AA Prospectus 2012-13 by AA School

Architectural Association School of Architecture

201 2 AA prospectus

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CONTENTS Introduction 2 Student Awards & Prizes 2011/12 School Life and History

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AA Schools Undergraduate School 41 Foundation 42 First Year 44 Intermediate 49 Diploma 72 Complementary Studies 99 History & Theory Studies 100 Media Studies 108 Technical Studies 116 Architectural Practice 124 Graduate School 129 Design Research Lab 130 Emergent Technologies 136 History and Critical Thinking 140 of Architecture Housing & Urbanism 144 Landscape Urbanism 148 Sustainable Environmental Design 152 Conservation of Historic Buildings 156 Design & Make 158 160 AA Interprofessional Studio 162 Projective Cities 164 PhD Programme 166 Graduate Seminar Visiting School London Schools Global Workshops

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Research Clusters

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AA Organisation, Resources, Support and Information 205

Prospectus 2012â&#x20AC;&#x201C;13

AA School

Brett Steele Director, AA School

Introduction

I. Welcome to the AA School Welcome to the 2012/13 academic year of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. This Prospectus provides an overview and introduction to the courses and other public activities that make the AA the world’s most diverse and international school of architecture. It is in four parts: 1) introduction to the AA School and the larger AA world; 2) course, unit and programme information related to our 2012/13 undergraduate and graduate schools here in London; 3) summaries of our Visiting School, a programme of short courses and design workshops that will be held in cities around the world in 2012/13; and finally, 4) a brief guide to resources and other information. Now in its 165th year, the AA School is not only the world’s most influential and well-known school of architecture, but also an incredibly fluid, dynamic and unrivalled learning environment. Alongside its courses and programmes, the AA also has a year-long schedule of visiting lectures, symposia, book launches, exhibitions and other events that bring together a growing public audience who, like us, are interested in collectively pushing the limits and boundaries of architectural culture today. The AA School lies at the heart of a global association of architects and other committed individuals dedicated in every way imaginable to engaging with and preparing for the challenges that lie ahead. This Prospectus offers only a summary guide to the depth of the AA’s commitment to this goal: 4

the best way to experience the AA is through direct participation – whether as a full-time student, as an AA Member or as part of the audience convened here throughout the coming year. Also, please remember to consult our growing online and print materials which will keep you constantly updated on the AA’s various activities. This Prospectus should provide a sense not only of the range of our interests but also of the unsurpassed opportunities we provide for learning. To prospective students, we welcome your enquiry and reach out to you as our future. To those of you who are already at the school, thank you – your hard work, intelligent insight and unbridled talent already lie at the centre of everything we do and believe in. To all of you, I hope this Prospectus opens the door to the AA and encourages you to join us as we go forward and seek to create not only the leaders of architecture’s future, but an architectural culture that can lead the world forward in new and unexpected ways.

II. The School, its Audiences and a Legacy of Experimentation The AA has been located on the west side of Bedford Square, London’s last-remaining intact Georgian Square, since the early years of the twentieth century. Today the surrounding area of Bloomsbury is recognised as Europe’s single largest academic precinct encompassing some of the UK’s best-known research universities and independent academic institutions. Major cultural institutions such as the British Museum are also nearby, as are other spaces that have long given the AA’s historic home a setting unlike any other school in the world. At the core of the AA School is our five-year ARB/RIBA-accredited Undergraduate School, which leads to an AA Diploma and Parts 1 and 2 of the UK qualification as an architect. The undergraduate school includes as well a full-time Foundation Course for those contemplating studies in architecture or associated creative fields at the AA or elsewhere. The focus of our undergraduate students’ academic lives is our famed ‘unit’ system of study, which involves highly focused, intensive and agenda-driven design units within which students pursue year-long design projects while also attending related Complementary Studies courses. The AA Graduate School is accredited by the Open University in the UK, and encompasses 11 programmes that last one or more years in graduate design or other specialised courses of study. Our Conservation of Historic Buildings

and AA Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) both offer options for parttime study; all other undergraduate and graduate programmes are full-time. In 2011 over two thirds of our 600 full-time students in London were undergraduates working towards the AA Diploma, and around one third were graduate students pursuing advanced studies in a Graduate Diploma, Master’s or PhD programme. While admission to all parts of our full-time schools is very competitive, all interested prospective students are actively encouraged to visit the AA and to make an application in the knowledge that what the AA seeks above all are self-motivated students who are able to bring with them interesting personal, professional and other academic qualities that will allow them to contribute to a school filled with like-minded students and staff. Complementing the AA’s courses and activities in London, the AA Visiting School was formalised and expanded in early 2008, giving students all around the world the chance to experience the AA’s influential form of unit-based teaching. Following a year-long effort led by the Director’s Office, in 2012 the AA School successfully attained for the first time ever the full confidence of the UK Government’s Quality Assurance Agency, which confirmed that the school today is operating and making information about itself available at the highest standards. The school’s commitment to high quality, and to enhancing the lives of our students, staff and visitors, 5

is something that will continue to drive the AA forward this year and in the years ahead. The AA is a famously independent educational experiment. We are self-directed, self-motivated and even self-funded. As the UK’s oldest and only remaining private school of architecture, we has grown up alongside – and to a very great degree helped shape – the modern architectural profession. The AA School sits entirely outside the state funding of higher education in the UK, and as a private school – with a broad commitment to bringing issues of contemp-orary architecture, cities and the environment to a large public audience – we are deeply committed to realising the potential that our independence allows, by adapting intelligently to the changing conditions of architecture at a time when the profession is facing a spectacular range of challenges. The AA’s independence also means that we are able to push boundaries, test new ideas and promote new ways of teaching and learning. The modern history of the AA School is bound up with the incredible legacy of architectural personalities, projects and pedagogies that have emerged from the school during the past half century. When we consider that three of the past decade’s recipients of the Pritzker Prize are AA graduates from a brief, intense 17year period during the 1960 and 70s – Richard Rogers (AA ’60), Rem Koolhaas (AA ’72) and Zaha Hadid (AA ’77) – we realise that our school has fostered remarkable architectural 6

careers and personalities. The AA has long been a home for some of the most experimental advances in architectural education, teaching and learning, hosting countless avantgardes, such as Cedric Price, Archigram, the NATO collective and the formation of the DRL. Past AA Prospectuses are where architects can find the origins of many of the ways of thinking that spawned some of the great architects, designers and educators of our time. Today this legacy of invention runs strong in a school that is committed not only to new kinds of architectural projects, practices and ideas but also to an open experimentation with the many new ways of working and thinking architecture. At the heart of the AA’s exploration of new approaches lies our belief that architecture will be transformed one project at a time. The school’s famed unit system of teaching is built around a few, simple challenges to a conventional school of architecture. We believe: 1) Students learn best by working in small, highly focused groups around a single tutor or team for an entire year, allowing them to direct their own path through a school. 2) AA learning is project- and portfolio-driven. Students learn architecture and address the broad spectrum of associated professional and political issues by embedding these realities within the scope of a single, resolved design portfolio.

3) Collective assessment and enquiry is fundamental. Student projects are assessed at the end of the academic year by a panel of tutors, who together determine the relative success of any given project and portfolio and ensure that our the work is seen and socialised across the school. Taken together, these beliefs have become our key feature – a way of affirming how a small and independent school such as ours can so consistently discover, define, promote and debate promising new architectural agendas whose principal purpose is to challenge architecture as the world currently imagines it. Sitting entirely outside its formal coursework, our Public Programme is a year-long series of evening lectures, exhibitions, publications, open workshops, symposia, performances and other events by which we seek to bring together new audiences for architectural ideas, projects and practices. Each year the AA brings to London hundreds of visitors; architects, artists, designers and scholars at the forefront of contemporary culture who, like us, seek to challenge the status quo.

III. The Year Ahead 2012/13 brings new faces, projects and spaces to the school. Our Foundation Course, led by Saskia Lewis, continues to grow and enrich the lives of its students. Built around a year of intensive project-based art, design, performance and installation work, this year’s course includes the appointment of Taneli Mansikkamaki and Umberto Bellardi-Ricci, both recent graduates of the school. The First Year course, led by Monia de Marchi, and located in its new studio at the First Floor Rear of 34–36, includes the following new Studio Masters: Maria S Giudici, James Alexander Craig, Shany Barath and John Ng. In the Intermediate School, architects Nacho Martin and Manuel Collado, from Mi5 Architects in Madrid, lead a new Intermediate Unit 11 that will take as its topic the natural, tourist and other challenges of Ibiza. Longtime AA tutor Valentin Bontjes van Beek will return to unit teaching this year, leading a new Intermediate Unit 10 that will direct its energies towards the design and making of a new rooftop space in Bedford Square. Sam Jacob steps away from Intermediate Unit 12 to begin a new AA initiative in 2012/13: the launching of a new AA Night School – which will unfold as a series of part-time, short-format, special-event, latenight, weekend and other courses open to all AA members, students and a broader public. In the Diploma School Tyen Masten will return to more active teaching and involvement in Diploma Unit 5. Pablo Ros, an 7

architect working in Barcelona, joins Diploma 18 as they continue work on new, experimental approaches to energy and sustainability. Another, smaller innovation this year in the Diploma School is that fourth year Technical Studies courses will move to Term 2, providing better overall balance in the year’s Complementary Studies activities and allowing the courses to be introduced to students later in the autumn, once unit work is already underway. In the Graduate School our two recently launched graduate courses, Design & Make and Projective Cities, are expected to have a full enrolment of students. Design & Make students are already well on the way to realising the first of their annual building projects at Hooke Park, a student lodge that accompanies the upcoming completion of a new caretaker’s house, and last spring’s ‘Big Shed’. Also in the Graduate School, Pier Vittorio Aureli will launch a new taught component of our recently approved PhD by Design programme, titled Architecture and the City, which aims

to reassess the relationship between architecture and its broader context: the city. The programme will ask PhD candidates to develop an innovative and radical understanding of architecture in light of the problems and questions that characterise the city today, following recent decades of architectural work that has mapped, represented and discussed urban conditions as if overwhelmed by irresolvable complexities and contradictions. As the AA School goes forward in these early years of the twentyfirst century all of us involved in the AA are committed to advancing both our historical mission as well as our ongoing commitment to transforming architecture and its potential everywhere. We actively seek out new members who will join us in this project and continue to welcome any and all enquiries by those interested in helping us make the AA the world’s most unique environment for the learning and promotion of architecture. Brett Steele, Director AA School of Architecture

student awards & prizes 2011/12

Diploma Honours Benjamin Reynolds, Diploma Unit 5, Fifth Year

Diploma Honours Manijeh Verghese, Diploma Unit 9, Fifth Year

student awards & prizes 2011/12

Diploma Honours Beom Kwan Kim, Diploma Unit 8, Fifth Year

Diploma Honours Samuel Nelson, Diploma Unit 14, Fifth Year

William Glover Bequest FortunĂŠÂ Penniman, Intermediate Unit 13, Third Year

Henry Florence Studentship Lara Yegenoglu, Intermediate Unit 6, Third Year

student awards & prizes 2011/12

Alex Stanhope Forbes Prize Yuk Fung Geoffrey Cheung, Diploma Unit 9, Fifth Year

AA Travel Studentship Nara Ha, Intermediate Unit 5, Third Year

Howard Colls Studentship Matthew Critchley, Diploma Unit 14, Fourth Year

Alexander Memorial Travel Fund Anthony Shung Yiu Ko, First Year

student awards & prizes 2011/12

Henry Saxon Snell Scholarship Harry Cliffe-Roberts, Diploma Unit 10, Fifth Year

AA Student Honours Prize Amir Atta Yousefi, Diploma Unit 18, Fifth Year

Ralph Knott Memorial Fund Andrew Bardzik, Intermediate Unit 8, Third Year

Ralph Knott Memorial Fund Lucy Moroney, Intermediate Unit 9, Third Year

student awards & prizes 2011/12

Ramos Station

153m

Morro do Alemao Stn.

51m

Morro da Baiana Stn

80m

Itarare Station

105m

Fazendinha Station

113m

Morro do Adeus Stn

Bonsucesso Station

Holloway Trust Hwui Zhi Brian Cheng, Diploma Unit 17, Fifth Year

tegic Interven on

100m train sta on cablecar sta on affected region

Holloway Trust Beom Kwan Kim, Diploma Unit 8, Fifth Year

hill summit

exis ng commerce

proposed interven on

cable car route

proposed extensions

boundary line

Boas Travel Scholarship George Fergusson, First Year

Boas Travel Scholarship Alexander Laing, Diploma Unit 6, Fifth Year

student awards & prizes 2011/12

There is a long tradition of military personnel recreating aspects of their homeland on foreign soil in varying forms. A notable military anecdote involves the Suez landing of 1956 when a staff officer observed a three-tonne truck stuck on the harbour ramp during the battle. ‘Who the hell are you?’, he yelled. ‘I, sir’, replied a dignified voice, ‘am the Mess Sergeant of Her Majesty’s Life Guards and I have with me the Officers’ Mess silver and champagne.’ Dennis Sharp Prize for Excellence in Writing Philip Turner, Diploma Unit 3, Fourth Year

AA Prize Manijeh Verghese, Diploma Unit 9, Fifth Year

Foster & Partners Prize Yvonne Weng, Diploma Unit 17, Fourth Year

Projection illuminating the AA facades by Enric Guez Geli and Diploma 18 students with Jeremy Rifkin, 2011 Photo Valerie Bennett

Top: AA studio, 1960s. Courtesy AA Photo Library.

Bottom: Diploma 5 presentation to First Year students, 2011. Photo Valerie Bennett

Top: Nozomi Nakabayashi stands in her Big Shed project on the day she submitted her thesis, 2011

Bottom: Peter Wilson, Non Urban Space, 1974

Top: Alison and Peter Smithson, Plateau Beaubourg, Fifth Year project, 1971. Courtesy AA Archives

Bottom: The Library is on Fire, New Soft Room, 2012. Photo Alexander Furunes

Rem Koolhaas, lecture, 2007

Owen Hatherley, lecture, 2011. Photo Sue Barr

Top: Frank Lloyd Wright outside the AA Courtesy AA Photo Library

Bottom: Philip Johnson visits the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nicholas Grimshaw exhibition. Photo Valerie Bennett

First Year work sheet, Tutor Robin Evans, 1971. Courtesy AA Archives

Top: ARCHIZINES, exhibition, 2011

Bottom: Doreen Bernath, lecture, 2011 Photo Alexander Furunes

Top: Students at AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mount House premises, 1940s Cortesy AA Photo Library Bottom left: AA Sketching Pass, 1937 Courtesy AA Archives

Bottom right: FAT in conversation with Charles Jencks, lecture, 2011. Photo Valerie Bennett

Diploma Unit 18 jury, 2011 Photo Valerie Bennett

Conrad Koslowsky and Shin Egashira, Diploma 11 at Hooke Park, 2012 Photo Valerie Bennett

Top: Students researching in the AA Library, 2012 Photo Valerie Bennett

Bottom: 51N4E: Double or Nothing, exhibition, 2011 Photo Sue Barr

Top: Launch of AArchitecture newsletter in the AA Bookshop, 2012. Photo Valerie Bennett Bottom left: AArchitecture issue 17, edited by AA students Eleanor Dodman, Manijeh Verghese, Patricia Mato Mora and Radu Macovei, produced through AA Print Studio

Bottom right: Fulcrum issue 41, April 2012, independently produced AA student publication, edited and designed by Graham Baldwin and Jack Self

AA Publications and Bedford Press publications from 2011/12: Manifest Destiny by Jason Griffiths; ARCHIZINES, edited by Elias Redstone; Architecture Words 9: Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt by Mark Rakatansky; AA Files 62, edited by Tom Weaver

Zak 1. Manijeh Kyes Working shapes the Withâ&#x20AC;Ś, context exhibition, of dualities 2012.through her architecture Photo Brotherton of its Lock books and spaces.

2. Elenaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s context oscillates between building and city as she collects their layers and communities until they merge into one.

AA Foundation jury, 2011. Photo Sue Barr

Top left: Dan Graham pavilion, AA terrace, 1997 Photo Valerie Bennett

Top right: AATV production studio, 1970s Courtesy AA Photo Library Bottom: Foster Prize Ceremony at Foster + Partners office, 2011. Photo Sue Barr

Top: First Year Jury, 2011

Bottom: AA Projects Review, 1983 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Diploma 9 installation with unit tutor Zaha Hadid in the centre

AA Projects Review opening, 1998

Undergraduate School

The AA Undergraduate School is a RIBA/ARB-accredited five-year, fulltime course of studies in architecture leading to the AA Intermediate Examination (RIBA/ARB Part 1) and AA Final Examination (RIBA/ARB Part 2). It is divided into three distinct parts: Foundation/First Year, Intermediate School (Second and Third Years) and Diploma School (Fourth and Fifth Years). Students join the school in September and attend three terms of study concluding the following June. Entry into the school at any level can be from Foundation to Fourth Year, depending on experience. The AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one-year, full-time Foundation is open to students who do not have an extensive visual or design background. Some students joining have already begun their studies in architecture, engineering or art, some are exploring a career change, while others come direct from high school. In a group of approximately 20, students learn to think conceptually and creatively via the disciplines of art, film, architecture and craft in both group and individual projects. Ideas and designs are explored through the process of models, sketches, drawings, films and performance. While exploring individual design sensibilities and approaches, students have the opportunity to engage with the rich educational, cultural and social life of the AA and London. First Year introduces students to architectural design, critical thinking and experimental ways of working. It comprises approximately 60 students working both individually and in groups in an open studio format under the guidance of sevenw experienced and

energetic design tutors. Students begin to form their own architectural identities and personalities through a diverse range of design ideas, agendas and interests. In addition to the studio, students take courses in history, theory, media and technology. Together these courses lead to a portfolio of the yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, the basis for entrance into the Intermediate School. The Intermediate School gives Second and Third Year students the opportunity to work within the structure of the unit system. Each year the Intermediate School has a balance of units covering a diversity of questions and innovative approaches to material, craft and techniques of fabrication. Explorations of cultural and social issues are often set in inspiring places around the world. In parallel to the unit work, skills are developed through courses in history and theory, technical and media studies as well as professional practice. The Diploma School offers further opportunities for architectural experimentation and consolidation. With a broad range of interests and teaching methods, the aim is to marry drawing and technical proficiency to complex intellectual agendas in an atmosphere of lively and informed debate. Students are in an environment that fosters the development of creative independence and intelligence. They learn to refine their research skills and develop proposals into high-level design portfolios at the end of the year. Here students begin to define their voices as designers and to articulate individual academic agendas that will carry them into their future professional careers.

FOUNDATION The AA Foundation course is a one-year introduction to an art- and design-based education. It allows students to develop their conceptual ideas through experimenting with a wide range of media and creative disciplines. Students are taught in a studio-based environment and work on both individual and group projects. Drawing on a number of pedagogical practices, tutors and visiting practitioners, the Foundation offers a cross-disciplinary education within the context of an architectural school. What’s the Point? Using notions of territory as reference we will navigate scales, sites, materials, scenarios and identities as the datum for the creative process. By identifying the lost domains in precedents such as Stephen Gill’s photography, the assemblages of Arthur Bispo do Rosário and the strategies of Mel Bochner the course cohort will develop work with personal, cultural and contextual resonance. What Line are You In? Projects will range in scale from the hand-held to the reported and mapped, with bespoke workshops providing students with the skills to develop their individual projects. Students will use photography, drawing, painting, model-making, casting, mapping, form, structure, millinery, sewing, weaving, textiles, carpentry, performance, lighting and film-making. After developing skills in observational, visual and verbal representation, students will use their initial work as research to develop a final project that will culminate in a portfolio outlining their personal reflection on a creative journey over the year. Tilt the Plane – Find your Terrain – Claim your Domain A series of field trips will allow students to broaden their understanding of culture and context. These will include a trip to Rome, tours of London, gallery visits and residential periods in Hooke Park. Lectures in history and theory and discussions with visiting artists will stimulate dialogue within the studio. Throughout the year, students will concoct their own intellectual ambitions and play with the boundaries of their experience and personal development. 42

Foundation Director Saskia Lewis Studio Master Takako Hasegawa Tutors Umberto Bellardi Ricci Taneli Mansikkamäki Saskia Lewis has taught at the AA since 2001. She has practised in New York, Paris and London and taught at many London schools of art and architecture. She is co-author and photographer of Architectural Voices: Listening to Old Buildings (Wiley, 2007). Takako Hasegawa was born in Tokyo, educated at the AA and works on the periphery of architecture, art and performance. She also teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Umberto Bellardi Ricci has a degree in Social Anthropology and a Master’s in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies. He received his Diploma from the AA in 2011, and has worked at London architectural practices such as Ron Arad Associates, Boyarsky Murphy and Stanton Williams Architects. Taneli Mansikkamäki worked in the fields of music, media art and new media before relocating from Helsinki to London. He graduated from the AA and after working for Future Systems, Amanda Levete Architects and Cecil Balmond, amongst others, he is currently directing the studio Mansikkamäki+JOY.

Zsuzsa Peter, Mobile Shelter – a hide in Hyde Park, 2012

First Year First Year at the AA is the initial exposure to the study of architecture that ends after five undergraduate years with the AA Diploma. At its core is the translation of visual references, thoughts, intuitions and written briefs into a series of projects through the mastering of theoretical and practical exercises and the relentless making of relations between theory, design and discourse. First Year is not a distilled or compressed version of what architecture could be, but the extensive exposure to architecture as a form of knowledge, taught as a combination of designing, writing and arguing. Although design skills form its natural focus, the ability to write and argue are emphasised as essential skills in putting forward a position and a project, with writing being taught as an active tool that helps to guide an intention toward the construction of a clear discourse; while arguing is refined through a series of discussions and presentation techniques. Throughout the year you will learn how to enact intuitions and guide your thinking, firstly via visual representations and then through their articulation. You will not illustrate a position; you will not put all your efforts into the making only of a singular design; you will not focus purely on the embellishment of an image. Instead you will present your projects by using your imagination and the thoughtful synthesis of your explorations and research. You will be exposed to exciting discoveries, but also to what may seem at first to be frustrating challenges. You will be asked to take risks and be constantly active, self-critical and curious. You will learn to question how an architectural project can be innovative and novel but still sit within an existing set of ideas, histories and references. You will approach positions from different points of view and be prompted to absorb both impulsive and considered ways of understanding a given assignment.

Head of First Year Monia De Marchi Studio Tutors Shany Barath James Alexander Craig Maria S Giudici Max Kahlen Alex Kaiser John Ng Consultants Fabrizio Ballabio Elia Zenghelis Monia De Marchi is an architect and graduate of the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia. She has taught at the AA since 2005, as a Unit Master in both the Intermediate and Diploma schools, while also running her own design practice. Shany Barath is an architect and founding partner of ShaGa Studio. She studied at TU Delft and the AA, where she has been teaching since 2009 in the DRL and Media Studies, and is currently the director of the AA Tel Aviv visiting school. She has previously worked for UN Studio and West 8 in the Netherlands. James Alexander Craig is an architect and co-founder of STASUS. He has taught and been an invited critic at many UK and international schools of architecture and recently published his work in the latest instalment of the Pamphlet Architecture series. Maria S Giudici earned her MA from Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Switzerland, in 2006. Between 2005 and 2007 she worked in Bucharest-based office BAU, collaborated in Rotterdam with Donis in 2010 and Dogma in 2011. After teaching at the Berlage Institute and co-tutoring workshops at TU Delft (2008), TU Munich (2009), and Strelka (2010), she will be an assistant professor at BIArch Barcelona.

Max Kahlen works as an architect in London and Germany and is the founding director of CODKT. He studied at the Stuttgart Academy of Art & Design and the AA, where he graduated with honours. He has been teaching at the AA since 2008, initially in a Diploma unit and more recently running a Media Studies course and as a First Year tutor.

Alex Kaiser is a co-founding director of Ordinary, an architectural studio based in East London. He graduated from Oxford Brookes and the AA and has worked for firms including RSH-P and Moxon Architects. John Ng studied architecture at the University of Bath and then completed his diploma at the AA, where he has taught on Diploma Unit 5 since 2011.

Jiwon Lee, First Year (2011/12), series of devices to re-enact the identity of Brick Lane in a different context (top); First Year student projects â&#x20AC;&#x201C; series of plans exploring spatial relations with the placement of walls, enclosures and openings; physical devices reconstructing textures and effects; drawings of architectural elements; prototypes of spatial insertions in London; representations of architectural situations and events (bottom)

First Year Translations Term 1: Translations from Architectural References to Projects During the year you will learn by working on architectural projects. A project can start by translating a visual reference, or by questioning a brief; it can be the focus of a day or the exploration of a month. For each project that you make you will always have a vision, a position, numerous attempts and a synthesis. The focus of Term 1 is the translation of a series of architectural references into architectural projects. You will look at buildings and cities by re-annotating their different types of tectonics, spatial relations, effects and allusions, and by re-measuring a space with your body. You will re-imagine and develop architectures as characters; what are his/her features, what do they look like and what was their past? You will re-enact an ideal space and ask whether you can occupy a space and imagine a microcosm? Term 2: Translations from Briefs & Questions to Arguments & Projects During Term 2 you will translate written briefs into arguments and projects. You will learn to take a position, to have an argument and develop projects by exploring architecture not as a form of illustration and narration but as a direct investigation of its attributes. You will step away from social, cultural and any other meanings we give to a project and purely understand the language of architecture in its scale, tectonics, form and spatial relations through iterations of drawings and models. You will question how to 46

place a wall, an opening, a space and a building in a context that is more or less abstract, such as a grid, a city and a landscape. You will learn how to construct an argument with different forms of writing, to set up discussions, present your work and engage in counter-positions. Term 3: Translations from Projects & Alternative Readings to Projects In Term 3 you will address a project in relation to other projects by other students and understand architecture in relation to other architectures through a series of crossover conversations and negotiations. Can you edit and define a synthesis between your work and another studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work? You will also learn to look at your work from different points of view and address alternative readings. You will present a line of thought and talk about architecture in your own terms: do you talk about architecture as form? Architecture as space? Architecture as pleasure? Portfolio Your entire work will be represented and composed in your own portfolio. The First Year portfolio is a project in itself, constructed throughout the year as an open collection of your learning via arguments, visual speculations and projects. Can you plan it and draft it as a collection of learning experiences built up over the year? How do you organise the content? Is there a line of thought that goes beyond a chronological ordering? Your portfolio is both critical and poetic; it is the synthesis of many trials and failed attempts;

it discloses your own way of looking, searching, thinking and putting forward positions and projects of architecture. First Year Studio The First Year Studio is the place where you will research, make, think and question via a series of seminars, tutorials and conversations with other students, tutors and thinkers. The conversations and explorations that you actively set up in the studio are essential in forming your learning and work. The First Year Studio is a dynamic and experimental environment that shifts from a chaotic workshop to a quiet research space, allowing for multiple discussions, thoughts and explorations and the continual development of your individually distinct portfolios.

Intermediate 1 The Passenger ‘Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.’ – Jeffrey Eugenides This year Intermediate 1 will travel to Detroit, Michigan – a city so synonymous with architectural ruin that the images of its civic decay are as clichéd as they are poignant. The home of the US auto industry’s ‘Big Three’ – Ford, Chrysler and General Motors – ‘Motor City’ now relies on Federal life support with enough vacant land to accommodate Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco combined, and a population that has contracted by almost 40 per cent since 1950. If ‘America is the original version of modernity,’ as Jean Baudrillard believed, then Detroit’s collapse provides us with a vision of what the end of modernity might look like. ‘I am the passenger, I ride under glass’, Iggy Pop noted of this existential view of his hometown. ‘I look through the window light, I see the stars come out tonight, I see the city’s ripped insides, I see the dark and hollow sky, I see the winding ocean drive. And everything looks good to you and me, so see me ride.” Following these provocations, we will examine the Detroit area in order to explore the notion of architectural obsolescence. Acting as ‘archaeologists of the immediate future’ our forensic enquiries will include found architectures, speculative possibilities and spurious research. We begin by questioning the ‘faked histories’, architectural potential and cultural appropriation of Detroit through works such as Robert Smithson’s ‘Monuments of the Passaic’ and filmic representations of dystopic urbanity like Robocop, Escape from New York, Alphaville and La Jetée. Working in defiance of conventional architectural norms, the unit will be charged with designing a real, surreal or entirely speculative architectural intervention within the remains of this once great city. 48

Unit Staff Mark Campbell Stewart Dodd Mark Campbell has taught history and design at the AA since 2004. He has taught previously at the Cooper Union, Princeton University and Auckland University and received post graduate degrees as a Fulbright Scholar from Princeton University (MA, PhD) and undergraduate degrees from Auckland University (BA, Arch Hons). He has worked in practice in Auckland, New York and London and served as the Managing Editor of Grey Room and the Cooper Union Archive, in addition to publishing extensively. He is the Director of the ‘Paradise Lost’ AA Research Cluster. Stewart Dodd is founding director of Satellite Architects Limited. He studied architecture at the Bartlett and worked for several architects in the UK and Europe. He has taught extensively at schools including the AA, the Bartlett and Brighton University, as well as being a visiting critic at a number of schools worldwide. He presently sits on the RIBA Validation board and is an external examiner at the Bartlett and Brighton University. Satellite has been the recipient of numerous architectural awards, most recently, the Green Apple, Gold Award for Sustainable Architecture.

