AA Prospectus 2010-11 by AA School

AA PROSPECTUS ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

CONTENTS Introduction

AA SCHOOLS Undergraduate School Foundation First Year Intermediate Diploma

34 36 40 64

Complementary Studies History & Theory Studies Media Studies Technical Studies Architectural Practice

96 104 112 118

Graduate School Design Research Lab Emergent Technologies History and Critical Thinking Housing and Urbanism Landscape Urbanism Sustainable Environmental Design Conservation of Historic Buildings Design & Make Projective Cities PhD Programme AA Interprofessional Studies Independents Group Research Clusters

124 130 134 138 142 146 150 152 154 156 158 160 162

Visiting School One Year at the AA Spring Semester Programme Summer Make Summer School Summer dLab Visiting Teachers Global Schools

166 166 167 167 168 168 169

RESOURCES AND INFORMATION Resources The AA Participatory Democracy Development Office Library Photo Library Computer Room Audiovisual Lab AAIR Wood and Metal Workshop Model Workshop Digital Prototyping Lab Hooke Park Maeda Workshop Drawing Materials Shop AA Bookshop Bar & Restaurant

180 181 181 181 182 182 182 183 183 183 183 184 184 184 184

Information Undergraduate Admissions Undergraduate Entry Requirements Graduate Admissions Fees Scholarships and Bursaries Required Qualifications Staff List

184 184 186 186 186 188 190

AA PROSPECTUS

INTRODUCTION I. WELCOME Welcome to the 2010/11 academic year of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. The following prospectus provides an overview and introduction to the courses and public programme activities that make the AA the world’s most diverse and international school of architecture. It is divided into four parts: 1) a general introduction to the Architectural Association, the larger organisation within which the AA School operates; 2) course, unit and programme information related to this year’s undergraduate and graduate schools in Bedford Square, London; 3) a summary of our international visiting school programme of design workshops held in cities around the world; 4) a brief guide to resources and other information that will answer the questions of prospective applicants and current students. Now in its 163rd 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 active learning environment. Alongside the formal coursework it offers a year-long schedule of visiting lectures, symposia, book launches, exhibitions and other events, bringing together a growing public audience who collectively push the 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 in the collective futures of our world. This prospectus offers only a summary guide to the depth of the AA’s commitment to this goal: the best way to experience the AA is through direct participation in it – whether as a full-time student, as an AA Member, or as part of the audience convened here throughout the coming year. Please remember also to consult our growing online and print materials, including the Events List, which will keep you updated on a weekly basis. The prospectus should give you 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 itself that can lead the world forward in new and unexpected ways.

Top: Introduction Week picnic in Bedford Square Garden, Bottom: Projects Review Opening 2010 Photos Valerie Bennett

INTRODUCTION II. THE AA SCHOOL: A LEGACY OF EXPERIMENTATION Our mission at the AA School isn’t to teach architecture as it is already known, but rather to create the conditions for new forms of teaching, working and above all thinking and learning that will ultimately transform architecture in ways not yet fully realised. This has long been the central ambition of the AA School, which has for decades been home to the world’s leaders – and leading experimenters – in architecture.

The AA’s independence also means that we are able to push boundaries, test new ideas and promote new ways of teaching and learning. We takes immense pride in the opportunities that our organisation and governance present. As a small and independent school located at the heart of the world’s most international and multicultural city, the AA is unique in at

AA Students on a survey trip in the 1940s

The AA is, at its heart, an experimental school of great independence, ambition and expectation. As a school, we expect that architecture can and will be more than it is today; that it can and will be an essential aspect of public and political debates about our collective futures; that it can and will be central to shaping a better world for everyone. 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, it has grown up alongside – and to a very great degree helped shape – the architectural profession. It should be stressed that 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 contemporary 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.

From top left: Bernard Tschumi with Rose Lee Goldberg in the 1970s; technical bricklaying exercise in the 1930s; AA student pantomine, 1928

least three important ways. First, we are by far the world’s most international school of architecture, with nearly 90 per cent of our full-time students and nearly as many of our teachers coming to the AA from abroad. Secondly, we are organised around two distinct kinds of activities, both of which are of immense value to our students and staff: our formal courses and our Public Programme of evening lectures, symposia, exhibitions and publication launches –the world’s largest year-round series of public events dedicated to contemporary architectural culture. Thirdly, there is the famous pedagogical basis for the school itself: our ‘unit’ system of teaching and learning in which, in various ways, all of our students participate as the foundation for the experimental forms of teaching that remain the hallmark of the AA.

INTRODUCTION

III. NEW ACADEMIC UNITS, STAFF AND PROGRAMMES

Over the past five years, the Office of the Director at the AA School has created new courses of study; initiated a series of research clusters connecting different parts of the school with outside partners; led a historic expansion of the AA’s main campus in Bedford Square; secured unprecedented levels of outside funding, helping our students and staff to help realise new kinds of projects and events; organised and expanded the AA’s public programme; and brought in dozens of new teachers to work in every part of our undergraduate and graduate schools. Above all, the AA’s independence and organisational structure enables the Director’s Office to make swift and targeted changes to existing parts of the school. It allows for the identification of new challenges and opportunities, the launching of new academic initiatives and the invention of entirely new kinds of educational experiments, all of which figure prominently in our school today.

of the five-year ARB/RIBA accredited AA Diploma Course, which is the traditional core of the AA’s academic life. In First Year, Sarah Entwistle and Ingrid Schröder bring new agendas and experiences to the studio, and join our existing Studio Masters there in the delivery of a studio-based programme of projects and workshops that allow the AA’s youngest and least experienced students to prepare for their academic and professional lives. In the Intermediate School, unit studios will again be based in our building at 4 Morwell Street. This year Stewart Dodd joins Mark Campbell in Intermediate Unit 1, which will continue its work on land-, water- and

Piranesian Constructivism, Doyeon Cho, Intermediate 12

Left: ‘Datafossils’ by Tobias Jewson and Ioana Iliesiu, Intermediate 7, Right: First Year Zbigniew Oksiuta workshop, photo Valerie Bennett

Like our student body, our academic staff have been attracted to the unique opportunities at the AA and have come to London from across Europe, Asia, Latin and North America, adding to the uniquely global forms of architectural knowledge that make the AA School such a distinctive voice in architectural education. Many of our new AA teachers have moved here to combine practice with teaching small, focused and self-selected groups of students. In 2010/11 many more new teachers, design units and academic staff will join us, further enhancing the incredible diversity of talent, agendas and experiences that make up our school. The AA Foundation Course is aimed at young UK year-out students or mid-career individuals contemplating an academic or professional career in the creative arts, including architecture, and will continue to evolve this year in a new dedicated studio setting. Flora Maclean will join our existing studio teachers and Course Director Saskia Lewis. In our Undergraduate School, we are pleased to announce the launch of several new units and the appointment of new teachers at every level

air-based networks, looking at the Mississippi River Delta. Our new Intermediate Unit 2, taught by the London architect Takero Shimazaki, with Ana Araujo, will look at a tale of ‘architecture, craft and love’ in a programme based upon a Venetian Renaissance text published in 1499. Roz Barr will join Stefano Rabolli Pansera in Intermediate Unit 5, which will look at energy as a poetic device for the development of space and form. Our new Intermediate Unit 6 will pursue prototypes for urban dwellings, and is jointly led by Jeroen van Ameijde, Head of our Digital Prototyping Lab, and Olivier Ottevaere, now based in London after leading prototypedriven design studios in the the US and Switzerland. Maria Fedorchenko will lead a new Intermediate Unit 7, which will look east and to transitions in the urban context of Moscow at the outset of a multi-year research and design agenda in Eastern European cities. An evolution in new personalities, projects and agendas will mark our Diploma School this year. Our new Diploma Unit 3, led by Peter Karl Becher, a London-based architect, assisted by Matthew Barnett Howland, introduces history as an active contemporary design reality, with a brief that looks at the completion of Beauvais Cathedral in Normandy alongside the urban context that the structure has long sought to transform.

INTRODUCTION Liam Young and Kate Davies, jointly teaching our new Diploma 6, will embark with the unit on a road trip across Australia as the latest stage of their work on dreamscapes and architectural speculation. Tom Tong joins Diploma Unit 16, which will extend its ongoing work on adaptive ecologies, seeking better forms for adapting urban culture to natural ecologies. Theo Sarantoglou Lalis and Dora Sweijd transfer their infrastructural work from

in 2010/11 by Theodore Spyropolous, as Yusuke Obuchi steps away from the programme mid-year to take up new teaching opportunities in Japan. Mollie Claypool and Ryan Dillon both join the course this year as Programme Tutors working with DRL students on every aspect of the written and seminar-related coursework and submissions. Suryansh Chandra, a research architect at Zaha Hadid Architects, joins Emergent Technologies as a Studio Tutor assisting the programme’s core studio. AA Files Editor Thomas Weaver and Diploma Unit 4 Master John Palmesino join existing teaching staff and Programme Director Marina Lathouri in the newly renamed History and Critical Thinking programme, which provides a platform for enquiry into theoretical debates. Alfredo Ramirez joins Landscape Urbanism as a new Studio Master, which this year will focus on China’s ambitions to develop the countryside and not only new urban conditions. Paula Cadima joins Sustainable Environmental Design, where she will lead core studio and seminar courses. David Hills, an architect with a major conservation practice and a special interest in modern architecture with heritage significance, joins the AA’s part-time Conservation of Historic Buildings programme. Two exciting new graduate programmes launch this year, extending the forms of specialised teaching and learning that already make the AA Graduate School one of the world’s most challenging and influential settings for advanced architectural studies. The new Design & Make programme is a 16-month, studio- and site-based MArch design programme located at the AA’s Hooke Park campus in Dorset, and will be

Self-Packaging Project, Mahsa Ramezan Poor, Foundation

the Intermediate School to a new Diploma Unit 17, which will look at the latent territories of airports as sites that materialise the myths and ambitions of a globalised world. The well-known Barcelona architect Enric Ruiz-Gelli leads an experienced team teaching a new Diploma Unit 18, which connects Jeremy Rifkin’s call for a new culture of empathy with the capacity for new technologies and design agendas to deliver ecologically intelligent form, space and material. Piers Taylor, leader of the Hooke Park summer programme ‘Studio in the Woods’ and Kate Darby, AA graduate and principal of the rural UK architectural practice KDA, adding their tremendous experience and vision to that of Martin Self. Together they will lead a small and selective Diploma Unit 19, which will extend the collaboration between the Diploma School and the AA’s new Design & Make programme. Its focus this year will be on the design and construction of a new big shed at Hooke Park, the AA’s rural campus in Dorset. In our Graduate School new studio, seminar and workshop staff join nearly every programme. Robert Stuart-Smith leaves the undergraduate First Year Studio and joins the DRL as a new Studio Master, building on his previous part-time appointment with the course. The DRL will be directed

Left: Modelmaking Workshop, photo Valerie Bennett Right: DRL Projects Review installation 2010, photo Valerie Bennett

taught by an accomplished team including Piers Taylor and Kate Darby alongside Course Director Martin Self. Our other new graduate programme is Projective Cities, offering a taught MPhil degree awarded at the end of 20 months of study and led by Christopher C M Lee and Sam Jacoby. The studio-based course offers a unique combination of studio design and written analysis of the contemporary and emergent conditions of the city. Finally, in the AA’s long-running PhD programme, applications are again being accepted for the programme’s new PhD in Design course, offering

INTRODUCTION advanced research into highly specialised areas within contemporary architectural and design culture. In the AA’s growing part-time Visiting School, new global design workshops will again be led by AA teachers across the world, following last year’s enrolment of several hundred visiting students in nearly two dozen cities worldwide. As an extension of our Visiting and Graduate Schools, the AA will lead the establishment of the Independents Group (IG) under the aegis of London-based architect Alan Dempsey. The IG is a new worldwide network of six of the world’s leading independent schools of architecture in Asia, the Americas and Europe, who will meet and work together to establish an annual series of design fellowships, independent studies projects and public events associated with today’s revolution in new distributed, networked design platforms, manufacturing and production.

