Architects tour of the Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton led by Lars Treichmann, 14 April 2011

22

Edward Bottoms talks about the AA Archives exhibition, Projects, Personalities & Publics, 26 March 2011

Beyond Entropy curator Stefano Rabolli Pansera, 21 May 2011. Photos Sue Barr

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Events

AA Timeline 2010/11

24

30 July

22 October

Architecture Open Talks

Educating Architects,

Mark Cousins

at Hooke Park: Bill Gething

Reinventing Architecture

Technology and the First Person Singular

28 August

Achill – Linda Brownlee Exhibiting an Exhibition:

10 November

AA Today in Tokyo

Sean Edwards, Sam Jacob

Beyond Entropy at

Book Launch/Lecture:

Cini Foundation Venice

Lorens Holm

No Dust Adheres

Open Seminars:

Brunelleschi, Lacan,

11 November

20 September

Le Corbusier: Architecture,

The Americas, Photographs

AA Diploma Honours 2010

Space and the Construction

by Alex Laing

of Subjectivity The Nicholas Pozner Prize

23 November Writing as Architecture Christopher C M Lee Working in Series

12 November 25 October

Mark Cousins

24 November

8 October

Book Launch/Lecture:

Technology and the First

Gabriele Mastrigli

David Garcia

Monster Pieces:

Person Singular

In Praise of Discontinuity

MAP (Manual of

A Retrospective of

Architectural Possibilities)

Retro-perspective

12 October

26 October

Francine Houben

Peter Ahrends,

Dutch Mountains

Richard Burton,

Architecture Open Talks

Paul Koralek

at Hooke Park: Peter Clegg

13 October

ABK: Threads and

The Photographers’ Gallery

Connections

@ the AA Stephen Shore

28 October

Photography and the Limits

Alain de Botton

of Representation

Living Architecture

or La Leçon de Rome Book Launch/Lecture: William Firebrace

25 November

Marseille Mix

Public Occasion Agency: Metahaven

26 November 16 November

Symposium:

Open Seminars:

Stranger than Truth

Writing as Architecture

Thrilling Wonder Stories 2

Public Occasion Agency:

30 November

Nur Puri Purini

Open Seminars: Writing as Architecture

15 October

29 October

Commodities, Environmental

Reading Landscape:

Mark Cousins

Markets and the Future

Contemporary Landscape

Technology and the

of Cities

Photography

First Person Singular

In the Bubble:

Book Launch/Evening

Eugene Kohn

Noam Andrews and

Lecture: Jane Burry

KPF: The Global Practice

René Barownick

The ‘New Mathematics’

Concrete Geometries

Schumacher

Public Occasion Agency:

The Autopoiesis of Architecture

Kai Van Hasselt

Spatial Form in Social

The Photographers’ Gallery

Reflexive Urbanism

and Aesthetic Processes

@ the AA: Paula Yacoub 19 November

The Photographers’ Gallery

‘What happens to me’

Mark Cousins

@ the AA: David Spero

Technology and the First

Structures and Environment

5 November 18 October

Open Jury: Portfolios

Shumon Basar,

2009/10

Cynthia Davidson

Person Singular 9 December Anthony Vidler

Alexis Zavialoff

The Crisis of Modernism:

Distribution & Attitudes

AA Bookshop and Bedford

James Stirling out

Press at the New York

of the Archive

Art Bookfair

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Brett Steele

8 December

‘What do I do’ and Peter Eisenman

PE50: Peter Eisenman,

7 December Book Launch/Lecture: Patrik

2 November

Editing vs Curating

The City as Performance

18 November

Research Cluster:

PE50: 50 Years of

Public Occasion Agency: Arnold Reijndorp

17 November

of Architecture

Uncorporate Identity

First Year Lecture Series: 20 November

9 November

Grayson Perry

The Slice: Cutting to See

Daniel Libeskind The Space of Encounter

10 December

John Pawson – Plain Space Working in Series: Serie Architects

25

Events Mark Cousins

Bata City vs Thames

Photographers’ Gallery @

Architecture Open Talks at

Technology and the First

Gateway Projects

the AA: Stephen Gill

Hooke Park: Matthew Lewis

Person Singular

Bauhaus Kolleg/AAIS

Mostly Within the Area:

Interprofessional Studio

Photographic projects from

25 February

in and around East London

Artist Talks: Jeff Kipnis,

15 December Hide and Seek

26 January

Tobias Rehberger

Peter Cook

10 February

12 January

The Lost Art of Architectural

Translated By Book Launch

The Photographers’ Gallery

Composition – The

and Report:

28 February

@ the AA: Beatriz Colomina

Ingredients

Charles Arsène-Henry,

HHF architects: Recent

Shumon Basar

Works/Formalistic

How We Are Readers

Pragmatism

11 February

1 March

Artist Talks: Hito Steyerl

Lecture/Book Launch:

Double Exposure: Architecture as a Machine

28 January

to See

Artist Talks Series: Peter Welz

13 January

Enric Ruiz Geli

Mark Wigley, Brett Steele

1 February

Architecture of Failure

Damon Rich

15 February

Cities Destroyed for Cash

Public Occasion Agency:

14 January

On Art and Architecture

Media-ICT

Anna Minton

2 March

Ground Control

Anton Garcia Abril

Jeffrey Inaba, Mark Wigley,

3 February

Brett Steele and others

Wouter Vanstiphout

Volume 24 Roundtable

Blame the Architect: On the

16 February

Relationship Between Urban

Bolle Tham,

Architecture Open Talks

Planning, Architecture,

Martin Videgård

at Hooke Park:

Culture and Urban Violence

Out of the Real

Steven Johnson

4 February

17 February

4 March

Symposium/Book Launch

AA Archives: Projects,

Christoph Keller

The Unprimed Canvas:

Personalities & Publics

A Perisher’s Nostalgia:

Translated By

Stones and Beams

True Cities Dolor 15 January

Burgeoning Fields in

Becoming Fiction –

Practice

Self-Portrait as a Film-still AA Foundation

Books and Art – 18 February

A Relational Crisis

Open Jury The Unprimed Canvas

Wish We Were Here Yannis Kizis

Cedric Price: Mental Notes Ecclesial Anatomies

17 January

7 February

Book Launch:

Lecture/Book Launch:

22 February

Teresa Stoppani, Fred Scott

Brian Ford,

Bruno Latour

Paradigm Islands:

Rosa Schiano-Phan

Do Objects Reside in ‘res

Inter 1 – Going Back to

Manhattan and Venice

The Architecture &

extensa’ and If Not Where

Greenville

Engineering of Downdraught

are They Located?

18 January

Cooling

EmTech Jury Keynote

8 March 23 February

Book Launch: AAINTER10/

Lecture: Michael Weinstock

8 February

Peter Cook

ecoMachines v3.0

Architectural Agendas 21C

Public Occasion Agency:

The Lost Art of Architectural

Dubai Marine World: Life

Patrick Wright

Composition – The

Incubators

19 January

On Living in a World of

Ingredients

Book Launch/SED Jury:

Facades: From Prince

Joana Carla Soares

Potemkin to the Berlin Wall

AD Typological Urbanism:

The Photographers’ Gallery

and the Truman Show

Projective Cities

@ the AA: Howard Caygill

Performance of Tall

9 February

24 February

Temple: Architecture and

Buildings

Peter Cook

Bedford Press Lecture

Proto-Photography

The Lost Art of Architectural

Series: Can Atlay

21 January

Composition – The

Exercise in Sharing:

10 March

DRL Jury Keynote Lecture:

Ingredients

Inhabitants, Settings

Marcelo Spina

and a Gazette

Interstitial Mass: Figural and

Gonçalves

9 March

The Environmental

Neil Denari

Revisiting the Boulevard du

Embedded

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Lecture/Book Launch:

21 March

Vittorio Pizzigoni

23 May

Brad Cloepfil

Bedford Press Lecture

The Energy of

Concrete Geometries:

Occupation

Series: Jesko Fezer

Mies van der Rohe

Space versus Geometry

Design Problem Reality 4 May

27 May

Symposium

22 March

Book Launch:

Concrete Geometries:

Debating Fundamentals:

Public Occasion Agency:

Rosa Ainley

Finnisage

Probing the Autopoiesis

Markus Miessen,

2 Ennerdale Drive:

of Architecture

Hans Ulrich Obrist,

unauthorised biography

11 March

Armin Linke

Presentation: Alyssa Ueno,

14 March

The Archive as a Productive

6 May

First Year Lecture Series:

Space of Conflict

Concrete Geometries:

Hoi Chi Ning 23 March Luc Merx, Christian Holl

Gareth Doherty et al

Opulent Decay: The

Launch event: New

Contingency of Design

Geographies, A Journal of Design, Agency, Territory

15 March SED Lectures

Daewha Kang

Reporting Back From Tohoku

Spatial Form in Social and

EmTech Lecture Series:

Aesthetic Processes

Andrew Kudless, Recent Works

P.E.A.R. 11 June Sharp Prize for Excellence in

Benedict O’Looney,

Writing: Poetics and

Low Weald Cycling and

Polemics

Sketching in the Kent

Environmentally Responsive PhD Presentations

10 June

Countryside

Architecture: An Integrated

13 May

Approach to Design

Politics of Fabrication

17 June

Laboratory

Projects Review

16 March Peter Cook

24 March

The Lost Art of Architectural

Caroline Evans

Beyond Entropy:

AALASH End of Year after

Composition – The

The Ontology of the

Carlos Villanueva Brandt

Show Party

Ingredients

Fashion Model

The City as Creative Energy

16 March

25 March

14 May

Projects Review, Members’

Concrete Geometries

Writing and Critical Thinking

AHRA Research Student

Evening

Research Cluster Event:

in Architecture

Symposium

20 June

Arno Brandlhuber,

The City: Language,

28 June

Planning and Politics

FORMAT Issue 1: Magic

Christian Posthofen,

Book Launch:

Marianne Mueller

Martin Self, Charles Walker

The Ordering of Social

AA Agendas 9: Making

17 May

Relations through Building

Pavilions

Beyond Entropy:

30 June

Dr Silvia Davoli

FORMAT Issue 1: Philosophy Format

Format

17 March

26 March

Lina Bo Bardi: Primitivism

Lecture/Book Launch:

Meet the Curators Brunch

and Sustainability

Pier Vittorio Aureli

and Private Talks

The Possibility of an

6 July 19 May

FORMAT Issue 1: Lecture Format

Absolute Architecture –

28 March

Informal Cities Cluster

Writing Architecture

First Year Lecture Series:

Event: Alfredo Brillembourg

Max Hatler

S.L.U.M. Lifting: Informal

8 July

Toolbox for a New

FORMAT Issue 1: Library

Architecture

Format

18 March First Year Lecture Series:

29 March

Henry Hemming

Peter Cook The Lost Art of Architectural

20 May

11 July

Angelo Merlino

Composition – The

Beyond Entropy: Time Travel

Summer 2011 Trajectory

Large Hadron Collider:

Ingredients

– Shamanism to the Space

Public Forum,

Age

Unknown Fields: From the

The Big Bang Factory 3 May Beyond Entropy

Atomic to the Cosmic 21 May Meet the Curators Brunch

FORMAT Issue 1:

and Private Talks

Anniversary Format

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Projects

Faceted House 1

By Paul McAneary Architects

Clutter-free concept kitchen with sliding glass doors and frameless folded roof panel.

Paul McAneary Architects have recently completed Faceted House 1; an Edwardian terrace house located within a conservation area, in Hammersmith, London.

The project’s brief was to remodel and extend the three-bedroom, two storey house that was in a decrepit state and in need of considerable refurbishment and modernisation. The client asked for a contemporary design and functionality and he also expressed the desire to be able to perceive the garden as a continuation of the domestic space rather than ‘the outdoors’.

Paul McAneary Architects (PMA) responded to the brief by demolishing the existing 1980s rear extension to the property which was crumbling and dilapidated. The new extension was added via a clean and clearly defined line to the rear that respects the house’s heritage and gives it a unique, uniform aesthetic. The sculptural facade is at the same time visually striking and elegant. The reconfigured and expanded existing space was achieved by designing a huge openplan. The concept driving the whole design is a 30° twist that allows physical and perceptive overlapping between indoor and outdoor spaces, between garden and kitchen thresholds – so whilst at the sink you feel the garden is actually behind you. This conceptual idea is manifest in the details of the faceted zinc facade and the floating external deck, cut back to a fine angled edge.

Light floods into the house via the finest possible sections, making up the sliding doors,

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combined with the large fixed frameless panels of the facade that fold back into the depth of the building with a frameless folded roof panel. A sharp beam of light is projected into the depth of the house which dances through the space during the hours of daylight and which is extenuated by the pale coloured floor and ceiling bouncing light to the other end of the house.

A ‘ballet of light’ is the result.

PMA emphasise the importance of having a good client. As one of the earliest projects for his medium-sized office, Faceted House 1 was a unique opportunity due to the freedom the clients afforded the architects in the design and construction of the project. Their only request was a clutter-free and practical house allowing PMA near-autonomy in making most of the design decisions. Thus rather than just a pragmatic construction, the house takes on a conceptual playful approach using light and angular forms to make an architectural statement.

Faceted House 1 was included in the Don’t Move Improve! exhibition at NLA and was awarded the Living Space Design of the Year at the 2010 Design Awards.

Paul McAneary is an alumnus of the AA and a former AA Honorary Secretary Faceted House 1, Alumni Project, Hammersmith, London

Bird’s-eye view of the 30° faceted angle that allows the overlap between the indoor and outdoor spaces.

Night view of the sculptural facade and the floating deck. Photos: Paul McAneary Architects Ltd

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Projects

Honours Students 2011 Every year the AA awards exceptional fifth year Diploma students with Honours for achieving outstanding innovative work. This year’s recipients were Kim Bjarke (Diploma Unit 9), Tom Fox (Diploma Unit 4), Fredrik Hellberg (Diploma Unit 5) and Aram Mooradian (Diploma Unit 6), who were awarded with AADipl (Hons). Their units’ work was displayed as part of the exhibition and their Honours work will be showcased at the AA next term.

Kim Bjarke: The encased copy The project investigates the relationship between the original architectural object and its copies. Contrary to general opinion in today’s society, the project is based on the argument that the copy is not something bad, devalued or impure, it is instead something to cherish. The argument is visualised through a scenario of multiple iterations of copying, creating a context in which our preconceived ideas of the copy can be re-evaluated. The physical context of the project is located around Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. But the context of the project is not limited to the physical boundaries of the campus site. It also includes the larger body of Miesian architecture, and how the buildings are represented, and in the end perceived.

Tom Fox: The Southern Mediterranean:

Towards Radical Hospitality The project proposes a series of architectural and infrastructural devices that operate within Europe’s southern frontier. Set within the recent reorganisation of the European border and the popular uprising in North Africa, the project examines the close relationship between circulations of populations, capital and technology, and the construction of both urban systems and water infrastructures. Rather than the prevalent image of the border as a finite limit, the project exposes the frontier as a deep, fragmented and temporal surface extending deep into both the European and African interior, operating through the reorganisation of local space. Within this system, sovereignty is largely defined by the ability to identify levels of mobility for people and objects, or the power to limit or qualify the right to hospitality. The project proposes both spatial and institutional structures that position architecture amongst the multitude of practices that shape the physical space of the southern Mediterranean city.

Spanning from Europe to North Africa, the project reorganises the various regimes of mobility that operate in the territory: tourism, global agriculture, oil extraction, surveillance of migration and water management.

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Fredrik Hellberg: The Second Community.

Identity Tourism. California City In the desert northeast of Los Angeles in an abandoned city called California City the 739600m2 Second Community floats above the desert floor like a mountain avatar. In its crater the 1500 heliostatic mirrors reflect the light onto the artificial sky covering the desert of the trans-identity port.

With a capacity of 40,000 people the port gathers in its featureless white space individuals open to roleplay. The Second Community explores an alternative identity tourism that goes beyond the virtual space of online role-playing games, the open desert of the Burning Man festival and the convention halls of Cosplayers. Spanning half a kilometre the artificial desert of the port isolates the person in a void of imagination where the persona of an individual becomes a fugitive and creative semiotic gadget which collectively generates a public space of radical self-exploration; an experimentation. The porous mountain avatar surrounding and supporting the sky of the port collects its energy from the concentrated solar power plant in the centre of the crater, harvesting the power of the sun and delivers it to the caves around the central port where the identity tourists prepare for the events in the port.

Aram Mooradian: Gold Fictions Aboriginal dreamtime narratives speak of a time when the ground was soft and creation beings shaped mountains and rivers. Now the financial narratives of gold prices reshape the earth through massive excavations and technological incisions. The Atlas of Gold Fictions catalogues the strange infrastructures of the gold economy, from its source in the mines of Australia to the web of precious artefacts scattered across the globe. The infrastructure of gold’s solely virtual value is reimagined through the speculative artefacts of a new network of gold objects inscribed with the oral histories of the land from which it came.

A suicide note is inscribed on a single gold bullet, the sound of a grandmother’s laughter is encoded into an heirloom necklace and the dying languages of Australia’s indigenous culture are recorded onto the gold bars dug out of the very ground of their homeland.

Our relationship to our finite resources is re-examined with this new dispersed geology of artefacts encoded with the cultural rather than economic values of the contemporary world.