Vere Van Gool, Intermediate 1 (2011/12), Home is Where the Harvester Is

Intermediate 2 Crafted Narratives: Matter and Space A Sort of Homecoming – Slane Castle, County Meath Background: One of the key political and social agendas at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the UK is the notion of ‘austerity’. Since the banking crisis in 2008, and the plans set by the coalition government, the majority of UK residents have been forced to struggle to make ends meet. Yet, one of the positive aspects to come out of this has been the shift in focus to look at ‘what we have’ rather than ‘what we don’t have’. Austerity Britain is looking from ‘within’, making the most of home-grown products to ensure our survival. With this in mind, Intermediate 2 will investigate in and around the British Isles in search of Crafted Narratives. Let England Shake – recorded at Eype Church, Dorset Site: Our site for the year will be King’s Cross in London, currently one of the largest development sites in the city, which is significantly altering an area once known for prostitution, drug-related crimes and nightclubs. We will be learning from contemporary ‘craftfocused’ practices such as O’Donnell + Tuomey, Edmund de Waal, Susan Collis and Rachel Whiteread, as well as dipping into the past to indulge in the Arts and Crafts and the British modernists. OK Computer – recorded at St Catherine’s Court, Bath Making Architecture: As in previous years, we will look at materials and processes. This year our method will be archaeological, collecting and analysing material fragments from the site, and tracing their political, social, economic and environmental implications. Our interventions will grow out of these archaeological findings. They will be subtle and intricate, tactile and processbased. And they will accommodate human activities that respond positively to the challenges imposed on us by the sober conditions of the world today. 50

Unit Staff Takero Shimazaki Ana Araujo Takero Shimazaki is a director of leading UK practice, Toh Shimazaki Architecture in London. He also runs t-sa forum workshops, which are associated with the practice. He has taught and lectured internationally. The practice combines critical thinking with projects, built and realised since 1996. www.t-sa.co.uk Ana Araujo practises as a designer, an educator and a researcher. She works at the crossover between spatial and textile design, having published and exhibited internationally (Germany, Holland, Brazil, UK, Japan, Australia). Ana is currently working on a publication and exhibition about Lina Bo Bardi’s work, as part of a larger project of dissemination of twentieth-century Latin American craft and design worldwide.

Albane Duvillier, Intermediate 2 (2011/12), Soho Dig â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a proposal to reconfigure Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clandestine activities through a rechanneling of its water system; wax, cement dust, sand, chalk, plywood support, steel tubes, copper tubes and moss

Intermediate 3 Mystical Infrastructures or Formulas to Transform into a Snake Intermediate 3 will investigate the impact of natural resources and their ambivalent role, both commercial and mystical. As much as mineral fields, mines, rivers and forests have an obvious economic value as resources that transcend their face value. By looking closely at alternative cultures and proto-native social practices we will develop alternative infrastructural interventions. The blend of what is impossible to prove, but also impossible to deny, will materialise in the understanding of magical and technological properties. In Formulas to Transform into a Snake we will study the strange mutation of resources that exist between technology and mythology in different scales through experiments, tests and prototypes. As a departure point we will focus on low-tech and neo-analogue strategies by investigating transformation of material properties in order to shape new territories between physical, chemical and symbolical attributes. In parallel with creative technical research, the role of myths and rituals of neo-urban and indigenous traditions will provide a field of conceptual studies covering potential roles for resources and infrastructural interventions. Studies on mystical rivers, sacred and profane sites, protoplasmic creatures and ancient paganism will broaden the horizon for new breeding grounds of built environments. Intermediate 3 is a unit strongly based on design, utilising architectural experimentation, literary poetic and interactive technologies to reconfigure infrastructures as social experiences. As the line between magic and technology becomes blurred, we will voyage out on a feverish trip visiting forests and resource-depleted sites. Staring into what lies beyond from the mundane, Intermediate 3 will work on architectures of the supernatural. Amid architectures of intense sensorial speculation, we will discuss the role of resources not only as commodities but also as human techne-logia.

Unit Staff Nannette Jackowski Ricardo de Ostos Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos (najadeostos.com) are principals of NaJa & deOstos. They are the authors of The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad and Pamphlet Architecture 29: Ambiguous Spaces. They have been nominated for the 2012 Iakov Chernikhov prize for young architects around the world. Nannette has worked for Wilkinson Eyre and Zaha Hadid. Ricardo has worked for Peter Cook, Future Systems and Foster + Partners. He has taught at Lund University in Sweden and is currently an Assoc-iate Professor at Ecole SpĂŠciale dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Architecture in Paris. He was appointed curator of the Brazilian Pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture in 2008 and 2010.

Leni Popovici, Intermediate 3 (2011/12), Landscape exploration of a Tsunami line and contextual shift

Intermediate 4 Urban Interior: Corridor Setting itself in a new geopolitical divide, Intermediate 4 will continue to investigate urbanity from the perspective of the interior. The confrontation of commonly opposed scales will create unexpected ways to consider both the detail and the city through textured and layered architectural strategies. Continuing the unit’s work in historically rich settings, we will pursue our experimental design processes in the evolving context of southeast Asia. The recent end of the political oddity of a kilometres-long Malaysian railway territory threading through Singapore’s sovereign state will be our opportunity to look at territorial linearity in one of Asia’s vertical playgrounds. Our investigation will be informed by contrasted studies of European architectural grammar, engaging in dialogue with the hybrid Singaporean social and morphological experiment. As a typological setting, the corridor will be our building block and tool to suggest novel urban linearity. Through a series of staged exercises we will explore this mundane and utilitarian space as a possible organisational apparatus and multi-scale spatial experience. A systematic parameterisation of pictorial and classical architectonics will form the basis for our investigation into a phenomenological reading of space that will offer instrumental insights into historical shifts in architectural typologies as physical expressions of social and political change. The year will be enriched by a series of seminars and workshops exploring both historical references and advanced production tools. The unit will apply its unique dedication to representational techniques and rulebased approaches to create rich design processes merging specific scales and forms of investigation. Acting on a unique urban situation while at the same time learning from a particular spatial typology, we will aim at infusing cultural, social and experimental data into an organisationally driven urban realm.

Unit Staff Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel da Costa Gonçalves Nathalie Rozencwajg studied and has been teaching at the AA since 2004 as well as being the coordinator of the AA Visiting School in Singapore. She is cofounder of RARE architects who have been awarded the RIBA 2011 award and RICS Project of the Year Award for Town Hall Hotel in London and is working on large-scale projects exploring advanced fabrication methods notably in the Arctic Circle. She was recently commended as emerging woman architect of the year. www.r-are.net Michel da Costa Gonçalves studied in Spain and France, and later graduated from the AA Emergent Technologies & Design programme. Cofounder of RARE architects, he is a former project architect for Shigeru Ban, notably on the new Pompidou museum in Metz, and AS in Paris. Director and author of ‘City’ series for Autrement publishers and contributor to The Art of Artificial Evolution/Springer Natural Computing Series, he has previously taught at the ENSAPL and is coordinator of the AA visiting school in Singapore since 2006.

Marguerite dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Aboville, Lisa Rukavina, Pavin Banternghansal, Intermediate 4, Framing Windows: Visual Porosity Map

Intermediate 5 Architecture Everywhere – The Pursuit of Approximation This unit is interested in an architecture that is conditioned by the processes and technologies of search and retrieval. We really do mean search and not research: both a methodology and a design brief for speculating on the architectural consequences of today’s culture of continuous ventilation and circulation of information – what most people are doing most of the time. Students are invited to respond to a series of architectural provocations* – rethinking them in the light of now – with consideration to time, form and behaviour. Each student will design and build their own bill of quantities to include technical and cultural components with an emphasis on primary sources. The tools of search, documentation and articulation are as follows: Film Book Model Outstanding development of search and retrieval skills will produce possibilities for an architecture for the simultaneous search, storage, retrieval and deployment of information at a designated time and location. – – – – –

We encourage a multiple aesthetic, individual interests and collective action across the school – expect the unexpected. We are interested not in solutions but in responses. We ask that students take care of their ideas and be generous with them too. We shall work with expert searchers in the fields of science, digital anthropology, art, medicine and food. We will travel within a one-hour radius of WC1.

* Garden of Enamel (1974) at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands by Jean Dubuffet Greenbird (1975), by Cedric Price Horse ecology (1978) – Search/Informal Architecture, L.A.W.u.N Project #19, p. C190

Unit Staff David Greene Samantha Hardingham David Greene, born Nottingham 1937, usual English provincial suburban upbringing, Art School, elected Associate member of the RIBA and onto London to begin a nervous twitchy career, from big buildings to T-shirts for Paul Smith to conceptual speculations for Archigram which he founded with Peter Cook. RIBA Gold Medal 2002 (Archigram). Joint Annie Spinks Award with Sir Peter Cook (2002). Currently visiting Prof of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University and External Examiner on the Masters in Advanced Research at the Bartlett. Samantha Hardingham is an architectural writer and editor publishing work in several editions of the original ellipsis architecture guide series. She graduated from the AA in 1993. She was senior research fellow in the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster 2003–09. She co-edited a book and cocurated the accompanying exhibition for L.A.W.u.N Project #19+20. She is currently researching a publication on the ‘Complete Works of Cedric Price’.

Insoo Hwang, Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the difference between a package tour and hitching a ride, 2012

Intermediate 6 Urban Assemblies ‘In most cases the architect is an unnecessary and cumbersome (and even detrimental) middleman between individual, constantly changing needs and the continuous incorporation of these needs into the built environment.’ – Nicholas Negroponte, 1975 Intermediate Unit 6 will continue to explore of research-based design and construction methods for architectural structures that capture and catalyse the complex nature of urban ecologies. This year we will use a different organisation of research topics, addressing the final project ambitions from week one. Studying precedents such as MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, we will investigate how construction can be part of an ongoing, user-driven design process. Our focus will shift from formation to assembly, concentrating on the growth of buildings as an unavoidable outcome of the social, economic and material flows within cities. This emphasises the architect’s role as process-director instead of form-maker, addressing the contingencies and ambiguities of real-world briefs. In the first term students will work in small teams to design and test models of machine-driven construction scenarios programmed through architectural rules. The experiments will be conducted at Hooke Park and TU Delft’s Robotic Lab in Rotterdam, with the final installations being built around the AA. Although these will be conceived as 1:1 structures informed by their real context, they will also act as testing scenarios of possible operations at an urban scale. Term 2 will move onto individual project work applying and expanding our ideas onto sites in Beijing, an epicentre of a transitioning global economy and laboratory for urban transformation. The design projects will focus on hybrid buildings that house a diverse population within limited space. Speculating on how architecture can evolve through the negotiation between the interests of individuals and the collective, we will investigate ways to encode quality of life into an ever-changing built environment. 58

Unit Staff Jeroen van Ameijde Brendon Carlin Jeroen van Ameijde received a Master’s degree in Architecture and Building Technology from the Delft University of Technology and has practised in The Netherlands, New York, Hong Kong and London. He has taught in design studios at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Innsbruck and the AA graduate programme and has lectured and taught workshops worldwide. He is currently directing the MakeLab AA Visiting School and practising as co-director of Urban Systems, a London-based architecture practice. Brendon Carlin completed his Master’s in Architecture and Urbanism at the AA and has worked for several offices in London, Beijing and Amsterdam. He has also taught with or coordinated courses and workshops at the University of Colorado, the AA, the Berlage Institute and Harvard. Currently he is practising as an associate of Relational Urbanism, and as co-director of Urban Systems, a London-based architecture practice.

Ekatarina Obedkova, Intermediate 6 (2011/12) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; variable apartment types regulated by environmental constraints and a social differentiation strategy, generated through a design methodology that incorporates the structural performance of the space-frame system

Intermediate 7 Moscow Nights: Spectacular Condensers The unit continues to explore design ‘infrastructures’ that act as transfers between urban systems while aligning programme and form. Playing on collisions between commerce and culture, we will tap into the whirlpools of leisure and entertainment behind flagrant Moscow transformations to define hybrid typologies. The city’s ingeniously extravagant nightlife inspires unconventional hotspots: lavish bashes ignite behind solemn facades, exclusive shows bypass sumptuous Palaces of Culture, and clandestine havens proliferate beside decadent nightclubs. Learning from paradoxical conjunctions of static and dynamic, contained and distributed, exposed and concealed, we will exaggerate scenarios of densification and intensification. Focusing on performance, we will seek variations on the urban club as the ultimate ‘social condenser’ – a mixer and an accelerator for a 24-hour city. Favouring pragmatic diagnostics, opportunistic sampling and progressive transplants, we will inject sterile hosts with vital elements. Hybrids of offices and stage-sets, stations and studios, museums and runways will be resolved as synthetic ‘infrastructures’. These diagrammatic frameworks and spatial scaffolds will link expanded networks, fields and ecologies with compressed conduits, mats and megastructures. Translating diagrams into forms, we will move from prototypes and infrastructural models to ‘decorated’ programmes and theatrical atmospheres. Multiplying the functional and the fantastic, extreme conceptual and graphic ‘provocations’ will respond to critical utopias by visionaries from Ginzburg and Chernikhov, to Price and Archizoom, to Koolhaas and Tschumi. Final ‘work/fun palaces’, ‘plug-in theatres’ and ‘no-stop function-mixers’ will manage volatile spaces and events for maximum visual impact. Catalogues, manuals and plates will mediate between city and architecture, analysis and projection, operation and appearance. For multiplied effects, portfolios will contain urban transcripts and hybrid drawings, composite maps and visual scenarios, diagrammatic matrices and intricate images. 60

Unit Staff Maria Fedorchenko Tatiana von Preussen Maria Fedorchenko studied at UCLA, Princeton University and MARKHI. Having practised in Russia, Greece and the US (including Michael Graves & Associates), she co-directs Fedorchenko Studio and runs an urban consultancy. Focusing on diagrammatic tools and polyvalent design systems, her research and design has been published and exhibited internationally. Teaching at UC Berkeley, UCLA and CCA since 2003, she has been involved in HTS, Housing & Urbanism and the Visiting School at the AA. Tatiana von Preussen was educated at Cambridge University and Columbia University. She has practised in London and New York where she worked for James Corner Field Operations. She has taught design studio and advanced representation at Columbia University. Previously a partner of the research group Gleamlab, she is currently a director of vPPR Architects.

Vidhya Pushpanathan, Intermediate 7 (2011/12, RIBA President’s Bronze Medal Nomination), The Depository of Forgotten Monuments – with ‘no-stop’ organisational scaffold to enable cycles of deconstruction/reconstruction, a bridge of architectural fragments thrives on colliding ‘condenser’ cores

Intermediate 8 Politics of a Transformative Block Understanding scale through the Buenos Aires city grid This year Intermediate Unit 8 will be working on the design of a mix-use city block that will be shared by a private corporation and a public institution in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Latin American cities, rapid socioeconomic changes are spawning unprecedented city block configurations with radical programmatic assemblages, reversibility between inside and outside and interchange between public and private domains. However, the potential of these transformations, which change our understanding of cities as politically controlled entities through policy-making, lies in their attachment to a generic urban grid. The 100x100m grid in Buenos Aires is one of the densest in Latin America and the perfect scenario to showcase the potential value of the block to regenerate the city today. This implies a complex form-finding process reassessing the tension between block and grid, a gradation between permanence and change in buildings. Students will work on a 100x100m urban block using an empty or built plot within the city grid. The unit will be structured in three interrelated parts. 1. Operational Fields: research on socio-cultural and economic aspects that will inform the programmatic brief of block proposals. This research will also be accompanied by a reading of the city through a collection of maps, photographs and city fragments that will be used for filling the block with content. 2. Spatial Organisations: buildings by Clorindo Testa in Buenos Aires and urban block proposals by Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff and Rafael Moneo will be analysed to understand their formal and spatial organisations, and will be extrapolated as preliminary systems of spatial relations of block proposals. These axonometric diagrams will articulate and structure the programmatic content of the block. 3. Active Interfaces: studies on the transformation, adaptation and responsiveness of the block, reflecting on its relationship with both the grid and passersby, will be studied through a 1/5 mock-up of the building envelope. 62

Unit Staff Francisco Gonzรกlez de Canales Nuria Alvarez Lombardero Francisco Gonzรกlez de Canales studied architecture at ETSA Seville, ETSA Barcelona and Harvard University, and worked for Foster + Partners and Rafael Moneo. He is co-director of awardwinning office Canales & Lombardero. An active architectural critic, he has previously lectured in England, Mexico, Spain and the US, worked as AACP coordinator and collaborated in different architectural publications. He is currently AA HTS tutor and has recently published the book Experiments with life itself (Actar 2012) based on his PhD research on the radical domestic selfexperimentations of the 1940s and 1950s. Nuria Alvarez Lombardero studied architecture and urbanism at ETSA Madrid and the AA. She has worked for Machado & Silvetti Associates in Boston and for Neutra Magazine on the editorial board. Since 2003 she has co-directed the London Seville-based office Canales & Lombardero. She has previously taught at the University of Cambridge and TEC Monterrey and lectured on urbanism at the University of Seville. After working as a researcher at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge and the AA, she finished her PhD on the dissolution of boundaries traced by modern urban planning.

Fragkiskos Konstantatos, Intermediate 8 (2011/12) – a new transport hub in Tlatelolco that combines a spontaneous peseros’ network with the regulated transportation system as a response to the acceleration of Mexico City’s socio-spatial fragmentation

Intermediate 9 Hunger On the rocky eastern side of the island of Säynätsalo, Intermediate 9 will build the future by reinventing the past. Here, we will be intellectually, physically and emotionally immersed in the built and unbuilt legacy of Alvar Aalto, situating our projects in proximity to his town hall and carrying out experiments, as Aalto himself wrote, ‘that are not yet sufficiently well developed to be tried out in practice and where the proximity of nature may offer inspiration for both form and structure’. Confronted with this well-mannered Scandic seriousness, we’ll need some other kind of distraction. And so to mix things up, we’ll play with ideas of authenticity by also looking at Aalto’s slightly more roguish, quixotically British copyists – Leslie Martin, Patrick Hodgkinson and Colin St John Wilson. Then to escape from the frozen north altogether, we’ll head to warmer climes, to the comarca of Vallés Oriental and into the atelier of Toni Cumella, where we’ll produce a ceramic slip-cast series from landscape-scale 3D scans of our intricate laser-cut 3D white card constructions and at the same time synthesise our time-based project sections. All of these experiments and experiences at home and abroad will be punctuated by a set of ‘Aalto Addresses’. Deborah Saunt, MJ Long, Niall Hobhouse, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Juhani Pallasmaa and Harry Charrington are some of those invited to rant and rave over Aalto and your work. We’ll work at UPM Jyväskylä’s plywood mill, draw on the 2D and 3D archives of the Aalto Museum in Helsinki and Jyväskylä and slip in to some of the psychosis of Knut Hamsun’s unnamed vagrant by foraging in the Finnish forests. And in case you don’t know it already, the unit operates between fine art and architecture – or what Aalto termed ‘artek’– following a non-programme-based design approach, emphasising an array of types of movement in TS, and always, as Cedric Price once said, ‘delight in the unknown’.

Unit Staff Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews Christopher Pierce studied at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Among his recent publications are essays on Jordi Bonet Armengol, ‘Gaudi’s Gatekeeper’ (2011) and Cero 9, ‘Bump and Grind’ (2011). He formed MisArchitecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Christopher Matthews in 2000. Christopher Matthews is a principal of Pastina Matthews Architects (PMA), and was educated at the Bartlett, UCL. For nearly a decade he worked with James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates on projects including the Singapore Arts Centre, Lowry Centre and No 1 Poultry before setting up PMA in 2000.

Despoina Kafetzopoulou, Intermediate 9 (2011/12), Ornithological Administration

Intermediate 10 (+1) Intermediate 10 will be going out on a limb, both figuratively and conceptually, by exploring a new roof tectonic for London’s vertical urbanisation. We will focus on the city’s roof terrain with a desire to construct a full-scale architectural intervention. Our site is the room that touches the sky. Traditionally the top floor is the domain of a diverse set of inhabitants: the artist, the chambermaid, the contract killer in the attic or the nursery of forgotten children. All these characters inhabit this necessary appendix that paradoxically has a close proximity to the street while being located in splendid isolation – a prime location to gain a new understanding of the city. The pinnacle of the urban house is a beacon and a force shield – a battleground with the stars. This threshold provides delicious design opportunities for the young architect – working from the pragmatic to the surreal, from the inside out and vice versa, from doorknob to chimneypot, and from window openings to carpet patterns. To understand these conditions we will look at projects such as Coop Himmelblau’s Falkestrasse, the Beistegui apartment by Le Corbusier, Gaudi’s Casa Milà, Bernard Tschumi’s advertising for architecture in reference to Yves Klein’s leap into the void, and we will go to visit Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre in Paris. This investigation of the roof derives from an urge to tackle the exploding density within cities of the ‘urban millennium’, where for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population is urban-based. Unlike the Haussmannian avenues of Paris, New York’s grid or Rome’s historical overlays, London is an organically grown city, with its human-scaled buildings and narrow streets that limits horizontal, street-level extension. We will add one extra level (+1) to London’s skyline and speculate on tangible and fantastic alternatives for London, savouring the English breeze blowing around our head and a sheepish desire to rise above the parapet.

Unit Staff Valentin Bontjes van Beek Valentin Bontjes van Beek lives and works in London and trained as a carpenter in Germany before graduating from the AA in 1998. He subsequently worked as an architect in New York with Bernard Tschumi. He has taught an MArch Urban Design studio at the Bartlett and has been a Unit Master at the AA since 2001. He currently runs the Pending Structures and Replica Structures Media Studies course, which explores the design and fabrication from surreal to utilitarian CNC-machined plywood structures.

Yves Klein, Le saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) at 5 rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960

Intermediate 11 Ibiza: Body-Mind Space Station Ibiza is not just a location, it is a testing-ground. From the 1960s onwards, the island has been a non-stop laboratory, transforming the natural landscape into an amplified environment of experience. From hippies to techno-kids, Ibiza has invented and consolidated a kind of extraterritorial tourism, searching for a situation that blends into a unique atmosphere combining the wildest nature of the site with its most radical altered experiences. Its legendary natural elements are mixed with technological devices to produce a kind of rocky platform that works as an inside-outside station where sound systems and resorts empower the seductive and magical properties of the mountains, the beaches and the sea. Today, multiple versions of 60s experimental practices are hidden under hyper-commercial concepts such as brand experience, body culture or wellness. Among these practices there is an attempt to restore strong relations with the body but without the 60s radical soul. To revisit these ideas, we will look at contemporary artists like Carsten Höller or Yayoi Kusama, who through their installations are trying to achieve ways of radicalism – subverting the senses in order to create intense relations between body and space. The unit trip will be our first foray into the island, understood as the initial step into immersion, as well as a base tool for analysing the Ibiza context. Our research will be based on the belief that architecture is able to offer a high-fidelity translation of all these expanded senses, adding more qualities to the island party ecosystem. Working at both the scale of the individual and the group, the unit will use a wide range of techniques expressing the 3D versions of the altered senses, with a particular emphasis on the use of colour in order to describe and define new architectural devices that we will call Body-Mind Space Stations: islands inside islands.

Unit Staff Manuel Collado Arpia Nacho Martín Asunción Manuel Collado Arpia & Nacho Martín Asunción are founders of the Madridbased office Mi5 Architects. They have won and built several competitions and their work has been recognised, awarded and published in a wide range of media such as Dezeen, Archdaily, Icon, and El País. Since 2003, they have taught at various institutions such as the Architectural Polytechnic Universities, UAH Madrid, UA Alicante and UCJC Madrid, the Architectural Association Summer School and Fashion Design at IED Madrid. Additionally they have participated in several juries, lectures and exhibitions such as at the Venice Biennale, RIBA London and IVAM Valencia, among others. They are both currently completing their PhD dissertations at ETSAM Madrid.

View over Ibiza Island from the aircraft (top); Yayoi Kusama’s, ‘Dots Obsession’ installation, 2004 (bottom)

Intermediate 13 The Void Hypothesis: Controlled Experiments to Quantify the Ineffable Qualities of Emptiness ‘An American technology firm is building a town the size of Bristol in the desert in New Mexico but nobody will live there.’ – Daily Telegraph Intermediate 13 will continue its exploration of void – this time in relation to the design of empty buildings as experimental space. We are interested in the eternal qualities of architecture: contemplation of the philosophical, experiential and socio-political attributes of space. Our focus will be directed toward the phenomenological potential of absence/presence as a commentary on the nature of space and the city. The site will be the Isle of Dogs. West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs in London’s East End was once the world’s busiest commercial port. The four docks, surrounded by warehouses and a continuous six-metre brick wall, accommodated over 1,000 ships. Following decline in the late twentieth century the Isle of Dogs was designated an enterprise zone free from the constraints of urban planning and taxation. Exploiting these legal loopholes developers Olympia & York created the dense high-rise global financial capital of Canary Wharf. In both instances the void was used as an economic tool counter to the values of urban realm. Canary Wharf is a now a fascinating manifestation of what happens when the principles of civic inclusion and responsibility are made subservient to the exigencies of raising and deploying capital. This appraisal sets up our main thesis of investigation: to what extent can the potency of the void be employed to release the civic qualities of the contemporary city? If the processes of taking away, clearing, emptying and excluding have such potential, what scope is there to apply them to today’s impoverished Isle of Dogs? Rather than the everyday objectives of urban regeneration, our interest is in the idea of experimentation: the ineffable, the unknown and the improbable. How could the most exquisite outcome be achieved through an engagement with emptiness? 70

Unit Staff Miraj Ahmed Martin Jameson Miraj Ahmed is a practising painter and architect. He has taught at the AA since 2000 and is a Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art. Martin Jameson is an associate at Serie Architects. He studied for five years at the AA and received his Diploma with honours. Before studying architecture he was a business consultant advising corporations on strategy and organisational design. He has a BA from Oxford University where he studied Kantian philosophy and political theory, and an MBA from IMD, Switzerland.

Rachel Khalil, Intermediate 13 (2011/12), The Vertiginous Abyss â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Â shopping in Tottenham Hale

Diploma 1 Prototypes of the Informational Revolution: Synchronicity In 1967, nearly 30 years before the invention of the internet, Marshall McLuhan predicted that ‘in this electronic age we see ourselves being translated… into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness’. Superseding McLuhan’s prediction, today’s social, cultural and economic reality is largely made up of 900 million Facebook users, tweeting up to 15,000 tweets per second – the web. Behind the electronic dream, we glance at the infrastructural epitome of our time – an electromagnetic behemoth consuming two per cent of the world’s energy. A world of intoxicating data transfer rates, running through countless server hubs, black fibre-optic cables on the floor of our oceans, crisscrossing the globe to shave off a fraction of trading time. This is today’s reality, fuelled by the metropoles – physical residues and engines of a newly established hybrid urbanity. Set within this socio-technological reality, Diploma 1 explores the idea of synchronicity – the articulation of a series of events and spaces causally unrelated, yet occurring and perceived solely in a precisely constructed framework. In consequence we aim to establish architecture that is dislocated from an singular analogue genius loci in favour of a speculative choreographed urban condition. Our testing ground will be the artificial space in between London and New York. Divided physically by the Atlantic, but intrinsically connected not only through a net of fibre optics, these two metropoles are able to articulate civic architectures occurring in the constructed overlaps of our digital networks and actual realities. Embodied within these two nodal points, Diploma 1 seeks the emergence of a third city constructed as a series of speculative public spaces, timely dislocated events, electromagnetic ecclesial constructs, agendas for economic and ecological choreographed interdependencies. This is a call to define spatial strategies for civic structures stretched over a distance of 5,500km – a new terra incognita, ready to be articulated and acknowledged as part of today’s architecture. 72

Unit Staff Tobias Klein Tobias Klein studied architecture at the RWTH (Aachen, Germany), the University of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria) and the Bartlett School for Architecture (London, UK). He has worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au before opening his own practice, Studio Tobias Klein. The practice operates in the between architecture and art, across the fields of installation, experimental design, interactivity and urbanism. The studio was recently commissioned to install work at the V&A in June 2012. He is one of the founders of .horhizon, has lectured internationally at Royal College of Art, TU Munich, TU Innsbruck and has been teaching at the AA since 2008.