IV. THE AA: FULL-TIME LONDON AND PART-TIME GLOBAL VISITING SCHOOLS The AA’s five-year ARB/RIBA accredited AA Undergraduate School leads to an AA Diploma and Parts 1 and 2 of the UK qualification as an architect. This part of the school also includes an associated, full-time Foundation Course for those contemplating studies in architecture or associated creative fields at the AA or elsewhere. The focus of our undergraduate

Hooke Park workshop in Dorset, photo Valerie Bennett

Alongside these and many other smaller adjustments to the structuring of our undergraduate and graduate courses, there are other important announcements to make regarding our staff and spaces in 2010/11. Following last year’s acquisition of three new properties as part of our larger Bedford Square campus, masterplanning work will continue this year in preparation of a guiding strategy for the medium- and long-term development of our historic home, which for now covers ten buildings and twice the floor area of the AA only five years ago. Over the past summer an operational advisory group within the school has helped define plans for the 2010/11 academic year. These include a significant expansion of key workshop areas already underway, with an expanded and relocated Computing Workshop, Digital Prototyping Workshop and many other vital learning spaces. Following last year’s introduction of new studio spaces for all of the Intermediate School, this year will see a doubling of the floor area within the Diploma School, where 14 unit spaces will operate as studios across the third floor of the entire front six buildings of the AA, facing onto Bedford Square.

Top: Juries with Intermediate 9 and Diploma 9, Bottom: FAB Village Underground, photos Valerie Bennett

students’ academic lives are the units, which involve year-long design teaching and learning alongside associated Complementary Studies courses. The AA Graduate School is accredited by the Open University in the UK, and encompasses ten 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 part-time study; all other undergraduate and graduate programmes are full-time. In 2010 two-thirds of our 650 full-time students in London were undergraduate completing the AA Diploma leading to professional qualification

INTRODUCTION as an architect in the UK, and one-third were graduate students pursuing advanced studies in a Graduate Diploma, Masters 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.

Left: Visiting school in Korea, photo Peter Ferretto Right: São Paulo global school, photo Anne Save de Beaurecueil

The AA Visiting School was formalised and expanded in early 2008 by the Office of the Director of the School as the global extension of the AA’s influential forms of unit-based teaching and learning in London. In less than two years the Visiting School has arranged short design workshop courses in 30 different cities worldwide, bringing together AA tutors, outside partners and local teaching staff together to do work on important projects and problems related to the challenges of local cultures, cities and environments. Adding established workshops in Dubai, Istanbul, Turin, Singapore, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Madrid, Pagu Book City and Daejon in Korea, AA tutors have, during the past year, directed two-week design studios in Tehran, Venice, São Paulo, Santiago, San Francisco and other new locations. Visiting students from around the world have been able in this way to experience the AA’s unique, intensive forms of teaching and learning. In 2010/11 the AA Visiting School will add yet other new and challenging opportunities to its existing roster of destinations and events.

Top: Students pinning up work for an open jury, Bottom: Workshop, photos Valerie Bennett

DIPLOMA HONOURS 2009/10

Bottom: Amandine Kastler, Diploma 9, Iconicfiction – a world of interiors

Top: Jorgen Tandberg, Diploma 14, Immeuble Cité Visiting school in London, photo Valerie Bennett

INTRODUCTION

STUDENT AWARDS AND PRIZES 2009/10

1 2 3

17 16

1. Albane Duvillier, Foundation, Julia Wood Foundation Prize; 2. Lara Lesmes, Diploma 9 Alex Stanhope Forbes Prize; 3. Aimee O’Carroll, Diploma 11, Foster & Partners Prize; 4. Zachary Fluker, Intermediate 10, Henry Florence Studentship; 5. Camille Steyaert, Intermediate 1, AA Prize;

6. James Kwong-ho Chung, Intermediate 4, AA Travel Studentship; 7. Elliot Krause, Diploma 16, 8. James Rai, Diploma 7, 9.Erland Skjeseth, Intermediate 11, 7–9 Holloway Trust

Memorial Travel Fund; 16. Simon Whittle, Diploma 14, Dennis Sharp Prize for outstanding writing; 17. Fredrik Hellberg, Diploma 13, Nicolas Pozner Award; 18. Yheu-Shen Chua, Intermediate 11, Ralph Knott Memorial Fund 19. Huida Xia, Intermediate 13, William Glover Bequest

10. Alma Wang, Diploma 13, Howard Colls Studentship; 11. Wiktor Kidziak, First Year, 12. Jerome Tsui, Diploma 14, 13. Akhil Bakhda, First Year, 11–13 Nicholas boas Travel Award; 14. Amber Wood, Diploma 10, Henry Saxon Snell Scholarship; 15. Max Hacke, Intermediate 8, Alexander

INTRODUCTION In 2010/11 the AA will carry forward its recent and ongoing transformation of our historic home in Bedford Square, as part of a long-term strategic plan for the AA, which will create far-reaching changes and improvements to the learning resources of the entire Architectural Association in the coming years.

Ching’s Yard in the 1950s, Photo David Critchlow

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. It not only includes some of the UK’s largest and best-known research universities, but also serves as the home for leading independent academic institutions and as the European headquarters for many overseas universities, colleges and schools. Major cultural institutions such as the British Museum are also nearby.

Outside the AA in Bedford Square

INTRODUCTION V. A LEGACY OF UNITS, COLLABORATION AND EXPERIMENTATION The modern history of the AA School is bound up with the incredible legacy of architectural personalities, projects and pedagogies which have emerged from the school during the past half century, and have gone on to shape the profession and culture more of architecture broadly throughout the world. When we consider that three of the past decade’s recipients of the Pritzker Prize are AA graduates from a brief, intense 17-year period during the 1960 and 70s – Richard Rogers (AA ’60), Rem Koolhaas (AA ’72) and Zaha Hadid (AA ’77) – we realise that our small, independent school has fostered remarkable architectural 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 avant-gardes – from the thinking of Cedric Price or the seminal group Archigram in the 1960s, the provocative NATO collective of the 1980s, to the formalised, team-based experimentation across electronic design networks begun with

AA 125th Anniversary exhibition catalogue designed by Archigram Architects

the formation of the DRL in the 1990s. For decades the school has been the place where young architectural interests and agendas have been given space to establish themselves, seek audiences and mature into the kinds of projects and careers that gain worldwide recognition. Past AA prospectuses are where architects can go to find the origins of many of the ways of thinking that spawned some of the great architects, designers and educators of our time, from the experimentation with classical and pre-modern architecture described in the units of Léon Krier in the

1970s, to the studios seeking a new kind of metropolitan architecture led by Elias Zenghelis and his former student and collaborator Rem Koolhaas. During a period when it was directed by Alvin Boyarsky, one of the twentieth-century’s leading architectural educators, the AA School was a hive of experimentation and invention, with teachers like Jan Kaplicky, Ron Herron, Bernard Tschumi, Nigel Coates, Zaha Hadid, Peter Cook and many others laying out agendas for work and careers that would unfold over the past quarter century.

From top left: Installation at Hooke Park 2008; EmTech canopy 2007, photos Sue Barr; Fibrous room installation in Istanbul, part of a collaboration by students from the AA and Bilgi University led by ecoLogicStudio

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. Our era has been transformed not just by the realities of globalised economies and forms of practice, but by fundamental changes to the organisation of architectural studios and design networks, based

INTRODUCTION on an increasingly collaborative, multidisciplinary approach. Today the AA seeks to embrace, confront and transform the conditions of architectural practice and culture – as well as the very idea of how an architectural school should be organised, operated and inhabited in an era of change. At the heart of the AA’s exploration of new approaches lies our belief that architecture – including architectural thinking – 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 that: 1) Students learn best by working in small, highly focused groups around a single tutor or team for an entire year. The expectation is that our students can direct their own path through a school that offers an intense diversity of possible paths; our students assume a great part of the responsibility for defining their own future through their selection of a specific unit (in the Undergraduate School) or programme (in the Graduate School).

Top left: Korea visiting school, photo Peter Ferreto, Top right: Media Studies Pending Structures on the AA Terrace, photo Valerie Bennett, Bottom: Members’ visit to London Olympic Stadium, photo Camille Steyaert Second Year Technical Studies bridge building project, photo Valerie Bennett

2) AA learning is project- and portfolio-driven. AA 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. The AA remains committed to the pursuit of architectural learning by doing – by the making of design projects (or in the case of some specialised graduate programmes, dissertations). 3) Collective assessment and enquiry. The AA School’s unit system of year-long teaching and learning is unique not only in its emphasis on the close collaboration of small groups of students and tutors, but also in the way student projects are assessed at the end of the academic year – across a panel of tutors, who together determine the relative success of any given project and portfolio. The AA undergraduate end-of-year review panels, as well as our Graduate School’s double-marking of design studio results, ensures that our students’ work is seen and socialised across the school, as part of a process that counterbalances the emphasis on the autonomy and independence of each design unit, course or programme.

Taken together, these features of the AA’s internal organisation help account for how a small and independent school such as ours can so consistently define the conditions for the emergence of unexpected and promising new architectural agendas. Year in and year out, the AA School continues to be a distinctive learning environment formed not only just by the global range of experiences and expectations of the staff and students who inhabit it but by the unparalleled soft academic infrastructures that encourage individual experimentation and the communicating of these new discoveries to countless audiences.

INTRODUCTION VI. AA PUBLIC PROGRAMME One of the most remarkable resources of the AA, and one that sits entirely outside the formal coursework of the school, is the Public Programme, a year-long collection of evening lectures, exhibitions, publications, open workshops, symposia, performances and other events by which the AA seeks to create new audiences for architectural ideas, projects and practices. Each year the AA brings to London dozens of the world’s leading architects, artists, designers and scholars as part of its global mission to operate at the forefront of contemporary culture.

Recent exhibitions from top left: Minimaform, photo Sue Barr; Invisible University Department of Unbinding & Overprinting; Books of OMA; photo VB, photos by Valerie Bennett

The AA Public Programme, coordinated by the AA School Director’s Office, has grown in recent years to include not only established activities in our lecture halls and exhibition galleries but also design competitions, music performances and other activities. We have expanded the planning and coordination of the activities through the research cluster initiative as well as through the formation of AACP Critical Projects and Cultural Practices, headed by Shumon Basar, which has overseen major exhibitions and other special events. This year will also see the launch of a new summer series of talks and events called FORMAT – a new, annual ‘live magazine’ Enzo Mari in front of the Autoprogettazione installation, photo Valerie Bennett

INTRODUCTION that takes place during the month of July, running in parallel to the AA’s Projects Review exhibition. While the appetite for live discourse keeps soaring – despite the digitalisation of life – the forms it is customarily delivered in have flat-lined. FORMAT hopes to offer alternatives to these complacent conservatisms, involving writers, editors, artists, philosophers, theorists, magicians and broadcasters in varied configurations of repose and rhetoric. Through experiments in ways of talking, seeing and listening, FORMAT will suggest that the grammar of presentation is not extraneous to knowledge production but in fact utterly dependent on it.