AA Honours Students, 17 July 2011

Kim Bjarke

Fredrik Hellberg

Tom Fox

Aram Mooradian

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Documents

Foster + Partners Award

Haiti Simbi Hubs , Aditya Aachi, Diploma Unit 7

Foster + Partners award an AA fifth year Diploma student a prize to commend the work which best addresses the themes of sustainability and infrastructure. Established last year, the prize aims to build stronger links between Foster + Partners and the AA and to promote understanding of contextual practices in the architectural industry today. This year’s winner was Aditya Aachi, Diploma Unit 7 with his project Haiti Simbi Hubs. He was awarded the prize at Projects Review. A formal reception and exhibition of all the finalists’ work at Foster + Partners’ studio will follow later this year.

Project Description: The earthquake and cholera outbreak of 2010 have exposed the lack of both physical and governmental infrastructure in Haiti.

Rapid unregulated growth of the city during economic depression led to bad building practice and planning. Post quake the IDP camps have overtaken any existing public space.

The rapid spread of cholera has highlighted poor access to water and sanitation in the country: ——34 per cent of people get all their water from rivers ——Only eight per cent have taps in their houses ——Only 19 per cent of people have access to a toilet.

The government can’t afford to build infrastructure and it is outside of the power of NGOs

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to do so. The earthquake and cholera have caused the Government and WASH NGO cluster to work together for the first time. This proposal aims to take advantage of this rare cooperation through the implementation of a government-managed and NGO-built infrastructure.

This will be achieved through introducing a network of sanitation points in the form of Simbi Hubs. These hubs localise sanitation processes by providing toilets/showers/clothes washing areas and food storage and preparation facilities.

In each hub the path of the water purification process is intersected at specific locations where recycled aluminium components act as a cue for maintenance or user interaction via the use of local vodou symbology. The aluminium components are designed and fabricated locally, using both traditional methods of metal fabrication present in villages outside the city and also training people in more modern techniques within the city.

The vision for the interventions is not only to create a new sanitation infrastructure, but also to make sense of the largely unplanned city through adding a layer of much needed public realm into the urban fabric.

Foster + Partners Award, 17 July 2011

Documents

The Dennis Sharp Prize for Architectural Writing In an effort to promote critical thought and historical understanding through writing, this year saw the Dennis Sharp Prize opened up across the school inviting entries that were submitted not only for History and Theory courses but also student writing for projects or otherwise. Dennis Sharp, through his work at the AA as editor, educator and writer, was committed to the development of architectural practice through writing. The prize preserves his legacy and reminds a new generation of architects that writing is an equal part of architectural expression. Of the 60 papers nominated, 12 shortlisted essays were presented on 6 May 2011 as part of a roundtable discussion. The judging panel for the award included Academic Head Charles Tashima, Editor of AA Files Thomas Weaver, Dennis Sharp’s widow Yasmin Shariff and Simon Whittle, recipient of the inaugural Sharp Prize last year (see AArchitecture 13). With students nominated from both the Intermediate and Diploma Schools, the essays covered a broad range of themes from the narrative to the critical, the historical to the abstract.

The 2011 winners were Scrap Marshall (Fourth Year), Aram Mooradian (Fifth Year) and Silvana Taher (Fifth Year). Excerpts are reproduced below: No Escape From Modernism and Modernity: Mr. Blandings Attempts to Build His Dream Home and Escape From The City

Scrap Marshall, AA Fourth Year ‘By looking at issues opened up by this lack of consideration of what constitutes city and country we can question the role of Mr. Blandings’ Dream in terms of both modern ideal and modern production, the problems of realisation and a life that seems to balance so precariously between happiness and anxiety. By looking beyond the inevitable narrative conceit of the film, I’d like to suggest that far from escaping the city and leaving his problems behind, Mr. Blandings is in fact inadvertently embracing it and what the city actually stands for. In fixating on an image of a better life in the country and endeavouring to make that image a reality, he is in fact consuming both the image of modernism and the production of modernity. Through this he becomes intrinsically involved in the continuation of the city he is trying to leave, playing a vital part in the construction of yet another iteration of it – the suburb. Put simply: Blandings can’t leave the city because he’s too busy building another.’

Fly-In, Fly-Out. Fit-In or Fuck Off: Fictions of the Australian Industrial Landscape

Aram Mooradian, AA Fifth Year ‘Peter lit his own cigarette and for the first time since entering the bus at Kalgoorlie, looked at the landscape around him. The bus had not stopped in a town at all, or rather, it had stopped in a corpse of one. Large rusted machines, the valves of crushers and the husks of old cars, sat piled in a line, which he imagined at some point in the dying years of the settlement had been rearranged in some effort of salvage. The dirt road that had brought the group to Menzies stretched forwards and backwards into the distance, with an array of scattered stone buildings on either side.

He approached the nearest and read the words General Shop painted in blue across a surprisingly recently painted stone wall. At least it looked recent, he thought. As he peered between the bars that guarded the windows, he saw dusty shelves where the odd can and package still sat, half moved.’

Architects Vs. The City or the Problem of Chaos

Silvana Taher, AA Fifth Year ‘In 1978, Koolhaas put Corbusier up against Manhattan and, perhaps surprisingly, declared Manhattan the winner. Manhattan, the city, managed effortlessly to create what Corbusier had tried painfully (and unsuccessfully one might add) to recreate. If Manhattan could outsmart Corbusier (not a meagre architect by any standards) would it not be reasonable to consider that cities might be better at creating cities then architects are at creating cities? That cities, partly planned, partly unplanned, partly designed, partly forgotten are simply better at creating the social and economic construct of the urban. So in 1978, Koolhaas put Corbusier up against Manhattan. Six years prior to that, he put himself up against London. This time he declared himself the winner. The architect, the organiser, the designer, the one with the holistic vision had won over the unorganised, the historic, the chaotic, the sometimes rather ugly, London.’

Dennis Sharp Prize for Architectural Writing, 6 May 2011

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Documents

New from AA Publications

Architecture Words 6: Projectiles Bernard Cache Selected essays with an introduction

by Mario Carpo Translated by Clare Barrett and Pamela Johnston 144 pp, 180 x 110 mm, paperback May 2011 978-1-902902-88-3 £12 Architecture Words 8: Tarzans in the Media Forest Toyo Ito Selected essays with an introduction

by Thomas Daniell c 160 pp, 180 x 110 mm, paperback April 2011 978-1-902902-90-6 £12 Architecture Words is a series of texts and essays on architecture written by architects, critics and scholars.

The words are edited and the pages designed in a way that acknowledges the ability of graphic forms to communicate architectural ideas; not only the ideas contained within each volume, but also the power of written ideas to challenge and change the way all architects think.

Forthcoming Architecture Words 5–8 Box Set Limited edition June 2011 978-1-902902-91-3 £55

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Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing Jason Griffiths With an afterword by Martino Stierli 144 pp, extensive col. ills 170 x 220 mm, hardback August 2011 978-1-907896-05-7 c £15 On 18 October 2002 Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino set out to explore the American suburbs. Over 178 days they drove 22,382 miles, made 134 suburban house calls and took 2,593 photographs. In Manifest Destiny, Griffiths reveals the results of this exploration.

Structured through 58 short chapters, the anthology offers an architectural pattern book of suburban conditions all focused not on the unique or specific but the placeless. These chapters are complemented by an introduction by Griffiths and an afterword by Swiss architectural historian Martino Stierli.

For further information on AA Publications visit www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications

Documents

New from Bedford Press

Civic City Cahier 5 Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis Erik Swyngedouw 64 pp, 2 col.

115 x 190 mm, paperback with dust jacket May 2011 978-1-907414-19-0 £8 Reading the urban revolts and out-bursts of irrational violence preceding and following the crisis of neoliberalism as signs of discontent and of a desire for alternative designs of the urban, Erik Swyngedouw reintroduces the idea of the (dead) polis as a space of political encounter. Techno-managerial policies of governing colonised the polis. Politics as dispute is replaced by the neoliberal, postdemocratic consensus.

This condition, which designers of all kinds helped to shape, excludes disagreement and disavows conflict as the constitutive element of democratic politics.

For Swyngedouw, designing dissensus in the context of a post-political regime requires transgressing ‘the fantasy that sustains the post-political order’.

It would strive to redesign ‘the urban as a democratic political field of dispute’ and to produce ‘common values and the collective oeuvre, the city’. While the city as polis may be dead, spaces of political engagement occur within the cracks, in between the meshes and the strange inter-locations that shape places that contest the police order. It is here that design, as a renewed political practice, can intervene.

Bedford Press was initiated by the Architectural Association (AA), London in 2008 as a publishing imprint of AA Publications Ltd that seeks to develop contemporary models of publication practice. It aims to establish a more responsive model of small-scale publishing, nimble enough to encompass the entire chain of production in a single fluid activity, from initial commission to the final printing.