Hye-Ju Park (Diploma 1, 2011/12) defines new territories and time zones in a selfreferential cartography system based on high frequency trading, latency of information and fibre-optic infrastructures between the seven nodal locations of global trade.Â

Diploma 2 Last Exit To Block X Subject: A de-territorialised city made of autonomous blocks along an urban transportation line, where each block constitutes a political society, independent from the others, with its own government, laws and customs. Issue: Each student will develop one block and one building within a block. Collectively the unit will work as a team on the overall masterplan and programme. The projects will be designed in relation to the political, social and architectural fiction written by the students. Writing of a Political, Social and Architectural Fiction Term 1: Concept/Urban Scale – Time 01: City Zero Determine a moral/amoral/non moral statement; design an artefact, a flag and a pavilion; place along a route – Time 02: Block Zero Determine the urban rules; Programme adaptation (100,000m2); Schematic design – Study trip to Los Angeles, CA and the US desert Term 2: Design/Building Scale – Time 03: Power Zero-One Mutate the artefact into the place and symbol; Architectural development in relation to: Time 01 statement, Time 02 urban rules, schematic design and the chosen site – Time 04: Block One Re-integration of a building into the block’s core; Global development and design; Technical studies; Finalisation Unit Book Term 3: Unit Scale – Time 05: City Onep Blocks assembling/sections (exquisite corpse); Harmonisation of graphic documents; Models and catalogue The overall agenda of the unit will be to design a fictional city composed of autonomous blocks. Similar to Neal Stephenson’s city-states, the blocks will be designed upon fictions written by the students of which the city will be the collection. 74

Unit Staff Didier Faustino Kostas Grigoriadis Didier Faustino is an architect by education and explores the relationships between architecture and the arts, between body and space. His approach is multifaceted, from artistic installations to experimentation, from subversive visual artworks to spaces designed as a tool for exacerbating our senses and sharpening our awareness of reality. Kostas Grigoriadis studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL followed by a Master’s at the AA’s Design Research Laboratory. After winning an international competition he is currently co-designing a large-scale mixed-use development in Delhi and is pursuing a PhD in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London.

Marilia Spanou, Diploma 2 (2011/12) Peripatetic Circus â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the circus performance spaces are separated into five different module types that can be reconfigured according to the site they are unfolded into.

Diploma 4 Polity and Space â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Coast of Europe The project of Europe is wrought by a wide set of formgenerating processes, both material and institutional. The lay of the ground of European cities and territories forms the specific interactions and circulations of the many populations and processes that inhabit them, and is in turn shaped by the economic, political, institutional and cultural procedures that characterise contemporary Europe. At a time of economic crisis and institutional reorganisation, Diploma 4 investigates how, in the twenty-first century, architecture can interact with multiple forms of expert knowledge to shape inhabited spaces. The dynamic forms of contemporary institutions, societies, organisations and economies interact with the complex forms of the material spaces and processes of our territories to produce a novel mixture of human and artificial spaces. The complex process of construction and modification over time of these territories is itself an architecture, an organisation of the relation between contemporary polities and their spaces of operation. The European peninsula is explored as a space where processes of change and innovation are layered with retraction, decay and inertia. It is a complex space in transformation, shaped by wide-ranging processes as well as individual initiatives and projects. It is a space where architecture can re-imagine and re-link the spaces, practices and knowledges of a variety of agents, operating both above and beneath the state. Characterised by increasing separations and demarcations in space and between knowledges and practices, the European space is transforming into a new territorial constellation, where cohabitation is marked by introversion, self-referential systems and infrastructures, and compounds. Combining sharp analytical capacity with contemporary architecture, urbanism, remote sensing and new imaging technologies, the project creates a new image and focus for integrated spatial transformations. It establishes realworld propositions in response to the uncertain processes of change of Europe.

Unit Staff John Palmesino Ann-Sofi RĂśnnskog John Palmesino & Ann-Sofi RĂśnnskog are architects and urbanists. They have established Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that combines architecture, analysis, advocacy and action for integrated spatial transformation of contemporary territories. John is Research Advisor at the Design Department of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He is researching for his PhD at the Research Architecture Centre at Goldsmiths, where he also teaches the MA. He has previously been Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel/ Contemporary City Institute and has co-founded Multiplicity, an international urban research network. Ann-Sofi is a PhD research fellow at AHO in Oslo, was previously a researcher at ETH Studio Basel and has studied in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Zurich.

Carrie Lim, Diploma 4 (2011/12) â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Â extraterritorial conditions along the New Northern Sea Route

Diploma 5 Enclaves: Alternative Forms of Togetherness After an exploration of the world of social groups and subcultures leading to a definition of Third Natures, Diploma 5 will this year redefine the relationship between alternative forms of being together and their material and spatial infrastructure, taking account of their levels of control, freedom and coercion. We will pay special attention to activities, rituals and events linked to these forms of co-being, their counter-routines, including their feasts and forms of assembly or insurrection. Our aim will be to develop spaces that encourage explicit discussion between individuals, both accommodating and inciting these alternative forms of togetherness. For Diploma 5 the definition of space cannot be separated from the activities and lifestyles in which it shelters, or the specific cultural context and the technology involved in its realisation. The real challenge of our time lies in the reinvention of alternative lifestyles based on the exploration of new existential territories, literally rebuilding modes of being together. These reinventions cultivate new forms of subjectivity and dissensus as a remedy against the passive consumption of existential forms and preconceived ideas of beauty. Each student will study, select and develop the formal and cultural autonomy of their proposals, defining buildings as spatial territories that have concrete and distinctive systems of rules, yet at the same time are immersed in a set of culturally defined connections. This year we will be gardeners and explorers of a territory strongly anchored in the present – in a permanent state of oscillation created by the frantic quest for new forms of beauty expressed through models, drawings and writing. We will discuss these media in relation to their cultural material and political context, cultivating a critical approach and an intellectual commitment. Defining enclaves as a set of assemblies, rituals and feasts will allow Diploma 5 to dream of reinventing alternative forms of being together, in an eager search for an escape from the inherited forms of community and spatial models. 78

Unit Staff Cristina Díaz Moreno Efrén García Grinda Tyen Masten Cristina Díaz Moreno & Efrén García Grinda are both architects and founders of the Madrid based office AMID.cero9 (cero9.com). Since 1998 they have been teaching in parallel at ETSAM and ESAYA, and have been visiting teachers and lecturers throughout the USA, Europe and Asia. Their projects have been widely disseminated only in exhibitions, biennials and publications of architecture as well as in museums and biennials of art (Sharjah Biennial, 13 March 2013). They have won more than 30 prizes in national and international competitions, and their projects and writings have been published in ‘Breathable’ and ‘from cero9 to AMID’. Tyen Masten earned a Masters Degree from UCLA and worked extensively in both Los Angeles and New York, and has most recently worked at Zaha Hadid Architects from 2004–12. He has been a tutor at the AA since 2005 and has previously taught with Charles Tashima.

Ben Reynolds, Diploma 5 (2011/12, Diploma Honours), New Value â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Â nestled between the fairway-condos of Palm Springs is a data centre storing the shapeless stuff of digital production. It is also a country club for leisure-suit-laden retired bankers where games exploit their tired bodies as a wax landscape excretes below.

Diploma 6 Unknown Fields The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross section and seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. In previous years we have travelled through the wilds of the Galapagos Islands and the Ecuadorian Amazon, the eternal night of the Arctic Circle, the Mining Landscapes of Outback Australia and the irradiated forests of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. We bear witness to these alternative worlds as a means to understand our own world in new ways. A more familiar city like London is thoroughly embedded in a global network of landscapes and infrastructures that are typically forgotten, unseen, ignored or only presented through particular cultural narratives. Unknown Fields aims to remap the city and the technologies it contains not as discrete, independent collections of buildings and technologies but as a networked object that conditions and is conditioned by a wide array of local and global landscapes. Our projects are speculative scenarios that deploy time-based media, film, animation, performance, gaming and choreographic drawings to define dynamic spaces of motion and commotion, cycles and shifts, ebbs and flows, wonder and intrigue. In the division we are both visionaries and reporters, critically engaged with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Our architecture will operate in the no-manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land between the cultivated and the natural: intervening in a new kind of wilderness. The natural world is being radically redefined through technology and our culture will be shaped by our response to the questions this raises. It is a journey of uncertain destination, punctuated with hidden detours and unexpected tangents. So goggles on, pack a light lunch, your binoculars and spacesuits as we head off to visit the unknown fields between nature and technology. 80

Unit Staff Liam Young Kate Davies Liam Young is an architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is founder of the think-tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, perverse and imaginary urbanisms. Their projects develop fictional speculations as critical instruments to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological futures. Kate Davies is a designer, writer and educator. She is co-founder of the multidisciplinary group LiquidFactory. Kate makes objects, narrative work, films and installations that deal with obscure territories of occupation. Her current work explores the psychology of extreme landscapes and the meaning of wilderness. Kate has taught at London Metropolitan, the Bartlett and Chelsea College of Art and regularly runs international design workshops.

Samantha Lee, Diploma 6 (2011/12) Landscapes of Plausible Uncertainty â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the territory of far north Alaska is redesigned as the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fastest supercomputer, endlessly calculating its own future

Diploma 8 Corporate Domain The role of the corporation in the city originated as an agent of urban form, yet has evolved to become the primary problematic for a contemporary understanding of the various formats of polis. Throughout this evolution, the relationship of architecture and building has become confused, dormant and marginalised as an esoteric praxis. As such, Diploma Unit 8 is concerned with how architecture can reclaim relevance in the dialectic between form and the complexity of the city. Corporate Campus The brief for yearlong proposals will be for a revival and redefinition of the corporate campus within a fragmented urban condition. Beginning our research with the history of the corporation and the city, we will first examine urban precedents of the early twentieth century. We will then proceed to more global contemporary trends ranging from a general desire to reintroduce production within urban agglomerations, and the more recent compromise of trends that seek to encapsulate particular urban phenomena in peripheral and polycentric cores. Students will formulate and demonstrate their positions through architectural speculations, founded on a site and context of their own determination. Common Form The focus on this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s approach to the architectural â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;objectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; will address fissures inherent in the historical distinction between building and architecture. For students to both demonstrate and extrapolate their developing proposals, the methodology of form development will be integral in the elaboration of associated technical and theoretical concepts. Inherent in this process is the development of an architectural syntax focusing on the model of reductive elements, presupposing an urban concept of paradigm and syntagma, or classes and the links between them. Students will engage with both the development of a general order of architectural elements, its structure of possibilities, and the implementation of types critical to their propositions. 82

Unit Staff Eugene Han Eugene Han runs AVAStudio, developing systems in industrial design, architecture and computation. He is the Head of Media Studies and a Diploma Unit Master at the AA.

Beom Kwan Kim, Diploma 8, (AA Diploma Honours, 2011/12) â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Â an irregular distribution of tower and podium types throughout the city of Shenzhen, producing striated armatures using variable inclusion and exclusion of architecture and context

Diploma 9 The End of Context ‘Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings’ – Rose Macaulay ‘So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing’ – Robert Rauschenberg This year Diploma 9 moves from the room to the ruin. Last year’s work on the room created unprecedented unit projects by virtue of an intense internalisation of our ongoing aims and agendas. Students were able to create incredibly singular, self-contained worlds comprising invented rooms that no longer represented the city, but rather embodied and suggested entirely new forms of the city. The goal this year will be the same: to continue rethinking what it means to make an architectural portfolio as an essential dimension of what we call an architectural project, and to craft its individuality in new, unexpected ways. The ruins we will challenge are the dead spaces (and portfolios) we already know, and we will force them to undergo radical transformation. Our ruins will not be those of lamented lost buildings or ancient cities. Instead, the remnants we embrace as precedents are the places where connections between people, histories, spaces and culture have already begun to fray. In Diploma 9 context is all about relationships, real or invented, built between objects, places and spaces. This year the idea of the isolated ruin – where these ties are in danger or at worst broken – is one we will use to further threaten architecture’s belief in context. From Rauschenberg’s Combines to Duchamp’s Fountain and Piranesi’s Carceri, we will consider the ruin as something else entirely: as points able to reveal architecture’s capacity for displacing time and place. Our goal will be to show that once reconnected by absurd links of our own invention, new contexts can emerge and spawn the imagination and invention of fantastical, new architectural forms. The ruin will become our tabula rasa. 84

Unit Staff Natasha Sandmeier Natasha Sandmeier is an architect and partner of Big Picture Studio. She was Project Architect for the Seattle Public Library while at OMA. She has been Unit Master of Diploma 9 since 2007, and was Intermediate 2 Unit Master from 2001–6. She also directs the AA Summer School.

Manijeh Verhese, Diploma 9 (2011/12 Diploma Honours), The Case of the Elusive Room is the Mystery that Plagues the City â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one committed by architects who believe the room and the city to be mutually exclusive

Diploma 10 Direct Urbanism: 3 Scans Diploma 10 will deploy a perimeter of 1km by 1km to scan specific areas in three cities. In Scan 1, we will scan a particular part of London, where we will seek to identify the physical and social variables that make up the reality of its spatial experience. In this scanning process, we will examine how conflict, control, exchange, fiction, groups, life, power, space, structures and time influence the city. We will start by focusing on control and then challenge its current dominant role by expanding the spatial potential of the other themes. We will learn from the city, engage with the live realm and redefine the live or ‘direct’ dimension that activates the city’s space. By applying this direct dimension, we will invent composite spatial interventions that expressly test different combinations of physical and social structures. The city’s spaces are intrinsically composite: Central London, Zone 1 and the Congestion Charge create a hybrid space and, similarly, stadiums, teams, matches and fans make up the composite space of football. We will consider the definite and the elusive qualities of space and then define the interrelation that needs to exist between them. Within the London scan, in a smaller area, we will tackle architecture by developing components and interactive elements that will deliberately, blur the separation of space delineated by architecture from that of the city. One key question is: can we use the spatial language of the city to design architecture? In Scan 2, we will travel to an alternative European city to experiment with the use of the constructed situation as a form of spatial intervention. In Scan 3, we will test our spatial strategies and investigate the theme of conflict in a contrasting city that is undergoing a process of political change. Using constructed situations, videos, models and architectural drawings to communicate our spatial experiments, and informed by the comparisons of the three scans and cities, we will set out to transform, physically and socially, the area of the London scan. 86

Unit Staff Carlos Villanueva Brandt Carlos Villanueva Brandt has been Diploma 10 Unit Master since 1986 and was awarded the RIBA President’s Silver Medal Tutor Prize 2000. The varied work of Carlos Villanueva Brandt Architecture, formed in 1984, has been published widely and exhibited internationally. (villanuevabrandt.com)

Harry Cliffe-Roberts, Diploma 10 (2011/12), Reactivating the Thames at Wapping – the ‘E1 Station’ reconfigures London’s logistics and combines the transfer of goods and citizens to create a new setting for the live realm.

Diploma 11 Radical Remodelling Diploma 11 has been collecting leftover matter, unplanned spaces, incomplete objects and accidental architecture throughout London. These are the live expressions of time and places that inspire us to imagine micro-cities, leading to alternative architectural strategies that assemble fragments and celebrate a city that is beautifully incomplete. Our approach is empirical. Interpreting the city through direct contact, we sample textural details by reading their histories and stories. We will start by briefly revisiting the sites our unit has explored over the years and conclude our journey on the theme of micro-city. We will focus on an inner area of London: the redevelopment of Euston Station, which is estimated to open up approximately 2.5 million ft2 of mixed-use development, possibly increasing the number of platforms for a new High Speed 2 railway that will connect the city to the Midlands and the North. The rebuild will have a direct impact on certain landmarks in the surrounding area including Euston Square; a church burial ground; hundreds of council homes including Somers Town; a Victorian office block may be demolished; Royal Mail could be forced to close a crucial distribution centre; and the National Temperance Hospital, which has been empty for years, is set to be sold off to the highest bidder despite calls for it to be used as social housing. Our research will cross-examine these masterplans and their surroundings: the environment, social sustainability and details of its architecture. We will speculate on a micro-urban unit that will be investigated parallel to the existing plans and see how the proposals may compensate for the lack of health care and learning facilities throughout the city. Responding to a series of ‘what ifs’ we will articulate the simplest forms to condense and clarify the essential matters that we unearth and discover. Our challenge is to attempt to define what makes up London today, as an antithesis to the Starbucks and Holiday Inn homogenisation that has engulfed the city, and what are the layers and levels of complexity that form this urban definition. 88

Unit Staff Shin Egashira Shin Egashira makes art and architecture worldwide. His recent collaboration experiments include the rebuilding of Alfred Jarry’s ‘Time Machine’, ‘How to Walk a Flat Elephant’ and ‘Twisting Concrete’, which intend to fuse the old with the new. His work has been exhibited in Japan and Europe in venues such as the Spiral Garden in Tokyo and the Venice Biennale. For the last 16 years he has been conducting a series of landscape workshops in rural communities across the world including Koshirakura (Japan), Gu-Zhu Village (China) and Muxagata (Portugal). He has been Diploma 11 Unit Master since 1996.

Diploma 11 Projects Review Exhibition at the AA, June 2012

Diploma 14 The Politics of Sacred Space After decades of neglect within the field of architecture and urbanism we want to re-open the issue of sacred space. In architecture, ‘sacredness’ is either ignored as an irrational sphere, or it is reduced to stereotypes of spirituality and contemplation. In its attempt to reconnect architecture to the political, Diploma 14 proposes to focus on one of its most intense manifestations – the issue of sacred space. If the political concerns difference and conflict as collective phenomena, it is within the category of the sacred that this concept acquires its most potent representations. It is possible to speculate that the very origin of the city as political space was precisely the foundation of a sacred space, a sanctuary. The sanctuary was a space set apart within an open territory and as such the safe meeting point for different clans or fugitives. The sanctuary was both open to different subjects and parties and closed in order to preserve its safety and difference towards everything outside itself. The dialectic of openness and exclusion implied in sacred space is thus one of the most ancient manifestations of the political. Therefore it is precisely by examining the issue of the sacred that we can trace back many latent conditions that still affect the city today as political body. For example, if in contemporary discourse words such as community, participation and publicness have become clichés, it is within the idea of sacred space that they reacquire an intense meaning. Moreover, it is by studying the different forms of worship inherent in each religion that we can grasp the ethos of a civilisation. The work in the unit will depart from an in-depth study of the category of the sacred from ancient to contemporary times, and will pay special attention to theological concepts and forms of worship as foundations for political and spatial organisation of the city. Above all we will study how sacred space highlights the crucial link between architecture and the city. As always Diploma 14 will address the unit project by giving relevance to drawing and writing as fundamental means of design. 90

Unit Staff Pier Vittorio Aureli Maria Shéhérazade Giudici Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. His research and projects focus on the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. He is Davenport Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University and is the author of many essays including, ‘The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture’ (2011) and ‘The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture’ (2008). Aureli is co-founder of Dogma, an architectural studio based in Brussels and focused on the project of the city. Maria S Giudici earned her MA from Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Switzerland, in 2006. Between 2005 and 2007 she worked in Bucharestbased office BAU, collaborated in Rotterdam with Donis in 2010 and Dogma in 2011. After teaching at the Berlage Institute and co-tutoring workshops at TU Delft (2008), TU Munich (2009), and Strelka (2010), she will be an assistant professor at BIArch Barcelona.

Sam Nelson, Diploma 14 (2011/12)

Diploma 16 Cybernetic Insurgence II: Super Order Diploma 16 is exploring emerging design and fabrication techniques capable of adapting to new environmental contingencies. The generation of cultural and BIOMEspecific urban public space, where morphology and a time-based metabolism (in)form an overall urban ecology, will be a continuing focus of research. This year’s brief proposes the production of new social, economic, environmental and cultural orders as primers for a resilient, self-generating urban morphology capable of being deployed in the tabula rasa conditions associated with the production of new cities. These prototypical urban forms and structures will be informed by an investigation of alternative architectural production methods and urban models based on cybernetics, adaptation to our rapidly changing environment, and the need for biodiversity and social sustainability. Central to the unit is a belief in the projective power of architecture and urban design. Each student will develop a comprehensive urban thesis formulating a new ‘Super Order’ capable of adapting to future change. The treatise will include an extended case study analysing the bases for this order, from critique to ideology, and from manifesto to technology and technique. In addition a BIOME-specific urban manifesto and abstract will be developed in order to build an individual research consultancy relating the project to a larger cultural context. Exploiting the innate opportunities afforded by generative and associative modelling techniques, BIMS and digital manufacture, we will begin the year with a series of computational workshops that will allow each student to develop their own repertoire of BIMS and associative modelling techniques used for the generation of a BIOME-specific eco-systemic model. Finally, we will embrace the fundamental belief in the exploration and exploitation of architectural/urban form to formulate an architectural/urban critique and appropriation based on ideological rationale in parallel with critical learning and reflection.

Unit Staff Jonas Lundberg Andrew Yau Andrew Yau & Jonas Lundberg are members of Urban Future Organisation, an international architecture practice and design research collaborative. UFO has won a number of international competitions, exhibited its work at the Venice and Beijing Biennales and was featured in 10X10 v2. Currently they are working on large-scale urban and architectural projects in the Far East.

Jin Ho, Diploma 16 (2011/12)

Diploma 17 Latent Territories: Productive Fields Diploma 17 continues to investigate new forms of the contemporary city and its ramifications within complex and exacerbated territories at the fringe of large metropolises. This year we will focus our attention on Africa, a region of extensive economic growth now undergoing unprecedented territorial transformations. The continent still suffers from unresolved postcolonial conflicts, the creation of slums, unequal distribution of resources and vast ungoverned regions. On the other hand, Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s extensive natural resources, agrarian developments and large investments on infrastructure offer possibilities to develop new speculative briefs. Within these rapidly changing conditions, students will identify a prospect of progress within prototypical settlements within the context of productive territories, whether agrarian or industrial, and develop their thesis through speculative proposals of radicalised urban concepts for the near future. Our research will explore the possibilities and benefits of a dynamic and symbiotic synergy between architecture and infrastructure. Through programmatic coupling, we will experiment with new organisational and growth patterns as a means of producing vibrant public occupancy. We will set out to explore the geometrical integration of multiple design objectives such as programmatic definition, environmental performance and spatial criteria in order to produce economically viable synergies, new modes of civic appropriation and enhanced experiential urban conditions. During Term 1 the thesis will be developed through an elaborate study of socio-political utopias from the 50s and 60s architectural avant-garde producing concurrently with a series of tectonic, physical and digital model explorations. We will be organising digital design and fabrication workshops supported by consultant specialists and will take short trips to fabricators from the aerospace, automotive and naval industries. The unit aim is to deepen our understanding of the architectural project as an integral contribution to a broader socio-political framework. 94

Unit Staff Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Dora Swejd Dora Swejd & Theo Sarantoglou Lalis are the founders of LASSA (lassa-architects.com), an international architecture studio with offices in London and Brussels. Dora and Theo have lectured internationally, led workshops and taught undergraduate studios at LTU in Sweden and at the AA. Theo has taught postgraduate studios at Columbia and Harvard.

Hwui Zhi Cheng, Diploma 17 (2011/12), Favela Rising

diploma 18 Energy Attack Team: Architecture and the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change’ – Charles Darwin Diploma 18 continues its exploration on territories affected by global warming by focusing on the natural patrimony of the Galápagos Islands. It is within this isolated archipelago that Darwin encountered the complex biodiversity that enabled him to complete his taxonomies and construct his theory of evolution. These islands are still used as a ‘live laboratory’ to investigate and understand microevolution and speciation. However, this fragile environment (on UNESCO’s list of Endangered World Heritage sites) is highly threatened by invading species, pollution, over-exploitation and, most importantly, climate change, and can be seen as a microcosm of the changes occuring in our world. This year we will start in Barcelona, exploring on lightness, space, structure and geometry, as well as physical and climatic phenomena, through an investigation of soap films. We will run a series of seminars on generative design methodologies through the application of algorithmic techniques in processing. Students will analyse the archipelago, using a taxonomy of resources such as recursion, branching, swarm behaviour, cellular automata and fractals. The design projects will be initiated by a unit trip to the Galápagos. From there, each student will select a specific theme of analysis related to climate change that will ultimately unfold into a design thesis addressing social, political, economic and ecological matters. The unit proposes a research-based agenda that will compel students to take an independent position towards the role of the architect in a world affected by global warming, with empathy, leading to a new environmental consciousness in architecture.

Unit Staff Enric Ruiz Geli Edouard Cabay Pablo Ros Enric Ruiz Geli studied architecture in Barcelona. He founded Cloud 9 in 1997, an interdisciplinary architectural team in Barcelona that works on the interface between architecture and art, digital processes as well as technological material development. Edouard Cabay graduated from the AA in 2005. After working for FOA and Cloud 9, he founded his studio, Appareil, in Barcelona in 2011 and is currently working on projects in Europe and Latin America. In parallel he also teaches at the IAAC in Barcelona and at the ESA in Paris. Pablo Ros received his Masters of Science in Advanced Architectural Design and Architectural Research (MSAAD+AAR) from GSAPP, Columbia University. He has been the Director for Foreign Office Architects in Spain and is currently Head of the Office at Cloud 9.

RetrAAfit Project and Projection – Diploma 18 carried out an environmental analysis of the AA and projected a retrofitting proposal onto the façade of the school. The project follows the pillars of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ as outlined by the economist Jeremy Rifkin. Photo Valerie Bennett

undergraduate: complementary studies

Three kinds of Complementary Studies courses in History and Theory, Media and Technical Studies are an essential part of every year of the Undergraduate School. In term-long courses or shorter projects students obtain knowledge and gain experience related to a wide range of architectural learning. Additionally, Third and Fifth Year students take a Professional Practice course as part of their RIBA Part I and II requirements. These courses also provide opportunities for students approaching architecture from the different agendas of the units to come together in shared settings.

History and Theory Studies includes courses that develop historical and theoretical knowledge and writing related to architectural discourses, concepts and ways of thinking. Media Studies helps students to develop skills in traditional forms of architectural representation as well as todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most experimental forms of information and communication technology. Technical Studies offers surveys as well as indepth instruction in particular material, structural, environmental and other architectural systems, leading to technical submissions that build upon the ideas and ambitions of projects related to work within the units. Together, the various courses on offer in Complementary Studies give students the opportunity to establish and develop their own individual interests and direction within the school.

History and Theory Studies History and Theory courses run over all five years of a students study at the AA. Overall the courses have the function of introducing students to the nature of architecture, not solely through the issue of design but also in the larger context of architecture’s relation to culture now, in the past, in the future and across different cultures. The courses are also linked to another and major function – writing. Architects are increasingly expected at a professional level to describe and analyse both designs and buildings in a written form. Writing is a central skill for the architect and the lack of it would stunt the individual professional development. As a consequence History and Theory Studies is renewing those aspects of the courses enabling students to develop their own point of view in seminars by enhancing their writing skills. In the first three years the intention of the courses is to provide a fundamental framework for the student’s comprehension of architecture at several levels. This is envisioned through a series of distinct stages in the student’s development, moving from a broad background on the theories and concepts of architecture, to architecture’s role in the materialisation of cultural ideas and then an understanding of contemporary buildings in detail. We think it is important that students are given the tools to understand the histories and theories behind architecture. It is for the student to decide what he or she thinks; it is for the course to enable the student to articulate their thoughts and choices; it is for the seminar to allow an open discussion of the choices. In the first year the course presents a series of exemplary texts and projects addressing architectural form, space, tectonic, subject and context that will highlight fundamental instruments within the history of architecture and urbanism. In the second year the student is introduced both to the past of architecture and to the nature of architecture in different cultures. It considers the different ways in which architecture has been used as the material support of different religions, forms of political power and forms of family life. In the third year the students will study a variety of twentieth100

Director Mark Cousins Course Lecturers/ Course Tutors Pier Vittorio Aureli Mark Cousins Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon Christopher Pierce Brett Steele Sylvie Tanner Programme Staff William Firebrace Teaching Assistants Ross Adams Fabrizio Ballabio Shumi Bose Gabriela Garcia de Cortazer Emma Jones Konstantinos Kizis Emanouil Stavrakakis Alexandra Vougia Zaynab Dena Ziari Consultants Jonathan Allen Doreen Bernath Mark Campbell Francisco González de Canales Samantha Hardingham Frances Mikuriya Alison Moffett

Mark Cousins is a guest professor at South Eastern University, Nanjing. He was a founder member the London Consortium and has been a member of the Visual Arts Panel and of the Architectural Panel of the Arts Council. He is the co-author with Athar Hussein of Michel Foucault, has written the catalogues for the Wilson twins and Anthony Gormley and has published in journals including October, Harvard Design Review, AA Files. Christopher Pierce studied at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His recent publications are essays on Jordi Bonet Armengol, ‘Gaudi’s Gatekeeper’ (2011) and Cero 9, ‘Bump and Grind’ (2011). He formed Mis-Architecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Christopher Matthews in 2000.