Lebbeus Woods. Alongside architects the school has presented artists, animators, filmmakers, critics and scholars whose work challenges assumptions and beliefs about what architecture, cities and culture can be today. Last spring’s major conference on Architecture and its Pasts organised by Mark Cousins, brought together historians and critics in a two-day symposium examining the current state of history in architectural education.

Toyo Ito in the AA Director’s Office, photo Valerie Bennett

From top: Martin Creed; Andrea Branzi; Autoprogettazione Revisited Roundtable, photos Valerie Bennett

In the past two years lecturers in the Public Programme have included architects and others at all stages of their careers. The AA has hosted Denise Scott Brown (AA ’52) and Robert Venturi, the Belgian architect Pierre Hebbelinck, the architectural curator and writer Aaron Levy, Hanif Kara, Phyllis Lambert, Greg Lynn, Michael Silver and Kelly Shannon. Autumn evening lectures were given by Jorg Heiser, Ingo Niermann, Sam Jacob, Detlef Mertins, Iwan Baan, Peter Cook, Paul Nakazawa, Bernard Cache and Lars Spuybroek, among others. During the past year some of the world’s leading architects have presented current and past work, including Thom Mayne, Toyo Ito, Rafael Moneo, Mike Webb, Zaha Hadid and

In recent years the AA’s Public Programme has played host to the architectural world’s leading thinkers, practitioners and teachers, with lectures by Rem Koolhaas, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Ben van Berkel, Ross Lovegrove, Hella Jongerius, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, Charles Jencks, Peter Murray, Claude Parent, Bernard Tschumi, Jeffrey Kipnis, Karl Chu, Julia Peyton Jones, Ken Frampton, David Greene, Jan de Cock, Peter Bouchain, Eric Owen Moss, Stan Allen, Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, Felicity Scott, Kengo Kuma, Jürg Conzett, Peter Saville, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia/Superstudio, Madelon Vriesendorp, Joseph Rykwert, Keller Easterling, Ryan Gander, Norman Klein, Joris Laarmann, Francois Roche, Catherine Ingraham, Sylvia Lavin and many, many, others. This year, the AA will again bring a host of visitors to the school to give evening lectures and, in many cases, participate in juries and workshops. Combined with the AA’s growing programme of exhibitions and publications, which increasingly includes international events, the AA today remains an unparalleled setting not only for architectural education, teaching and learning of all kinds but also for the promotion of contemporary architectural culture in all its forms.

INTRODUCTION VII. THE AA INC: A UNIQUE ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENT The AA School is the core activity and cultural centre of the larger Architectural Association, which currently includes more than 3,800 members who join us in helping to shape the future of one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great organisations dedicated to promoting, discussing and debating the conditions of architectural practice, learning and education.

From top left: Rem Koolhaas, Shumon Basar, Todd Reisz and Brett Steele in conversation, photo Valerie Bennett; Beyond Entropy cluster presentations, photo Valerie Bennett; AA installation at Takenaka A4 Gallery, Tokyo, photo Yuma Yamamota

The AA was established more than 160 years ago by two young architectural apprentices, initially as a public forum and learned society. Within a few years of its founding, the AA established itself as an important space for the presentation and discussion of new architectural ideas, attracting such luminaries as John Ruskin, who visited the AA to give lectures on the conditions of a newly industrialised modern world and the challenges this presented to young architects and designers. More than half a century passed before the AA evolved from offering part-time evening courses to become the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first full-time, professional day school in architecture, providing one of the first professional diplomas in architecture in Europe. The AA grew steadily throughout the A selection of recent and forthcoming AA Publications

INTRODUCTION first half of the twentieth century and in 1947 on the occasion of its centenary became, for the first time ever, a school of more than 500 students – a size still close to its current enrolment of 600. What has changed most dramatically over the past half century has been the demographics of the AA, which today makes it not only the architectural world’s most international membership organisation, but also the world’s most international school of architecture.

Left: Orientation room. Right: Graduation 2010, photos Valerie Bennett

As the AA School goes forward in these early years of the twenty-first 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

AA SCHOOLS

UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOL

The AA Undergraduate School is a RIBA/ARB-accredited five-year, full-time 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 October 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 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. First Year comprises approximately 65 students working both individually and in groups in an open studio format under the guidance of five 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 basis for development through experimentation 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 opportunities for architectural experimention 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

FOUNDATION DIRECTOR Saskia Lewis

The Foundation course offers a one-year introduction to an art- and designbased education. It allows students to develop their conceptual ideas through experimenting with a wide range of media and a variety of creative disciplines from fine art to architecture. Students are taught in an intimate studio-based environment and work on both individual and group projects. Drawing on a number of pedagogical practices, experienced tutors and visiting practitioners, the Foundation offers a unique cross-disciplinary education within the context of an architectural school.

UNDERGRADUATE

STUDIO STAFF Matthew Butcher Takako Hasegawa Flora McLean

Trust that little voice in your head that says, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if?’ And then do it. – Duane Michals Set Your Sights: Inspired by the installations of Robert Morris, the imagined film characters of Cindy Sherman’s Film Still series and the curious garments of Hussein Chalayan, this year we will explore scale, site, materiality, scenario and identity. The Foundation cohort will feature as both makers and players in this process. Get Set: Projects range in scale from a hand-held object to a journey through the city. Bespoke workshops will provide students with the appropriate skills to develop their individual projects. The first two terms follow a fictionalised autobiographical figure within the city through its relationships to self-image, clothing, personal possession, memory, atmosphere and context. Students will make and represent their work using photography, drawing, painting, model-making, casting, mapping, material studies, form, structure, pattern-cutting, costume, sewing, weaving, textiles, carpentry, performance, lighting and filmmaking. After developing skills in observational, visual and verbal representation, they will then spend the final term concentrating on a self-generated project, which will complete the portfolio describing their creative journey over the year. Go: A series of field trips will allow students to broaden their understanding of context and culture, including tours of London and Paris, gallery visits and residential periods in Hooke Park. Lectures in history and theory and talks from visiting artists will stimulate dialogue within the Studio, defining a context behind student work. Throughout the year students will be encouraged to identify and develop their own intellectual ambitions and expand the boundaries of their experience and personal development.

FOUNDATION DIRECTOR Saskia Lewis has taught at the AA since 2001. She practised in New York, Paris and London and has taught at many London schools of art and architecture. She is co-author and photographer of Architectural Voices: Listening to Old

Buildings published in October 2007 by Wiley.

School, Chelsea College of Art and Nottingham.

STUDIO STAFF Matthew Butcher is an architect based in London, a founding member of the design collective Post Works and editor of architectural magazine P.E.A.R. He has taught at The Bartlett

Takako Hasegawa was born in Tokyo and educated at the AA. Working on the periphery of architecture, art and performance. She also teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Flora McLean is the head designer at the House of Flora specialising in avant-garde headwear. She has collaborated with many successful labels including Blumarine, Bruce Oldfield and Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy Haute Couture. She also teaches at the Royal College of Art.

Andra Miruna Mazilu – Headpiece constructed to examine parts of the body that normally remain hidden from view

FIRST YEAR Welcome to the island of interest. You have arrived at the very beginning of the five-year course leading to an AA Diploma and are now officially lost – but don’t worry about starving – there’s plenty of food for thought... The AA First Year Studio seeks to equip students with knowledge, skills and interests, so they can take those interests to places they never imagined and visually declare and dissect their curiosity. By taking a stand for their beliefs in an unknown world called architecture, AA First Year students are asked to do as much as they can with the little they know. Why? To find out more, to question what it means to be an architect from all angles, and to create beauty in the face of ugly failures. For all technical problems there also exist aesthetic ones… or so they say. Perhaps most pertinently, AA First Year students are asked to develop their critical thinking for making design decisions. Differing projects, agendas and teaching approaches prepare them to travel along any one of the multifarious paths through the school. The course reflects the importance the AA places on students’ uncovering their own talents and identities. Whatever the lessons learnt, in all mediums imaginable and unimaginable, students are asked to arm themselves with tools, ideas and interests and test them with a burning spirit of enquiry. The year is organised around the combination of a year-long Design Studio, History & Theory Studies, Media Studies, and Technical Studies. Together these courses lead to the preparation of a portfolio of the year’s work, the successful completion of which becomes the basis for entrance into the AA Intermediate School.

STUDIO STAFF Valentin Bontjes van Beek David Greene Samantha Hardingham Tobias Klein

UNDERGRADUATE

Sarah Entwistle Ingrid Schroeder

Design Studio Organisation 2010/11: One Room Stripped Bare Autumn Term 1. One Room…One Day The year begins with an individual design giving each student the opportunity to introduce themselves to the entire group. Students are asked to think about one room – if you could have one book, one song, one t-shirt, one room, one day… what would you do? 2. Full-Scale Elaborations: Construction, Making and Placement An introduction to methods of construction, measuring, drawing, making, composition (manual and digital) and ideas of placement in two phases. Phase one is an exploration of shaping, joining and installing at full scale (1:1) in locations throughout the AA School. Students will work in groups to develop their ‘elaborations’ and will be introduced to the workshop, discovering the qualities, properties and performance of different materials. The project engages students in thinking about the implications of designing and making at full scale – taking the act of ‘making’ from the abstract and into the tectonic. Locus 1 The provisional physical fabrications are further explored through digital media – a dedicated workshop will introduce students to a variety of digital software for drawing and model production.

First Year students select lawnmower machine parts: an exercise in measured drawing in order to understand the technical nature of the beast.

FIRST YEAR

UNDERGRADUATE

3. Surveyswap: Measuring, Drawing + Remaking Phase two begins with explorations into technical drawings that will address questions of precision, proportion and material properties. Later, this will expand into different modes of representation and alternative techniques including the tracing and the mapping of movement. Utilising the full-scale ‘elaborations’ from phase one students will produce a unique construction document that will be swapped between groups and used to design alternative construction solutions. Winter Term 4. The Quintessence of Place, or… Has Anyone Found My Genius Loci? The second term will be preoccupied with site on the larger scale of micrometropolitan neighbourhoods, using six locations in London as comparative testing grounds. These will be explored in an intensive video workshop introducing film and editing tools as time-based techniques for exploring architectural space and its social context. Captured video footage will be used to describe the atmosphere and experiential qualities of a locale and provide raw material for new imagined spaces. 5. Designing the Species of Spaces… Places, Traces… Students will work individually using their video material of localised geographies to develop one of six programme briefs around questions of neighbourhood, locale, territory, concentration, proximity and stomping ground. These conventional (and increasingly awkward) definitions will be challenged in order to invent new terms and define their time-based conditions through the making of a series of one-room design proposals. Locus 2 Every other week, specific open studio days will be used for cross-Studio discussions – with Technical Studies playing an integral role. A number of visits to fabrication workshops and architectural wonders in the UK will take place during this term. In addition, a competition brief focusing on an aspect of the work will be issued for all to enter over the Easter holidays. Spring Term 6. Mutations of Species of Spaces… Students will reconvene and work intensively for three weeks in new groups and with different tutors to review and refresh their one-room designs initiated in the Winter Term. 7. Portfolio Reconstruction: Presenting the Unpresentable The final design problem is to reinvent the idea of the typical two-dimensional, linearly assembled flat portfolio. The project asks students to present and position their work from the year in an accentuated and critical way that reflects their individual experiences. The portfolio will seek to challenge conventional modes of selection and assembly by expanding the range of media through which to communicate a body of work.