Its output includes publications, pamphlets, posters and limited edition prints. www.bedfordpress.org

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Documents

Photo Library: Call for Collections

Jumping on the dunes, UAE. Photo Dimiter Dobrev

Contribute to the AA Photo Library Collection.

Have you taken any pictures on unit trips this year?

Would you like your photographs exhibited in the Photo Library Gallery? 9,000 images are already online and the Collection holds thousands more. Many have been taken by AA students, staff and alumni.

The AA’s photographic collection was originally created by students and staff when they started to take slides on school trips. Many were members of the AA Camera Club which began in 1893 and was re-launched in 2005 to encourage students and members to contribute to the Collection. Since the 1890s, the AA Photo Library has expanded dramatically with an archive of over 300,000 slides, negatives, prints and lantern slides, which are in the process of being uploaded to the website. AA students and staff have the facility to download low-resolution images from this site for school projects and it’s also a useful academic resource holding comprehensive information about each building featured. Versions without watermarks are available in the Photo Library.

We publish cards and postcards from the Collection and hold regular exhibitions and competitions, for example, a Camera Club exhibition is scheduled for early next year, to which new members are welcome to contribute by sending either slides or high resolution tiffs for selection for the Collection.

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Over the past six years we have also been scanning and cataloguing the collections of schoolwork dating from the 1880s, and school life from the 1920s – with the ambition of creating a new online resource. In the meantime, these can be accessed in the Photo Library.

The Photo Library also holds the AA’s DVD archive of our lectures dating back to the 1960s, including talks by Cedric Price, Robin Evans, Reyner Banham, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. Not to mention an expanding collection of approximately 1,000 films by directors including Wim Wenders, Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Jean Cocteau, Werner Herzog and Jim Jarmusch.

These are for student use only and can be borrowed overnight. The films and lectures can also be viewed in the exciting new AA Cinema, which opened in 2009 (equipped with 20 cinema seats and surround-sound).

The Cinema can be booked by units and students, and the AA Film Club has screenings every week during term time.

Addendum: The two images on page 13 of AArchitecture 14 of buildings by James Stirling are part of the AA Photo Library collection. www.aaschool.ac.uk/photolib AA Photo Library, Mon–Fri 10am–6pm, 37 Bedford Square

In rows from top left; An Italian conversation, Acireale; Cleaning the sunlight, Abu Dhabi; Vine fields, Trentino; Satellite dishes, Istanbul; Calatrava’s Oceanographic Museum, Valencia; India; Casa Mila, Barcelona; Floral Ornament, John Soane Museum; Barcelona. Photos Dimiter Dobrev

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Courses

Hooke Park Building Begins

By Martin Self In the autumn of 2011 the new Forestry Plan for Hooke Park, which is redefined on a ten-year basis, will be written. This will force the AA to consider its place and ambitions for Hooke Park (the 350-acre woodland campus that the AA took on in 2001) in new wider terms, expanding consideration beyond the workshop and studio facilities and into the estate’s landscape and ecology as a whole. The detail of the 25-year plan will determine the tree felling and replanting strategy and how issues like public use and biodiversity are managed.

But underlying those decisions must be a fundamental philosophy about how a place is treated in the long term, beyond being just a resource for building material and a site for a workshop.

2011 is a significant year for the AA at Hooke Park, with the Design & Make programme underway and the first student-designed building projects starting on site this summer. Until now the AA’s presence at Hooke Park has been mainly as short-term visitors, so for the first time we have a permanent engagement in, and responsibility for, this unique place. Using the framework set out in the strategic plan (developed by Andrew Freear, Elena Bartel and their students in 2006–7) an infrastructure is emerging which allows the future of Hooke Park – physically and culturally – to be determined by the AA. Through the mix of activities at Hooke – including short unit and other London-based programme visits, Visiting School workshops, and the long-term residential Design & Make programme – the AA now has a continuous presence at Hooke Park.

In setting out the ambition for Hooke Park, the strategic plan described the basis of the Design & Make MArch course. This year with Diploma 19, Design & Make is designing and building the ‘Big Shed’, a large covered work-space that will provide the prototyping and assembly space for subsequent projects. The building is part of the development of facilities at Hooke Park, which includes the Caretaker’s House designed by Intermediate Unit 2 last year (and which will be on-site later in the year) and, in subsequent years, further accommodation and studio space. Substantial initial funding from these projects is in place through the very generous Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest.

A public programme of visiting lectures at Hooke Park also began this academic year. Peter Clegg, Gianni Botsford and Bill Gething spoke during the autumn term about their respective approaches to sustainable architecture. These open talks take place

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alongside seminars for Design & Make and are opened up to a local audience of architects, artists, builders and others with an interest in Hooke Park. This new and supportive local group is emerging through word-of-mouth. In the second term the talks’ focus shifted to timber and fabrication technologies.

Matthew Lewis, of London’s Metropolitan Works talked about how digital fabrication technologies may be applied to natural materials and Steven Johnson, of The Architecture Ensemble, presented the processes involved in designing and building the Downland Gridshell Museum. Jez Ralph, of the Silvanus Trust, also visited to speak about relationships with UK forestry, local timber production for construction and the future projects at Hooke Park.

Outside of term-time, a series of short residential courses is being developed. In April 2011 the new MakeLab Visiting School, a collaboration between Hooke Park’s workshop and the Digital Prototyping Lab, spent five days testing inventive approaches to fabricating and assembling at Hooke Park, using materials from the woodland. Led by Jeroen van Ameijde, Michael Grau, Luke Olsen and Brendon Carlin, bespoke robotic setting-out devices were made and deployed to help build two structures amongst the trees. Motion-capture and brain-wave-sensing technologies, linked to the geometric definitions used by the devices, were employed to help determine and analyse the constructions. The following week, the Maeda-sponsored workshop, entitled Furnishing the Landscape and led by Shin Egashira, continued the explorations of the previous Twisting Concrete workshops, by looking at how those systems can be applied as site-specific furniture in the Hooke Park landscape. These projects are all examples of the emerging ambition to have a deeper engagement in Hooke Park’s topography. Working with Chris Sadd, Hooke Park’s forester, the redefinition of the Forest Plan is one example where we can influence the future of the Hooke Park landscape at a fundamental level.

Martin Self is the Director of the Design & Make MArch Programme and Unit Master, Diploma 19 Hooke Park, Beaminster, Dorset

Design & Make and Diploma 19 students prototyping assemblies of the Big Shed workshop building.

A structure produced during the MakeLab Visiting School in April 2011, using an automated setting-out device suspended from the trees. Photos Martin Self

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Legacy

Spring 2011 School Meetings

By Hugo Hinsley The AA is a unique organisation which over its long history has offered a place for debate, exhibition and argument about all aspects of architecture, as well as creating a distinguished School. The AA is independent and self-governing, and runs both the School and the Association. Since 1971 the model of organising the AA has developed a dynamic balance between the Council (the elected trustees), the School Community (Council members and all students and staff), and the broader membership of the Association.

The Chairman or Director has been selected by the School Community and appointed by Council to lead the academic and operational development of the AA. Intentionally, there is very little structure imposed by Council or the AA constitution on a Director – they are free to make whatever arrangements, committees or other administrative structures they think best, so long as they maintain the confidence of the School Community and remain within the terms of their contract with Council.

The School has evolved and expanded over the past 20 years, offering a rich and diverse programme of undergraduate and postgraduate education. In the past few years Brett Steele has consolidated and expanded the space of the AA into the current collection of buildings in Bedford Square and Morwell Street. One result of this is the recent opportunity to rethink how we use the space – there has been a first exercise to propose an outline plan, and there will be further debate about this in the next few years, combined with a major fundraising exercise.

During this academic year there has been a lot of discussion across the School about developing a debate on the present and future models of the academic structure, and on ways of improving discussion and communication. Part of this has been about immediate questions (for example about the academic calendar, and about Brett’s new contract), and part has been about a longer term rethinking of the relationships between the Director, the Academic Head and all the parts of the School. This debate has flowed through many informal meetings, a formal meeting of the School Community, and a Special General Meeting of the whole Membership.

At the School Community Meeting on 21 March 2011 there were three agenda items. The first was a statement by Brett to bring the discussion up to date following the many meetings, and this led to further discussion and an agreement for further informal meetings before the end of term. The second item was

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to review a previous model of a representative group of students and staff that was established in order to improve communication and the discussion of ideas across the School, and between the School and the Director. Such a group of elected representatives existed from 1993 to 1996. It was an advisory group and had regular meetings with the then Chairman.

Questions raised in the discussion at the meeting included: ——Does the School need another group, or should we consolidate and link more effectively the existing groups?

——If the School needs another group, should it be elected, what structure of representation should it have, and what remit and powers should it have?