Mollie Claypool has held teaching positions at the AA since 2009 in the DRL and History and Theory Studies programme. She has taught at the University of Reading and University of Brighton, and has worked with the RCA, AA Publications and Phaidon Press. She studied architecture at Pratt Institute and received her masters from the AA. Ryan Dillon has studied at Syracuse University and the AA. Currently he teaches in the History and Theory programme as well as working as a designer at EGG Office. Previously he worked at Moshe Safdie Architects. Sylvie Taher is a writer and architect based in London. She trained at the AA where she wrote a thesis titled ‘Architects Versus the City or the Problem of Chaos’. She has since written for Publica, The Architectural Review, AA Files and Blueprint.

Brett Steele is Director of the AA School. His research and writings can be found online at brettsteele.net Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. He is the author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (2008), and other books. His writings and research focus on the relationship between architecture, the city and political theory. Together with Martino Tattara is the co-founder of Dogma.

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History and Theory Studies century buildings, critical texts and other forms of representation providing the student with a more experienced way of analysing architectural devices. Students in the Intermediate School follow the courses outlined in the course document while students in the Diploma School choose from a number of optional courses taken in the First Term only. The courses are designed to be much more focused and specific, covering a wide spectrum of contemporary topics that are continuously changing from year to year. Student can choose to write either a thesis or two separate diploma essays. At the end of the Diploma School we would hope and expect that students would be able to independently research a topic and write about a problem clearly and with a definite argument. A full account of the courses and reading lists will be given in the Complementary Studies Course Booklet which, will be available at the beginning of the academic year.

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The courses in First, Second and Third Year take place in Terms 1 and 2.

First Year Introduction to Design, Building and Writing Term 1 Lecturers: Christopher Pierce, Brett Steele Term 2 Lecturer: Pier Vittorio Aureli Course Tutor: Mollie Claypool Teaching Assistants: Fabrizio Ballabio, Emma Jones, Zaynab Dena Ziari These first lessons of history and theory of architecture will address a series of fundamental aspects within the discipline of architecture. The purpose of this, apart from the obvious objective of enabling students to know exemplary projects and positions in architecture, is to understand the relationship between architecture and its past as a form of knowledge constituted by forms of writing, designing and buildings. In the first term the course will present a series of exemplary texts and projects addressing architectural form, space, tectonics, subject and context. This will lead to the second term when the same conditions will be highlighted as fundamental instruments within the history of architecture and urbanism. Both terms will underline that knowledge of architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past is indispensable for an intelligent and critical point of view in the practise of architecture.

Second Year Architecture and its Pasts Course Lecturer: Mark Cousins Course Tutor: Ryan Dillon Teaching Assistants: Ross Adams, Gabriela Garcia de Cortazer, Alexandra Vougia This course introduces students to the historical and cross-cultural range of built forms. It does so by looking at buildings that are related to the institutions of politics, of religion and of private life. But it also considers architecture from the point of view of modernisation in which architectural forms are increasingly both internationalised and globalised. It considers the bases upon which new organisations of variation can be thought about in architectural terms.

Third Year Architectural Coupling [+1] Course Lecturers: Mollie Claypool, Ryan Dillon Course Tutor: Sylvie Taher Teaching Assistants: Shumi Bose, Emanouil Stavrakakis, Konstantinos Kizis This course will couple architectural projects from the rise of modernism until the early 1990s exposing important architectural trajectories of the twentieth-century. By pitting a series of architectural projects, practices, educational models and, occasionally, architects themselves against one another, the course will take on a twoterm project of comparative analysis. Pairings such as the Situationists

versus Archigram and the Vienna Secession versus the Bauhaus will be discussed. Each coupling will be supplemented by a key device (the +1) such as theoretical writing, drawings, film publications, photography, etc, which link these projects to other contemporary disciplines outside of architecture. Through the act of writing students will dissect key terms and how to decipher their multiple meanings bringing theory, writing and the analysis of architectural projects into a succinct body of work.

The courses in the Diploma School take place in Term 1 only

Diploma Courses Conjuring Consent – Secular Magic and the Politics of Power Jonathan Allen This course elaborates upon ‘secular magic’ that is the kind of magic that makes no claim to draw its power from any form of supernatural or paranormal source. Secular magic can thus be most commonly understood as the magic of the conjuror or stage illusionist, a figure of cultural agency whose influence extends far beyond our everyday perception of the magician as simply a benevolent entertainer. From warfare and religion, to politics, economics and architecture, secular magic technology and dramaturgy, and magicians themselves, can be seen as key components in modernity’s development and conception of itself. 103

History and Theory Studies Aporias in Translation Doreen Bernath A familiar procedure: as architects we bring projects to design juries projects that we believe have embodied a set of concepts. Thus the unpacking of translation from idea to form is deemed direct and under the full mastery of the designer; the success of the project is dependent on it. This assumption often leads to the conjugation of a plethora of theoretical notions to particular formalisations: deconstruction to fragmented form, field energy to net form, algorithm to swarm form, biomorphic to growth form, and so on. This course proposes an antithesis to the direct formalisation of concepts by conducting a set of forensic exercises and in the process uncovering doubts, deceits and digressions in the translations between idea and form. Three parts – ‘Shapes that Came Before Ideas’, ‘Images that Came Before Stories’ and ‘Pictures that Came Before Realities’ – attempts to trace incidental and erratic leaps between thinking and forming, between imagining and shaping, between materialising and embodying, not to rectify the lost, but to grapple with what is found in translation. By Any Measure Mark Campbell Architecturally speaking, it’s always been difficult to hide the bodies. This seminar examines how different notions of human subjectivity have informed architectural discourse from the Italian Renaissance to the avant-garde of the 1970s. We begin by discussing how the 104

Renaissance conception of perspective inscribed the human body at the centre of architectural space, before examining how this figure inspired Heinrich Wölfflin’s theory of the psychosomatic inhabitation of architecture. Following these positivistic conceptions, we review the hypochondriac body of Geoffrey Scott, wracked and exhausted by architecture, and the spilt psyche of Sigmund Freud, fractured by the experience of modernity itself. And finally, we conclude by examining how the mechanically enabled subject of Siegfried Giedion, Reyner Banham and Archigram mutated into the disillusioned human figure of Superstudio. The Incorporation of the Body Mollie Claypool It has recently been argued that the affective experience of architecture has historically been wholly constituted from the experience of the masculine, not the female subject. Architectural experience is, effectively, finite and as macho as the mighty John Wayne (or Piranesi or Boullée or Le Corbusier or Eisenman). However, since Giedion’s Mechanisation Takes Command (1948) architects have been increasingly interested in how to reconstitute the female, the either/or and the this/and; the amputee and the paraplegic through the use of prosthetics and the advent of new technologies; or the incorporation of the body as architecture. Using these categories of subjects and the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition ‘Superhuman’ as a starting point, this course will explore the concept that the experience of the

contemporary architectural object has become the experience of these now ever-more-so reconstituted bodies. Media, Medium and Form Mark Cousins This course links the fundamental theoretical work of Friedrich Kittler with questions that arise in the architectural past. It starts by linking the emergence of writing to the development of architecture. In particular it considers the architecture of ancient Greece as having a significant relation to the diffusion of writing and texts. It then links the Renaissance and the classical tradition to the emergence of printing. The course concludes with an investigation of Kittler’s arguments about electronic media and the digital to contemporary architecture. An Architectural Straightjacket Ryan Dillon In an attempt to understand Igor Stravinsky’s claim that ‘The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit...the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution’, the willing participants of this course will be placed in an architectural straightjacket of sorts, impeded by constraints that are both self- and externally-inflicted. With Oulipian writer Georges Perec as our muse we will attempt to understand that no artist can work from a blank canvas by understanding that a variety of constraints, be they architectural, social or literary, can foster an artist’s ambitions and inventions. Each student will construct their own architectural

palindromes, lipograms and snowballs in a personal codex that will result in a piece of architectural literature that is not an essay but a project. The Irrelevance of the North When Seeing from the South Francisco González de Canales ‘Eurocentric literature on cities and architecture is often patronising and does not understand Americanness’. – Mario Galdensonas Is the modernity that we know the only possible one? Is the model of social and economic development that is so prevalent today ineluctable for the advance of modern democratic societies? As derived from the medieval notion of canon, the historiography of modern architecture has constructed its own narrative around a fixed set of western references. Opposed to this widely assumed framework, some marginalised figures of Latin-American architecture such as Juan O’Gorman, Jose Antonio Bonet, João Vilanova Artigas, Amancio Williams and Germán Rodríguez Arias prove how alternative notions of modernity emerge throughout the twentieth century as independent from traditional western models. Cedric Price – In Forward-minded Retrospect Samantha Hardingham A series of seven sessions will cover the life and work of Cedric Price (1934–2003). By studying this most singular of British architects, students will discover the full extent of Price’s oeuvre to gain a greater understanding 105

History and Theory Studies of his theory and practice of an anticipatory architecture, and the context from which his ideas and methods grew. Based on the draft material for a forthcoming publication, the content of the sessions will focus on original archive material: drawings and text documents – much of it previously unpublished. Students will have the unique opportunity to work with the material as a basis for articulating specific themes within the work in relation to such topics as life conditioning, indeterminacy, planned obsolescence and delight in the unknown. The Case of the National Gallery Extension Frances Mikuriya In the spring of 2013 the AA will host an exhibition about the competitions for the National Gallery Extension. The first competition, in 1982, provoked Prince Charles’ attack upon contemporary architecture and caused the cancellation of ABK’s winning entry. This led to the second competition in 1985 with Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown’s proposal emerging as the winner. The course will provide a detailed analysis of these events and how they fuelled architectural arguments about post-modernism, modernism, tradition and innovation. We will also include an analysis of the Prince’s exhibition and catalogue, A Vision of Britain (1989), which demonstrated that he had considerable public support for his antagonism to twentiethcentury architecture.

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Vanishing Point Alison Moffett Dismissed as an archaic or artificial mode of representation by the twentieth-century avant-gardes, the use of perspectival projection in image making is actually inherent to our visualisation of space, carrying with it a rich historical and theoretical importance. There resides a fascinating give and take between vanishing-point pespectival drawing and built architecture, which is true at its inception in the fifteenth century, but also carries through to today. To better understand this importance, we shall undertake an investigation of the aspects of its ‘birth’, Brunelleschi’s famous Baptistery experiment, the picking apart of which will enable an unfolding out into a multitude of areas, enriching the understanding of such an important mode of representation.

Open Lecture Course Friday Evening Lecture Series, 5.00pm Where is Everyday Life? Mark Cousins This year the Friday evening lecture series will deal with the architectural and artistic use of the category ‘everyday life’. It appears to be a realm that is immune to interpretation – it is just there. The course seeks to show that everyday life has a strong relation to the issue of the cliché, the topic of last year’s lectures. The course demonstrates that the phrase is imbedded with philosophical presuppositions. Sometimes it means the given, the appearance, sometimes the concrete. It frequently involves the use of what the course will represent as the imaginary. It proceeds by looking at aspects of architecture and design from both the point of view of the cliché and the imaginary.

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media studies Media Studies at the AA includes required studio-based courses for First and Second Year undergraduate students covering methods of production in the design process. In addition to these courses Media Studies offers a set of computer laboratory-based courses that focus on the direct instruction of a series of significant digital applications in the architectural pipeline. Studiobased courses available to Second Year students are also open to participation by all students who are currently in the Intermediate or Diploma schools, while laboratory-based courses are open to students throughout the entire school. Together the many classes and special events comprising Media Studies expose students to the work of architects, artists and other practitioners, the innovative skills associated with traditional forms of architectural media and representation, and today’s most experimental forms of information, communication and fabrication technologies. Media Studies emphasises the integration of established techniques in design with the potential of progressive media and production methods, underlining its potential within the creative process. Required Media Studies Courses Media Studies courses are a required part of the First Year and Intermediate Schools, providing students with the knowledge and skills associated with a wide range of contemporary design, communication and fabrication media. These weekly courses are taught by AA Unit Staff, the school’s AV department, Workshop and Computing staff, as well as by invited outside architects, artists, media and other creative specialists. Each termlong course focuses on the conceptual and technical aspects of a specified topic of design media, and emphasises a sustained development of a student’s ability to use design techniques as a means for conceiving, developing and producing design projects and strategies.

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Department Head Eugene Han Department Staff Charles Arsene-Henry Shany Barath Sue Barr Valentin Bontjes van Beek Shin Egashira Trevor Flynn Anderson Inge Alex Kaiser Tobias Klein Immanuel Koh Heather Lyons Antoni Malinowski Marlie Mul Joel Newman Eugene Han runs AVAStudio, researching and developing systems in industrial design, architecture and planning. (eugenehan@aaschool.ac. uk) Charles Arsene-Henry is a writer, a reader and an editor. He is the founder of White Box Black Box, a speculative agency enquiring in the different formats of research and fiction. He is conceiving an experimental library with the Luma Foundation called The Library is on Fire. Shany Barath studied architecture at TUDelft in the Netherlands, and completed her post-professional Master’s degree at the AA. She and Gary Freedman established SHaGa Studio, an interdisciplinary design practice at the interface of architecture, visual art, ecology and computation. She has worked at UNStudio and West 8.

Sue Barr studied at the London College of Printing where she specialised in photographing Brutalist architecture. She is now in practice as an architectural photographer and is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. In collaboration with David Heathcote she is making a film about public space in London for exhibition at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Valentin Bontjes Van Beek trained as a carpenter in Germany before attending the AA, from which he graduated in 1998. He has practised architecture in Berlin, New York and London, and has taught at the AA since 2001, where he is currently an Intermediate Tutor. Shin Egashira worked in Tokyo, Beijing and New York before coming to London. Artworks and installations include ‘English House’ at the Camden Arts Centre, ‘Impossible Vehicle’ at the Spiral Garden, Tokyo, and ‘Slow Box/ Afterimage’ for the Tsunami Triennale 2000. He has taught at the AA since 1990 and is currently Unit Master of Diploma Unit 11. Trevor Flynn received an MFA Goldsmiths, is Course Director of Drawing At Work and a freehand drawing tutor at several architectural and engineering offices including Foster + Partners, Future Systems, and Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners. He is visiting tutor at Central St Martins College of Art and Design and RISD.

Anderson Inge is a practising architect who has completed additional training in structural engineering (at MIT) and sculpture (at St Martins). He also teaches at the Rural Studio and Royal College of Art (sculpture). Alex Kaiser graduated from Oxford Brookes and the AA and worked for firms including RSH-P and Moxon Architects. Before co-founding Ordinary, where he is currently researching trans-media methods for design through drawing, painting and manufacture and experimenting with line beyond the representational and into areas such as material science, timber construction and ‘beyond bio-mimetics’. Tobias Klein studied architecture at the RWTH, the University of Applied Arts and the Bartlett School of Architecture. He worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au before founding his own practice, Studio Tobias Klein and is one of the founders of .horhizon. He currently runs Diploma Unit 1 at the AA, where he has taught since 2008 and has lectured internationally. Immanuel Koh is a computational designer/ architect based in London. He graduated from the AA Design Research Lab and has since taught at various AA Visiting Schools and other international universities. Previously, he practised in Berlin and taught at Dessau Institute of Architecture (Bauhaus) Graduate School. He currently works at Zaha Hadid Architects.

Heather Lyons is an architect and interaction designer who designs digital products and experiences working on a wide variety of projects from interactive kiosks to mobile applications. Her work focuses on creating experiences that are visually compelling, easy to understand and push the limits of technology. She received her Master’s degree in Architecture from Princeton University. Antoni Malinowski is an artist whose practice comprises painting and large-scale drawing installations. He has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, and his paintings are in most major collections, including the Tate’s. He is currently working as artist-colourist with MJP Architects on the redevelopment of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. Marlie Mul is an artist, currently based in Berlin and Amsterdam. She received a Master’s degree in Histories and Theories from the Architectural Association in 2009, and a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht. Marlie Mul exhibits internationally and is an initiator of the online publishing platform www.xym.no. Joel Newman was born in 1971 in rural Hertfordshire. He studied fine art at Reading University and has exhibited in the UK and abroad. He has run the AA’s Audio Visual department since 1994 and has taught video within Media Studies since 1998.

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media studies Media Studies Lab Courses Working in close relationship with the AA Computer Lab, Media Studies offer a range of focused workshop-format courses that allow students to quickly grasp fundamental techniques in major digital applications for architecture. As the recent proliferation of digital design technologies has now matured as an integral part of the architectural education offered by the school, Media Studies provides concise one-day courses on many of the most common computer applications, covering content such as 3D Modelling, Computer Aided Drafting, Imaging, Publication, Digital Computation and Scripting, various Physics-Based Analyses, and other relevant software. aa-mediastudies.net

First Year, Term 1 Peripheral Landscapes Sue Barr This year we will be taking inspiration from the work of legendary American landscape photographer Robert Adams, by exploring landscape photography in suburbia. Instead of photographing iconic architecture within the city centre we will be working at the periphery of the city, where the landscape is more subtle and reveals its forms more quietly. Sampling 5x5x5 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Drawing Christopher Dyvik & Jorgen Tandberg Participants in the course will learn how to measure and redraw architectural fragments as a means of improving their understanding of built space.

Pietro de Rothschild, Testing feedback of augmented reality system Course: WebCam It + Augment It. Tutor: Immanuel Koh

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We will focus on how the placement and proportions of basic architectural elements such as walls, windows, doorways, columns and stairs, as architectural composition, produces a silent argument. Translation Object to Drawing Shin Egashira An examination of the link between processes used in representing and making space, based on the translation of objects into drawings and the interpretation into models. Information Design and Presentation: Diagrams Heather Lyons We will survey the worlds of maps, diagrams, infographics, colour and typography and then create our own maps and diagrams. We will work together to communicate abstract concepts in a visually clear way while looking at the pros and cons of different visual production techniques from Adobe CS to light scripting. Materiality of Colour Antoni Malinowski This course focuses on the potential of colour in creating/manipulating space. Students will be introduced to the materiality of pure pigments with the focus on colour as micro-structure. Students will be encouraged to create their own distinctive notational system sensitive to space, time, light and the characteristics of materials.

Second Year, Term 1 Shapes of Fiction - Viewpoint Charles Arsene-Henry The course will enable access to a film or a text the way one might enter an abandoned spaceship: as a faceted volume to be examined with a sense of slowness, attention and wonder. Viewpoint in Shapes of Fiction 01: ‘If Only You Could See What I Saw With Your Eyes.’ Matter-of-Fact Shany Barath This course examines fabrication techniques as potential activators of material systems. Working at the interface between fact and matter, computed geometry and machinic properties, we will develop material catalogues translating visible and invisible properties into variables of effect, behaviour, scale and articulation. We will use Rhinoceros, lasercutting, and CNC technologies to create a series of ‘data prototypes’ demonstrating possible design negotiations between the machine and the material. Replica Structures Valentin Bontjes Van Beek The course will focus on the redesign (copy) and fabrication of an existing chair. Each student will select an original (chair) and work towards a translation and a fresh construction strategy for the fabrication of this replica structure. Our sole material will be 12mm sheet birch plywood. All components will be designed and produced with the use of CNC milling technology in mind. Issues of weight, 111

media studies porosity and composition should be considered. The course will culminate with a fabrication trip to Hooke Park. Customised Computation Eugene Han This course will focus on the manipulation of digital geometry using scripting techniques within a NURBS modelling environment (Python for Rhino). We will cover the basics of scripted logic to customise geometry using iterative logic. Students will also be introduced to the basics behind the theory of computation and processing as a means to establish intelligent geometrical systems that can be applied to their on going unit projects. Drawing in the Nation’s Cupboards Anderson Inge Escape the AA, draw on the riches of nearby national collections to discover new ways of seeing. We will develop ways to draw with authority, to author drawing that stands on its own. Hand drawing is the architect’s most powerful tool – find your drawnvoice here in Second Year. ‘So much more than I expected from a “drawing class”, a new perspective in visualisation was unravelled.’ Painting Architecture I Alex Kaiser This course will explore painting as a means of design that goes beyond the representational and into the prototypical. We will examine the fundamentals of painting and drawing; line, tone and colour, and begin to explore how these techniques of 112

painting can be utilised in the creation of physical objects. The paintings will go through several iterations on the digital canvas (Photoshop) before being translated in a series of soft and hardware (3D Max, Zbrush, Illustrator, CNC) into their final state. Paper Projections – Layered Realities Tobias Klein This is a roller-coaster journey from inherently 3D perception-based architecture, to its 2D representation and analysis, to a 3D or possibly 4D fragment. We will be working with the precise settings of visual perception and its manipulation throughout the centuries, from anamorphic projections, to the vertical skewing of Disney’s castle. The course aim is twofold: to articulate an example of a perception-manipulating architecture through a set of planimetric drawings and finally, to design a 3D printed object. Scanned Space Immanuel Koh The course is interested in computer-vision as a means of exploring new architectural forms through the implementation of computational techniques. This term students will use X-Box’s Kinect sensor to extract ‘live’ physical data and embed this as digitally scanned architectural geometries within the work. The rich algorithmic and graphical capabilities found in processing will be utilised to allow direct application to the students’ on-going unit projects.

Video: Intermediate Joel Newman It’s no surprise that when we talk about video, we use the language and conventions of not only cinema but of literature, fine art, theatre and photography too. Walter Benjamin thought watching a film was akin to moving through a building and required a similar pattern of habits and thought processes. With this in mind we will construct a journey that retells the story of a space.

First Year, Term 2 Peripheral Landscapes Sue Barr We will be taking inspiration from the work of legendary American landscape photographer Robert Adams, by exploring landscape photography in suburbia. Instead of photographing iconic architecture within the city centre we will be working at the periphery of the city, where the landscape is more subtle and reveals its forms more quietly. (Continues from Term 1) Sampling 5x5x5 – Model Christopher Dyvik, Jorgen Tandberg The course will focus on modelmaking as a tool to study and articulate building volumes, by revisiting existing spaces and abstracting them to their most telling, simplified motifs. In the process we will develop our understanding of architectural proportions by using basic digital tools to develop customised moulds for resin casts, articulating mass, volume and space through a series of material choices.

One-to-One Instruments Shin Egashira Techniques for constructing performative instruments, including collage and bricolage, are to be tested through an application towards the city. We will be working with both drawings and physical assemblages to develop design concepts. Life Drawing Trevor Flynn The human figure will be used as a departure point as we draw male and female models in both long and short poses that enable us to study tone, mass, line and simple underlying structures through a range of drawing media. We will also explore concept sketches, viewpoint and biomorphic improvisations and remind ourselves of the Matisse maxim ‘exactitude isn’t truth’. Information Design and Presentation: Portfolio Heather Lyons During the second term of this course, through an investigation of typography and layout strategies, we will experiment with the relationship between image and text while also refining the graphic presentation of your portfolios. We will also look at the differences between printed and bound and digital portfolios. Materiality of Colour Antoni Malinowski This course focuses on the potential of colour in creating/manipulating space. Students will be introduced to the materiality of pure pigments with 113

media studies the focus on colour as micro-structure. Students will be encouraged to create their own distinctive notational system sensitive to space, time, light and the characteristics of materials. Formal Improvisations Marlie Mul In a course focused on formal improvisation we will work towards the creation of 1:1 scale functional objects from Styrofoam. Working according to a set of parameters, the object will be the site for finding successful structures. The outcome of the fourweek workshop will be a completed object following the workshop brief, with a clearly presented documentation of the production process. Video: First Year One-Minute Animation Joel Newman Students will make a one-minute animation (1500 discrete frames) that plays with scale and disrupts perspectival space. ChromaKeying, Motion, AfterEffects and HD video will be our weapons of choice.

Second Year, Term 2 Shapes of Fiction – Environment Charles Arsene-Henry The course will enable access to a film or a text the way one might enter an abandoned spaceship: as a faceted volume to be examined with a sense of slowness, attention and wonder. Environment in Shapes of Fiction 02: ‘It is not a Place, It is a Feeling.’ 114

Matter-of-Fact Shany Barath This course examines fabrication techniques as potential activators of material systems. Working at the interface between fact and matter, computed geometry and machinic properties, we will develop material catalogues translating visible and invisible properties into variables of effect, behaviour, scale and articulation. We will use Rhinoceros, laser cutting, and CNC technologies to create a series of ‘data prototypes’ demonstrating possible design negotiations between the machine and the material. Pending Structures Valentin Bontjes Van Beek Going beyond the scale of the standard model, this course focuses on developing a working understanding of fabrication through designing on the CNC-machine for an actual scale. Throughout the term, students will be developing projects that address the design of installation pieces within the school, examining the relationship of material structures and physical resolution. The ‘Pending Structure’ should be beautiful and consider ideas of independence while respecting forms of integration – a measured ratio of directionality and belonging. The course will culminate with the fabrication of a final project at Hooke Park. Articulation of Volumes Christopher Dyvik & Jorgen Tandberg The course will investigate the articulation of building volumes through model making, each study culminating

in a model comprising one or more carefully crafted, abstracted volumes cast in resin. Students will integrate their studio projects into the proposal, abstracting to their most essential motifs, and modelling them as a constellation of pieces with a minimum of detail. This process of reduction is intended to communicate basic architectural qualities purely through mass, detail level, colour and opacity. Orders of the Indefinite Eugene Han The course will progress from scripting knowledge gained in the previous term, moving onto a theoretical and technical study of Object-Oriented paradigms. Students will be responsible for linking architectural concepts within a class-driven structure, advancing their proposals into presentation and production to establish a general order of indefinite formal ensembles of their own making. As in the previous term, the course will employ Python scripting/programming within Rhino. Painting Architecture II Alex Kaiser Using methods of painting, printing, lasercutting, folding, sticking, 3D Maxing and cutting, deep paintings will physically manifest themselves out of an aggregation of digital paintings created at the beginning of the course. There will be a greater emphasis on the mapping of pixels to 3D surfaces and the relationships that form when you begin to layer, fold, interlace and pleat paint surfaces.

Lucid Perception Tobias Klein This is a roller-coaster journey from inherently 3D perception-based architecture, to its 2D representation and analysis, to a 3D or possibly 4D fragment. We will be working with the precise settings of visual perception and its manipulation throughout the centuries, from anamorphic projections, to the vertical skewing of Disney’s castle. The course aim is twofold: to articulate an example of a perception-manipulating architecture through a set of planimetric drawings and finally, to design a 3D printed object. Augmented Space Immanuel Koh The course continues the conceptual computational framework set out in Term 1 by looking at Augmented Reality (AR) as another potential site of spatial investigation using real-time video-based input. This term students will use the Smartphone/Webcam as the main hardware and Processing/ Java as the main scripting software. The generative interaction between physical and virtual spatial entities will be developed to complement students’ unit projects.