Locus 3 All students will work together as one group to develop a full-scale installation for Projects Review. This proposal will enable students to design strategic links and contrasts between their different projects, allowing them to be communicated to a wider public audience as one body of work. Requirements The principal course requirement is participation in the year-long design studio, including daily work and tutorials in the studio. All work is presented at the end of each project and compiled in the year-long portfolio, which is the basis for each student’s end-of-year final assessment. In addition to the design studio, each student selects courses from Complementary Studies including four First Year Media Studies courses, two each in the Autumn and Winter Terms from the list of those on offer. Students attend lectures and write several short essays and one longer essay throughout the year as part of the First Year History & Theory Studies course, and prepare a project analysis submission for First Year Technical Studies. Special Events In addition to scheduled coursework there will be a number of workshops with outside critics and specialists. A critical part of studio activity this year is the in-studio lecture series, ‘First Year Talks’. Established artists, writers and scientists will come to show their work to the First Year students. We will also take full advantage of London as a cultural think-tank for museum visits, film screenings, music events and live performances. Other site visits, design competitions and festive events are also part of the year.

STUDIO STAFF Valentin Bontjes van Beek lives and works in London and trained as a carpenter in Germany before graduating from the AA in 1998. He has worked in New York with Bernard Tschumi, in Berlin and London, and has taught at the AA since 2001. Part of the AA’s Interim Management Group during the 2004/5 search for a new chairman, he runs the Pending Structures Media Studies course, which explores the design and fabrication of CNC-machined plywood structures. 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 co-curated the accompanying exhibition for L.A.W.U.N Project #19+20. She is currently researching for the ‘Complete Works of Cedric Price’ publication. Tobias Klein worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au and collaborated with Nigel Coates. He is co-founder of .horhizon and researches as a tutor in the Royal College of Art. He studied at the RWTH Aachen, the University for applied Arts Vienna (dieAngewandte) and at the Bartlett School for Architecture, UCL. Sarah Entwistle researches on the theme of the architectural archive, focusing on the unrealised designs of Clive

Entwistle. She has worked for Thomas Heatherwick Studio, Cazenove Architects and Charles Tashima Architecture. She has taught at the AA Summer School as Unit Tutor, and at the Dunamaise Arts Centre, Masterclass Tutor. Ingrid Schroeder is a practising architect who has been teaching studio since 2001 at the University of Cambridge where she also lectures on American Urbanism. She is a PhD candidate at LSE writing on the relationship between political ideology and urban planning in Washington, D.C.

INTERMEDIATE 1

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Mark Campbell Stewart Dodd

To understand the world, you must first understand the Mississippi – William Faulkner The Lost Highway This year the unit continues its three-year investigation into the architectural possibilities of land-, water- and air-based networks. In 2010–11 we will study the Mississippi River Delta in the Southern United States – a system David L. Cohn once noted ‘begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, Memphis, and ends on Catfish Row, Vicksburg’. The Mississippi River runs for 2,320 miles from the Canadian border in the north to the dead zone off the Gulf of Mexico in the south. Along the way it drains 31 US states, from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachian Mountains in the east, and forms a major navigational channel through the United States, protected against flooding by thousands of levees and dams. The architectural possibilities of the ‘Big River’ are as pragmatic as they are symbolic. We will examine how the cultural history and serpentine reach of the Mississippi creates new architectural and urban typologies, such as the emergency rehousing of disaster victims, to the rusted barges that ply its muddy waters, to those communities along the river who – in the words of photographer Alec Soth – ‘live with their feet in the water and their heads in the clouds’. By utilising and critiquing representational precedents such as maps and technical manuals, films and interviews, together with intellectual precepts like Venturi and Scott Brown’s ‘forgotten symbolism’ in Learning from Las Vegas (1972) or Koolhaas’s hypersymbolic in S,M,L,XL (1995) and Great Leap Forward (2002), we will examine how architects employ – and distort – research during the design process. As a unit based largely around 2D modes of representation, we will employ graphic methods such as drawing, mapping, photography, film and television advertising to explore the Mississippi River Delta system and work toward defining a new type of research-based design studio. Following the collection of spurious research data, debatable information and seemingly irrelevant documents, students will be asked to design a ‘drive-thru’ – an architectural junction between the user, the vehicle and the river. ‘The Mississippi River will always have its own way’, as Mark Twain once offered, and ‘no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise’. In light of this assertion, we will again endeavour to be as architecturally persuasive as possible.

UNIT STAFF Mark Campbell is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. His research interests include contemporary American culture between 1960 and 1975, paranoia, cultural exhaustion and dreams. A practising architect, he is a founding principal

of paperaeroplane and has taught at Auckland University, Princeton University and the Cooper Union.

and has previously taught at the Bartlett and Brighton. He has lectured widely and the work of his practice has featured in a number of architectural and design publications. He currently sits of the RIBA Validation Board.

Stewart Dodd is an architect and founding director of Satellite Architects. He is a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture

1927 Flood, Mississippi Delta

INTERMEDIATE 2

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Takero Shimazaki Ana Araujo

Crafted Narratives Intimate Spaces, Hidden Spaces, Spaces You don’t See Published in Venice in 1499, the book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (hypno = sleep; eros = love; mache = fight; polis = city) is a tale of architecture, craft and love. In a dreamlike scenario the main character, Polyphilo, pursues his beloved Polia. Polyphilo’s saga is embellished with minute descriptions of the spaces through which he travels. Landscape, buildings and building ornaments perform as allegorical figures that express his erotic desire for Polia. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is illustrated using 168 delicate and superbly crafted woodcuts that poetically portray the settings for Polyphilo’s adventures. The artefact bears a deep resonance with the tale it narrates. We can think of this book as a microcosm in itself, a miniaturised setting where Polyphilo’s oneiric voyage is not only represented but also enacted. In Polyphilo’s microcosm, architecture and landscape operate as bearers of shifting associations. Meanings, or use, are never fixed. Instead, they change constantly, adapting to the circumstances of the plot as they do in our dreams. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili will be one of the sources of inspiration for our work in unit 2. We will explore old-fashioned techniques of craft production and venture into the restoration of obsolete narratives in search of hybrid, controversial and sophisticated architectures to respond to a culture in a state of shift. In the first term we will design a fictional set inspired by a literary narrative. Fine handcraft drawing and modelling will be our major design tools. In the second term we will design a building in London’s South Kensington area, working with history and the narrative of the site. The programme will materialise in a medium-scale scheme that will include: a place to hide, a place to be intimate and to indulge the body. We will pursue the potential of the craft-led, bespoke design in this economic downturn, and look at how it might contribute to the social balance between short-term gain and lasting, adaptable cultural heritage. We will work with a variety of collaborators, visit craft workshops in Japan and explore the resources of Hooke Park in Dorset. Our work will focus on the material, the miniaturised, the fine and the graceful.

UNIT STAFF Takero Shimazaki is a director of Toh Shimazaki Architecture in London. He also runs t-sa forum workshops, which are associated with the practice. He has taught and lectured internationally. He graduated from the Bartlett and previously worked for Alison

and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Itsuko Hasegawa. Ana Araujo practises as a designer, educator and researcher. She works at the crossover between spatial and textile design, having published and exhibited internationally (Germany, Holland, Brazil,

UK, Japan, Australia). She is a co-founder of Atelier Domino, a London-based studio committed to the realisation of hand-crafted art and design.

Context and craft, t-sa forum 2008

INTERMEDIATE 3

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Nannette Jackowski Ricardo de Ostos

The way to get wonderfully lifelike behaviour is not to try to make a really complex creature, but to make a wonderfully rich environment for a simple creature. – David Ackley Burning Wastelands This year, culturally interactive landscapes and narrative-driven infrastructures will be the point of departure for Inter 3. We will examine energy by investigating natural resources and alternative energy technologies, focusing on collaborative energy strategies and an analysis of the protocols of extraction, processing and utilisation and the landscapes these occupy. From a heartbeat to a nuclear reactor, we will investigate industrial landscapes in relation to urban demands. Counter to the myth of technological percision- the myth of immaculate extraction facilities and hermetically sealed laboratories- the unit welcomes uncertainty. We will create experiments that articulate personal assumptions through collective stories. From symbiotic buildings to mechanical interactive landscapes, we will design and make, test and build, dream and act. Collaborative Efficiency The unit will analyse the concept of participation and DIY attitude in relation to techo-infrastructures and create alternative scenarios for Silicon Valley. Acting as agents ‘provocateurs’ we will blur the logic of corporations embedded in advanced technologies and crossbreed these with narrative and myth while investigating manufactured landscapes. Visiting highand low-tech facilities, deep uranium and solar mines, vast oil fields, concrete dammed rivers and toxic algae lagoons in the UK and abroad we will extract information from science to slum surviving techniques. Welcome to the Techo-social In our maverick energy safari we will collect stories, interact with sub-cultures and invent and encounter eccentric characters. In the process, Inter 3 will contrast the realities of high-developed industrial areas with energy poverty scenarios. As a result, student theses will offer small proposals as alternatives to large infrastructural corporations, generating links, networks and partnerships to create our alternative suns and their new gods. Ultimately, mythologies of the urban will be woven with the rituals of the ancient to create provocative and hopeful environments.

UNIT STAFF Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos (naja-deostos.com) are principals of NaJa & deOstos, a studio developed as a platform for experimental architecture.

Nannette is a former project architect at Wilkinson Eyre and currently works for Zaha Hadid. She has taught at the AA-SAKIA Summer School 2009 in Daejeon, South Korea as part of the AA Visiting School’s programme.

Ricardo has taught at Lund University in Sweden and at Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris. He is the coordinator of the AA-IE Summer School in Madrid and he has been appointed curator of the Brazilian Pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture in 2010. He has worked for

Peter Cook, Future Systems and Foster + Partners. Together they are the authors of The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad (Springer, 2007) and Pamphlet Architecture 29: Ambiguous Spaces (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

Conner Callahan, The White Drought – Chain Reaction Prototype, Inter 3 2009/10

INTERMEDIATE 4

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel da Costa Gonçalves

Envelop(e): Locus Inter 4 will trawl through the intricacies of the city’s entrails in search of hidden multi-scalar microcosms of imbricate typologies. Looking for organisational patterns that shape informal urban forms and individual behaviours within directive landscapes, we will thicken walls into urban fabric: grow blocks into cities. As an accumulative history of immobile progress, futures set in stone, frozen utopias or muted manifestos, European urban conditions fluctuate between forms of cultural exacerbations and self-referential isolated objects. Within increasingly regulated environments, we will subvert these sporadic and secluding modes of evolution through novel definitions of ‘place’, encapsulating manifested and perceived contextual heterogeneity. Exploring how complexity overlaps within different scales, from detail to the whole, we will aim to generate new combinatorial responses with architectural forms bridging meaning and experimentation. The building surface will be our medium of intervention. As an environmental and narrative interface, it will provide a framework instigating the reinvention of typologies within spatial boundaries as well as socially and historically dense fabrics. ‘Scale’, as an instrument, allows us to compress an understanding of the richness of urban living, folding it in on itself in order to create more within restricted space and decorum. In converging multilayered aspects of the Parisian setting, we will be creating qualitative densities through proposals for new urban building blocks. Through a staged exploration of domestic morphologies, focusing on the housing/working typology, the proposals will explore spatial, experiential and perceptive qualities to inform the possibility of territorial evolution without expansion. Within the city’s contrived fabrics, students will develop design processes that embed individual readings of eclectic, (though organised) conditions into new hierarchic spatialities. Building on the unit’s grammar, forms of codified representation will hybridise objective mapping and phenomenal interpretation, while performative responses will equally fashion formal vocabularies. Extended into collaborative conversations, proposals will be developed along collective and individual hypotheses. In strongly defined and mutating European cities, the unit will pursue our exploration in the fragilely balanced territory between response to a seemingly homogenous context and the singularities of the designed object, along the way questioning the contemporary paradoxical demand for growth, spatial scarcity and environmental accountability.