——How soon could such a group be organised?

It was pointed out that there were a number of advisory groups currently reporting to the Director’s office, but it was unclear how many of these existed and what their remit was. Brett agreed to circulate an updated list of these groups and their remits.

It was agreed that written proposals for representative models could be made by any members of the School. These proposals were discussed at a School meeting at the start of the Spring Term. Two proposals were presented, only one of which was a long-term model. This model will be developed and there will be a report back to the School in the form of a meeting at the start of next term

The third item on the agenda was not discussed for lack of time but it was supposed to be an explanation of a previous model of a Working Group of the School Community to develop alternative models for the future academic and organisational structure of the AA School. It is expected that this item will be discussed at a later date and an agreement reached about whether to set up a Working Group, to enable alternative models to be developed and discussed before the end of the current Director’s contract. These debates will continue and new models will evolve, as they always have in the culture and history of the AA. We can look forward to another cycle of change in this unique organisation.

Hugo Hinsley is a Course Director of AA Housing and Urbanism, AA Future Practice and the AA Visiting Teachers Programme AA School Meetings, 21 March and 26 May 2011

Global

AA Tohoku Earthquake Action

By Naoki Kotaka

Yakitori grill, designed and made by Shin Egashira,

AATEA Yakitori Fundraiser. Photos Valerie Bennett

Rubens Azevedo, Julian Loeffler, Masaki Echizenya & Xiong Chan. Long distance design consultant Jesse Sabatier.

‘A month has passed since the traumatic disaster occurred on 11 March...’ Yet, while scrolling through an online newspaper, the length of time that has passed since Japan’s earthquake and subsequent Tsunami feels almost immeasurable. It is as if the sheer ferocity of this natural catastrophe has collapsed any sense of value that our lives had previously been built upon.

The physical and psychological scars with which the disaster has left us are unprecedented. However, on a more positive note, the network of support and sympathy that emerged from the global community has proven to be extraordinary. In addition to worldwide financial aid for Japan, there have been numerous fundraising activities at both institutional and individual levels. The AA was no exception with AATEA (AA Tohoku Earthquake Action), comprised of students, alumni and tutors, being formed on the Monday after the earthquake, to promote the immediate aid and redevelopment of the Tohoku area of Japan. A network of support quickly spread through donation boxes located within the AA as well as a first fundraising event that took place on the following Friday. On the evening of the event, the AA was packed with like-minded, generous people who had come to show their support. A second fundraising event took place at the end of term party where AATEA sold Asahi beers, and a further event took place on 10 June 2011.

After these initial actions, the formulation of ideas through architecture and education is crucial in order to assist the long-term redevelopment of the region. The Miyagi prefecture, one of the most severely damaged areas, presented an outline of their

redevelopment plan in a recent news article, assigning the first three years to restoration, the next four years to reformation, with the last three years as a reinforcement period. This shows what it will take to return to normalcy – a considerable length of time and a commitment to rebuild Tohoku’s architecture and culture. As time progresses and coverage of the incident gradually disappears, it is inevitable that our awareness of the disaster will fade. Thus, AATEA will continue to act as an agent within the AA to raise awareness through organising a series of talks and events in the coming months.

Naoki Kotaka is a Fourth Year AA Student AATEA has raised £4,024 at the time of writing and all donations have been passed on to the Civic Force, a Japanese disaster relief organisation.

AATEA would like to thank all the generous donations and extend our acknowledgement to: AA Director’s office, AA Development office, AA Membership office, AA Audio Visual office, AA Digital Platforms, AA Workshop, AA Maintenance, POA, and Student Forum.

For more information please visit tea.aaschool.ac.uk or write to aatea@aaschool.ac.uk AATEA, Fundraising Events, 25 March 2011, 1 April 2011, 10 June 2011

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NEWS AND NEWS BRIEFS

AA COUNCIL 2011/12

AA BOOKSHOP HAS MOVED

Every year the AA Membership (including staff and students) elect a number of representatives to form the AA Council, the body that has overall responsibility for governing the Architectural Association, Inc., which includes the AA School. The AA is governed constitutionally as a charitable company, which means that it is both a Registered Charity as well as a Company Limited by Guarantee. AA Council Members are, in effect, trustees of the charity and directors of the company.

The Council for the session 2011/12, made up of Officers and Ordinary Members of Council is:

The AA Bookshop has relocated to the ground floor front room of number 32 Bedford Square for the duration of the Autumn term. We will close for a few weeks after Christmas and re-open mid-late January in an expanded space at the same location. Our contact details and opening hours remain the same. www.aabookshop.net

Officers President: Keith Priest Hon. Vice Presidents: David Jenkins, Christina Smith Hon. Treasurer: Sadie Morgan, BA(Hons) MA(RCA) Hon. Secretary: John Andrews, AADipl Past President: Alex Lifschutz, BSc(Social Sciences) Ordinary Members Julia Barfield, MBE RIBA Mike Davies, CBE AADipl MArch RIBA FRSA FRGS FICPD Frank Duffy Merlin Eayrs Julia King, AADipl Sophie Le Bourva Aram Mooradian Diana Periton, M.Phil DipArch Ken Powell, MA HonFRIBA Jerome Tsui Jane Wernick, BSc(Hons) FICE FIStructE FRSA Julyan Wickham For information concerning the AA Council, the AA’s structure and constitution or a copy of the Electoral Reform Services report, please contact Kathleen Formosa, Company Secretary, on 020 7887 4018 or email secretary@aaschool.ac.uk

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MEMBERS’ TRIP TO COPENHAGEN

The AA Membership Office is organising a trip to Copenhagen for a guided tour of Living Frontiers of Architecture III–IV at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (www.louisiana.dk).

The exhibition consists of a crossover between architectural projects, art installations and case studies from various places in the world and is divided in to three overarching themes: The Dream, Cell/Network and Homeland.

Additional programme information TBC. Friday 30 September – Sunday 2 October 2011 www.aaschool.ac.uk/membership/ benefits/events.php

Bolles+Wilson, the practice of Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter Wilson (both former AA students) has a new book being published, entitled A Handful of Productive Paradigms. The book chronicles not only the wide range of projects by the Münster-based architects over the last eight years, but also includes an accompanying theoretical and cultural discourse which underpins their international reputation. Bolles + Wilson believe that architecture is a symbiosis of the conceptual and the pragmatic, of the everyday and the exceptional, of the scales of masterplans and of details of urban context and choreographed interiors, of emotion and ‘ratio’.

Gustafson Porter, the practice of Neil Porter (AADipl (Hons)1983, former AA Academic Staff and Former AA Council Member), Kathryn Gustafson and Mary Bowman (AA Dipl 1988, former Vice-President of the AA and former AA Academic staff) received a commendation at the 2011 MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Awards for their project Bay East, Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.

The Gardens by the Bay form an integral part of the strategic development plan to promote Singapore as a ‘City in a Garden’. Gustafson Porter addressed not only the environmental concerns within the site, but worked collaboratively with Government agencies to understand how the Bay East Gardens can enhance the future development of Singapore.

The practice has recently won two major high-profile design competitions: the Milan City Life Park, a major redevelopment of the historical Fiera Milano Quarter, and the 23-hectare Valencia Parque Central project which is part of the most important redevelopment project of Spain’s third biggest city to date. In addition, Mary Bowman judged the 2011 RIBA Awards for the East Midlands, as one of 17 RIBA judges this year selected for their professional eminence, while Neil Porter presented

NEWS BRIEFS

Landscapes in Transition: Gustafson Porter’s Work on the Periphery at the Rapperswil Meeting 2011 in Switzerland.

The Angel Building by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the practice of Simon Allford (former Vice President of the AA) and Paul Monaghan (GradDiplCons AA 1989) (see p21–23), was featured in the 10 February 2011 issue of the AJ. The refurbishment is the practice’s fourth office project for Derwent London, a development company.

Valeria Guzman (AA H&T MA 2006 and AA PhD 2010) recently organised an event entitled Training as an Architect, Thinking about Architecture, which featured nine architects from Costa Rica who studied at the AA, presenting their ideas, tools and the modalities through which they make, speak and think about architecture at the School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica, May – June 2011. Valeria has also had her AA Doctoral Thesis published as the book Form and Fact: Graphic Design, Modernity and Governance.

The book is about how the graphical arrangement of numerical data becomes a means through which to collect, classify, enumerate and disseminate knowledge in the modern western world.

Paolo Cascone (AA E&E MA 2003) was interviewed in Abitare on the topic of post-vernacular design and the Atelier Paolo Cascone self-construction experiment in Sourgoubila, Burkina Faso in February 2011 (see AArchitecture 14).