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Technical Studies The Technical Studies programme stands as a complete and coherent technical education over five years, and constructs a creative collaboration with the material demands of individual unit agendas. The programme continues to evolve from detailed discussions with lecturers, all of whom are drawn from leading engineering practices and research institutions embracing a wide range of disciplines and current projects. It is founded on the provision of a substantial knowledge base, developed through case studies of contemporary fabrication processes, constructed artefacts and buildings. These studies include critical reflection and experimentation with the ideas and techniques taught. Knowledge acquired in this way generates a ‘means’, a set of principles capable of negotiating the technical requirements of construction in unforeseen futures and unpredictable contexts. Lecture courses form a portion of each year’s requirements, with a particular emphasis on the First, Second and Fourth Years of study. Students concentrate on case studies, analysis and material experiments, undertaking a selection of required courses, ensuring they receive a complete and all-round experience of structures, materials and the environment. In the Third Year, lecture coursework, workshop experiments and technical ambitions are synthesised in a detailed Technical Design Project (TS3). Students conduct design research and experiments to explore and resolve the technical issues of the main project of their unit portfolio, with the guidance of Technical Studies tutors. In the Fifth Year, students undertake a Technical Design Thesis (TS5), a substantial individual work that is developed under the guidance of Technical Studies. The thesis is contextualised as part of a broader dialogue which the technical and the architectural agendas that arise within the units. Its critical development is pursued through case studies, material experiments and extensive research and consultation. In both the Third and Fifth Years students are provided with options for interim reviews and final 116

Head of Technical Studies Javier Castañón Diploma Master Javier Castañón Intermediate Master Kenneth Fraser Javier Castañón is in private practice as director of Castañón Associates (London) and Castañón Asociados (Madrid). Kenneth Fraser has taught at the AA since 2007 and is a director of Kirkland Fraser Moor Architects (k-f-m.com). He served as an advisor to the Department of the Environment Construction Research and Innovation Strategy Panel. Carolina Bartram is a professionally qualified engineer with degrees in both engineering and architecture. She currently helps lead one of Arup’s multi-disciplinary building engineering teams in London. Giles Bruce is director of A_ZERO and has worked as environmental consultant with Foster + Partners, O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects, Snøhetta and Grafton Architects. He received an MArch in Sustainable Environmental Design at the AA. Philip Cooper is technical director of Cameron Taylor Bedford, Consulting Engineers. He has taught at Cambridge University, Leeds University and the AA. Christina Doumpioti received her masters from the AA and has worked at Arup Associates. She was Studio Master i n the EmTech graduate programme at the AA. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Royal College of Art.

Ian Duncombe is a Director of BDSP Partnership, which he co-founded in 1995. The practice has worked on projects including the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi and 30 St Mary Axe. Current work includes Central Market in Abu Dhabi. Wolfgang Frese studied at Stuttgart and the Bartlett, UCL. He is an associate at Alsop Architects working on many international projects. Clive Fussell is a chartered structural engineer. He worked at Buro Happold Engineers and in 2010 founded Engenuiti. He studied Engineering Science at Oxford University and graduated from the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment (IDBE) masters degree at the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the Institution of Structural Engineers. Mehran Gharleghi is an architect, researcher and designer. He received his MArch in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA and has worked for distinguished architectural practices including Plasma Studio and Foster + Partners. In 2009 he co-founded Studio INTEGRATE with Amin Sadeghy. Ben Godber is a structural engineer and founding director of Godber & Co. He studied architecture at the Bartlett, UCL and civil engineering at Imperial College. He was an associate at Expedition Engineering and currently teaches at the Bartlett, UCL and The University of Kent.

Evan Greenberg is a researcher and design consultant based in London. He has worked with architects, engineers, artists and fashion designers around the world. He gained his MSc in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA where he is also a First Year Technical Studies Tutor. He has lectured and taught internationally and was co-director of the AA San Francisco Visiting School from 2009 to 2011. Pablo Gugel studied architecture at the ETSA of La Coruna and gained his MArch in Sustainable Environmental Design at the AA. He has worked for Diaz & Diaz Arquitectos and Grimshaw Architects, working on projects and competitions in the educational and cultural field around Europe. He currently works as an environmental analyst at BDSP Partnership.

Anderson Inge studied architecture at the AA and at the University of Texas at Austin, before completing additional academic trainings in structures (at MIT) and sculpture (at St Martins). He practices in London, and has taught at the Ruskin School at the University of Oxford, Central St Martins, Rural Studio at Auburn University and the Sir John Soane Museum, London. Marissa Kretsch gained a double degree in civil engineering and history from the University of Melbourne, before joining Arup Melbourne as a structural engineer. She has worked for Buro Happold and Expedition Engineering, while working alongside Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Korey Kromm obtained his AA Diploma in 2010 and is currently working for Charles Tashima Architecture.

Martin Hagemann studied architecture in Germany and Denmark and worked in Vienna and Sydney before coming to London. He worked with Grimshawâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in London until 2011 and is now director of WHP Architects in Germany. He has taught at the AA since 2008 and previously at UTS Sydney.

Emanuele Marfisi is a structural engineer with a degree from the University of Florence and a PhD from Cambridge University. He has worked with architects such as Foster, Grimshaw, Hadid, Hopkins and Arad. He is now working for Jacobs Engineering.

David Illingworth is a chartered structural engineer working at Buro Happold. He studied civil and structural engineering at the University of Sheffield and was awarded a Happold Scholarship. He has also tutored at the Welsh School of Architecture and lectured at Imperial College.

Nacho MartĂ graduated from Elisava School of Design in Barcelona and the Emergent Technologies and Design MSc at the AA. He founded his design studio in 2004 and has directed the Mamori Art Lab design summer workshops. He won the FAD award in 2008 and the IPlus award in 2009.

Federico Montella received his MSc in Sustainable Environmental Design from the AA in 2006 and is currently senior sustainability advisor at HLM Architects. Manja van de Worp studied at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Holland and the Emergent Technology programme at the AA. She worked for Ove Arup in the Advanced Geometry Unit, and currently works in their AT&R department designing movable structures. She has also taught at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and an AA Visiting School in Tehran. Simos Yannas has been involved in environmental design research for more than 35 years and has taught and lectured in some 30 countries. His book Roof Cooling Techniques was shortlisted for the RIBA International Book Award for Architecture. In 2001, he was awarded the PLEA (Passive and Low Energy Architecture) International Achievement Award. Mohsen Zikri is a director of Ove Arup & Partners and a chartered building services engineer, specialising in the environmental design of buildings. He has worked closely with leading architects on notable buildings in the UK and worldwide. He has a particular interest in sustainability in tall buildings and has lectured on that subject.

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Technical Studies document submission that both unit tutors, technical tutors and each student agree upon. The aim is to integrate technical work within the unit agendas as much as possible, and by supporting it with additional specialised information by means of seminars, lectures and site visits. This ambition is tailored to the individual student and the programme attempts to be flexible in a way that can deal with the varying design agendas of each unit. Full details of the programme will be found in the Complementary Studies Course booklet, which will be available at the beginning of the academic year.

First Year Case Study First Year Compulsory Course Term 1 Ben Godber and David Illingworth This course aims to equip students with the skills to critically engage with existing buildings and works of architecture through the examination of structure. The year will be divided into groups, with each group being assigned a case study building in London. As such, London will be our principal teaching resource. Students will be encouraged to get under the skin of their case study buildings,

Hwui Zhi Cheng (Brian), Diploma Unit 17 (2011/12), Front Elevation – top down construction of infrastructural urban support to the Brazil favelas as a way of materialising a concept for an ‘alternative intervention’ to the official government programmes

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to see them ‘in the flesh’, to draw them, to conduct research into them, to produce physical models and, above all, to ask questions. What loads is the building subject to? Why this particular geometry? Why was this material chosen? How was it constructed? Weekly lectures given by the course tutors aim to provide students with a sound qualitative understanding and appreciation of fundamental structural principles: forces and loads; form and geometry; and mechanics of materials. The course will conclude with each group of students presenting their case study to their peers along with the submission of a brief written report. First Applications First Year Compulsory Course Term 2 Environment Giles Bruce and Kori Kromm Structures Ben Godber, Marissa Kretsch and Manja van de Worp Materials Nacho Martí and Evan Greenberg The purpose of this course is to offer students a more direct hands-on experimental approach that will allow a greater integration of Technical Studies with the First Year design portfolio. Technical Studies tutors (experts on structures, materials and environmental issues) will join First Year studio tutors. Seven separate briefs will cover three areas – structure, materials and environment. The submission for the course will be made as part of the TS workshop during Week 11 of Term 2 and will be assessed by the TS tutors in the presence of the First Year studio tutors.

Intermediate School The TS requirements for AA Intermediate and RIBA Part I is that each student has to undertake and pass the Structures, Material and Technologies and Environmental Design in Practice courses in the Second Year and the Structures course in Term 1 of the Third Year. In addition to this the Third Year students undertake a Technical Design Project (TS3) as part of their main project, which synthesises their individual architectural ambitions with an account of the material production of the proposal. Structures 2nd Year Compulsory Course Term 1 Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge This course aims to develop a feel for forces in structures through a series of lectures and student presentations that investigate how the structural elements of a building carry a load. We will analyse well-known buildings to show how strength and safety can be predicted by calculation. In addition to making physical models and load-testing them to illustrate deformation and failure, we will find idealised conceptual models to demonstrate structural behaviour, focusing on the stability of the whole building structure. We will also examine how forces create stresses and deformations in architectural structures, taking into account material properties.

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Technical Studies Material and Technologies 2nd Year Compulsory Course Term 2 Carolina Bartram This course will investigate a range of materials used in contemporary structures including concrete, timber, brick and blocks, glass, fabrics and composites. Material properties, methods of manufacture, durability, cost and appearance are significant factors that will be reviewed, leading to an understanding of how different materials can be used in a variety of applications. Environmental Design in Practice 2nd Year Compulsory Course Term 2 Giles Bruce ‘We all know environmental design is important – but we just can’t see how it is relevant to our studio work.’ This course aims to challenge this sentiment by showing how every design decision that architects make has an immediate and quantifiable impact in terms of environmental performance. The course provides students with an intuitive grasp of the underlying principles of environmental design and the creative opportunities these present in terms of architectural form, materiality and expression. Above all, the course aims to eliminate the temptation of ‘greenwash’ from studio design work by providing students with analytical techniques to test and validate their environmental hypotheses.

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Structures 3rd Year Compulsory Course Term 2 Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge This course introduces structural model analysis, inviting students to make and test scale models to predict the static and dynamic behaviour of structures under load. The theory and practice of the effects of scale will become obvious from the model testing, promoting better intuition for predicting the behaviour of real, full-size structures. Analytical skills will be applied to make predictions. The observed behaviour of physical models under load will be used to establish the parameters of a detailed digital model that a computer can analyse. 3rd Year Technical Design Project (TS3) Kenneth Fraser with Christina Doumpioti, Wolfgang Frese, Clive Fussell, Pablo Gugel and Manja van de Worp Third year students undertake a comprehensive design study (TS3) that explores and resolves the central technical issues of their projects in collaboration with individual unit agendas. The study records the strategic technical decisions made as the design is developed, integrating knowledge of the environmental context, use of materials, structural forms and processes of assembly. It also documents the research carried out in the process of developing the design project. The individual projects are developed in conjunction with the unit tutors by means of the support and tutorials

with the Intermediate TS Staff under the direction of Kenneth Fraser. Seminars on specific relevant subject are organised by the technical teaching staff and a guest speaker further supports the research.

Diploma School Fourth Year students choose two courses in Term 2 from the selection on offer and may attend others according to their interests: Form and Matter Christina Doumpioti Through the investigation of natural systems, form-finding techniques, smart materials and novel digital fabrication technologies, this course will introduce a new method of design influenced by the embedded intelligence of materials. Case studies will examine the use of traditional materials in both past and contemporary contexts, analysing techniques of assemblage and fabrication while developing an understanding of how common materials can be applied in innovative ways. Using physical formfinding models as well as computational tools to simulate material behaviour, we will approach structures as complex systems emerging from the strong relationship between force, energy and material organisation, resulting in the desired performative and spatial effects. Guest speakers from research and practice will contribute by providing expertise through different scales of material implementation.

Sustainable Urban Design Ian Duncombe There is a continuing fascination with the tall and super-tall buildings that define the evolving skylines of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s major cities. But can they contribute to a more sustainable future, and what role does environmental engineering play in the design of these towering structures? The course aims to address these questions whilst imparting the fundamental knowledge needed to design tall. We will consider tall buildings in an urban context, the strategic considerations defining form, the impact of climate, the environmental drivers affecting form and fabric, servicing strategies and various approaches to low-energy and sustainable design. Students will have the chance to apply the principles learned from the course by developing a concept for their own tall building. Process in the Making Wolfgang Frese This course aims to highlight and explain the complex forces underlying the transformation of architectural designs into built form, joining the processes that link the design of architecture with the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;art of buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. We will focus on interdisciplinary collaboration since the architect, as lead consultant, has to constantly adjust and evaluate his designs to address these often contradictory forces. Guest speakers from other consultancies will discuss their own perspective on the importance of collaboration within a project team.

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Technical Studies Small in Large â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the Interrelation of Component and System Martin Hagemann The course aims to analyse and classify architectural components as part of larger systems. Due to rationalisation, prefabrication, flexibility, exchangeability and maintenance the use of components in architecture has become very common. We will review existing component-based systems and investigate how advanced technology in the design and fabrication process can be used for redefinition and contemporary interpretation. Further investigation will introduce systems having an individual component that is adaptable and thus turns the whole system into a responsive structure. Invited researchers from different European and American research institutes will present their latest experiments in theory and practice. Studies in Advanced Structural Design Emanuele Marfisi Structures are complex systems providing strength, stiffness and stability to buildings. This course starts with a brief history of common types of constructions and an analysis of many structural materials, followed by detailed studies of structural principles and forms. The discussion includes the comparison of construction details, buildability issues and other non-structural design challenges. Advanced methods used in structural engineering are introduced and discussed with the students. The assignment for this course requires the analysis of drawings and photographs of an existing 122

building to gain an understanding of its structural principles while also developing alternative concepts of the existing structure. The objective is to make students more aware of structural options and thus more comfortable during the development of their unit project designs and in their future professional endeavours. Transform â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Bridging technologies Manja van de Worp This course aims to explore and define methods of transforming a concept into a material. It bridges complexity and simplicity by understanding our own and other fields, making them exist simultaneously. Bridges with fashion, product design, information technology, science and nature bring us new products, systems and processes. We will interrogate their rules and applied methods to be able to not only see what is happening around us in technology, but also to use and apply it within architecture. Environmental Modelling & Simulation Simos Yannas This hands-on technical course is on the use of environmental design software for the generation and assessment of climate data and the simulation of solar, thermal and lighting processes in and around real or virtual buildings. An introduction to fundamental environmental design parameters is followed by a study of adaptive comfort mechanisms relating to the different climatic, programmatic and operational conditions characterising unit projects. This becomes input for modelling and

simulation studies using software aimed at achieving thermal and visual comfort with minimum use of non-renewable energy sources. Form, Energy and Environment Mohsen Zikri The course explores design territories where architecture and engineering meet. It examines the links between building form, energy and the micro/ macro environment and reviews the development of the building skin. An investigation of sustainability issues, passive energy and renewable energy sources are examined through real projects that can generate exciting energy solutions. We will examine the application of computer modelling tools for the design of buildings and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Students will complete a project involving research of completed buildings in different climatic zones and can conceive a futuristic building that extends design and social boundaries.

of a broader dialogue in which the technical and the architectural agendas that arise within the unit are synthesised, and its critical development is pursued through case studies, material experiments and extensive research and consultation. The ultimate aim is for students to materialise the ideas, concepts or ambitions born in the intimacy of their individual unit agendas.

5th Year Technical Design Thesis (TS5) Javier Castañón with Kenneth Fraser, Mehran Gharleghi, Martin Hagemann, David Illingworth, Nacho Martí and Federico Montella The Technical Design Thesis is a substantial individual work developed under the guidance of Javier Castañón and the Diploma TS Staff. Tutorial support and guidance is also provided within the unit. The central interests and concerns may emerge from current or past design work, or from one of the many lecture and seminar courses the student has attended in previous years. The Thesis is contextualised as part 123

Architectural Practice Developing an understanding of architectural practice is a mandatory requirement in the Intermediate and Diploma schools, and specific courses are run for third year and fifth year students. A Professional Studies Advisor is available for year-out students and post-Part 2 students to help with work experience. Developing practice experience is essential preparation for the final Part 3 examination that may be taken after several years’ office experience working on live building projects.

Part 1 Professional Practice for Third Year Javier Castañón This course prepares Third Year students for their year out, a time for practical training taken after completion of RIBA Part 1. It aims to provide students with an idea of what working in an architectural practice entails. Students will learn how to ‘make themselves useful’ in an office with the intent that the sooner they are perceived as useful, the sooner they will become part of the action and the more they will benefit from the experience. The first lecture, titled Roadmap to Architectural Registration, describes the steps required for registration as an architect and is followed by four lectures which cover a wide range of subjects illustrating issues with real-life examples and well-known case studies. The sixth lecture will be conducted as a meeting to illustrate the importance of conveying information in the professional environment (be it in a site hut or client’s boardroom) and how this differs from the lecture theatre or a jury in the AA. This affords students the opportunity to prepare their assignments and group presentations as well as a chance to practise tasks such as taking meeting minutes. The final lecture consists of a 15-minute presentation by four groups of students on a topic selected from those covered in the previous sessions. Those students not participating in this presentation will need to submit a short written essay. Since AA students come from all over the world, and many of 124

Staff Javier Castañon Hugo Hinsley Alastair Robertson Robert Sparrow Javier Castañon is in private practice as Director of Castañón Associates (London) and Castañón Asociados (Madrid). He has taught at the AA since 1978. Hugo Hinsley is an architect with experience in urban development projects, housing and community buildings. He is a Director of the Housing & Urbanism programme in the Graduate School, and has taught, lectured and published internationally. His recent research explores London’s design and planning, particularly in the East End and Docklands; European urban policy and design; and housing and urban density. Alastair Robertson trained at the AA and Manchester Business School and has taught at the AA since 1971. As a senior consultant architect/planner he has worked on several English new towns and St Katharine Dock in London and currently advises on urban regeneration projects in the West of England and Wales. In another role he is chairman of an international consultancy that advises industry sector organisations in the UK and several governments in the Middle East and Latin America on vocational training and qualification systems and policies.

them intend to practise back home, the essays are encouraged to be comparative in nature, for studies of situations arising both in Britain and in home countries. The essays should present concepts, facts, points of law, etc, clearly and succinctly, in no more than 1,500 words on the appointed day.

Part 2 Future Practice for Fifth Year Hugo Hinsley The context and conditions of architectural work are changing rapidly. Practice needs to adapt, both conceptually and practically. Being a good designer is not, in itself, enough to succeed in practice. This course provides an opportunity to investigate how design work is implemented in the real world and the implications of this for developing a practice of architecture. There is no standard model of practice and each student should address the question of how to design a concept and structure of practice that will best support the type of work they aim to achieve. A series of lectures and discussion sessions explores issues relating to the changing context of design and production of the built environment, and different concepts and models of practice. These issues include the changing context in which projects are realised; different responsibilities towards clients and users; economic and cultural impacts; political and legislative considerations; environmental issues and ethical implications. There are also more practical points,

including ways to collaborate with other disciplines and consultants; effective ways to engage with the construction process; and suitable models and scales of an ‘office’. Students work with a tutor to develop a critical paper of around 3,000 words. This should discuss, in relation to the issues covered in the course, some implications for developing a practice of design, as well as potential techniques and structures to support the evolution of the most effective future practice. ARB/RIBA validation procedures for Part II require evidence of Professional Studies. Fifth Year students must achieve a pass in this course and include the assessed paper in their final portfolios. Supervision of Work Experience for Intermediate & Diploma School For year-out and post-Part 2 students, Alastair Robertson, the AA Professional Studies Advisor (PSA) provides counselling on all aspects of training and work experience in architectural practice. Students can make an appointment through Rob Sparrow (sparrow_ro@ aaschool.ac.uk) to meet with Alastair. A guidebook on the year out, Working out in Architecture, gives advice and tips on how to obtain a job and what is expected from year-out experience. The guidebook is downloadable from the AA Website (www. aaschool.ac.uk/architecturalpractice). All year-out and post-Part 2 students must register with Rob Sparrow. Registration for the year out is free. For post-Part 2 students it is £250. Registration entitles students to workplace oversight, tutorials with the PSA and 125

Architectural Practice UKBA liaison, as required. Review and sign-off of PEDR records – the Professional Education and Development Record (see www.pedr. co.uk) is a mandatory part of students’ final Part 3 requirements and a failure to keep the records up to date during Part 1 and Part 2 can cause serious problems in future practice. For students subject to UK Border Agency visa regulations sign-on is critical because the AA cannot support visa extensions and renewals without proper documents.

Part 3 AA Course and Exam in Professional Practice Leads to exemption from the ARB/ RIBA requirements for the Part 3 Examination Alastair Robertson and Rob Sparrow Each year the AA provides two courses and examination programmes, one beginning in March, the other in mid-September. Alastair Robertson, the AA’s Director of Professional Practice and Professional Studies Advisor (PSA), and Rob Sparrow, the Professional Practice Coordinator, advise students through the process. Typically there are 25 places available for each course and examination programme. Candidates are drawn from the AA and other UK and international schools and pass rates exceed 75 per cent. The course and examination is formally recognised by the Architects Registration Board (ARB) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). An intensive full-time, two-week 126

course offers an introduction to the examination process and covers all the topics central to professional practice, including building contract, planning and building regulations as well as business management and soft skills such as personal presentation. It is not intended as a foundation course, but the AA provides an extensive bibliography, lecture notes, past papers, tutorials and access to study groups. In addition a two-day optional course, ‘Contract Game’ was introduced in 2012, with student teams working together to devise strategies to overcome contract issues and practical problems during project negotiations. The 48-week/year-long AA Part 3 programme also serves as a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme for UK-registered practitioners trained elsewhere in the EU who have not had to sit a Part 3 exam in the UK because of European Law on ‘Mutual Recognition of professional qualifications between EU states’. The examination is a two-step process. First, candidates must establish their eligibility by submitting a report for an Initial Assessment by the PSA. Second, they must submit a scenario-based research paper that is completed over four weeks. Third, three digitally based papers are done under exam conditions at the AA and finally, candidates present themselves for a professional review by two examiners from the AA Board of Part 3 Examiners. The review is based on their record of professional experience (normally a PEDR record – see www.pedr.co.uk), the documents submitted for their initial assessment

and their exam papers. To be eligible to sit the exam, candidates must have exemption from the ARB/RIBA Part 1 and 2 Examinations, at least two yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; practice experience (three to four years is more usual). Ideally, at least one year should be in the UK working on UKbased projects and under the supervision of a UK-registered architect. The essential starting point for Part 3 students is to register with the school immediately after completing Diploma School/Part 2. The registration fee covers the costs of practice monitoring, PEDR review and sign-off, an initial Part 3 Assessment and tutorials with the PSA, as required. Registration is essential for students subject to visa regulations, as they could lose their UK work experience entitlements because of the AA Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sponsorship obligations to the UK Borders Agency. The PSA will not sign PEDR forms unless the student is registered with the AA School. aaschool.ac.uk/professionalstudies

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Graduate School

The AA Graduate School includes 11 postgraduate programmes offering advanced studies in one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most dynamic learning environments. All enrolled students join the school in September at the outset of an academic year, and attend full-time studies according to the length of the course selected. Full-time masters programmes include 12-month MA and MSc and 16-month MArch options. The Design Research Lab (MArch), focuses on experimental architecture and urbanism through a series of design projects. Emergent Technologies & Design (MArch/MSc) emphasises forms of architectural design that proceed from innovative technologies. History & Critical Thinking (MA) encourages a critical understanding of contemporary architecture and urban culture grounded in a knowledge of histories and forms of practice. Housing & Urbanism (MA) rethinks urbanism as a spatial discipline through a combination of design projects and contemporary theory. Landscape Urbanism (MA) investigates the processes, techniques and knowledge related to the practices of contemporary urbanism. Sustainable Environmental Design (MArch/MSc) introduces new forms of architectural practice and design related to the environment and sustainability. Design & Make (MArch) attempts to close the gap between design and making in architectural education by placing

students in a unique rural environment that physically combines a design studio, workshop and building site. Projective Cities (MPhil) recognises the city as a new contemporary design and research agenda, and pursues through architectural experimentation and speculation the meaningful production of new ideas for the city. The Interprofessional Studio researches and applies alternative forms of collaboration between creative professions through the research, conception and implementation of spatial performances and constructions, resulting in a Graduate Diploma. Building Conservation attempts to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to become more effective in conservation practice, and also leads to a Graduate Diploma. Complementing these masters programmes, the AA PhD programme fosters advanced scholarship and innovative research in the fields of architecture and urbanism through full-time doctoral studies, while a new PhD by Design programme provides a setting for advanced research and learning for architects, designers and other qualified professionals. The AA is an Approved Institution and Affiliated Research Centre of the Open University (OU), UK. All taught graduate courses at the AA are validated by the OU. The OU is the awarding body for research degrees at the AA.

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DRL Design Research: Experimentation and Innovation (v.15) The DRL is a 16-month post-professional design programme leading to a Masters of Architecture and Urbanism (MArch) degree. The DRL investigates digital and analogue forms of computation in the pursuit of systemic design applications that are scenario- and time-based. Considering controls systems as open acts of design experimentation, the Design Research Lab examines production processes as active agents in the development of Proto-Design systems. Course Structure Four terms of study are divided into two phases. Phase I, a three-term academic year beginning each autumn, introduces design techniques and topics through a combination of team-based studio, workshop and seminar courses. In Phase II, beginning the following autumn, teams carry forward their Phase I work in the form of comprehensive design thesis projects. At the end of January these projects are presented to a panel of distinguished visiting critics, after which each team documents their 16 months of design research work in a hardbound book. Phase I Design Research Agenda: Behaviour (v.1) The DRL continues it exploration of prototypical design systems with the introduction of our next design research agenda titled Behaviour, which will investigate architecture as an instrument engaging both material and social forms of interaction. Social scenarios will be coupled with material life-cycles as a way to speculate on how we live and the role architecture can play. Behavioural, parametric and generative methodologies of computational design are coupled with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic and reflexive feedback processes. New forms of spatial organisation are explored that are not typeor site-dependent but instead evolve as ecologies and environments seeking adaptive and hyper-specific features. This performance-driven approach seeks 130

Director Theodore Spyropoulos Founder Patrik Schumacher Course Masters Robert Stuart-Smith Philippe Morel Course Tutors Pierandrea Angius Shajay Bhooshan Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon Jose Sanchez Mostafa El-Sayed Technical Tutors Memo Akten Albert Taylor Software Tutors Torsten Broeder Paul Jeffries Manuel JimĂŠnez GarcĂa Theodore Spyropoulos is director of the experimental architecture and design practice Minimaforms. He has been a visiting Research Fellow at MIT and co-founded the New Media Research Initiative at the AA. He has taught in the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania and the Royal College of Art, Innovation Design Engineering Department and previously worked as a project architect for the offices of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid Architects. Patrik Schumacher is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. He studied philosophy and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart and London and received his doctorate at the Institute for Cultural Science at Klagenfurt University. He is a visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and university professor at Innsbruck University.

Robert Stuart-Smith is a Founding Design Director of Kokkugia, and graduate of the AADRL. He has worked in the offices of Lab Architecture Studio and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners. He previously taught at RMIT University (Australia), the University of East London, and First Year Studio at the AA. He also leads Kokkugia’s consultation to Cecil Balmond on algorithmic design research. Philippe Morel is an architect and cofounder of EZCT Architecture & Design Research. He is an Associate Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, where he leads the Digital Knowledge programme, and a Studio Master at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. He has written about the consequences of technological phenomena on global disurbanism (Living in the Ice Age).

Pierandrea Angius is currently working for Zaha Hadid Architects. He holds a degree in Architecture and a PhD in Building Technology from the Politecnico of Milan and a MArch in Architecture and Urbanism from the AA. Since 2009 he has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvannia Visiting Design Studio. Shajay Bhooshan works as Lead Researcher in the Computation and Design (co|de) group at Zaha Hadid Architects. He completed his masters degree at the AA in 2006. Previously he worked at HOK Sport Architecture. He recently completed scholarship-in-residence with Autodesk Idea Studio in San Francisco. Mollie Claypool has held teaching positions at the AA since 2009 in the DRL and History and Theory Studies programme, as well as at the University of Reading and University of Brighton. She has

worked with the RCA, AA Publications and Phaidon Press. She studied architecture at Pratt Institute and received her Masters with Distinction from the AA. Ryan Dillon has studied at Syracuse University and the AA. Currently he teaches in the History and Theory programme as well as working as a designer at EGG Office. Previously he worked at Moshe Safdie Architects. Jose Sanchez is an architect/programmer based in London. In 2009 he joined Biothing, expanding the research of generative design/ complexity. He is also co-founder of Probotics, an architecture/robotics practice in London. Mostafa El-Sayed is currently working as a member of the Computation and Design (co|de) group at Zaha Hadid Architects. He is a graduate of the AA and the American University of Sharjah. He

has taught and presented work at various events, workshops and institutions both in London and internationally. Memo Akten is a visual artist, director, musician and engineer. In 2007 he founded the Mega Super Awesome Visuals Company – a network of artists, designers, musicians, engineers, hackers and tinkerers. He has collaborated on a music video for Depeche Mode and has worked with brands such as Apple, Google, Rolls-Royce, Samsung and Vodafone. Albert Taylor is a cofounder of AKT II, a design-led structural engineering practice working on international projects with renowned architects such as David Chipperfield Architects, Foreign Office Architects, Future Systems and Zaha Hadid Architects.