UNIT STAFF Nathalie Rozencwajg has been teaching at the AA since 2004 and is coordinator of the AA Visiting Workshop in Singapore. She is cofounder of rare architects (r-are.net), based both in Paris and London. The office emphasises work at

different scales integrating research, design and experiment. Michel da Costa Gonçalves studied in Spain and France, and later graduated from the Emergent Technologies & Design programme. Cofounder of rare architects, he is a former

project architect for Shigeru Ban and AS in Paris working on various prestigious international projects. Director and author of ‘City’ series for Autrement publishers, he has previously taught at the ENSAPL and has been coordinator of the AA Singapore Visiting Workshop since 2006.

Kien Pham – Manhattan regulations

INTERMEDIATE 5

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Stefano Rabolli Pansera Roz Barr

The principle of the conservation of energy is mingled in every artist or technician… In architecture this search is undoubtedly bound up with the material and with energy; and if one fails to take note of this, it is not possible to comprehend any building either from a technical point of view or from a compositional one. – Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography Beyond Entropy By refusing the rhetoric of sustainability and the promises of ecology, Intermediate 5 focuses on the concept of energy as a poetic device to develop a new understanding of space and form. Developed from Aldo Rossi’s observations on the city, this approach is far removed from pseudo-science and robotic renders. Energy becomes a conceptual device for considering space as the temporary moment of a complex system of forces that remain visible in the evidence of form. The unit is interested not in turbines or solar panels, but in the relationship between the city and architectural form as temporal coalescing of ever-changing social, political, technical and economic energies. These forces provide a framework for urban intervention in the north of Italy, a region of urban sprawl that offers an extreme example of how submerged our landscapes have become in the ambiguity of being neither ‘nature’ nor city. In this entropic landscape, how can we reactivate social and political functions? We will look at how urban sprawl may be countered through a more efficient use of resources, with the reintroduction of formal principles able to reanimate our environment at both the urban and the architectural scales. The unit work operates through ‘progressive’ design stages – making, unmaking and remaking. The first term will focus on the notion of energy through drawing, crafting and performing, with a conceptual model that acts as spatial prototype. The second term will adopt the prototype as a tool to analyse the context and to define a programme and architectural proposal. The third term will articulate the design project in constant confrontation with technical requirements. The final proposal, an urban intervention, will be fabricated through a constructive analysis of defined and urban constraints concluding with a 1:100 scale model. The work will, in large part, be structured by weekly student submissions in the form of pin-ups that will include visiting critics, including external consultants Goswin Schwendinger and HTS tutor Ryan Dillon.

UNIT STAFF Stefano Rabolli Pansera is founder and director of Rabolli Pansera Ltd, an architectural practice involved in projects in the UK, Italy and Lebanon. After graduating with honours from AA in 2005, he worked for two years for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. He has been

teaching in the AA Intermediate School since 2005. He is director of the Research Cluster ‘Beyond Entropy: when Energy becomes Form’. Roz Barr founded her practice Roz Barr Architects in 2009. The London-based studio is working on projects in the

UK and Spain, with the emphasis being ‘the process of making’. She worked as Associate Director with Eric Barry for nearly ten years. She has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture and sits on the RIBA Validation Panel for Education. Potential Energy – Giuseppe Penone, Albero Fiume, 1987

INTERMEDIATE 6

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Jeroen van Ameijde Olivier Ottevaere

In-fill / Out-fits: Prototypes for Urban Dwelling Intermediate 6 investigates the critical application of innovative digital design and construction processes in relation to the challenges facing cities today. Deploying fabrication-based design strategies in dense urban environments, we will develop architectural structures that negotiate spatial and material constructs within contexts of limited resources, infrastructure and space. The year will be structured in two interdependent phases, with students working collaboratively on the design and construction of a 1:1 scale prototype as well as individually to develop their projects and portfolios, which will include research into context, programme and site. Phase 1: ‘In Vitro’ Starting out as a laboratory for the discovery of inventive techniques of making, the first phase of the year will involve the production of a series of physical prototypes that can be deployed as small urban shelters or enclosures. Starting from existing construction methods and extracting design criteria from specific material properties, we will develop file-tofactory processes exploring architectural vocabulary in relation to methods of construction. Assisted by computational tutorials with invited experts, our digital design processes will aim to produce a ‘living unit’, a minimum dwelling capable of being adapted to a range of different environments and living scenarios. To complement a catalogue of models and drawings recording various stages of design to production, we will develop diagramming techniques to describe our generative strategies and potential outcomes. The first phase will end with the collaborative design and construction of a proposal sited within the premises of the AA. Phase 2: ‘In Vivo’ During the second phase we will test our concepts, applying them to the extremely dense, integrated and networked context of Hong Kong. We will seek out three-dimensional gaps within the city fabric where we can reformulate our living units in increased numbers, operating on a range of scales and exploiting issues of grounding, verticality, site constraints and infrastructures. We will envision how our fabrication strategies can develop the particularities of context and the specific needs of its users. These design models can be applied to negotiate between the collective project and the interests of individuals, building on living structures that can grow over time.

UNIT STAFF Jeroen van Ameijde studied Architecture and Building Technology at the Delft University of Technology. He has worked in offices in Holland, New York and Hong Kong and taught in a graduate design studio at the University of Pennsylvania. As Head of

Digital Prototyping he has been teaching at the AA since 2007, working with various units and programmes including one of the design studios in the DRL with Marta Malé-Alemany. He has lectured and taught workshops in several universities worldwide and has recently founded

the experimental architecture practice Material_Codes. Olivier Ottevaere graduated with a degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union in New York in 2002 and in 2008 from the Bartlett in London with an MSc in adaptive architecture and

computation. He has practised in New York, Lisbon and London and has taught design studios in Denmark, the UK and for last four years in Switzerland. He currently develops design works under his initials – double(O). ‘Huesos varios’, series of precast (reinforced concrete) elements by architect Miguel Ficas (1913–2006)

INTERMEDIATE 7

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Maria Fedorchenko + co-tutor

Eastern Promises: Shopping Transfers This unit is concerned with design responses to transitional urban contexts, targeting ‘transfers’ between conflicted site systems in Eastern European cities. Our focus will be on the excesses and ingenuities of shopping in the bewildering context of Moscow – a sophisticated monster with a method to its madness. Political and economic overhauls loaded post-Soviet Moscow with severe tensions. With the transition from central planning to the free market, the unprecedented explosion of commercial space had to absorb clashes between old and new built forms, transit links and use patterns. From imposing hypermarkets to informal outlets, promiscuous shopping is at the core of Moscow’s paradoxical commingling of control and freedom, stability and turmoil, staging and neglect. To engage with such an ambiguous context, we will interrogate our approaches and tools. Fieldwork in Moscow will link extravagant boutiques and clubs with utilitarian stalls and bars, awe-inspiring treasures with shocking eyesores, grand masterplans with ad hoc deviations. Looking for rules behind the inconsistencies, we will remain alert to what things look like in contrast to how they work. The unit will devise analytical and generative tools to convert problems and malfunctions into inventions. Relying on research and diagrammatic analysis of local and global case-studies, we will tackle Moscow’s sore spots to alleviate ruptures between transportation, recreational and cultural programmes via shopping. Interventions will exploit site conflicts instigated by colonised structures, residual public spaces or circulation bypasses, and will experiment with synthetic infrastructures that can mediate between forms and processes at the level of organisation. Combining previously untested design strategies within a structured framework, projects will test the effects of commercial space on urban resilience. As tools of modification, shopping transfers will supply the missing infrastructure for heterogeneous design measures with plastic relationships between form and programme. Projects will test dissimilar precedents, merging, for example, performative approaches by Bernard Tschumi and OMA with material approaches to continuity by Reiser & Umemoto and FOA. By expanding shopping typologies, exchanges between internal and external architectural arsenals will occur via an active graphic interface between research and design.

UNIT STAFF Maria Fedorchenko studied at UCLA, Princeton University and Moscow Institute of Architecture. She has practised architecture in the United States, Russia and Greece, and currently directs a design consultancy. Since 2003, she has taught at UC Berkeley,

UCLA and CCA. Joining the AA in 2008, she has been involved in the First Year Studio, History and Theory Studies and the Housing & Urbanism programmes. Her art, designs and research have appeared in Salon Interior, Art of Russia and Architectural Theory Review, as well as

numerous conference proceedings and exhibitions. Recent work focuses on methodologies for urban analysis and projection as well as design systems that link formal and programmatic agendas. Top: ‘Mall of Russia’ at the core of Moscow City Business Centre (Source: AFI Development, afi-development. ru)

Bottom: ‘Ohotniy Ryad’ Shopping and Entertainment Complex on Manezh Square, Moscow (Source: Zurab Tsereteli, tsereteli.ru)

INTERMEDIATE 8

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Francisco Gonzalez de Canales Nuria Alvarez Lombardero

Politics of Fabrication II Challenging Political Expression in Little Havana, Miami Inter 8 continues exploring the politics of today from its most basic manifestations in the city, experimenting with new scenarios of political expression in intentionally polemical locations. In todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cities, where tourists and natives, immigrants and citizens, temporary and life-long residents all live side by side, the traditional meaning of politics has changed. Consequently, political representation depends less on constituencies than it does on direct, voluntary and unbinding associations among people who assert their presence in the public arena. The unit posits the possibility of redefining the political expression of the multitude as the making visible of the relationship between everyday activities in public and the particular material constructions that ultimately give them political value. This year the unit will be working on the Versailles Restaurant in the Calle Ocho (SW 8 St.) of Little Havana, Miami. This has been the epicentre of political expression of Cuban exiles in the United States since 1971, and manifests within its walls the invisible barriers that lie between Cuba and the US. Students will analyse this building and the small public space in front, exploring their socio-cultural milieu in order to redefine them within a sophisticated understanding of politics today. The year will begin with two small workshops introducing students to the political implications of architectural elements that are used or seen in everyday life, such as the Architectural Associationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s front door or the US embassy perimeter in London. Such architectural thresholds articulate and mediate the identities between the different users, comprising the cultural and social diversity that makes London so rich. Following this initial conceptual development, students are expected to present their own critical arguments on the changing associations of individuals within the public realm manifested in material articulations. After our site visit to Little Havana, each student will propose specific urban strategies and architectural-material systems that articulate the relationship of Cuban exiles and Latinos to the city. Students will test the formal, programmatic, atmospheric and constructive organisation of their design proposals in relation to their arguments. Projects will address construction methods which can be produced by the collective, bringing political expression of the masses into the realm of fabrication.