Cascone/CodesignLab also led a workshop entitled ECO-LOGIC HABITAT about performative self-construction from 27 June – 9 July 2011 at Casa dell-Architettura di Roma, in partnership with Fabrizio Carola and AKT Engineering. The workshop proposed a new way of bridging high-tech design processes and low-tech construction. The final prototype was

realised in the garden of the House of Architecture in Rome, on 9 July 2011, with a public ceremony. www.abitare.it www.inarch.it/default.aspx? pag=0.6.10.3&lang=it#english www.co-design-lab.net Tal Senior (AADipl 1991) won first prize for the design of the Holocaust Children’s Monument in the Open Public Competition in the city of Holon, near Tel Aviv in 2010. The monument, designed as a labyrinth consisting of walls of varying heights, is intended to create a sense of place. The walls will be clad with a system of glass panels containing 1.5 million marbles to commemorate the 1.5 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust.

The project was exhibited along with other work by Tal at the 2010 Israel Conference for Architecture and Design which took place in May 2010 in Tel Aviv.

Around 50 Israeli Architects, including Senior, were invited to exhibit at the conference, which was organised in collaboration with Domus magazine.

Building will take place this year.

Paola Yacoub (AADipl 1994) had an exhibition entitled Drawing with the Things Themselves at the Beirut Art Center from 10 February – 15 April 2011 which was reviewed in the Daily Star online, a Lebanese publication. She also gave a performance of The Edifying Story of Li Guoxing at the venue on 24 February 2011, written by herself and Michel Lasserre. In addition she led a workshop entitled Aldo Rossi’s Displacements at the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’île de Vassivière on 14 March 2011. www.dailystar.com.lb/article. asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4& article_id=124974#axzz1EJyPmdG3 Based on the (now infamous) 2010 assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mahbouh in a five star

luxury hotel in Dubai, Face Scripting: What did the Building See? is a film collaboration between artists Jane & Louise Wilson, Eyal Weizman (AADipl 1998) and Shumon Basar (AA Dipl 2000 and AACP director), which debuted at the Sharjah Biennial. It reflects on the mediatisation of the incident as a new kind of filmmaking and 21st century forensics. The project was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, and co-produced by the Farook Foundation, with Mohammed Hafiz & Dalia Asaad and Luis Augusto Teixeira de Frietas. www.sharjahart.org/biennial/ sharjah-biennial-10/artists-participants Alfredo Ramirez (AALU Studio Master and AA Mexico Visiting School Director) gave a lecture on the subject of Landscape Urbanism at the School of Architecture, Syracuse University in Florence on 31 March 2011. The lecture was part of a Symposium called: Green Value: the Economic Benefits of Sustainable Design, organised by Lawrence Davis, Syracuse School’s co-ordinator.

Teresa Stoppani (AA Member and former AA Academic Staff) gave a public lecture at UTS, where she is a visiting professor of Architecture History and Theory, on 6 April 2011 entitled, Islands and Paradigms: on Unorthodox Ways to Read the City. Drawing from Teresa’s recent book Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge 2010), the talk argued that the city and its processes are intellectually understood not only by reference to the urban cultural context but also by drawing categories from other disciplines. She also presented the paper Eyes that do not see; Urban trompe-l’oeil as a Critical Act on 9 April 2011 at the University of Sydney as part of the Right to the City Symposium. In addition she gave a lecture entitled The Architecture of the Disaster at RMIT University in Melbourne on 27 May 2011. www.therighttothecity.com/ symposium.html

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NEWS BRIEFS

The Bronks Youth Theatre in Brussels

by MDMA, the practice of Martine De Maeseneer (Former Diploma Unit Master) having previously been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prize 2011 (see news briefs, AArchitecture 14) was one of the six finalists. This is the first building in Belgium to have reached this stage in the competition.

Ahmad Sukkar (AA DRL March 2006) presented his PhD thesis Structures of Light: the Body and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition at the Boundless Human Potential Symposium, Worcester College, Oxford on 7–8 May 2011. www.ibnarabisociety.org/ events.html#sukkar www.ahmadsukkar.com Michael Kloihofer and Zoe Chan (both AADipl 2010) have created a temporary architecture/art installation project and pop-up teahouse in Dalston in collaboration with other designers.

The installation, called Urban Fog, was on display from 1–21 May 2011. Proceeds went towards the relief effort in Japan following the disaster earlier this year.

Lawrence Lek (AADipl 2008) created a sound installation entitled Drones for the project which consisted of two sculptural speakers placed at opposite ends of Urban Fog, playing an ambient sound loop that slowly pans between the front and back chambers, thereby augmenting the acoustic depth of the installation.

In addition Lawrence and Onur Ozkaya (AA Emtech MSc 2007) produced a sculptural installation entitled Twins in which two identical wings formed from bent plywood cells create a suspended surface and path into an artificial cave.

The Coldharbour London gallery hosted the inhabitable sculpture at its inaugural exhibition, Illuminations, in June 2011. www.urbanfog.net

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Immanuel Koh (AADRL MArch 2010 & AA Istanbul Visiting School 2011 Unit Master) has been appointed Unit Master at the Dessau Institute of Architecture (DIA/Bauhaus) Graduate School in Germany, in addition to his current role as Scripting Course Master. His studio investigates the use of computational systems and physical computing apparatus in architectural design, constituting part of DIA’s Digital Cluster. Immanuel has also been invited to teach at the ars11Berlin, a five-week programme based at the Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin (BHT), in June 2011. www.immanuelkoh.net http://codesintheclouds.wordpress.com http://summer-academy-berlin.eu/ ars_berlin.html Eugenia Fratzeskou (AA Member) has been one of the international reviewers for ISEA 2011 Istanbul and she will deliver her lecture, Mapping Uncertainty, at ISEA 2011 Istanbul Conference (14–21 September 2011). Eugenia has also been appointed a workshop tutor and member of the Curatorial Committee for Urban Transcripts, Rome, 2011. Her video work was included in the Road Movie One Minutes Selection, April 2011. Eugenia’s latest articles Urban Transcripts 2010: Over the Skin of the City and Revealing Interstitial Spaces are available in English & Italian through Digicult. www.digicult.it/en/ www.sarcha.gr/ViewAssociate. aspx?associateID=134 Mark Pimlott (AA Dipl 1985 and former AA Academic Staff) was commissioned to make a new work, Some Clearings, a series of thirty-six photographs, for the exhibition Radical Autonomy / Nieuwe Werelden van Niks which recently opened at Netwerk, Centrum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Aalst, Belgium. In addition, World, a public square designed by Mark at BBC’s Broadcasting House in central London is now complete. Mark’s essay,

Jeanne d’Architecture, or: Phyllis Lambert and the Love of Architecture, in Oase 83: Commissioning Architecture, was published at the beginning of 2011.

An essay on the renowned architectural photographer Hélène Binet was published in a monograph on her work

by Phaidon in May 2011. An essay about artists and architects was published in Painting with Architecture in Mind, edited

by Ed Whittaker and Alex Landrum in June 2011 and a short essay about the lobby of New York’s Paramount Hotel recently appeared in Lobbies and Lounges, published by Routledge and edited by Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey.

Le Foin Bas, a residential project by Max Babbé (AA Dipl 2006) with MOOARC, located on the southcoast of Jersey, Channel Islands, has won a Downland Prize in 2010, and has been nominated for a RIBA Award in 2011.

Following the award-winning repair and restoration by John Melvin (AA Dipl 1963 and former Vice President of the AA) of Oxford’s Holywell Music Room, the oldest purpose built music room in Europe, Papadakis Publishers recently published John’s The Stones of Oxford: Conjectures on a Cockleshell, illustrated essays on architecture and town planning.

Saturday 7 May marked the first time at the AA and in the UK that the AA’s Part 3 exam went digital, thanks to Alastair Robertson (AA PP Director) and Rob Sparrow (AA PP Co-ordinator). The 17 Part 3 candidates prepared and submitted all their experience records and wrote all their four examination papers in digital format, including one candidate sitting the AA Part 3 exam in Dubai.

Students already get their Part 3 resource materials and course lecture notes on a memory stick. Now the Part 3 examiners will receive students’ exam submissions in the same format.

NEWS BRIEFS

Henrietta Williams (AAIS student) was recently interviewed by Tom Dyckhoff for a section on The Culture Show about the subtle militiarisation of cities in which she showed Tom around the Ring of Steel, a security installation around the City of London that she photographed and mapped with George Gingell (former AA student).