Space Oddity_rub-a-dub Tutor: Theodore Spyropoulos; Team: Sebastian Andia (Argentina), Rodrigo Roberto Chain Rodriguez (Colombia), Apostolos Despotidis (Greece), Thomas Jensen (Denmark)

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DRL to develop novel design proposals concerned with the everyday. The iterative methodologies of the design studio focus on the investigations of spatial, structural and material organisation, engaging in contemporary discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. Phase II Design Research Agenda: Proto-Design (v.4) Four parallel research studios, run by Theodore Spyropoulos, Patrik Schumacher, Robert Stuart-Smith and Philippe Morel, explore the possibilities of the Proto-Design studio. Theodore Spyropoulosâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; studio, Extreme Materialism, investigates behaviour as the means to explore self-regulating and deployable soft systems within the field of scientific enquiry. Parametric Semiology, led by Patrik Schumacher, focuses on the design of parametric prototypes that intelligently vary general topological schemata across a wide range of parametrically specifiable site-conditions such as a campus. Robert Stuart-Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio, Behavioural Materialism, explores how nonlinear design processes may be instrumentalised to generate a temporal architecture with a designed life-cycle. Philippe Morelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio, Reconsidering Elementarism, challenges the contemporary relevance of high-technologies through shelter-related architectures that make use of cheap and deployable elemental geometric components.

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Phase I Design Studio: Proto-Architectures Patrik Schumacher, Theodore Spyropoulos, Robert Stuart-Smith Four design studios will continue to challenge the notion of the design project driven exclusively by contextual and programmatic parameters. Each studio will introduce a specific arena of design concepts, tools and intended outcomes, ranging from prototypes of urbanism, architecture and detail systems. This body of initial design research work will be carried forward to Phase II in 2012/13, and applied to a series of specific briefs and sites for each studio. Phase I Design Workshops: Material Behaviour Theodore Spyropoulos, Robert Stuart-Smith, Mostafa El-Sayed, Shajay Bhooshan (Term 1) Term 1 begins with two sets of three design workshop modules, emphasising computational and material prototyping as both an analytical methodology and the prime mode of design production and representation. Each five-week module focuses on a specific set of methods and intended design output, introducing Phase I students to a broad range of concepts and techniques that can be taken forward to further workshops and the year-long Phase I and Phase II studio projects.

Phase II Design Workshop: Adaptive Systems and Structures Theodore Spyropoulos, Robert Stuart-Smith, Mostafa ElSayed, Shajay Bhooshan (Term 1) This five-week workshop at the midpoint of Phase II addresses a detailed part of the spatial, structural, material and environmental systems of each teamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thesis project, with an emphasis on modelling techniques which act as feedback for the testing and development of the larger-scale proposals. A presentation in November will serve as a major interim review. Phase I Core Seminars: Design as Research I â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Open Source Robert Stuart-Smith with Mollie Claypool (Term 1) Pursuing design as a form of research raises a series of questions that this course will examine in relation to larger technological, economic and cultural contexts. The seminar will explore ways of associating design with forms of research, as well as the implications of this for architectural and design practice. Weekly sessions will include presentations related to course readings. Synthesis: Project Submission, Writing & Research Documentation Mollie Claypool & Ryan Dillon (Terms 1 & 2) These weekly sessions will review the basics of writing and research related to DRL course submissions. Presentations will cover resources in London and beyond, the preparation of

thesis abstracts, writing styles and issues related to essays, papers and project booklets. Tutorials will discuss ongoing research topics and seminar and studio presentations. Behaviour: Examining the Proto-Systemic Theodore Spyropoulos with Ryan Dillon (Term 2) This core seminar will articulate a behaviour-based agenda that engages experimental forms of material and computational practice. Examining cybernetic and systemic thinking through seminal forms of prototyping and experimentation, the seminar will look at the thought experiments that have manifested since the early 1950s as maverick machines, architectures and ideologies. Team-based presentations will examine these methods and outputs as case studies for studio experimentation. Design as Research II: Computational Space Robert Stuart-Smith with Mollie Claypool (Term 2) This seminar is an overview of computational approaches to architectural design, strategies and processes. Weekly readings on software technologies and design systems will relate computational work in art, music, new media, science and other sources to contemporary architectural discourses around parametric design. Teams will make weekly presentations related to the readings and an analysis of selected projects. 133

DRL Digital Tools: Maya, Rhino, 3D Studio, Catia, Processing, Arduino & Macromedia – Software & Scripting Shajay Bhooshan, Mostafa El-Sayed, Jose Manuel Sanchez, Robert StuartSmith, Paul Jeffries, Torsten Broeder, Manuel Jiménez García, (Terms 1 & 2) These optional workshops provide an introduction to the digital tools and systems used in the DRL, introducing the basic skills needed to build and control parametric models and interactive presentations. Sessions will build up to advanced scripting, programming and dynamic modelling techniques.

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KillingMeSoftly_SoftKill Tutor: Robert Stuart-Smith; Team: Nicholette Chan (USA), Gilles Peter Felix Retsin (Belgium), Aaron Josephe Silver (USA), Sophia Hua Tang (USA/China)

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Emergent Technologies The Emergent Technologies and Design programme continues to evolve through the development of our research in studio, the seminar coursework and the dissertations. We aim to produce new research each year, building from our interests and expertise in material organisation and the design and development of systems in a variety of scales. Our work is focused on the interdisciplinary effects of emergence, biomimetics and evolutionary computation of design and production technologies, and on developing these as creative inputs to new architectural and urban design processes. Building on the achievements of our past studies, we will include greater involvement from experts in the fields of component systems and material computation, urban physics and algorithmic urban design, engineering, advanced computation, and computationally driven fabrication. We will continue our Masterclass series for the fourth year, along with lectures, tutorials and workshops from Wolf Mangelsdorf (Buro Happold), Achim Menges (ICD Stuttgart), Hugh Whitehead, (Director of SMG Foster and Partners), Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda (AMID/Cero 9), Skylar Tibbits (MIT), Joan Busquets (Harvard GSD), and Dr Janet Barlow (Urban Physics, Reading). The instruments of analysis and design in Emergent Technologies are computational processes. The Seminar Courses and Core Studio are designed to familiarise students with these instruments, their associated conceptual fields and their application to architectural design research. The courses are extensively crosslinked, thematically and instrumentally, with each other and with the Core Studio. In Core Studio 1 the focus is on the exploration of material systems and their development into differentiated surfaces and assemblies. These assemblies demonstrate the potential for integrated structural and environmental performance producing local ‘microclimatic’ variations that define spatial arrangement. In Core Studio 2 we investigate a larger and more complex piece of the city, examining urban systems and generating new material, social and ecological organisations. 136

Directors Michael Weinstock George Jeronimidis Studio Master Evan L Greenberg Tutors Mehran Gharleghi Achim Menges Wolf Mangelsdorf Michael Weinstock is an architect. Born in Germany, lived as a child in the Far East and then West Africa, attended an English public school. Ran away to sea at age 17 after reading Conrad. Years at sea in traditional sailing ships, with shipyard and shipbuilding experience. Studied architecture at the AA and has taught at the AA since 1989. His research interest lies in exploring the convergence of biomimetic engineering, architecture, emergence and material sciences. He received the Acadia Award for Excellence 2008. He has published The Architecture of Emergence and Emergent Technologies and Design – Towards a Biological Paradigm for Architecture, and has been Visiting professor at Rome, Barcelona, Calgary and Yale. George Jeronimidis is the Director of the Centre for Biomimetics in the School of Construction Management and Engineering. He is an active member of the Smart Materials and Structures Committee of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IoM3). He has published extensively in these fields with articles in scientific journals, books and conference contributions, including keynote lectures. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute of Colloid and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany and is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Virtual and Physical Prototyping.

Mehran Gharleghi is an architect, researcher and designer. He received his MArch in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA, where he is also a Fifth Year Technical Studies Tutor. He has worked for distinguished architectural practices including Plasma Studio and Foster + Partners in London. In 2009 he co-founded Studio INTEGRATE with Amin Sadeghy.

The Emergent Technologies and Design programme AA Projects Review Exhibition, 2011/12

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Emergent Technologies The Programme Core Studio 1 and 2 – Active Systems Evan Greenberg and Mehran Gharleghi Core Studio 1 – Material Systems Evolutionary strategies and computational techniques are used to develop the architectural qualities of different material systems. Physical models will explore the integration of material behaviour and fabrication processes. Core Studio 1 is supported by weekly sessions on associative modelling in Grasshopper/Rhino, workshops on scripting in VB and in Grasshopper, sessions on geometry and iterative processes, and L-Systems to model and control growth processes. The studio concludes with fully fabricated and digitally modelled, doubly curved material systems that exhibit integrated structural and environmental properties. Core Studio 2 – City Systems The Core Studio 2 project extends the system logics to a larger and more complex piece of the city. We study the microclimatic, typological and social organisations of a defined urban tissue, and the interactions between them across the hierarchical levels analogous to cell, tissue and organ. A generative set of rules at the scale of the neighbourhood is developed and initiated. The studio concludes with the design of a new urban tissue and its systems, and the detailed design of one ‘cell’ within it through fully fabricated and digital models. 138

Emergence Seminar Course Michael Weinstock (Terms 1 & 2) Emergence has been an important concept in biology, mathematics, artificial intelligence, information theory and computer science, newer domains of climatic modelling and other complex systems analysis and simulations. A survey is presented of the mathematics of evolution and embryological development, the data structures and processes of the genome, population dynamics and pressures. Applications to architectural design are explored through generative design experiments, concluding with the detailed modelling and analysis of the set of forms, surfaces and structures evolved. Biomimetics Seminar Course George Jeronimidis with Evan Greenberg (Term 1) This course is an introduction to the ways in which organisms have evolved their form, materials and structures in response to varied functions and environments, followed by an account of engineering design principles that have been abstracted from nature in current research projects for industry and material science. It will include a study of a natural system (general form, anatomy, energy flows and behaviour) and the engineering principles abstracted from it (analysis continues into winter term).

Design Research Studio and the Thesis/Dissertation (Terms 3 & 4) Three main fields of design research are offered â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Active Material Systems with Advanced Fabrication, Natural Ecological Systems Design (currently focused on shorelines and deltas), and Urban Metabolic Design (currently focused on algorithmic design for energetic models of new cities in emergent biomes). Students may choose one of the three fields, and will work in pairs. The Design Research Studio facilitates the development of a deeper understanding of emergence and its application to advanced production in architecture, urbanism and ecological engineering, while integrating theoretical discourses, science and the insights gained from experiments. It will develop the ability to analyse complex issues and to engage in independent research. The Design Research Studio concludes with the presentation of the fully developed Thesis/Dissertation proposal.

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History and Critical Thinking History and Critical Thinking provides a platform for critical enquiry into theoretical debates and forms of architectural and urban practice. The aim is three-fold: to connect contemporary arguments and projects with a wider historical, cultural and political context; to produce a knowledge which will relate to design and public cultures in architecture; and to enquire into new forms of knowledge, research and practice. Central to the 12-month programme is an emphasis on writing as a practice of thinking. Different forms of writing such as essays, reviews, short commentaries, publications and interviews allow students to engage with diverse forms of enquiry and articulate the various aspects of their study. A common concern of the different courses is the relations of theoretical debates to particular projects and practices in order to develop a critical view of the arguments put into the design and the knowledge produced through its mechanisms and effects. To this aim, the programme is also involved with design work produced in the school through joint events with Diploma units, and HCT students act as jurors during reviews. The programme also provides research facilities and supervision to research degree candidates (MPhil and PhD) registered under the AA’s joint PhD programme, a cross-disciplinary initiative supported by all of the graduate programmes.

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Director Marina Lathouri Staff Mark Cousins John Palmesino Douglas Spencer Thomas Weaver Visiting Tutors Pedro Ignacio Alonso Mario Carpo Marina Lathouri studied architecture and philosophy of art and aesthetics. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and since 1999 has been teaching at the AA and Cambridge University. She is visiting professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago and the Universidad de Navarra in Spain. She has published widely and most recently co-authored The Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Routledge). Mark Cousins is director of History and Theory Studies in the undergraduate school and guest professor at South Eastern University, Nanjing. He was a founding member of the London Consortium. He has been a member of the Visual Arts Panel and of the Architectural Panel of the Arts Council. He published (with Athar Hussein) Michel Foucault (McMillan). He has published widely in the human sciences, including October, Harvard Design Review, AA Files, etc. He has written catalogues for the Wilson twins and Anthony Gormley. John Palmesino has been Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel and is currently Research Advisor at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and Diploma Unit Master at the AA. He also teaches at the Research Architecture Centre at Goldsmiths, London. He co-founded Territorial Agency with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog.

Douglas Spencer has studied architectural history, cultural studies and critical theory. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, film and critical theory has been published in journals including The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy and AA Files. Thomas Weaver works at the Architectural Association as editor of AA Files. He has previously edited ANY magazine in New York and has taught architectural history and theory at Princeton University and the Cooper Union.

Pedro Ignacio Alonso studied architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile and completed his PhD at the Architectural Association. He has taught at the AA and worked for Arup’s Urban Design. He is currently directing the graduate programme in History and Design at the Universidad Católica de Chile.

Mario Carpo is Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at Yale University. His research and publications focus on the relationship between architectural theory, cultural history and the history of media and information technology. His publications include The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press, 2011) and Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001)

Fabrizio Ballabio, Interval 19, HCT Architecture and Photography workshop, December 2011

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History and Critical Thinking TERM 1 The courses in Term 1 have three main objectives: to help students understand the history of the discipline of architecture and the role of writing in the process of its formation; to interrogate the writing of history; and to investigate the question of modernity. Architecture Knowledge and Writing Marina Lathouri, Mario Carpo, Thomas Weaver The course has two parts, a lecture series and writing seminars. The lectures examine how a knowledge specific to the discipline of architecture has developed since the fifteenth century, paying particular attention to cultural technologies and the multiple formats within which this knowledge is produced and communicated. The aim of the writing seminars is to look more closely at a specific mode of architectural writing, namely the essay. Narratives of Modernity Marina Lathouri Through a detailed examination of forms of architectural writing, this seminar series looks at the role key texts played in the construction and critical assessment of a canonical history of architectural modernity. Aesthetics and Architecture Mark Cousins Although the term ‘beautiful’ is still used within architecture, the concept of beauty and indeed the whole question of aesthetics seems a long way from the concerns of contemporary 142

architectural theory. But Kant’s Critique of Judgement is fundamental to establishing the relation between art or architecture and subjectivity. This course tries to follow the history of aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by revisiting the impact of Hegel on Kant, of Wölfflin on architectural history, and of modernism and its interpretations by Duchamp and Greenberg. Architectural Photography This one-week workshop focuses on the use of the medium of architectural photography as a critical tool to explore the relationship between building, image and text.

TERM 2 In Term 2, lectures, seminars and debates examine contemporary forms of architectural and urban practice enabling the students to reinterpret disciplinary knowledge in a broad cultural and political arena. Architecture and its Mediations Douglas Spencer As a form of cultural production architecture is constituted more than any other by a ‘seam’ between the ‘economic organisation of society and the aesthetic production of its (spatial) art’. Through the analysis of projects in contemporary architecture, and a close reading of key texts, this series will address processes of architectural mediation and the theoretical instruments through which these can be critically analysed.

The Post-Eurocentric City John Palmesino This seminar series seeks to articulate the theoretical conjunctions of the contemporary city. It analyses the links between the transformations in international and sub-state polities, processes of institutional change and the material structures of human environments. HCT Debates: City, Politics and Spaces Marina Lathouri, John Palmesino, Douglas Spencer Many of the emerging urban formations and forms of urbanity are partially or completely novel institutional orders or systems of relations. Would that mean that the emerging spaces are also spaces for a new politics? Is it possible to proceed through a critical body of architectural references, existing or to be constituted, in order to rethink urban space and the communal? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in the debates with invited architects, critics and artists.

TERM 3 Thesis Research Seminar The thesis is the most significant component of the students’ work. The choice of topic, the organisation of the field of research and the development of the central argument are discussed within the Research Seminar where students learn about the nature of a dissertation from the shared experience of the group. The unit trip that takes place in the third term also includes intensive sessions to help students clarify their thesis. At the end of term, the work in progress is individually presented to a jury of invited critics.

TERM 4 In Term 4 the students complete the writing of their thesis to be submitted in September.

Critical Fabrications Pedro Ignacio Alonso This one-week workshop investigates the contemporary notion of ‘fabrication’ and how it has come to acquire the status that the notion of ‘construction’ had in accounts of modern architecture.

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Housing & Urbanism The Housing and Urbanism programme applies architecture to the challenges of contemporary urban strategies. Today’s metropolitan regions show tremendous diversity and complexity with significant global shifts in the patterns of urban growth and decline. Architecture has a central role to play in this dynamic context, developing far-reaching strategies and generating novel urban clusters. This course focuses on important changes in the contemporary urban condition and investigates how architectural intelligence helps us to understand and respond to these trends. Offering a 12-month MA and a 16-month MArch, the course is balanced between cross-disciplinary research and design application. The work is divided among three equally important areas: design workshops; lectures and seminars; and a written thesis for the MA or a design project for the MArch, which allow students to develop an extended and focused study within the broader themes of the course.

Lecture Courses and Seminars Design Workshop (Terms 1, 2 and 3) The Design Workshop is the core course of the programme, providing a framework for linking design investigation to a politically and historically informed approach to issues of contemporary urbanism. It has two components. One is the Group Workshop in which students and tutors form small teams working to explore and develop design responses to well-defined urban challenges. The other component is the Urban Seminar, which opens up a debate on different approaches to key themes in the programme’s areas of research, with presentations by both students and visiting scholars and practitioners. The course consists of individual and group projects, and students present both design and written work. While each of the Group Workshop teams will pursue distinct lines of investigation, the Urban Seminar and individual work gives the opportunity to evaluate and 144

Directors Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley Staff Lawrence Barth Nicholas Bullock Elad Eisenstein Anderson Inge Kathryn Firth Dominic Papa Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith Jorge Fiori is a sociologist and urban planner. He studied in Chile and has worked in academic institutions there and in Brazil and England. He is a visiting lecturer at several Latin American and European universities, and consultant to a number of international urban development agencies. He researches and publishes on housing and urban development, with particular focus on the interplay of spatial strategies and urban social policy. Hugo Hinsley is an architect with expertise in urban development projects, housing design and communityled co-developments. He has been a consultant to many projects in Europe, Australia and the US. He is a member of the research committee of Europan, and has taught, lectured and published internationally. Recent research includes London’s design and planning, particularly in Docklands and Spitalﬁelds; urban policy and structure in European cities; and rethinking density for housing and urban development. Lawrence Barth lectures on urbanism and political theory, and has written on the themes of politics and critical theory in relation to the urban. He practises as a consultant urbanist to architects and city governments on large-scale strategic projects, and is engaged in research on urban intensiﬁcation and innovation environments.

Nicholas Bullock studied architecture at Cambridge University where he completed a PhD. His research work includes issues of housing reform with a special interest in German postwar housing design and policy; and the architecture and planning of postwar reconstruction. Elad Eisenstein is an Associate Director at Arup and the leader for urban design and masterplanning for the UK, Middle East and Africa. He joined Arup in 2005 after completing his masters degree in Housing & Urbanism at the AA. He has experience in a wide range of projects and has lectured internationally on urban design and sustainable urbanism.

Kathryn Firth is Chief of Design at the Olympic Park Legacy Company in London where she is leading the masterplanning and urban design of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. She has been involved inÂ both design work and research projects and lectures internationally on issues of urbanism and urban design. She has taught in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics, the GSD at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Toronto. Anderson Inge is a practising architect who has completed additional training in structural engineering (at MIT) and sculpture (at St Martins). He also teaches at the Rural Studio and Royal College of Art (sculpture).

Dominic Papa is an architect and urban designer involved in practice, teaching and research. He is a founding partner of the practice s333 Studio for Architecture and Urbanism, which has won awards for projects across Europe. He is a design review panel member for CABE and the West Midlands, and has been a jury member for a number of international competitions. Elena Pascolo is an architect and urbanist who has trained and worked in London and South Africa on large housing and urban regeneration projects. She recently cofounded Urban Projects Bureau. Her research focuses on the development of spatial tools that structure complex urban strategies and the role of institutions in promoting urban transformation.

She is a member of the AA research cluster, The Architecture of the Informal City. Alex Warnock-Smith is an architect and urban designer. His work is concerned with the relationship between social experience and urban space. He is co-founder of Urban Projects Bureau. UPB were recently selected by the British Council as one of 10 teams to exhibit at the British Pavilion for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale 2012. He has lectured and written internationally on issues of urban development, social justice and current affairs.

Lower Lea Valley, points of intensity

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Housing & Urbanism reflect upon different approaches to key issues within urbanism today. The programme places particular emphasis upon the urban inner periphery, where the complexity of the urban process is plainly visible, and our project work in the Design Workshop reflects this emphasis. Each team will define the balance and integration of architectural, social and political concepts that drive its work, giving each project a distinctive style and character. Our main site for design investigation will be an inner-peripheral area of London. We will engage with the urban process of this site within the larger framework of London and of its metropolitan region. We will also have an intensive design workshop outside the UK, which gives us the opportunity to collaborate with other urbanism programmes and city governments, testing our design and conceptual approaches in a different context. Cities in a Transnational World (Term 1) This course explores the social and economic context of housing and urbanism as it interacts with the formulation and implementation of strategies of urban development and with the reshaping of the role of architects and planners in the making of cities. It offers a comparative analysis of the restructuring of cities in the context of the current stage of internationalisation of the world economy, placing strong emphasis on issues of policy and planning, and on current reforms in systems of urban governance. 146

The Reason of Urbanism (Term 1) This lecture and discussion series provides the foundations for an engagement with the urban as a ‘problemﬁeld’ in western governmental reasoning. The course will trace the twentieth-century development of urbanism to highlight the inherent political issues and will also develop a theoretical perspective through an engagement with the work of Arendt, Foucault, Sennett and others. Through this perspective students will investigate the relationship of key political concepts to the generation of new urban spatialities. Critical Urbanism (Terms 1 and 2) This course will explore the role of urbanism as an instrument of diagnosis and critique. Beginning with lectures and readings in Term 1 and building towards a seminar format in Term 2, the course explores the ways architecture has generated a range of critical and reﬂexive responses to the city over the last four decades. Emphasis will be placed on developing students’ facility with the critical analysis of contemporary urban projects, while background readings will include Koolhaas, Rowe, Rossi, Eisenman, Tschumi and others. Shaping the Modern City (Terms 1 and 2) This course explores the various national and local strategies evolved by the state to meet the challenge of urban expansion during the twentieth century. Rather than presenting a

continuous narrative history, the lectures and seminars will look at key events, projects and texts that illustrate contemporary responses to the opportunities and problems created by growth. The course will focus on post1945 housing and planning in a number of European and US cities, offering a vantage point from which to consider critical issues such as density, regeneration, mixed use and new working and living patterns. It will also review the development of ideas about housing form and production. Housing and the Informal City (Term 2) This course uses housing as a strategic vehicle for investigating the evolution of ideas and approaches to the informal and irregular processes of city making. In particular, it reviews critically the growing de-spatialisation of strategies to deal with urban informality and the social condition associated with it, and explores the role of urbanism and spatial design in addressing those conditions. It draws from the extreme circumstances of irregularity and sociospatial segregation of the cities in the developing world. With reference to relevant projects and programmes, it attempts to identify appropriate tools and instruments of spatial intervention and design and to examine their articulation with the redesigning of urban institutions and rules.

a discursive formation linking together domesticity and urbanism. Taking Mies van der Rohe’s patio houses of the 1930s and Karel Teige’s 1932 critique of the minimum dwelling as opening counterpoints, this course develops students’ understandings of type and diagram in the pursuit of fresh approaches to urban living. Core readings for the essay include theoretical and historical writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot and Nikolas Rose. Thesis Seminar (Term 3) This seminar is organised around the students’ work towards their written or design thesis. It provides a forum for students to discuss work in progress with members of staff and invited critics, and to comment on each other’s work. Other Events We will make a study trip to a European city in order to develop comparative research. We will invite a number of academics and practitioners from all over the world to contribute to the programme during the year. Students are also encouraged to attend complementary courses offered by other programmes in the AA.

Domesticity (Term 2) This seminar series explores trends in contemporary multi-residential housing against the background of 147

Landscape Urbanism ‘Landscape Urbanism’ is, by definition, transdisciplinary. Whilst drawing upon the legacy of landscape design to address the dynamics of contemporary urbanism, it integrates knowledge and techniques from environmental engineering, urban strategy and landscape ecology, deploying the science of complexity and emergence, the tools of digital design and the thought of political ecology. All these means are combined to project new material interventions that operate within an urbanism conceived as social, material, ecological and continually modulated by the spatial and temporal forces in which it is networked. The Landscape Urbanism MA programme is a 12-month studio-based course designed for students with prior academic and professional qualifications. It comprises a design studio, interrelated workshops and a series of lectures and seminars that form the core of project development.

Course Brief Prototypical Urbanities: India’s Infrastructural Metropolitanism ‘According to forecasts by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), India will have 68 cities of more than one million inhabitants by 2030, twice as many as in Europe, and will need to invest $1.2 trillion in infrastructure.’ – The Guardian The explosion of India’s urban population over the last few years has resutled in chaotic rapid urbanisation in the subcontinent. Major civil engineering projects are required to cope with a growth which needs to be founded both on the creativity of India’s entrepreneurs and on the grounds of its spatial infrastructures. As a long-term task, Landscape Urbanism intends to engage with these conditions of urbanisation, folding its methodology, social ethos and design aspirations into the framework of the rapidly urbanising fringes of major Indian conurbations. 148

Visiting Studio Master Eva Castro Master Co-Direction Alfredo Ramirez Eduardo Rico Design Tutor Clara Oloriz Seminar Tutors Tom Smith Douglas Spencer Eva Castro has been teaching at the AA since 2003 and studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and completed the AA Graduate Design programme. She is cofounder of Plasma Studio and Groundlab. She is winner of the Next Generation Architects Award, the Young Architect of the Year Award, the ContractWorld Award and the HotDip Galvanising Award. Alfredo Ramirez is an architect and director of Groundlab where he has won and developed several competitions, workshops, exhibitions and projects. He is Director of the AA Visiting School in Mexico City and has given workshops and lectured internationally on the topic of landscape urbanism and the work of Groundlab. Eduardo Rico studied civil engineering in Spain and graduated from the AA’s Landscape Urbanism programme. He has been a consultant and researcher in the fields of infrastructure and landscape in Spain and the UK. Currently he is working within the Arup engineering team as well as being part of Groundlab. He has taught at Harvard GSD and the Berlage Institute.

Clara Oloriz Sanjuan is a practising architect and received her PhD from the ETSA Universidad de Navarra. She has worked for Foreign Office Architects, Cerouno, Plasma Studio and Groundlab. She teaches at the University of Navarra and is codirector of the AA Visiting School in Bilbao. She co-directs an AA research cluster titled Urban Prototypes.

Douglas Spencer has studied design and architectural history, cultural studies, critical theory and has taught at a number of architectural schools. His research and writing has been published in journals including The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy, AA Files and Culture Machine. He is currently researching for a book which formulates a Marxian critique of contemporary architecture and ‘control society’.

Tom Smith is a landscape architect and urban designer. He works at EDAW AECOM on such projects as the masterplan for Chelsea Flower Show and developments in rural communities in Portugal. He was instrumental in the design of the London 2012 Olympic and Legacy Masterplan and is currently focusing on the design of the Olympic and Legacy Parklands.

AA Landscape Urbanism 2011/12 in the field workshop – students working on the creation of an overall strategy for Bilbao City in relation to the potentials and challenges the city faces.

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Landscape Urbanism Whether it is newly privatised sprawl or the coexistence of huge corporateoriented campuses with subcontractor workshops, India offers the contradictions and potentials for a study that can develop new forms of metropolitanism.