UNIT STAFF Francisco Gonzalez 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 Canales & Lombardero. An active

architectural critic, he has previously lectured in England, Mexico, Spain and the USA, collaborated and worked on different architectural publications, and is the current AACP coordinator. He recently completed his PhD on the radical domestic self-experimentations of the 1940s and 1950s.

Nuria Alvarez Lombardero studied architecture at ETSA Madrid and in the Housing and Urbanism MA programme at the AA. She has worked for Machado & Silvetti Associates in Boston, and is part of Neutra Magazine editorial board. Since 2003 she has been co-director of Canales

& Lombardero. She has lectured at the University of Seville and worked as a researcher at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge and the AA. She is currently finalising her PhD on the dissolution of boundaries traced by modern urban planning. Aerial view of Calle Ocho (SW 8 St.), Little Havana, Miami

INTERMEDIATE 9

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews

Bullish On the Carrer de Girona in Granollers, just up the coast from Barcelona, there sits a rough concrete and masonry building whose inside is stuffed full of various machines. A few of these are obsolete, others ignored, while the greater majority are whirring away, finishing the final stalactites as part of the endlessly drawn out restoration of Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. In between these different engines are the objects of future and past buildings – ceramic moulds, CNC polystyrene pieces and porcelain prototypes – remnants of a century of different fabrication processes. Each floor is an alchemical mix of ovens, scales, beakers, powders and formulas, and the roof is a field of unfinished and discarded objects. This is the studio of Toni Cumella (one of the world’s leading ceramicists and someone constantly in search of new architectural finishes and applications) – a four-storey building and its contents that the unit will take this year as a living ‘found drawing’. Tomb-raiding this space, we are going to invent ways to make our own 2D, thick 2D and 3D fragments and assemblages by scanning the atelier’s machines and objects; sampling environmental, cultural and historical registers; engaging in all forms of digital prototyping; and drawing with rapier-like precision. We will invent and mis-read ‘operational legends’, referencing systems and catalogues. By moving back and forth between the exacting visual language of hydrographic and aeronautic draughtsmen and the three-dimensional delicacy of the butterfly collector (both modes that engage in the precision of the laboratory scientist with the technique of the fine artist), Inter 9 will exploit the by-products of digital technology to produce unimaginable 3D architectural drawings. We will then move this armoury of textures, surfaces, volumes and objects from Granollers to the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona. Responding to Catalonia’s recent edict to outlaw bullfighting in 2012 we will lose ourselves in the refinery of the matador’s psychedelic patterns, colours and textures and bullfighting’s processes and producers. In a typically surrealist fashion, we will then deploy this substance to contrive the completion of Gaudí’s Colònia Güell in Santa Coloma de Cervelló, and, as Cedric Price once said, ‘delight in the unknown’.

UNIT STAFF 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 Ron Arad’s Design Museum, ‘In Praise of the Harpoon’ (2010); EMBT’s Shanghai

Pavilion, ‘Chinese Whispers’ (2010); and, with Tom Weaver, ‘In Conversation with Léon Krier’ (2010). He formed Mis-Architecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Christopher Matthews in 2000.

Christopher Matthews, principal of Pastina Matthews Architects (PMA), was educated at the Bartlett School of Architecture. 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. PMA has recently completed a two-storey penthouse above the Factory Gallery in Redchurch Street, London and current projects include the Museum for Captain Cook in Whitechapel, London.

Spanish bullfighter Julio Aparicio is gored in the throat by his first bull at Las Ventas bullring in Madrid, 21 May 2010 Photo © Corbis / Gustavo Cuevas

INTERMEDIATE 10

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Claudia Pasquero Marco Poletto

The Self-organising City v1.0: [Network-Oasis] Inter 10 is returning to the Arabian peninsula to develop a Network-Oasis [NO], self-organising trading hubs for the twenty-first-century Emirati metropolis. Resurfacing from last year’s coral reefs, Inter 10 will head inland, to one of the largest, most desolate and fascinating deserts on earth, the Rub Al Khali. Travelling in the footsteps of the Bedouin we will retrace their distributed territorial networks, the oases as the nodal trading hubs. We will learn how their nomadic practices have functioned as mechanisms of adaptation within such an extreme environment. The souks or markets have been the heart of this dynamic and diffused urban model for centuries, as the places where flows of goods, social information and environmental energy are exchanged and regulated. Our work will focus on a contemporary version of the ‘souk’ or ‘trading market’, set within one of the rapidly modernising global Emirati metropolises. The unit’s first workshop will investigate the contemporary relevance of these practices and engage with the re-evaluation and remaking of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ nomadic utopia, New Babylon. A second workshop will introduce parametric drawing techniques and the fabrication of physical experimental models as a design apparatus [for simulating] patterns of self-organisation and visualisations of emergent urban networks. The exercises will be developed largely in 1:200 plans and detail drawings which will then form the basis for investigating the critical intersection of our emergent Network-Oasis with the existing urban fabric. Term 3 will be dedicated to the production of a final physical model of the Oasis. The field trip to the Arabian Desert will involve a nomadic existence aided by modern-day 4WD and GPS, a visit to the ancient oases of Al Ain and Liwa, and a 1:1 replica of the 1974 experiment ‘Desert Cloud’ by Graham Stevens. As a building prototype, the Network-Oasis will support the redistribution of locally grown products and imported merchandise found in traditional souks while promoting the social interaction and experimentation of contemporary malls. As a model of self-organisation, the Network-Oasis will attempt to spatially organise and temporally balance multiple processes to achieve symbiotic urban growth and promote increasing differentiation of social spaces. www.aainter10.blogspot.com

UNIT STAFF Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto are co-founders of ecoLogicStudio, an architectural and urban design studio based in London. Completed projects include a public library, private villas, large facades and parametric roofs. ecoLogicStudio has

developed prototypes and installations for the most important Architectural Biennales, and it runs international workshops. Claudia and Marco are currently writing a new book on Systemic Architecture; they have been Inter 10 Unit Masters since 2007. (ecologicstudio.com)

The Rub Al Khali near Liwa Oasis – Satellite View

INTERMEDIATE 12

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Sam Jacob Tomas Klassnik

Deep Copy The greatest gift of the digital revolution is copying. Cut! Copy! Paste! is the implicit mantra of modern culture ritualised through familiar keystrokes. The cover version and the mash-up are the default settings of contemporary culture. Whether genetic clones, bootlegged iPhones or X-Factor covers, everything that has ever happened is a click away from revival. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, we might think of contemporary cut-copy-paste vernaculars like the LOL Cat as heirs to a century of avantgarde art practice. The unoriginality of copying as a cultural mechanism is only rivalled by the originality of its capacity to reinvent. The copy sets into stark contrast issues of cultural meaning and value. Copies ask us to look, hard. How, why and who copies determine the nature of the output: it’s not what you steal, it’s the way that you steal it. Despite modernism’s continuing myths of originality, copying is fundamental to the founding myths of architecture. Greek temples were stone copies of wooden structures, Romans copied Greeks, and the Renaissance copied both of them. Modernists copied engineers (and each other – as with Philip Johnson’s explicit copy of Mies’ Farnsworth House, see right). Neo-modernists copied modernists, and post-modernists copied everything. Each time the act of copying allowed something new to be said. These deep historical traditions of copying and the shallow puddle of contemporary culture will be our sites of investigation. We will learn from art practice, science, music, digital culture, criminals (and architecture), developing our own dictionary of copying. This will investigate the difference between bootlegs, forgeries, mash-ups, facsimiles and reproductions. It will help us understand the errors, degradations and hybridisations that copying introduces. We will use a wide array of representational techniques including 3D modelling and printing, Photoshop collage, YouTube videos, physical models and measured drawings, and apply these tactics to architectural proposals addressing programmatic briefs developed in response to individual student research. We will start the year amongst the replicas of the Victoria & Albert Museum, visit the (original) Venice – while thinking of its duplicates – and make proposals where dialogues between the original and the copy reinvent the possibilities of the present.

UNIT STAFF Sam Jacob is a director of FAT (fat.co.uk), an award-winning Londonbased architectural practice. He is also contributing editor to Icon, columnist for Art Review and is also the editor of Strange Harvest (strangeharvest.com).

Tomas Klassnik is director of The Klassnik Corporation (klassnik.com), a design practice focused on architectural speculation. UK correspondent for Deutsche Bauzeitung, he has also taught at Chelsea College of Art and the RCA.

Top: Canon iR 110 Digital Photocopier capable of 110 A4 copies per minute Middle: Dolly (1996–2003) first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell using nuclear transfer

Bottom: The Glass House, Philip Johnson, Connecticut, USA, 1949

INTERMEDIATE 13

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Miraj Ahmed Martin Jameson

The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object. – Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790 A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world. – George Bataille, Informe (Formless), 1929 Formless Inter 13 will continue to work with cultural readings of space. We are interested in the oppositional interplay between form and formlessness, order and disorder, sacred and profane, as essential to a heterogeneous urban experience. Contemporary interest in complex and exotic form has led to a proliferation of architectural objects that disallow the crude, contingent or everyday and instead promote the ‘ideal’ and, unintentionally, the homogeneous. In our post-crash, post-digital-excess world we can reengage with the concept of the ‘formless’. Formless here is understood as a phenomenon and process; in other words, we are asking what does formless do to form? Our prime focus is on the temporal and atmospheric, occupation and use, making and decay. In contrast to the glossy and the clinical, material concepts such as ‘base matter’ have renewed relevance in today’s cities where ‘baseness’ – related to formlessness – can be inferred by the unclassified or ‘raw’, both in substance and in programme. Against this background the unit will continue its engagement with London and social context. Observation and research will provide the ground for understanding formless phenomena such as entropy, estrangement and transgression. Theoretical positions will be explored through a wide range of media tools. To better understand the potential of base matter we will be placing increased emphasis on materiality and physical model-making, and in this regard casting, with its relation to ‘brut’ and the sacred, will become a key technique. Architectural precedent and site analysis will be used to develop programmes that are critically juxtaposed within dense urban fabric. Above all, we will be exploring strategic propositions that reflect contemporary urban and economic conditions that viscerally engage with the city.

UNIT STAFF Miraj Ahmed is a practising painter and architect exploring the interstice between art and architecture. 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.

Eli Lotar, ‘Abbatoir’ La Villette, Paris, 1929

DIPLOMA 3

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Peter Karl Becher Matthew Barnett Howland

Completing Beauvais Cathedral The cathedral Saint-Pierre in Beauvais, Normandy, is the tallest Gothic structure ever attempted. The monument collapsed twice during construction and was eventually left unfinished after the crossing-tower fell down in 1573 just a few days after completion. Only half of the cathedral has been built, including the choir and the transept. This project’s objective is to complete the fragmented cathedral in a contemporary and secular way, and to reinvent its immediate urban context. In this ambitious task, history is not seen as a ‘closed book’ but is valued as a complex, inspirational source for resolving major architectural problems of our time – such as the lack of urban complexity, the meagreness of public spaces, or the loss of material quality and craftsmanship – and as a mirror to understand and question our own positions. We will be interested in the monumentality of this building fragment, a result of its odd proportionality; in the radicalism, courage and ingenuity of the Gothic visionaries; and in the fact that the abandoned super-cathedral excellently represents the abrupt succession of the experimental Gothic style by a revival of the classical style, the Renaissance. By transforming sacred space into civic space the project taps into important contemporary questions of socio-cultural transformation and the role of architectural discourse. In seven preliminary experiments students will explore issues of incompleteness, structural and tectonic innovation, scale and context, and typology and function – echoing John Ruskin’s 1849 essay The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Underpinning the work will be juxtapositions of students’ own observations made during visits to great French and English cathedrals, with Gothic Revival theories, as well as a consideration of other unfinished precedents like Narbonne Cathedral or Sagrada Familía. A conceptual unit for innovators, Diploma 3 is not interested in imitating any particular architectural style. Instead, it aims for inventive, diverse and unprecedented solutions, and for architectural form as result rather than anticipated intention. The portfolio will include a large digital ‘painting’ and a substantial timber model. The unit will be inspired and critiqued by international professionals including artists, engineers, historians, theorists and entrepreneurs.