The programme aired on 19 May 2011. www.henriettawilliams.com AA Landscape Urbanism MA opened its landscape pavilion as part of the Horticultural Fair taking place in Xian, China from April to October 2011. The pavilion began as an invitation to develop a small piece of landscape able to reflect the principles and concepts developed in the MA programme. Special thanks to Hossein Kachabi, Jorge Ayala, and Min Joo Baek (all AA LU MA 2008) and Eduardo Rico (AA LU MA 2003 and AA LU Tutor) and Alfredo Ramirez (AA LU MA 2005, AA LU Tutor and AA Mexico Visiting School Course Director). http://aa-landscape-urbanism. blogspot.com Rosa Ainley (AA Digital Platforms Editor) published 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography (Zer0 Press), a memoir of an existing house in Colindale, north London and its occupants, their families and the houses they lived in. The book analyses the everyday lived experience of housing design, and its impact on class identities and gender roles, through the prism of family narrative, disturbing the boundaries of the imaginary and the real.

A work of text and image, 2 Ennerdale Drive calls into question the veracity accorded to ‘documents’ produced across institutional, public and private family contexts, using publicity materials such as production stills, promotional leaflets, postcards and press cuttings.

Christina Doumpioti (AA Emtech Studio Master and AA San Francisco Visiting School Course Co-ordinator) was an invited speaker at the Processing Matter / Processing Complexity event taking place in Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, on 17–18 May 2011. http://digitaltransformations.net/ processingmatter Studio Integrate: Mehran Gharleghi (AA Emtech MArch 2009), Amim Sadeghy (AA Emtech MArch 2008), Tomasz Mlynarski (AA Emtech MArch 2008), Kyle Schertzing (AA Emtech MArch 2010), and Diana Araya (AA LU MA 2010) recently designed an installation called Inverscape, comprised of draping a fabric ceiling and synthesising dynamic computational design and behaviour analyses with physical material experiments, to achieve an innovative and unique spatial quality. The installation was on view at Tina We Salute You in North London from 3 May – 1 July 2011. http://studiointegrate.com Zubin Khabazi (AA Emtech MSc 2009) recently published two e-books: Generative Algorithms, Concepts and Experiments, Weaving and Generative Algorithms, Concepts and Experiments, Porous Shell on Grasshopper, which are the result of his ongoing research on algorithmic architecture. www.grasshopper3d.com/page/ tutorials-1 Cesare Griffa (AA DRL MArch 2002) together with studiogriffa architetto recently presented their project Porto Pino Beach at the international competition 20+10+X Architecture Awards, 9th cycle and have been selected and classified in the top 20 by an international jury. http://cesaregriffa.com www.worldarchitecture.org

Mehmet Konuralp (AA Dipl 1965) has recently been awarded by the Turkish Chamber of Architects the Grand Architect Sinan Prize for lifetime achievement. He has been active as a designer as well as a lecturer in many parts of the world and he is still in practise in Istanbul.

Manijeh Verghese ( Fourth Year AA Student and Student Editor of AArchitecture) is now the website editor of a new start-up architecture, fashion and design journal entitled Disegno Magazine. www.disegnomagazine.com Accra Bus Rapid Transit System, designed by Elsie Owusu (AA Member and former AA Student) and Elsie Owusu Architects with FAM Architekti was recently launched by HE John Mahama, Vice-President of Ghana.

Jae-Sung Chon (AA Member and AA Visiting Teacher 2009) together with Migrating Landscapes Organization (MLO) was selected to curate the Canadian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture.

Marta Malé-Alemany (AA DRL Studio Master) has presented work from design studios at the AADRL and IAAC (Barcelona) at the FABRICATE conference at UCL, 16–17 April 2011.

The work, from design studios taught in collaboration with Victor Vina (Barcelona) and Jeroen van Ameijde (AA Digital Prototyping Lab, AA Unit Master Intermediate Unit 6 and AA DRL Course Tutor) is also published in the conference book under the same title, (FAB)BOTS, Customised Robotic Devices for Design and Fabrication.

Danielle Rago (AA MA HCT Student and Student Editor of AArchitecture) is now Curator at Archive of Spatial Aesthetics and Praxis. www.archiveofspatialaesthetics.com

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Martha Giannakopoulou (AA Dipl 2001), Seki Hirano (AA Dipl 1999) and Annika Grafweg (AA Dipl 2000) of IF-[untitled] Architects, an Athens- and Londonbased studio, have recently been selected

by NIB as one of the top ten young practices in Athens. www.if-untitled.com www.newitalianblood.com/ index.pl?pos=04.01 On Friday 13 May a symposium entitled Politics of Fabrication Laboratory took place at the E[AD] Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile. Participants included Brett Steele (AA Director) and Franklin Lee (AA Dipl 1995), among others academic leaders, practitioners and architectural personalities, opening up a conversation on the implications between particular socio-cultural conditions and current digital fabrication techniques. The event was a prelude to the AA Valparaíso Visiting School, 1–12 August 2011.

Dolores Ruiz Garrido (AA Member) was recently awarded honourable mention for the Spiretec Competition, India, along with Crab studio and Semisotano RGRM Arquitectos. Also, last month one of her buildings was selected in the Spanish Biennale, ‘Tetris house’ new apartments in an old house. www.rgrm.es www.semisotano.es The Plasmastudio/Groundlab Flowing Gardens project has officially opened in Xian, China as part of the International Horticultural Expo 2011. The project is a collaboration between Plasmastudio, the practice of Eva Castro (GradDiplDes (AA) and AA LU Director) and Holger Kehne (former AA Diploma Unit Master) and Groundlab Eva Castro, Holger Kehne, Alfredo Ramirez (AA LU MA2005 and AALU Studio Master), Eduardo Rico (AA LU MA 2003 and AA LU Course Tutor), Sarah Majid and

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Dongyun Liu (both AA LU MA 2005) comprising 37 hectares of landscape and three buildings – Guangyun entrance, Creativity pavilion and a greenhouse. www.groundlab.org www.plasmastudio.com GMG Collective, Eduardo McIntosh (AA Diploma 18 Technical Tutor), Kostas Grigoriadis (AADRL MArch 2009 and AA Design and Make Course Tutor), and Evan Greenberg (AA Emtech MSc 2008, AA Emtech Course Tutor and AA San Francisco Visiting School Co-Course Director) were winners of the Spiretec Competition 2010, appointed to design a new 62,000 square metre mixed-use development in Greater Noida, Delhi, India. www.gmgcollective.com Naina Gupta (AA DRL MArch 2003) is currently doing research at Strelka Institute of Architecture, Design and Media in Moscow entitled Russia: Beyond Oil and Gas: Minimisation of Energy.

X-Architects, the practice of Farid Esmaeil (AA Member), had work on display at a stand at Cityscape Jeddah 2011, an international urban development and real estate investment event which took place from 11–13 June 2011.

Helena Marconell (AA Member) had some of her art work exhibited at three venues at the Notting Hill Visual Arts Festival, the Tabernacle (8–16 June 2011), West Eleven Gallery (17–24 June 2011) and Harris Arcade (3–25 June 2011).

Max Kahlen (AA Dipl 2008 and AA Media Studies Course Lecturer) along with his London-based office Dyvik & Kahlen Architecture and Elseline Bazin was awarded the first prize for the European Wilmotte Competition in Versailles. The challenge was to invent

a contemporary language for Versailles’ architectural heritage: to convert the National Archives of Versailles, a very pragmatic building from around 1920, into a housing and office complex.

Matthew Butcher (AA Tutor, Foundation) was recently involved in an exhibition, organised by The Society of British Theatre Designers, a survey of British set design, at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The exhibition was called Transformation & Revelation: UK Design for Performance 2007–2011 and ran from 18 March to 16 April 2011. A collection of some of the works from the show will be exhibited at the V&A next year and at the Prague Quadrennial this summer. www.post-works.com www.theatredesign.org.uk/ publications/catalogues Somayeh Ebrahimi (AA Member and AA Tehran Visiting School student 2010) along with Mahdi Alirezaei was recently awarded a third place Iranian Interior Design Award for their AASAA Pain Clinic by Architecture & Construction magazine.

Emina Camdzic (AA Member and AA Dubrovnik Visiting School student 2011) is participating in the International Design Studio 2011 workshop entitled Development of a Sustainable Green Building. The workshop was established as a joint venture between the Architecture Faculty at the University Sarajevo, Yildiz Technical Faculty in Istanbul and Twente Technical Faculty in Enschede.

Shajay Bhooshan (AA DRL MArch 2006, AA DRL Course Tutor and AA Bangalore Visiting School Director) was recently interviewed by Computational Craft, published in city-vision magazine issue 3, 2011. Shajay also presented and published a technical paper Use of Sub-division Surfaces in Architectural

NEWS BRIEFS

Form-Finding and Procedural Modelling at simAUD 2011 along with Mostafa El Sayed in April 2011 and exhibited work at TED 2011, Palm Springs, as part of an Autodesk showcase in March 2011 and at Autodesk galleries in San Francisco. In addition, he lectured at the Digital Craft symposium, Autodesk University, Las Vegas in December 2010, as well as lecturing and participating in a panel discussion with Tobias Klein (AA First Year Master and AA Media Studies Course Tutor), Dietmar Koering and Michael Wihart at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, November 2010.