Framework ‘Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor is a mega-infrastructure project… covering an overall length of 1483 km2 between the political capital and the business capital of India.’ Landscape Urbanism will engage both critically and opportunistically with the plans for Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor starting in the north close to New Delhi. We will explore the generation of proto-strategies for new largescale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomena of mass-produced cities. Students will be asked to identify the conditions for their own projects, threading spatial, social and environmental discourses into the large-scale government-led ideas and the localised responses emerging from the found territorial conditions. In their entirety student projects will conform to an alternative mode of spatial development where the character of trans-national infrastructures is used to ground a socio-technical alternative for a new urban nature.

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Design Studio 1. Indexical Models: Mediation Between Typical Organisational Paradigms and Local Conditions Term 1 is based on a series of intensive workshops. It aims to initiate a dialogue between the techniques being acquired and their application in the development of new organisational models. It culminates with a field trip to India, providing us with the opportunity to engage with a real large-scale urban project and to communicate with local planners and architects. 2. Sensitive Systems: Development of a Prototype Subsequent to the field trip, the organisational models acquire a sense of local ‘urgency’ informing both topdown strategic intentions while allowing for a fluid negotiation with bottom-up local conditions. Central to this phase will be the development of a prototype, a malleable model capable of continuous transformations. 3 & 4. Network Urbanism: Global Behaviour During Terms 3 and 4 the work will develop different logics of proliferation while mastering degrees of selfdifferentiation, specificity and responsiveness within the field. Investigations developed during the year will be presented as a final Design Thesis in a public review at the end of September.

Seminars and Lectures Landscaping Urbanism Douglas Spencer (Terms 1 & 2) This lecture series and seminar unit is designed to synergise with its workshops, projects and field trips. Over its two terms it introduces students to the transdisciplinary origins of Landscape Urbanism whilst defining its unique configuration and potential in the context of urban conditions. Machining Landscapes Tom Smith (Terms 1 & 2) Félix Guattari, in his essay ‘On Machines’, proposed that the concept of the ‘technological machine’ be expanded to one of the ‘machinic assemblage’. Following this proposition the lecture series introduces a range of construction techniques related to the design of landscape projects that adopt a ‘machinic’ ethos to technical practice. Ecology & Environment Ian Carradice & Ove Arup Associates (Term 2) This lecture series by experts from the Arup Environmental Unit addresses environmental concerns, introducing a range of techniques aimed at ensuring sustainable management and design. Landscape Urbanism Guest Lecture Series 05 (Terms 1 & 2) These lectures, which are open to the public, allow the Landscape Urbanism programme to continue to refine its own transdisciplinary approach by

inviting a diverse range of speakers offering new perspectives on the issues that concern its practice.

Workshops Indexing Territories Alfredo Ramírez & Eduardo Rico (Term 1) This workshop aims to develop students’ capacity to read information from fields and then decode, synthesise and systematically process it into indexical models. The workshop understands mapping and diagramming as both exploratory and positive, having an active and crucial role in the design process. DFC (Digitally Fabricated Cities) Alfredo Ramírez & Eduardo Rico (Term 1) The workshop explores digital fabrication techniques allowing students to acquire an instrumental deployment of these tools and to create a feedback loop that overcomes the traditional two-dimensional reading of the city. Urban Prototypes: Clara Oloriz San Juan, Alfredo Ramírez, Eduardo Rico (Term 2) The purpose of the workshop is to explore various tools and techniques as a means of creating flexible design tools that are capable of accommodating change and a degree of indeterminacy in the design process.

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Sustainable Environmental Design The conditions for a symbiotic relationship between buildings and the urban environments they form and occupy are the main concern of the SED masters programme. The dynamic energy exchanges characterising this relation foster distinct change in the climates of cities, the environmental performance of buildings and the comfort and energy use of their inhabitants. Knowledge and understanding of the physical principles underlying these exchanges, along with the conceptual and computational tools to translate them into an ecological architecture and urbanism, form the core of the taught programme in sustainable environmental design. This is structured in two consecutive phases. Phase I is common to MSc and MArch candidates and is organised around joint studio projects that are undertaken in teams combining both groups. Project work is supported by weekly lectures, research seminars and computer workshops. Phase II is focused on dissertation projects which can be undertaken individually or collaboratively, supported by regular seminars and tutorials. The programme will continue developing its five-year research agenda on Refurbishing the City and practice of Adaptive Architecturing that engages with further urban contexts and building typologies.

Studio Projects Phase I Studio: What Can Cities Tell Us, What Can We Say Back (Terms 1 & 2) Starting from the very beginning of the academic year, Phase I Studio will look at how different microclimates form in cities and how these affect activity, energy use and environmental quality in and around buildings. With London as laboratory this first stage engages students in fieldwork that combines studies of how selected buildings and outdoor spaces are used with assessments of environmental performance. These studies inform the understanding of environmental processes and provide numerical data to help calibrate 152

Programme Director Simos Yannas Programme Staff Paula Cadima Rosa Schiano-Phan Joana Gonçalves Klaus Bode Gustavo Brunelli Jorge Rodriguez Simos Yannas has been involved in environmental design research for more than 35 years and has taught and lectured in some 30 countries. His latest books and essays focus on adaptive architecture, refurbishing the city and on lessons from vernacular architecture. His earlier book Roof Cooling Techniques was shortlisted for the RIBA International Book Award for Architecture. He was awarded the PLEA (Passive and Low Energy Architecture) International Achievement Award in 2001. Paula Cadima has been in architectural practice and environmental research for some 25 years and has taught at the Technical University of Lisbon where she created and directed the masters course on Bioclimatic Architecture. She worked for the European Commission in Brussels for five years, managing projects on energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and world-class research in emerging fields. She chaired the Environment & Sustainable Architecture working group of the Architect’s Council of Europe and is currently the President of PLEA (Passive Low Energy Architecture). Joana Carla Soares Gonçalves completed her PhD on the sustainability of tall buildings at the University of São Paulo, where she has taught since 1998. She practised in Rio de Janeiro with Ana Maria Niemeyer and has worked

as an environmental consultant on projects in Brazil, winning awards in a number of design competitions. She is the author of The Environmental Performance of Tall Buildings published by Earthscan in 2010. Rosa Schiano-Phan studied architecture in Italy and completed her masters and PhD studies in environmental design in the UK. She worked as senior sustainability consultant with Brian Ford & Associates and at WSP Environmental, and was a Research Fellow on passive cooling at the Department of Built

Environment, University of Nottingham. She is a co-author of The Architecture & Engineering of Downdraught Cooling published by PHDC Press in 2010. Klaus Bode co-founded BDSP Partnership, an international environmental engineering firm with offices in London, Lisbon and Belgrade. He was project engineer on Foster + Partners’ Commerzbank and on Rogers and Piano’s Potsdamer Platz projects in Berlin. He has collaborated with the Rogers Partnership on the Welsh Assembly building in Cardiff, with the sculptor

Antony Gormley on the Blind Light exhibition and with Hopkins Architects on the Velodrome for the London 2012 Olympics. Gustavo Brunelli graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo and won an Alban scholarship to the MA in Environment & Energy Studies programme at the AA, which he completed with Distinction in 2004. He has worked as environmental consultant on the new headquarters for Petrobras in Rio de Janeiro and with BDSP on projects in the UK and abroad.

Jorge Rodríguez Álvarez graduated from the architectural school of A Coruña, Spain where he is currently researching on sustainable urban design. He was awarded an MA in Building Conservation and Urban Regeneration from the University of Santiago and completed the MSc in Sustainable Environmental Design at the AA with Distinction in 2008. In 2009 he co-founded SAAI, an international environmental consultancy with projects in Europe, Asia and America.

Cool screens for warm climates – an ongoing research project initiated in the summer term of 2011/12 by SED students Chandini Agarwal, Alexandra Andone, Benito Gutierrez, Payal Chaudhari, Valli Chitambaram, Bilge Kobas, Aimilios Kourafas, Shaker Majali, Pulane Mpotokwane, Saachi Padubidri, Omar Rabie, Izzati Salim

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Sustainable Environmental Design computational tools, which are then applied on parametric studies as part of design research. While such work closely depends on new technical knowledge and computational tools provided by the taught course, its intention is distinctly focused on fundamental aspects of architectural research as informed by environmental criteria. A further objective is to extend the visual language of architectural representation so as to incorporate the spatial and temporal dynamics of environmental processes. The results of these case studies provide starting points for design projects, which begin in Term 2, exploring adaptive and performative strategies that can achieve autonomy from conventional energy sources addressing climate change and environmental quality in cities.

Phase II Studio: MArch Dissertation Projects (Terms 1–4) In Term 1 the MArch studio will host the final stage of the Phase II Dissertations that began in the previous academic year (2011/12). These encompass 15 design projects on a variety of briefs and urban contexts addressing issues mostly consisting of mixed-use buildings in warm climates. Following the completion of these MArch projects in early February 2013, a new set of MArch Phase II projects will be launched at the beginning of Term 3 by students who will have joined the programme at the beginning of the current academic year (2012/13). MArch dissertation research is best initiated collaboratively and can include MSc candidates within the team.

Phase II Studio: MSc Dissertation Projects (Terms 3 & 4) In Phase II of the course MSc candidates are expected to embark on a significant piece of design research addressing the programme’s areas of concern as well as students’ own backgrounds, professional interests and special skills. Project topics are decided by the end of Term 2 and grouped into thematic clusters identifying areas of research that can be developed individually or in teams of 2–4 students. MSc dissertations deal with design applicability of their research topic, while the MArch projects target a single design application that must be developed in some detail.

Lecture Courses, Seminars & Workshops

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Myths & Theories of Sustainable Architecture (Term 1) Many architects and students take sustainable environmental design for granted, as if it were standard practice, while others see environmental performance as a mere by-product of the digital revolution. The course dispels such myths, which continue to obscure the development of an architectural discourse of sustainable design. Far from being a computational gadget or an issue of engineering, the environmental performance of buildings is fundamentally a matter for architecture, being an outcome of programmatic, formal and

operational choices made, or ignored, by design. Sustainable environmental design requires essential architectural knowledge that recent generations of architects did not receive. Its main concepts and performative criteria are introduced in this course, providing the cognitive grounding and critical framework needed for design research and practice. Environmental Design Primer (Terms 1 & 2) The course deals with key topics in environmental design research. Lectures will look at the historical relationship between climate and architecture; adaptive theories of environmental comfort and their application in design; daylight and artificial light in architecture; natural and mechanical ventilation; passive and mechanical heating and cooling; ecology and performance of traditional and new materials; energy expenditure in buildings; and renewable energies and other related topics. Refurbishing the City (Terms 1 & 2) This course provides quantitative and qualitative criteria for the environmental assessment of cities based on climate, built density, urban morphology, materiality and anthropogenic activity. The course evolves in parallel to team projects providing examples and case studies of recent refurbishment schemes and new developments in different countries and urban contexts.

Lessons from Practice (Terms 2 & 3) The course draws on the experience of practising architects, engineers and researchers who are invited to present their approach and practice of sustainable environmental design with examples of projects from different climates and building programmes. Design Research Tools (Terms 1 & 2) This is a core technical course on computational tools and fieldwork methods that underpin all project work undertaken for this programme. The software introduced by the course covers the main energy exchanges between buildings and the outdoor environment, and is applied to modelling and simulation of the likely environmental performance, energy use and comfort conditions of alternative designs. Modelling & Simulation Workshop (Terms 1, 2 & 3) This weekly workshop provides hands-on training in the use of the computational tools and research techniques introduced by the Design Research Tools course, helping to build the necessary knowledge, skills and experience for their application to team projects and dissertation research. Research Seminar (Terms 1, 2 & 3) The purpose of this seminar is to support the acquisition of research and writing skills required for studio projects, research papers, dissertations and professional work in the areas of the programme. 155

Conservation of Historic Buildings The stewardship of the historic environment requires heritage practitioners with special skills in understanding, investigating, enhancing and communicating the legacy of the past. It is the ambition of this programme to inspire the participants to build upon their existing knowledge and skills to become more effective, competent and confident practitioners. This two-year part-time programme takes place on 32 Fridays over each of the two academic years and is designed to offer a comprehensive and innovative approach to the conservation of historic buildings. It attempts to address the need to conserve; the artefacts that require conservation; and the methods of conserving. Philosophical issues and craft techniques, are explored alongside modern value systems of assessment. The programme includes site and craft workshop visits that are connected to current conservation issues of interest. The First Year engages students in developing their own conservation philosophies, allied with the study of early and medieval building types. Amongst the required pieces of written work are a materials essay/investigation, a church development study, a conservation statement exercise and a fabric condition survey of a building. The Second Year extends the scope of these studies including the issues associated with the development and repair of historic interiors and the introduction of services into historic buildings. The principal work for the student is a thesis of 15â&#x20AC;&#x201C;20,000 words on a subject of their choice to be approved by the staff. Those directing the programme benefit from the expertise of its advisors, Richard Halsey, Elain Harwood, Frank Kelsall, John Redmill, Clive Richardson and Robert Thorne. Many former students show their continuing commitment to the course by returning to lecture. For 35 years the Conservation of Historic Buildings programme has been recognised as one of the leading courses of its kind and is designed to meet the ICOMOS Guidelines for Education and Training and is informed by current developments in conservation. The course is accepted by the RICS and IHBC, meeting the standards for members involved with conservation works. 156

Programme Director Andrew Shepherd Programme Staff David Hills David Heath Andrew Shepherd is an architect and has run a practice specialising in conservation work for over 30 years, principally in the ecclesiastical field. He is also involved in various international training programmes. David Hills is an architect with a major conservation practice and has a special interest in the conservation of modern architecture with heritage significance. David Heath was latterly Chief Conservation Architect to English Heritage and is the current Chairman of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He is the course thesis tutor for Conservation of Historical Buildings.

Church Weekend 2012

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Design & Make Students of Design & Make use the realisation of buildings as a vehicle for design research, aiming to develop new and alternative modes of architectural design that integrate full-scale making. Based at Hooke Park, the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset, they inhabit an environment that combines studio, workshop, building site and forest, as part of a wider rural community of rich craft tradition. Working within a masterplan for the extension of the campus, student teams design and construct new experimental buildings at Hooke Park. With access to the woodland as a source of material and to Hooke Park’s woodworking facilities, timber building technologies underlie the programme’s agendas. MArch Design & Make is a full-time 16-month graduate design programme open to post-graduate students of architecture who wish to pursue design and realisation of alternative rural architectures. We test prototypical design propositions through their construction, developing design methodologies in which form is generated in response to the conditions and phenomena presented by the real-world site; our physical contact with the materials of building; and reactively through the processes of fabrication and construction. The ambition is to work without distinction between designing and making. Following 2010/11’s ‘Big Shed’ assembly workshop and the student lodge being constructed by the 2011/12 cohort, further campus buildings will be designed and built in 2013. The programme consists of design studio projects and seminar courses, construction-driven studios and the individual production of a thesis. The Induction Project provides an intensive introduction to the programme’s key design methodologies and the Core Project is dedicated to individually themed full-scale, site-specific design-and-make explorations at Hooke Park. Design approaches and skills developed in the first term are applied in the team-based design of a project in Term 2. The four seminars are focused on the theory of making as design; the agendas of ruralism, sustainability and place; fabrication and construction technologies; and the theories of collective design. 158

Programme Director Martin Self Tutors Piers Taylor Charley Brentnall Brendon Carlin Kate Darby Kostas Grigoriadis Charley Brentnall is a timber-framing contractor who has played a pivotal role in the renaissance of timber framing in the UK. He founded Carpenter Oak & Woodland in 1988, is a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Bath and York and a member of the Timber Framers Guild, Carpenters Fellowship, Icomos and SPAB. Martin Self is Director of Hooke Park. He is an engineer and designer who has taught design and theory at the AA since 2004. He worked at Ove Arup & Partners where he was a founding member of the Advanced Geometry Group, studied architectural theory at the AA, and has consulted with such practices as Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio. With Charles Walker, he has led the design and production of the four AA Summer Pavilions (20062009) through tutorship of AA Intermediate Unit 2. Piers Taylor is an architect, a founding partner of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, a former Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge, the founder of the annual Studio in the Woods, and sits on the South West Design Review Panel. Taylor has won a number of awards for his work including the AJ Small Projects Award and a RIBA Award. He has studied with Glenn Murcutt and has been published extensively and internationally.

Design & Make students erecting the timber frame of their student lodge project at Hooke Park, June 2012

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AA Interprofessional Studio ‘Open Source’ The Post-Graduate Diploma in Spatial Performance and Design aims to create and define spatial arrangements and objects through performance and interaction. The studio utilises and links creative intelligence across multiple disciplines with the goal of achieving unique spatial conditions and generating a lasting interprofessional ethos among its participants. An ‘open source’ development is a widely known and understood concept where process and results of a project are constantly shared with an open network of participants. In this way projects advance collectively, can bifurcate into several versions and are relentlessly tested by experts and users at all times. Whereas it is easy to see how this concept might work within the digital world, in programming and software development, it is more difficult to understand what a physical and spatial manifestation of this method might be. Taking this concept of ‘open source’ as our focus, the studio will devise a series of three applied events that will form the framework of the creative process, driving our interventions and innovations. Our focus will be on self-enhancing spatial configurations that form creative platforms of exchange. The ‘Open Source’ series will explore the spatial and creative potential of three different scales and locations throughout Europe (UK/Spain/ Portugal). In the first phase we will look at a direct relationship between subject and object within spatial configurations. How can we extend the human physique to its surrounding environment and vice versa; how can both entities start to merge into one through choreographed design, composed atmosphere and movement? In the second phase these designs will translate into a platform and structure that is the source for a wider range of events and programmes. Constantly growing networks of integrated constructions will serve simultaneously as stages, pathways and film scenes, as well as audiences and exhibition spaces, creating an open source of exchange that seeks to generate an aftereffect of subsequent ventures. 160

Studio Director Theo Lorenz Studio Master Tanja Siems Studio Tutors Andy Dean Jonathan Goddard Allard van Hoorn Theo Lorenz is an artist, architect and media designer. Trespassing between art and architecture the focus of his work lies within the reciprocal relations of creative activities, virtual and physical spatial conditions and the related associations between subjects and objects. He has been teaching at the AA since 2000 and has directed the AAIS programme since 2008. Tanja Siems is an urban designer, infrastructural planner and the director of the interdisciplinary practice T2 spatialwork. The office tackles social, political, economic and environmental problems as fuel to the design process by developing a dialogue that can lead to an enhanced built proposal or solution rather than a reduced compromise. She is Professor of Urban Design at the BUW, Germany. Andy Dean is a British record producer, remixer, DJ, songwriter and soundtrack composer and has twenty million credited album sales and numerous awards for his work with artists Joss Stone, Texas and Gabrielle. Currently he is the CEO and Founder of Music Technology Ltd, producing expert interactive digital engagement and communication tools for Pete Tong, Space nightclub Ibiza and Sonica FM.

Jonathan Goddard is a professional dance artist and choreographer and has worked with many major British dance companies. He was the first contemporary dancer to win the Critics Circle National Dance Award for Best Male Dancer and is now teaching and dancing as a founder member of both Goddard Nixon and New Movement Collective.

Allard van Hoorn is a performance, sound, and installation artist working with architecture, music, theatre and design. He has shown at the Stedelijk Museum and the De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York. He works with Domus and Volume and also tutors at the Sandberg Institute and the RCA.

Peter Bazylak and Casey Reeve performing @ Angles of Incidence 40°, 3° Matadero Madrid. Photo by Elyse Agnello

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Projective Cities Projective Cities is a taught MPhil programme that targets graduates and practitioners intending to pursue a substantial and original piece of individual research in architecture. The programme seeks candidates who are great designers and exceptional thinkers and writers. The main ambitions of the Projective Cities programme is twofold. First, to examine how architectural ideas of the city provide alternatives to design doctrines dominated by the disciplines of urban design and masterplanning, which raises the question of what kind of project and research arises from architectural urbanism. Second, to redefine the ambivalent notion of research in architecture by proposing a new methodology to study, analyse and speculate on the synthesis of theoretical and practical design research, while making it operative. Projective Cities understands the city as the subject of new architectural knowledge, speculation and research, positing its potential to produce ideas for the city. This establishes the contemporary city as an architectural project, explicated by large-scale artefacts – a projection of the possibilities of architecture. The programme is divided into two phases. Phase I (30 weeks) represents the taught part, which introduces students to the pedagogy and methodology of the programme and provides the necessary analytical and technical skills. In Term 1 students analyse a ‘dominant type’ and its ‘deep structure’ within the studio, and study the theories of type and typology in the seminars. In Term 2 they continue to study a dominant type by relating it to an urban plan and by exploring concepts of typological conflict and change. This is complemented by seminars discussing theories of the contemporary city. Phase I concludes in Term 3 with a combined studio and seminar in which students formulate their individual dissertation proposals and develop relevant concepts and representations of the idea of the city. Phase II (30 weeks) represents the core research time when students work on their design-and-written dissertation.

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Director Sam Jacoby Staff Adrian Lahoud Maria S Giudici Max von Werz Sam Jacoby is an architect who trained as a cabinetmaker and graduated from the AA. He has taught at the AA since 2002 (including Diploma School and History & Theory Studies) and at the University of Nottingham (2007-09). He has directed Projective Cities since 2009. Adrian Lahoud is an architect and urban researcher. Currently he is Director of the Bartlett Prospective MArch in Urban Design at University College London. He is also the Coordinator of the MA and a PhD supervisor at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University. Maria S Giudici earned her MA from Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Switzerland, in 2006. Between 2005 and 2007 she worked in Bucharest-based office BAU, collaborated in Rotterdam with Donis in 2010 and Dogma in 2011. After teaching at the Berlage Institute and co-tutoring workshops at TU Delft (2008), TU Munich (2009), and Strelka (2010), she will be an assistant professor at BIArch Barcelona. Max von Werz graduated with the AA Diploma. He has been conducting regular design workshops at the AA since graduation. He has worked as a project architect for practices such as David Chipperfield Architects in London and Tatiana Bilbao Architects in Mexico City, and he recently co-founded the London/ Zurich-based partnership Heberle von Werz.

Sakiko Goto, Projective Cities (2012), Tokyo Podium: The Interface to the City

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PhD Programme The AA School’s PhD programme combines advanced research with a broader educational agenda, preparing graduates for practice in global academic and professional environments. Set up in the late 1970s the programme now operates as an autonomous, cross-disciplinary unit supported by all of the School’s postgraduate departments. Current doctoral research encompasses topics of architectural theory and history, architectural urbanism, emergent technologies and design, and sustainable environmental design. Along with the traditional format of the text-based dissertations, candidates can choose to incorporate design research as part of the formal argumentation and output of their PhD projects. PhD studies at the AA are full-time for the entire duration. This starts with a preparatory period during which candidates acquire knowledge and skills while developing their research proposals. Approved research proposals are submitted for registration initiating the formal period of PhD study, which has a duration of approximately four calendar years. PhD candidates work under the guidance of two supervisors. Regular events include research seminars and presentations of research work both within the AA School and in outside events. In the 2012/13 academic year 18 PhD candidates will be continuing into their second, third or final year and new candidates will join the programme for their first year. A new seminar of roundtable discussions with invited speakers will be held in Term 2. Several of this year’s second and third year PhD students will be active as teaching assistants within the school. External events include the coveted AA-CCA research award for a study period at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and participation in international conferences and publications. PhD students will also host the AA PhD Dialogues, an annual symposium of ongoing doctoral research. Scheduled for December 7, 2012 this year’s Dialogues will focus on the grid, ‘a tool for governance in the urban scale, that provides the symposium with ‘a productive framework within which to address some of the problems of the discipline, from a historical/critical perspective as well as a productive/strategic one’. 164

Programme Director Simos Yannas PhD Supervisors Pier Vittorio Aureli Lawrence Barth Paula Cadima Mark Cousins Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley George Jeronimidis Marina Lathouri Rosa Schiano-Phan Patrik Schumacher Brett Steele Thomas Weaver Michael Weinstock Simos Yannas External Supervisors 2012/13 Vida Norouz Borazjani David Cunningham Socratis Georgiadis Spyros Papapetros

The PhD Programmeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fortune cookies were on display at the Projects Review 2012 exhibition.

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Graduate Seminar Theory and Ethos: Towards a Common Architectural Language The course will focus on the relationship between architectural discourse and ethos. Ethos is a Greek word that can be roughly translated as ‘character’ and addresses the ethical principles – the guiding beliefs of a given society. It is possible to argue that every architectural theory implicitly or explicitly always addresses the ethos of the historical time in which it was written. Even if architectural theory mainly addresses practical issues such as problems of construction, design and ornament it always casts a light on the peculiar subjectivity of the period in which it was formulated. This course will re-examine critical treatises and texts of architecture from Vitruvius to Alberti, from Vignola to Blodel, from Durand to Koolhaas in light of the hypothesis that within any theory of architecture is always embedded a specific way to not only build but also govern the city. With this in mind it will examine a selection of important architectural theories in their social and political context, emphasising how the grammar of architecture was often a paradigmatic embodiment of a general Kunstwollen (a general will to art). In this sense, it is possible to say that every architectural theory is always a formulation of a common architectural language that is architecture as a collective and shared knowledge.

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Director Pier Vittorio Aureli Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. His research and projects focuses on the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. He is Davenport Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University. He is the author of many essays and of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture (2008). He is co-founder of Dogma an architectural studio based in Brussels and focused on the project of the city.

visiting School

On the following pages is a small sample of the myriad architectural design workshop options open to participants of all ages, levels of experience and different creative backgrounds. The AA Visiting School programme is divided in two distinct parts. There are the ‘London Schools’, based at the AA in Bedford Square and/or Hooke Park, Dorset, which are typically longer programmes that directly benefit from the AA’s vast London network and are supported by the AA’s state-of-the-art facilities and resources in the UK. Their counterpart, ‘Global Workshops’, are shorter creative design laboratories directed by current/past AA staff and graduates worldwide. All are supported by an extraordinary array of collaborators uniquely qualified to experiment on different agendas addressing some of today’s most pressing issues.

The Visiting School has expanded considerably over the last half decade, constantly ‘ducking-and-diving’ into new outposts. It now comprises more than 50 distinct programmes on five continents running over a full 12-month calendar. There is no way to summarise the imagination and experimentation in the school’s two parts, but you’ll see that the ‘London Schools’ alone include an immersive 15-week Semester Programme; the Visiting Teachers Programme, which for three weeks each year welcomes educators from around the world to our world at Bedford Square; DLab, which now operates between Bedford Square and Hooke Park to offer the latest technology and fabrication opportunities; and the wonderfully London-centric Summer School, which over the last decade has involved hundreds of students in completely re-imagining our metropolis – not forgetting other newer and shorter programmes, including Visioning Architecture and Campaigning Architecture at Bedford Square, and MakeLab and SummerMake at Hooke Park. 2012/13 sees not only the expansion of opportunities at many well-established ‘Global Workshops’ but the introduction of entirely new themes and programmes in Medellin, Taichung, Grenoble, Reykjavik and Ottawa, as well as an exciting new collaboration with Louis Vuitton at our Paris workshop. All of these featured programmes and many others can be discovered online or in the Visiting School prospectus published at the end of October.