UNIT STAFF Peter Karl Becher established Studio Becher in London in 2007 after working for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Beijing (Bird’s Nest) and London. He studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Enric Miralles, Peter Cook, Mark Wigley and Cecil Balmond, as well as

SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He has taught at Kingston University London, London Metropolitan University and NTNU Trondheim. Matthew Barnett Howland is co-founder of MPH Architects. He studied at Cambridge University and the Bartlett School of

Architecture and has extensive teaching experience from Kingston University London, London Metropolitan University, Cambridge and the University of East London. In 2004 he was awarded the RIBA Tutor Prize. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Cathedral by the Waterside, c 1813/4

DIPLOMA 4

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF John Palmesino Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

Polity and Space: The Coast of Europe The work of Diploma Unit 4 investigates the design of new forms of assembly, combining different and multiple agents – from international institutions such as the European Union, the United Nations, the OECD et al. to NGOs and individuals – in the re-organisation of material space. We will work within the multiple material, cultural, economic and political transformation processes that are reshaping the coastal territories of contemporary Europe. Our research and design unit will explore an architecture aimed at reassembling the complex urban and metropolitan forces into an integrated plan, where divergent and individual transformations interact with natural processes and forms. Diploma Unit 4 combines contemporary architecture, urbanism and research with the design of devices that spatially transform the coastal territories of Europe. Architecture is undergoing a set of negotiations and realignments that alters the relation between the form of the inhabited territories and their institutional frameworks. The shifts, expansions and modifications in the forms of contemporary polities have wrought parallel changes in the material configuration of their spaces of operation. Can architecture operate as a technology to link contemporary polities to contemporary spaces? Our work will examine the possibilities of integrated spatial transformation in the complex contemporary maritime territories of Europe. Relating architecture and urbanism with other disciplines, we will investigate the current state of affairs and the potentials of the coastal regions, from St. Petersburg to the Kattegat, from Norway to the British Isles to Gibraltar and Naples, from Venice to Athens, over the Golden Horn towards Odessa. The unit explores the potential of new image-making in the creation of a shared space for the multiple forces that transform the European coastal territories. Architecture is used both as the object and the method of enquiry into the many form-generating processes by which Europe is adapting and reconfiguring the specific forms, materials and structures of its territories. The work structures architectural design, urban forming, remote sensing and surveying technologies into a series of in-depth projects. The unit work is accompanied by a Diploma History and Theory seminar that analyses territorial and political transformations in a number of global contexts. www.aadip4.net

UNIT STAFF John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog 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. He has previously been Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel / Contemporary City

Institute and has co-founded Multiplicity, an international research network. Ann-Sofi was previously a researcher at ETH Studio Basel, she has studied in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Zurich. United Nations, Geneva Photo Armin Linke

DIPLOMA 5 (Re)public: Third Natures – Carnal and Mundane Assemblies Public space has been kidnapped by the market economy. Throughout its history it has always oscillated between representations of power and political control, but today this power is one that increasingly seems defined by consumerism. In light of this condition, the unit will look to establish a strong political affinity in constructing a new kind of architecture of the everyday – a new pop architecture and space that has links to contemporary culture but retains a significant critical dimension. In the past, according to Bruno Latour, it has been easy to see the world as being divided between humans, non-humans and objects. Today, however, it is the blurred connections between these categories that offer the most exciting possibilities. Following the work carried out in 2009/10, Dip 5 will focus this year on the role of architecture as assemblies or complex ecologies that act as mechanisms for the interrelation between living beings, social groups and technological objects. We will explore the notion of public buildings as third natures – deliberate, material and intellectual manipulations of our biotope. To encourage a profound rethinking of buildings as public and, more specifically, congregational spaces, we will focus on the conceptual and technical development of a medium-scale project that involves linking inert and living materials. Students will begin by selecting a social group as the context and scenario for their research. Using this group they will then develop a technically inventive material system and process of fabrication that will ultimately be applied to the project at various scales. Our working method will be based upon an experimental design office and will include brainstorming sessions, collective seminars, constant pin-ups, micro-lectures, work with consultants, sessions with special guests and workshops, all designed to stimulate creativity. Advanced digital design techniques will also be integrated into a combination of systems and tools that will come close to a kind of methodological anarchy and will focus on novelty, on the unconventional, on innovative thinking, audacity and fresh solutions. The range of interests will be extended from the programmatic, social, structural and climatic to the representational, contextual or conceptual.

UNIT STAFF Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda are both architects and founders of the Madrid based office AMID.cero9 and usual collaborators of El Croquis. Since 1998 they have taught at ETSAM and ESAYA, and have been visiting teachers at Cornell,

ESARQ or EPSA among others. They have won more than 30 prizes in national and international competitions, and their projects and writings have been collected in Breathable and From cero9 to AMID.

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Cristina Díaz Moreno Efrén García Grinda Tyen Masten

Tyen Masten works at Zaha Hadid Architects. Prior to joining the office in 2004, he was a graduate fellow at UCLA and worked extensively in both Los Angeles and New York. Phyllis Galembo, Gwarama Masquerade, Yegueresso Village, Burkina Faso (2006) (John Ng, Isle of Samba, London / Dip Unit 5 2009–10)

DIPLOMA 6

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Liam Young Kate Davies

In the Land of the Never-Never; in that elusive land with an elusive name – land of dangers and hardships and privations yet loved as few lands are loved – a land that bewitches her people with strange spells and mysteries, until they call sweet bitter, and bitter sweet. – Jeannie Gunn, We of the Never-Never Never Never Lands: Prospecting in Dreamtime Diploma 6, The Unknown Fields Division will enter into new relations with the territories of science, nature and fiction. We explore the complex, rich and contradictory realities of the present as a site of extraordinary futures and probe our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world. Two years ago, in Galapagos, we mused on evolution; last year, in the Arctic, we contemplated the end of the world; and now we will look to strange new beginnings as we voyage to bear witness to the reinvention of nature through technology in the Australian Never-Never. The Division will embark on a dust-blown road trip across Australia, into the vast and mysterious interior of the island continent in search of ancient tribal hinterlands and techno-landscapes. This land of rich resources and sparsely inhabited expanses houses feats of engineering and technological incisions into the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime – the creation mythology of the indigenous Aboriginals. Stories and ceremonies of dreaming beings who once shaped the sacred sites of mountain ranges and riverbeds are now spun alongside the ghosts of modern technologies. Here, beneath the Southern Cross, telescopes listen to the beep-beep from alien worlds, solar arrays track the sun, observatories scan the Milky Way and all the while machines harvest the earth for the precious ingredients of our daily lives. We will venture ‘out back’ to a strange landscape behind the scenes of modern living – visiting the vast mines of the interior, stalking mechanical beasts the size of buildings and exploring excavations as big as cities. Towering mountains, articulated valleys and expansive lakes emerge from these incisions – remade as new nature. We will be both visionaries and reporters, engaged with the conditions of today through speculation about tomorrow. Clambering over the wreckage of the future, our architecture will operate in the no-man’s land between the cultivated and the natural: a new dreaming for a new kind of wilderness. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C Clarke

UNIT STAFF Liam Young studied architecture in Australia and now works in London as an independent designer, futurist and curator. He has taught design studios at schools across Europe and Australasia and he is a founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts

Today who explore the consequences of fantastic perverse and underrated urbanisms. Their projects are sited in the projective worlds of speculation and fiction and become critical instruments for instigating debate about the cultural consequences of emerging biological and technological futures.

Kate Davies is a designer, writer and educator. She is a co-founder of the multidisciplinary group LiquidFactory, which explores the rich hinterlands of art, architecture and performance. She has taught at London Metropolitan University and Chelsea College of

Art and run various design workshops in Sweden, Spain, Belgium and Korea. She graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture, London and has worked for a number of architectural practises in the UK and Europe. Vincent Fournier – Space Project

DIPLOMA 7

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Simon Beames Kenneth Fraser

Where does the singularity of an urban artefact begin?...in the event and in the sign that it has marked the event. – Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1984 Events have their own fluidity, shifting – politically, economically, technically, culturally and tectonically. We are used to recognising persistent architectural elements that have modified over long periods of time and have evolved in a more complex way than the host economy. This implies the existence of typological constants, yet no type exists for resisting earthquakes. The immunity of the surviving structures has not been passed down through the building vernacular to subsequent building offspring. Should there be a fault-line vernacular? In February 2010 the Haiti earthquake, the most deadly in modern history, killed 222,570 people, devastating the urban environment. The super-specificity of designing for earthquake zones should extend from buildings to the landscape and planting which forms their habitat. The relationship between a specific location and the architecture it sustains is both singular and universal. While this concept is well researched in topographic or functional terms we would like to emphasise the conditions and qualities within undifferentiated space which are necessary for the safety and security of the ubrban artefact. While earthquake design is embedded in building codes, we want to find ways to embed the engineering aspects in the broader agenda of the role of building within the social structure of communities – a haven. Our interest lies in designing and cataloguing systems and typologies to shape the many reciprocal relationships that can be established through the dangers of the settings – whether ecological, hydrological, material and climatic or cultural and aesthetic. Projects developed by the unit will survey a broad range of interactions to generate interventions at differing scales while pursuing a rigorously green agenda that by its nature is transdisciplinary and reliant on collaboration and context. The typological studies will be tested at a territorial level, through the development of collaborative networks and partners. Technical ambitions will guide the unit’s work through an investigation into the reappropriation of digital tool-making and of accurate means to predict the behaviour of materials under severe loads. The expectations of the unit are technical, social and critical, emphasising the development of workable systems for addressing the danger of place.

UNIT STAFF Simon Beames is a director of Youmeheshe (youmeheshe.com) and architect for COTE, an NGO involved in construction and re-socialisation following conflict and disaster, completing community projects in Romania and Kosova.

Kenneth Fraser has taught at the AA since 2007 and is a director of Kirkland Fraser Moor Architects (k-f-m.com). He has also served as an RIBA external examiner, an advisor to the Department of the Environment Construction Research and Innovation Strategy Panel and as an Arts

Council of England Architectural Assessor.