Maria Fedorchenko (AA Unit Master Intermediate 7 and AA Unit Master HTS First Year studio) published an article, Shape Follows Decorated Diagram: Alignment of Form and Program in The International Journal of Constructed Environment.

Gonçalo Furtado (AA Member) is co-ordinating the research project Architectural Interactive Surfaces Modelled in Composed Materials, with the support of Oporto University and Banco Santander. The project intends to investigate components that bind the multisensorial experience of a space to a surface.

Tatiana von Preussen (AA Tutor, Intermediate Unit 7) along with PPR Architects, put on an exhibition in April 2011 at the Architecture Foundation, in collaboration with Joseph Bedford named More Than > A Building? Architecture on Trial: Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building. It was a satellite exhibition that coincided with Anthony Vidler’s exhibition at the Tate: James Stirling: Notes from the Archive (see AArchitecture 14). www.vppr.co.uk/index.php?/ongoing/ architecture-on-trial-exhibition

Jai Lee (AA Dipl 2003) and her architectural practice JAIA (Joint Architectural Intelligence Associates) held the 2011 JAIA workshop, 27 June–3 July 2011 on the theme of the International Ideas Competition for Busan Opera House. JAIA’s aim was to share information related to the competition and ultimately to help participants to explore and develop various ideas through this workshop. www.jai-a.com AL_A, the practice of Amanda Levete (AA Dipl 1982) has won the international design competition for the V&A Museum’s Exhibition Road development.

The project isn’t just about a gallery; it’s an opportunity to create a new public space for London – South Kensington’s Drawing Room. The pattern of the courtyard derives from the structure and the richness of the V&A’s collection, and continues the didactic tradition of the V&A buildings.

James McBennett (AA Dip 16) was selected to present at the first TED auditions in New York with his AA project Natural High. The project explores new forms of brick. For 8,000 years brick has had six sides. Opportunity exists to upgrade bricks with as many sides as a material can tolerate using 3D printing on-site. New forms that are cheaper, stronger, lighter and more intelligent than previous constructions can be created. This project applies these new opportunities to the informal city that can rise safe against disaster, without depleting natural resources; a natural high. hellojam.es www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yyQL8UFdHNo RARE, founded by Michel da Costa Gonçalves (AA Emtech MA 2005, AA Unit Master, Intermediate Unit 4 and AA Singapore Visiting School Course Co-Director) and Nathalie Rozencwajg

(AA Dipl 2001, AA Unit Master, Intermediate Unit 4 and AA Singapore Visiting School Course Co-Director), have received the RICS London Project of the Year Award for the Town Hall Hotel & Conference Centre in London.

The project was also awarded the RICS 2011 Building Conservation Award and was part of the London selection for this year’s RIBA Award.

SARCHA (School of ARCHitecture for All) www.sarcha.gr initiated by Maria Theodorou (AA H&T PhD 1998), was one of the seven teams shortlisted from the 56 entries submitted at the Resourceful Architect open call. The competition was organised by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and the Architecture Foundation. SARCHA’s entry features in the 12 May issue of the AJ. The final presentation took place at RSA on the day of ideas on 18 May 2011.

The working team also includes Stefania Triantafyllou (AA Year Out student). www.thersa.org/projects/design/ theresourcefularchitect On 31 May 2011 the church of St Patrick’s in Soho Square was opened once again to the public. It had been closed since March 2010 while building works were carried out. Castanon Associates, the practice of Javier Castañón (AA Technical Studies Course Master and AA Professional Practice, Part 1 Course Master) were the architects. The work carried out comprised the refurbishment of the interior of the church as well as the excavation of a new basement covering the entire area of the church. The church occupies the entire site so excavating the basement to form the new crypt, with expertise from the structural Engineers Sinclair Johnston and Partners, was the only way to provide the much-needed space for the many growing needs of this church. The church, designed by John Kelly, was built in 1893. The architects have tried to bring back its renaissance appearance by the treatment of the

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materials, particularly the new marble floor and the handling of natural light.

The refurbishment work was done in association with Castañón Asociados (Madrid). Javier would be happy to show the result to anyone who is interested. javier@castanon.co.uk www.itv.com/london/ soho-church-reopens25064 The collective Vatnavinir, of which Sigrún Birgisdottir (AADipl 2001) is one of the founding members, has been awarded the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2011 by Locus Foundation, under the patronage of UNESCO, for their work, Wellness Country Iceland. Vatnavinir is a multidisciplinary collective established in 2008 in Reykjavik and brings architects, designers, philosophers and artists together with experts in the areas of tourism, health and marketing in order to work with water as a resource for sustainable development in Iceland.

The Global Award for Sustainable Architecture is now in its fifth year and is awarded every year to five architects who are committed to the notion of sustainable development and have developed their own innovative approach to the issue.

Asif Khan (AADipl 2007) has been awarded Designer of the Future 2011 by Design Miami, the first architect to ever receive this award. He also had a solo installation at Design Miami/Basel 13–18 June 2011 for Designers of the Future 2011. In addition he was selected by the British Council and the Royal Academy to design their Future Memory Pavilion for the Singapore Arch-fest in October 2011 and he has also spoken at The Royal Academy as part of their Future Memory programme. He spoke at Knoll showroom on 24 May as part of the debate, Are there too many Designers?, during Clerkenwell Design Week 2011.

Asif has also won a special jury citation as a finalist in the MAXXI / MoMA young

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architects programme for his project MAXXI Cloud and launched a suspension light called Swivel for Italian brand Danese at the Milan Salone Del Mobile.

Khandaker Shabbir Ahmed (AA E&E PhD 1996) co-ordinated a two-day workshop entitled Performance Based Design: Introduction to Computer Based Lighting Simulation Techniques, designed to introduce lighting design techniques within the purview of Performance Based Design approach. The workshop took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 11–12 June 2011.

MESE, the office of Selahattin Tuysuz (AA DRL MArch 2008), Yusuf Burak Dolu and Erhan Yıldız has just received fourth prize in the Museum of Troy competition. The competition was organised by the Ministry of Culture of Turkey. The brief was to design a 10.5 square metre museum building at the Troy Archeological world heritage site.

MESE’s design aimed to create a simple modest cover which would form the museum’s open, semi-open and closed spaces and to allow for a visually calm green area.

Yasmin Shariff (AA Member) has been appointed to the newly formed Hertfordshire Design Review Panel. The panel is funded by Hertfordshire County Council and has been set up to help planners, developers and designers realise the full potential of development schemes. It is a new addition to the Building Futures initiative and provides a resource to support the delivery of high quality, sustainable design for those bringing forward development proposals. www.hertslink.org/buildingfutures In January 2011 Siamak G. Shahneshin (AA E&E MA 2000) delivered a lecture entitled Common Knowledge on the legislated architectural pedagogy and the claim by educators that they teach people

how to get answers. Siamak’s argument was how can graduates learn to get answers for those areas not addressed in studios or other course work? In addition his studio, SHAGAL│iodaa, recently designed the Reuse/Recycle/Retrofit of Suburban Zurich, as well as the doing the redesign of Zurich Airport through a shrinkage-programme. The exhibition Past/Present/Future in Spring 2011 presented a survey of selected works by SHAGAL│iodaa. www.shagal-iodaa.net The AA Membership Office is sorry to announce that the following Alumni have recently passed away: Cedric Astbury (AADipl 1952), Bertie Dinnage (AADipl 1961) and David Hoblyn (AADipl 1972). Landscape designer Jeanne Bliss, who collaborated with the AA’s former Garden Conservation course, passed away in March 2011.

Enrico De Pierro, AA tutor from the late 1940s to the early fifties, died at home aged 93 in June 2011.

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

AArchitecture has evolved considerably since its inception in the summer term of 2006. Established within the long tradition of AA journals, AArchitecture was initially aimed at cataloguing the printed space of the AA. The first six issues were devoted to revisiting ‘the legacy of numerous short-lived AA publications’, as outlined in the initial editorial statement. Subsequently, the publication evolved into a much more official and permanent entity – the form it takes today. A tri-annually issued booklet, it serves as a newsletter for the AA School Community and its wider membership.

This issue represents another milestone in the publication’s history as the first issue solely edited by students. We saw this as an opportunity to try to encompass a majority of the different groups and programmes that comprise the manifold organisation that is the AA. From the History and Critical Thinking Masters Programme to a summary of events taking place at our Hooke Park Campus in Dorset, to the typical coverage of lectures, symposiums, exhibitions and membership events, we hope to have encapsulated the true diversity of AA life.

Danielle Rago is an MA student in the History & Critical Thinking Programme. Manijeh Verghese is a Fourth Year AA Student. They are both Student Editors of AArchitecture.

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