Christopher Pierce Director, Visiting School

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visiting school: London schools Semester programme

January – May 2013 TerraLife Architectural Association The Semester Programme is a full-time 15-week studio-based course open to undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. The programme is integrated with the AA’s undergraduate History and Theory seminars and Media and Technical Studies courses. It is designed to allow transferable study credits and the AA School awards a Certificate of Completion. Terra Mítica theme park situated in the Spanish city of Benidorm, one of the most popular high-density tourist destinations in the Mediterranean, will be the ground of experimentation for this year’s core design studio. We will question the concept of today’s theme parks and their potential reinvention. 168

Director Naiara Vegara

Our challenge is to create new dialogues between existing site facilities and architectural interventions that provoke and activate the transformation from myth to life. aaschool.ac.uk/semesterprog

Maeda Workshop

Session 1: April 2013 Session 2: June 2013 Furnishing the Landscape Hooke Park, Dorset The Maeda Twisting Concrete Workshop will take place at Hooke Park and is open to AA students and members. Building on a series of workshops experimenting with minimal surface fabric formworks, the Twisting Concrete Workshop will make further explorations on design applications of GRC (Glassfibre Reinforced Concrete) at the scale of landscape furniture. This will involve the making of site-specific furniture by taking sectional measurements directly from the landscape of Hooke Park. Session one will focus on the textural reading of the microtopography and geo-strata within a chosen area of Hooke Park, on which

Director Shin Egashira

we will test various site-specific formworks. Session two will focus on the construction of finalised component pieces on site. Participants are encouraged to join for both sessions. aaschool.ac.uk/maeda

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visiting school: London schools MakeLab

Director Jeroen van Ameijde

2â&#x20AC;&#x201C;7 April 2013 Hooke Park, Dorset MakeLAB is a six-day programme engaging in pioneering architectural fabrication processes. Using innovative custom-built digital devices and design workflows, the programme aims to explore new modes of design conception through the real-time translation of environmental and social performance data. Using Hooke Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unique forestry and workshop resources to build 1:1 structures, it enables an iterative development and critical evaluation of experimental methodology in real life. Results from previous editions of this workshop have been published internationally and the tutor team each year is comprised of experienced specialists from within and outside of the AA. The programme is open to architectural students, teachers and professionals interested in the collaborative discussion and hands-on exploration of advanced digitally driven design and make processes. aaschool.ac.uk/makelab 170

Campaigning Architecture

Director Kirk Wooller

June 2013 Architectural Association Campaigning Architecture is a design research initiative that explores more effective ways for architects to campaign. Campaigning strategies engage the city like no other. Executed as an amalgamation of military-like precision and haphazard logic, the effectiveness of campaigning relies on strategically navigating the social, political and economic networks that make a city tick. And while our profession is never shy to proclaim, and often quicker to disdain, architects have yet to realise the power of a good campaign. Having been situated in Chicago in 2012, the workshop will relocate to London in 2013. Here we will advance the strategies deployed in Chicago and campaign with new modes of architectural intervention and urban space occupation to reactivate fatigued sites within the urban fabric of London. aaschool.ac.uk/campaigning

Visiting Teachers

May â&#x20AC;&#x201C; June 2013 Architectural Association The AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innovative model as a place of education and debate attracts the interest of academic visitors from all over the world. In response we offer a short programme to give teachers of architecture an opportunity to engage with the teaching and research of the school and to develop a debate about the aims and strategies of teaching architecture. The programme offers meetings with students and teachers, involvement in the review and assessment activities throughout the school, and the opportunity for detailed discussion of ideas and methods of education. Participants will present work for debate in a seminar on educational ideas and methods. Immersion in the

Director Hugo Hinsley

culture of the school through its programme of lectures, seminars and exhibitions is encouraged. Visits are also organised to important examples of architecture and planning in London, a city that offers a rich historical and contemporary record and is a laboratory of urbanism and architecture. The programme is open to a small group of participants who are currently teaching architecture or related subjects, and it begins at the end of May 2013. Applicants will be selected on the basis of a brief statement outlining the issues of architectural education. There is no fee for the programme. aaschool.ac.uk/visitingteachers

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visiting school: London schools DLab

Summer 2013 Blue Architectural Association & Hooke Park DLab experiments with the integration of algorithmic and generative design methodologies as well as with largescale digital fabrication tools. Continuing its colour-based agenda, DLab will utilise blue for its 2013 cycle as a way to investigate natural growth processes in relations to innovative concepts of architectural tectonics and fabrication. Blue will become the inspiration for diving into the depths of emergence, differentiation and complexity found at various scales in nature. We will carefully interweave these concepts with interaction and participatory design in order to create full-scale working prototypes. 172

Director Elif Erdine

The programme will be formulated as a two-phase process. The initial phase will take advantage of the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s London facilities, where participants have full access to the public lecture programme and the Digital Prototyping Lab. The second phase will shift to the Hooke Park campus and revolve around the fabrication and assembly of a full-scale architectural intervention that will unify the design goals of DLab. aaschool.ac.uk/dlab

Visioning Architecture

Directors Trevor Flynn Anderson Inge Alex Kaiser

22 July – 2 August 2013 Architectural Association ‘Draw what you see, know what you see, draw what you know you see.’ – Ruskin The course is a 10-day immersion into visualisation techniques for architecture. Acting as archaeologists, forensic observers and oracles, we extract from the city evidence of its people, stories and architecture. Using rich and diverse sites within the area between the AA and the Thames in Central London we discover and construct new realities of the city by weaving together visions of past, present and future. The course instils a core understanding of hand and digital drawing techniques. Through a period of production, collaboration and investigation of the properties of drawing, we will cross the boundaries between the actual and the visionary. aaschool.ac.uk/visioningarchitecture

Summer Make

Director Luke Olsen

July 2013 Hooke Park, Dorset The annual SummerMake course is a two-week opportunity to engage in a ‘live’ architecture project at Hooke Park. The programme provides handson workshop-driven engagement with design and production methods, leading to a built, full-scale architectural intervention using timber sourced from the surrounding 350-acre woodland. Participants get to live in the Edward Cullinan-designed lodge, work in the ABK/Frei Otto-designed workshop and eat in the refectory, also designed by Frei Otto. The theme last year was ‘Symphony: in search of Timbre in Timber’ in which participants designed and built three automated acoustic instruments to play a symphony that continues in the forest today. Performing on strings is the ‘Monster of Hooke’, a wind-driven intonarumori; a string section is provided by ‘Mystery Bellows’, a human-triggered marimba and thunder-tube; and on percussion is the ‘Water Logs’, a water-powered mechanical log drum and waterphone. aaschool.ac.uk/summermake 173

visiting school: London schools Summer School

1–19 July 2013 Waterworld Architectural Association ‘You can’t trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.’ – W C Fields London has a strained relationship with water. It turns its back on the very river that runs through it. It has just survived one of the rainiest summers on record, and its inhabitants have yet to acknowledge the rising sea levels that could threaten to submerge parts of the city this century. Kevin Kostner’s mid-90s film Waterworld could yet become our future reality, though hopefully without the bad fashion. This year’s AA Summer School will speculate on the future relationship 174

Director Natasha Sandmeier

London will be required to develop with the water: how it runs through, falls on and may soon engulf it. Our programme will work on this new Waterworld, inventing projects ranging from smallscale on-site installations to larger scale re-imaginings of the city’s future. The Summer School will invent and describe this new hydro-phenomenon through compelling visions: spatial, social, economic, ecological, cultural and technological. It will use London as an experimental laboratory of ideas and actions. The brief and intense course – based on the renowned AA unit system – emphasises techniques of interpretation, recording, drawing, making and thinking through diverse media types, both analogue and digital. aaschool.ac.uk/summerschool

Night school

Starting January 2013 Architectural Association The AA Night School will begin as a speculative project dealing with alternative models of architectural education. Though we often imagine the idea of architectural education to be a natural and inevitable phenomenon, it is of course as much an accidental by-product of educational politics and economics, of demands of professional training and of murkily subjective disciplinary ideas. Against a background of turmoil within both higher education and the profession, Night School will offer timely experiments in other ways of learning, other forms of generating knowledge and expertise. As much as it promises new pedagogical platforms, Night School

Director Sam Jacob

also recalls the origins of the AA School itself, which began as evening classes in the 1860s. The AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s composition of school and membership provides a unique landscape in which to reconsider relationships between education and practice. Night School proposes a pedagogical platform aimed at students and members alike, offering continuing professional development and student engagement with professional practice. By crossing established lines of practice and education, Night School hopes to invigorate both. Before launching, Night School will begin as a series of discussions within the AA to shape the nature of the programme. aaschool.ac.uk/nightschool 175

visiting school: Global Workshops

Koshirakura/Tokyo workshop, 2011

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Venice/ Calasetta

Director Stefano Rabolli Pansera

26 October – 2 November 2012 April 2013 Beyond Entropy This year Beyond Entropy will continue an investigation into the relationship between energy and form at two separate workshops located in Venice and Calasetta. Venice and the surrounding region are in a period of stasis reaching a level of saturation that has created an endless entropic landscape. We will study architectural typologies, from Palladio to Scarpa, and each participant will become a detective, collecting evidence of traditional forms of urban density and occupation. For Calsetta the open air space of Mangiabarche informs a new typology of art gallery by removing the roof from an existing building that sits in contrast to the endless construction of new structures on the Mediterranean coast. Through performance and filmmaking, the participants will suggest a different future for Calasetta fulfilling the words of Jean-Luc Godard, ‘to change nothing so that everything is different’. aaschool.ac.uk/venice

Paris

Director Jorge Ayala

26 October – 4 November 2012 21 March – 31 March 2013 Louis Vuitton’it up I & II Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris The Paris workshop is the only initiative within academia today that focuses on novel approaches in the emerging praxis between fashion and architecture. Students taking part in the programme will get to collaborate with one of the today’s most inventive market leaders – Louis Vuitton. This year, in the first instalment, the focus will be placed on the role of fashion as a complex ecosystem that acts as an interrelation between humans and material technologies. We will work on a variety of scales from a handbag to an entire popup store. The second workshop will reassess retail design by blurring the distinction between fashion and architecture through an investigation of the window display focusing on authenticity. We will rethink human performance, material, form and structure in relation to the window display, creating uncommon spatial configurations. aaschool.ac.uk/paris 177

visiting school: Global Workshops Medellin

Director Sergio Pineda

27 November – 7 December 2012 Hydromeme Urbam, Universidad EAFIT Since the mid-2000s, Medellin has been the industrial epicentre of Colombia’s economic resurgence. The region’s hydrology is fed by a tropical monsoon climate, which is becoming increasingly unpredictable. In 2010 a fierce sequence of storms triggered landslides with dire effects for settlements on the mountainous territory of the city. This is just a symptom of a wider challenge – city growth within an evolving hydrological wilderness. The workshop will run as a design research initiative for the synthesis of hydrological memes, in search of opportunities within the territory of the city. Simulation tools and hydromimetic code will allow us to imagine future topographies and new alliances with existing land masses. By bringing architects together, with researchers in hydrology and generative design, we will experiment with flow narratives and digital fabrication to produce new fictional territories. aaschool.ac.uk/medellin 178

Buenos Aires

Directors Victoria Goldstein Victor Orive Arturo Revilla

Winter 2013 Buenos Aires Turns to the River Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Building on a body of research established during the past two years, the school will continue its engagement with the paradoxical relation of Buenos Aires and the Río de la Plata. Taking advantage of the opportunities that this border condition offers for architecture’s participation in the making of the city, the workshop will revolve around the possibilities that parametric digital techniques provide for a new dialogue between the metropolis and nature. This exploration will deal with the mutual exclusion between the land’s ‘solidity’ and the massive liquid border seeking an integration of natural and artificial environments. This year we will continue our ongoing research along the coast of Buenos Aires through a series of design strategies for the southern area of the city. The negotiation between the dense mud fields of the river and the city grid provides an unexplored opportunity for urban public space. aaschool.ac.uk/buenosaires

Santiago

Director Pedro Ignacio Alonso

2–11 January 2013 Chile by Night Catholic University The AA/UC Visiting School will return to the extreme climatic and geographical conditions of the Atacama Desert in Chile for a 10-day workshop. Following two previous years that researched the desert’s mining and holiday industries, this third iteration of Deserta will turn to the relationship between science and the arid context by studying the demands imposed by astronomy upon Atacama’s cities and landscape. The workshop will consider the role of darkness in cities, and in the process will combine design and theoretical enquiry while investigating a panoply of architectural, art historical, literary and cinematic images and references, helping us to imagine scenarios for the possible futures of the Atacama desert. Organised in collaboration with the Atacama Desert Centre (CDA), the course will be taught by tutors from the AA and the Catholic University, and guest astronomers will join the group in lectures and working seminars. aaschool.ac.uk/santiago

Beijing

Director Yan Gao

29 January – 7 February 2013 The Big Symbol Tsinghua Architectural Design & Research Institute, Beijing Metaphor is the basis of Chinese characters as well as of many other forms of cultural representation, including architecture. In China, ‘successful’ architecture always embodies a widely recognised symbolic image for the people. The Bird’s Nest (2008 Olympic Stadium) is one of the best of Beijingknown architectural symbols but it is also becoming a dying symbol in the post-Olympic era, struggling to survive incredible financial losses. The big empty icon is deteriorating, and along with it, so is national pride. This year, the agenda for the course is to regenerate the Bird’s Nest through new ideas and techniques under the theme of Chinese symbolism. We will exam the theories of semiology in relation to Chinese aesthetics in an attempt to reactivate the ornamentation and space of the Bird’s Nest as a live symbol. aaschool.ac.uk/beijing 179

visiting school: Global Workshops Rio de janeiro

Directors Franklin Lee Anne Save de Beaurecueil

19â&#x20AC;&#x201C;28 March, 2013 Samba City Escola de Samba do Grande Rio Recently, the government of Rio de Janeiro implemented a policy of urban redevelopment that recognises the importance of providing space for the local creative economy of the Samba Schools. Using this strategy as our impetus the Rio de Janeiro Visiting School will work directly with this initiative and aim to broaden its scope and accessibility in an attempt to foster a diverse public space. The projects will include the design of both permanent structures and temporary interactive installations transforming the existing closed production area of Samba City into an open space linked to proposed leisure itineraries along the waterfront. Structures will be designed with computational design methods and built with digital fabrication techniques with the assistance of local artisans combining new materials and processes with reappropriated Carnival paraphernalia. aaschool.ac.uk/rio

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Taichung

Directors John Palmesino Ann-Sofi RĂśnnskog

March 2013 Taiwan Project Taiwan is a complex experiment in modernity. The programme explores the transformation processes that are reshaping its inhabited spaces, and investigates how architecture can interact with the complex material structures and the economic and geopolitical action that make up its specific forms. Taiwan Project is an experimental research initiative that combines contemporary architecture and territorial analysis to re-imagine the future of Taiwan, its spaces and international position. Cities and territories are dynamic systems in evolution, where individual projects and initiatives interact with large-scale form-generating processes. Today, Taiwan is experiencing a turning point in its complex history, where spatial transformations are promoted from both beneath and above the state. Individuals, corporations, associations, NGOs, international organisations and geopolitical actors are forming a new field of forces that is redirecting its evolution. aaschool.ac.uk/taichung

Lisbon

Director João Bravo da Costa

April 2013 AAVSLX Lisbon Architecture Triennale Lisbon is a unique field for experimentation: an enjoyable city with a growing problem – 4,000 vacant buildings that impose a persistent environmental, economic and cultural burden. Can fresh ideas, innovative strategies and audacious design stimulate the city’s imagination and conquer the problem? While discovering challenges and opportunities unique to this city, participants in the course will learn digital design, discuss their vision for urban transformation and make an installation for public exhibition. The AAVSLX is a collaboration between the AA and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the main architectural event in the Iberian Peninsula. Joining architectural education and culture, the initiative brings the AA’s workshop format to the Triennale’s headquarters for 11 days of learning and production, and is open to students and young professionals from around the world. aaschool.ac.uk/lisbon

Athens/ Istanbul

Directors Alexandros Kallegias Elif Erdine

Spring 2013 Anatomise: Tower Istanbul Technical University, Turkey Cipher City: Recharged National Technical University of Athens The agendas for the Athens and Istanbul schools will again create feedback for each another, allowing participation in either one or both programmes. Anatomise: Tower (Istanbul) will continue to rediscover verticality through novel generative design techniques and large-scale physical prototypes focusing on the sub-systems of the tower. In addition to custom-made digital design and evaluation tools, the course will focus on the fabrication and assembly of the prototype. Cipher City: Recharged (Athens) will follow the initial challenge of amplifying connectivity, adjustability and interaction by scaling up its design intentions. The driving force is the synergistic effect behind complex systems of form-making where interactive design patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple rules. aaschool.ac.uk/athens aaschool.ac.uk/istanbul 181

visiting school: Global Workshops Grenoble

Directors Stephanie Chaltiel Marie-Perrine Placais

27 May – 7 June 2013 Synchronised Movements Les Grands Ateliers de l’Isle d’Abeau Perform and design with your body like a contemporary dancer. Breathe and feel the pleasure of touching the mud. Weigh every heap of earth you scoop and build your pyramid. Play with it, get dirty and enjoy it! Record and map your actions and results like scientists and explore with cutting-edge techniques. The AA Visiting School at Les Grands Ateliers de l’Isle d’Abeau, a specialised fabrication laboratory, will challenge participants to make architecture from earth’s materials, creating life-size structures. Students will learn ancient earth-building techniques alongside digital design and fabrication processes. Inspired by architects, artists, craftsmen, scientists, ethnologists and engineers experienced with construction using earth as a living material – a natural concrete – our work will be highly experimental, leaving behind any prejudice about material behaviour. aaschool.ac.uk/grenoble 182

Reykjavik

Directors Mattia Gambardella Massimo Santanicchia

May 2013 Urban Colony: New Ground Academy of the Arts of Iceland The Icelandic economic meltdown in 2008 had a dramatic effect that left behind a fractured landscape with thousands of unfinished structures, empty buildings and vacant lots. The workshop is designed to examine these remnants with an interdisciplinary approach: graphic designers, urban planners, illustrators, landscapers, architects and street artists will be working together to reconceptualise the urban realm through operational designs, promoting a different perception of city spaces. Change of scale, use of colour, and pattern and variation, will be some of the tools implemented in the proposals through illustration techniques including 3D modelling (Rhino) and parametric tools (Grasshopper). Lectures by local academics, street artists and tours of the magnificent natural landscapes of Iceland will also constitute a source of inspiration and information. aaschool.ac.uk/reykjavik

Penang

Director Naiara Vegara

6–13 July 2013 Streetware II AA-ThinkCity-FM-USM George Town – state capital of Penang, Malaysia– will continue to be the focus of research for the AA Alumni Workshop (AAaw). This platform activates a design research studio that questions the generic term of the street and foresees opportunities within the protected core of Penang, a UNESCO World Heritage site. AA alumni and teaching staff create a research studio that works with a group of architecture students from USM, a local university, in order to help the exploration of AAaw. Studio work will combine digital tools and material experimentations that will be presented to relevant experts in Penang, followed by a publication distributed mainly in Europe and Asia. The aim of the course is to explore the fusion of traditional and contemporary architecture ultimately suggesting a direction for the twenty-first century development of George Town. aaschool.ac.uk/penang

Bilbao San Sebastian

Directors Maider Llaguno Munitxa Clara Olóriz Sanjuán

July 2013 Computing Topos Guggenheim Bilbao Museum and Ayuntamiento de Bilbao The integration of dense infrastructural networks within complex topographical territories is all too often ignored as a design problem. Taking this condition as our main focus and the city of Bilbao as our testing ground, we will look at the ecological, social and urban challenges posed by complex topography. The workshop proposes new material dialogues between topography and infrastructure that respond to contemporary ecologies. Computing Topos will build a platform for designers to engage not only with computational research but also with digital fabrication processes. It will focus on the hybridisation of infrastructures through micro-scale prototypes developed in conjunction with local fabricators and R+D institutions. Studio-based work will be complemented with lectures and seminars about engineering techniques, computational design and fabrication processes. aaschool.ac.uk/sansebastian 183

visiting school: Global Workshops Bogota

Director Diego Pérez Espitia

July 2013 Up the River, Up the Mountain We will invade a public building in downtown Bogotá. Once inside we will deploy small-scale paradoxical actions, à la Beistegui apartment by Le Corbusier, by knitting together windows or doors that can swiftly punctuate a corridor. Or perhaps the participants of this workshop will cling to the cracks of the building and attempt to fuse them with timber and plastic interventions that are conceived with algorithmic design processes. This appropriation of a structure in the city will allow us to interrogate one of Bogotá’s most striking features: its bizarre ad infinitum phase construction, where everything is half built and nothing is finished. All of the work will be dirty and on site within the building that we take command of. Algorithmic design and digital fabrication will influence this workshop, enabling us to shrink down the city to a manageable human scale and giving us the power to fabricate a speculative Bogotá. aaschool.ac.uk/bogota 184

Milan

Directors Claudia Pasquero Marco Poletto

July 2013 Cyber-Gardening the city v2.0 The ‘Cyber-Gardening the city’ project investigates the city as a fertile terrain for the breeding of new cultivation practices and ‘agri-urban’ networks. The programme will develop a series of research experiments allowing students to engage with the issue of urban agriculture by designing new ‘agriurban’ prototypes. These projects will address specific food-supply chains and how these relate to the metropolitan area of the city. The prototypes will take the form of large-scale three-dimensional diagrams and correlated digital interfaces, which will be assembled for a public exhibition in Milan. This school, together with its debates and proposals, aims to create a conceptual and design framework enabling (in relation to the forthcoming International Expo 2015) the emergence of a platform for discussion about the relationship between the farm and the city. Scientific Committee: Luca Molinari and Simona Galateo aaschool.ac.uk/milan

Ottawa

Director Tobias Klein

July 2013 Post-Industrial Landscapes Azrieli School of Architecture Carleton University Set within the context of a post-industrial era, we find ourselves venturing through the Canadian wilderness of Gatineau Park, walking in the footsteps of industrial alchemist Thomas ‘Carbide’ Willson. Within this natural blossom lie the ruins of his former empire, the decaying heart of industrialisation and manufacturing in a factory that never fully materialised. The course will explore 3D devices that can scan the unnatural post-industrial landscapes in an attempt to fuse the accidental qualities of discovery – such as Willson’s trial and error of calcium carbide – with the mathematical precision of laser-scanned environments. Students will form their own architectural ‘carbide’, a fusion of scans and digital modelling to generate a landscape that materialises from Willson’s place of decay into a new architectural ground. aaschool.ac.uk/ottawa

Tehran

Director Omid Kamvari

July 2013 Manufacturing Simplexitites Iranian Architectural Centre Manufacturing Simplexities will return to Tehran for a third year to explore both new and traditional manufacturing technologies in conjunction with algorithmic thinking. Throughout its history the people of Iran have conceived of strategies that resolve problems associated with manufacturing. We will investigate how these could be combined with new design approaches, such as algorithmic processes, in order to challenge conventional methods. Simple rules will form the basic ingredients of our systems, which will have the ability to adapt to the specific environmental conditions. These systems will be tested through 1:1 prototyping, which will allow students to fine-tune their design strategies in relation to a specific method of manufacturing. Constant testing and analysis will be fed back into the overall strategy to drive the evolution of each individual project. The school will culminate with a public exhibition of student work. aaschool.ac.uk/tehran 185

visiting school: Global Workshops Eugene

Directors Kristin Cross Stewart Dodd

Summer 2013 Marking The Forest 11 Marking the Forest returns to the Oregon wilderness for a second year where we will be inventing, imagining, designing and building an insertion into the forest. Exploring the old and new growth woodlands and the commercialisation and commodification of the tree, we will investigate the natural lifecycle of the forest and propose solutions for thoughtfully marking and occupying its terrain. In the first year we created an occupiable camera obscura and an oculus, sited in the woodland to exemplify the contrast of the immediate forest and the distant view across the ridge. We will be investigating an architecture that marks territories in the woodland through routes of inhabitation, forest talks from naturalists, environmentalists and loggers. We will visit mills and walk the ridge all of which will inform our design sessions. Our final evening will see us toasting our successes with a ‘feast in the forest’. aaschool.ac.uk/eugene 186

Nice

Director Goswin Schwendinger

Summer 2013 ‘Love and Crime. Basta!’ The programme is a 10-day investigation into the realm of short silent movies aimed a finding a creative approach towards a new structural and visual language. Using Pascal Schöning’s Manifesto as an entry point, we will re-investigate the very essence of cinematic architecture as the transformation of physicality into an energised ever-changing process of illuminated and enlightening event appearances. Pondering Godard’s 1964 sentiment, ‘Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world’, we will immerse ourselves in Nice, the perfect climate to encourage the spirit of creativity, imagination and fantasy. Starting with a constructed still image from a written fictional moment we will extract a timeline for a possible plot to be casted, produced, shot and edited with the aim of making a short silent movie that is choreographed to give a very specific definition of a place, a mood and a psychological moment – what is known to us as a cinematic house.   aaschool.ac.uk/nice

Tel Aviv

Directors Shany Barath Gary Freedman

Summer 2013 The Drifting Room This workshop will investigate ideas of constructed temporality within Israel’s desert ecology. Heading back to the Negev Desert for a second iteration, we will be experimenting with contextual patterns of nomadic inhabitation and exploring their intriguing relation to the surrounding area’s constant and intense flow of matter. Through an in-depth collaboration with experts in construction, manufacturing technology and climatic engineering we will set out to explore the intelligence of temporal structures and their potential for durable habitation, production or recreation within an extreme arid environment. By testing local materials, fabrication techniques and assembly logics from past, present and possible futures, we will conduct ourselves as an intense temporal community in order to envision, design, construct and inhabit a 1:1 prototype of the Drifting Room. aaschool.ac.uk/telaviv

Unknown Fields

Directors Liam Young Kate Davies

Summer 2013 Nomadic Studio The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth – to explore unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies, mapping the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. Past journeys have traversed the Galapagos Islands, the Australian outback, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the Burning Man Festival in our refurbished school bus. In the division we are visionaries and reporters, part documentarians and part science fiction soothsayers, as the sites we encounter afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios. Joining us on tour will be collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction, and we will examine the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness. aaschool.ac.uk/unknownfields 187

Research Clusters AA Research Clusters are year-long special projects, activities and events that bring together diverse groups of AA staff, students and outside partners – audiences, specialists, researchers – in order to realise a body of focused research. Originally conceived in 2005, Research Clusters are mechanisms for triggering and integrating discussion and exchange across the school. Operating as ‘vertical units’, they are intended as platforms through which to explore and enhance existing and new territories and modes of research. The clusters promote and cultivate the culture of applied research throughout the school. In addition to developing expertise and specific projects, Research Clusters seek to challenge existing forms of research and presentation – exploring alternative ways in which work can be produced. These might include events, symposia, conferences, workshops, performances, publications, off- or on-site exhibitions, fabrications and interdisciplinary collaborative research and competitions.

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Architectural Doppelgangers Directed by Ines Weizman and Sam Jacob Architectural Doppelgangers explores the multivalent meanings and implications of copying in architecture. Subject to law the idea of the copy also brings profound moral disturbance to our idea of architecture. Though the profession increasingly relies on technologies of copy, duplication and replication, the idea of originality remains a disciplinary foundation. Does the myth of the doppelganger haunt the discipline? Is architecture’s imminent death signalled by the encounter with its doppelganger? Does its doubling create an evil twin? Or conversely, can architecture find a productive relationship with the culture of the copy? Combining small symposia and talks with research and speculation, we examine a variety of intellectual products and properties. The cluster explores two main questions: the nature of the copy and the problem of copyright. Paradise Lost Directed by Mark Campbell As Marcel Proust famously offered, ‘the true paradises are the paradises that one has lost’. As such, it seems the only paradises worth naming are those that have been lost, and that there are many paradises to be lost. In this way, the notion of ‘paradise’ provides another name for loss. This research cluster examines the architectural implications of this loss through a study of contemporary America. If the United States of America was the world’s greatest economic,

scientific and cultural force during the twentieth century, it now faces a kind of unplanned obsolescence. With these changing patterns of consumption and demand resulting in a kind of architectural redundancy, architecture exists as a form of by-product, or residue. In recognition of this dynamic, the cluster is beginning to sift through these residues in the hope of determining the words and images that truly speak of these paradises lost. Saturated Space Directed by Antoni Malinowski, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Fenella Collingridge Saturated Space is about bringing colour back into theoretical discourse, practice and academic debate. The cluster held an inaugural event bringing together lectures on colour – its origins, perception, stories told by and design experiments with it. Speakers included, neuroscientist and founder of neuroesthetics Semir Zeki, geologist Lars Stixrude, art historian Jim Harris, and architects Louisa Hutton and Peter Salter. Our second event in Venice a symposium was hosted in conjunction with the IUAV PhD programme, initiating a joint research project, with visits to Carlo Scarpa’s projects, local fabricators and historical precedents of the use of colour in urban and architectural space. Our website is constantly updated with guest posts, and will act as the access point, register and archive of our inclusive and broad network of practitioners looking into the topic. For past and future events, updates and general info please visit: www.saturatedspace.org

Urban Prototypes Directed by Douglas Spencer and Clara Oloriz Sanjuan This cluster attempts to investigate the currency, thought, practice and critique of the urban prototype in the context of the continued and rapid urbanisation of the world, and the social, economic and ecological implications of this development. In this context, we are announcing, as part of the cluster’s development, an open call for visions, proposals and positions that explore contemporary thinking about ‘prototypes.’ Our goal is to gather, research and collaboratively consider the different inflections and discussions about the urban prototype. The aim is not to arrive at a unified or ‘correct’ definition of the urban prototype, but to encourage critical reflection upon its theorisation and practice. Selected abstracts and projects will be drawn upon in the development of a series of seminars and a publication, as part of this Research Cluster programme. For more information about this call visit: urbanprototypes.aaschool.ac.uk

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The AA in Detail

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Photographs by Valerie bennett