On screen: Haiti 2010 In book: Jürg Conzett’s Ottoplatz Building stress fields, from the AA Publication Structure as Space

DIPLOMA 8

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Eugene Han

Corporate Domain Diploma 8 seeks to establish architectural guidelines that operate on various scales of architecture and infrastructure within the realm of contemporary models from computational methodologies. The foundation of such research is the definition of reductive elements necessary to limit and define space, its organisation and its coherence. Elements are then regulated in an open framework and tested within an array of operative applications. To fully exploit the potential of such a regulated investigation, the unit will test its proposals against large-scale architectures constituted by recurrent elements such as the structural grid. Corporate Complex In response to the need for architecture to adapt to the constantly shifting demands of space, the unit will seek proposals that are unencumbered by the constraints of programme yet highly articulated in formal and spatial composition. Investigations will centre on the corporate complex, no longer exclusively relegated to the metropolitan centre with its array of office floor plans, nor to the outskirts of the secluded campus. The unit will propose the design of systematically massive complexes able to engage with the wide range of programmatically unbiased spaces required by a contemporary corporation. Compositional Frameworks The implementation of a compositional framework enables an investigation of hierarchically independent types and levels of spaces. In opposition to the modern movement’s rigid functional strategies, student proposals will seek to define a highly specific rationale that can accommodate an open implementation within their designed frameworks. The unit will visit precedent cases in US cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York, as well as major complexes developments such as Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center, Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters and SOM’s Lever House. Students will then choose their own site and corporate body, based on their initial studies. Implementing their own established set of reductive architectural elements, students will propose a large-scale corporate complex that simultaneously works with different compositional classes and proposes a precise yet accommodating definition of architecture.

UNIT STAFF Eugene Han is the founder of AVA-Studio, researching and developing systems in industrial design, architecture and planning. Top: Amberg, Siemens, 1991 – Andreas Gursky Bottom: Pfortner, Thyseen, Dusseldorf, Desk Attendants, 1982 – Andreas Gursky

DIPLOMA 9

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Natasha Sandmeier

iContext This year Dip 9 shifts its attention away from the single iconic object and towards the context of and conversation between architectural objects. So, what is context? Since the 1970s, architectural theory has defined context in banal and inadequate ways, as that which neighbours or surrounds a building. By contrast, we will approach the topic as an opportunity for something radical, in the true dogma of Dip 9 – to (re)unite and design an architectural project within a larger cultural world of your own making. We will develop a contextualism defined by the connections between constructed realities and architectural fantasies – somewhere between fact and fiction. In the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Valise or Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, you will invent a new self-contained world – a wunderkammer of sorts – within which you set the stage for your proposal. You will pursue your project as one intimately connected to and constructed from its physical and cultural relationships. ‘Conversation’ and ‘context’ will be our ruling forces. With these we will question, debate and collaboratively construct a new form of reading, designing, and communicating that will result in an alternate and more vital form of architectural project – as one intricately woven with its (historical, physical, geographical) materials. You will each develop your proposal and conversation with a small group of project consultants, including one specialist in a field related to your agenda. In this way you will situate your own proposition within a larger cultural discourse. The students of Dip 9 will each begin their year with the making of a personal manifesto, whose expression frames the year ahead. This year the manifesto will also set up the context that you will weave around your personality and project and shape your proposal. In terms 1 & 2 we will continue our collaboration with the graduate History and Critical Thinking programme through a series of seminars on ‘context’. The unit will also be supported by workshops and tutorials with AA Dip 9 graduates Adam Furman, Marco Ginex and Amandine Kastler in addition to other consultants (including editors, graphic designers and technical consultants) who will join us throughout the year.

UNIT STAFF Natasha Sandmeier is an architect and partner of Big Picture Studio. An AA Unit Master since 2001, she also co-directs the AA Summer School. She was project architect for the Seattle Public Library and has worked at offices in Europe and the US.

Amandine Kastler’s (AADip Honours 2010) room contains and defines the world of its inhabitant, and expands outward to connect and relate to the empire of cities and rooms just beyond its borders.

DIPLOMA 10

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Carlos Villanueva Brandt

Direct Urbanism: Engagement or Control? Working with the interaction between the live realm of the city and the urban fabric, we will continue to experiment with composite urban interventions that influence the city at the architectural and urban scales. In 2008/09, we speculated on the urban potential of topics such as ‘food’ and ‘sex’, and last year we focused on the role that urban, spatial and interactive rules play in the making of the city. The topics highlighted the importance of engagement and the rules revealed the multiple systems that control the urban environment. This year we will use combinations of engagement and control to design real and interactive urban proposals. Through a process of immersion we will identify variables that make up the reality of urban space. There is an often overlooked intrinsic relationship between physical and social structures, which we will tackle head-on. Live or direct interventions create new spaces, delineate territories, require specific physical structures and deploy adaptive organisational systems. Unlike current architecture and masterplans, these direct interventions engage, control and overlap with the existing urban context. This year we will appropriate the initiatives of Crossrail to anchor our interventions on one of the proposed stations. We will devise ways of working with physical and social structures and reconfigure them to generate composite interventions that concentrate on the spatial overlap between the architectural and the urban scales. We will restrict our urban experiments to an experiential scale and, using direct action, video, working drawings, 3D models, primary evidence and strategic documents, we will propose the following interventions: a constructed situation as immersion that will include one to ten people, an architectural construct that is a public building of minimum dimensions (10 x 10 x 10 metres), a strategic territory that is an expansion of the architectural construct (500 x 500 metres), and a proposed situation as insertion to include 10 or more users. What is the relationship between space, engagement and control? The city itself may hold some answers. We will work with the city, experimentally during immersion, propositionally during insertion, and we will conclude by testing our proposals within the social, political, economic and physical contexts of the city.

UNIT STAFF Carlos Villanueva Brandt formed his practise Carlos Villanueva Brandt Architecture in 1984 (villanuevabrandt.com). The varied work of the office has been published widely and exhibited internationally. He has been Diploma 10 Unit Master since 1986 and

was awarded the RIBA President’s Silver Medal Tutor Prize 2000.

Engagement: ‘Polyclinic’, appendicitis – a direct experience of the NHS. Chelsea Barracks, Amber Wood Control: ‘Best Defence is a Good Offence’ – two pathways respond to a variety of urban conditions in order to

establish the most effective form of security; the more public the boundaries between the differing conditions, the more secure its spaces will be. US Embassy Nine Elms, Korey Kromm

DIPLOMA 11

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Shin Egashira

A City Stripped Bare Unit 11 continues to develop architectural design strategies for the postinfrastructural landscape and the ‘inner-periphery’ of London. The unit examines the city’s current topology and identifies moments of disjuncture where adjacencies of textures, scales, structures and programmes are revealed. We explore the city’s ability to generate responsive urban artefacts with composite structures and material organisations that challenge the notion of the permanent and the temporal, the dynamic and the static, the transformative and the accumulative. Sampling The area between Hackney and Dalston is itself sandwiched between the City on one side and the Olympic site on the other (two different models of development: sprawling and autonomous with the Olympics; speculative and steady with the City). By reinterpreting the city as a catalogue of beautifully incomplete objects excluded from urban gentrification, we will gather fragments of textural detail, leftover gaps, exposed edges, subsidiary service networks and incomplete narratives. We will also reclassify, de-collage and aggregate urban resources and condense them into small groups of micro-components. In the process, as architects we will recompose a Micro City: a small city inside the city. Modelling Borrowing the notion of reverse urban engineering we will unmake the architecture of the city. Material studies will be made in non-scale, 1:5 and 1:10 detail components, developing a new vocabulary of forming structures as well as textural expressions, mixing digital analysis and the use of inherent material qualities with combined methods of fabrication. Micro Urban Condenser Proposals should speculate on the realm between localised service structures and reimagined infrastructural typologies. Edge conditions will then be reinvigorated. Ultimately, the projects will contextualise the uncertainties of the city’s future histories and allow the city to continue to represent a new spatial anthology. Supplementary investigations will include: a workshop on urban erasure, material experiments at Hooke Park, revisiting collage city with Grahame Shane and seminars on fragmentation with Peter Carl. UNIT STAFF Shin Egashira worked in Tokyo, Beijing, and New York, before coming to London, and has exhibited artwork and installations worldwide. He is the author of Before Object, After Image (AA Publications, 2006), a document of the workshop he has organised in

the remote village of Koshirakura each summer for more than a decade.

Project Review exhibition Dip 11 Micro City 2010

DIPLOMA 13

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Oliver Domeisen

Ornament negotiates among several contradictory concepts, including antiquity and modernity, mechanical objectivity and artistic subjectivity, convention and expression, and the real and the ideal. – Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style, 2003 The Principles of New Ornament In 1892 a second edition of The Principles of Ornament by James Ward was published as an instruction manual for the students of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts. One year later, in Berlin, Alois Riegl released his seminal Stilfragen (Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, 1893). Whilst the training of architects in the artistic practice of ornamental design was commonplace in London at the time, Riegl identified an elementary human drive within precisely those ornamental practices: the Kunstwollen – the artistic impulse to adorn. This year Dip13 will follow that impulse, once again battling our horror vacui. In view of a profession that is in danger of disintegrating into vacuous parametric accountancy, contract management and vapid environmentalism, we will reclaim the designing of architecture as an exhilarating artistic act. Dip13 will produce The Principles of New Ornament: Architectural Ornament and Ornate Architecture for the Twenty-first Century. Through ornament we will deliver architecture into the vibrant maelstrom of contemporary visual and material culture, fluctuating signification and transhistorical correspondences. You will design iterations of potent iconographic, naturalist, materialist and geometric ornament for the London residence of one of the world’s foremost art collectors. In restoring the space of secular art to its domestic origin, and in rejecting the tyranny of the white cube, your system of ornament will fuse container and contained into a total work of art. Your ornament will manifest itself in exquisite drawings, models and material prototypes, all experimentally crafted within a painterly and sculptural sensibility that layers digital with traditional methods. The unit will be accompanied by a Diploma History and Theory course and a series of lectures and talks by invited ornamentalists, art collectors and artists. Tristan Simmonds (founding member Arup AGU, consultant Studio Antony Gormley) will once again act as technical consultant. A Rococo monastery in Switzerland, an English castle and the Alhambra will be but a few of the pit-stops on our journey towards an architecture of beauty, meaning and complexity.

UNIT STAFF Oliver Domeisen studied at ETH Zurich and the AA. From 1997–2000 he worked as Project Architect for Zaha Hadid; since 2000 as Director of dlm ltd; from 2001–07 as Unit Master for Inter 9 and from 2007 for Dip 13; from 2005–07 as a Studio Master for AAVSP. He

currently writes and lectures – and has curated an exhibition – on the topic of ornament.

James Ward – The Principles of Ornament, 1892

DIPLOMA 14 Volker Bradke: Architecture Between the Generic and the Common In 1966 the German painter Gerhard Richter composed a multimedia installation that examined the everyday life of an average German young man: the 22-year-old Volker Bradke. What is interesting about this installation is how it mixes the generic nature of its subject with the monumentality of its representation. On one hand the subject remains elusive, average, lacking any specific attribute; on the other, its representation is emphatic, almost mimicking the rhetorical, monumental effect of social realist painting. The formal and political ethos of this artwork is the best way to introduce this year’s topic for Dip 14: the relationship between forms of labour, the generic and the common in architecture. By labour we mean not simply one activity among others, but an essential human condition: the productive (and reproductive) status of our life. By generic we mean what is common within the general condition of the city. By common we mean how to transform the latent generic condition of the city into a collective sphere, beyond the idea of it being simply a public and private space. Over the year architectural form will be addressed precisely in terms of its ability to construct and represent the idea of common space. Because of this, the unit will insist on issues of architectural form, composition, syntax and materiality. It is our conviction that only by engaging with form in its deepest, most elemental condition is it possible to trace architecture’s political motivation. The task for the unit will be the design of a housing unit for 1,600 people closely connected with a public transport network. The design will proceed from inside-out. Each project will be developed starting from the basic single cell of one inhabitant. This will then be developed to form the basis for the entire complex. The qualities of the resulting design will emerge out of the sharpness of the argument, the immediacy of its representation (the project must be expressed with very few drawings) and the conviction of its idea. The context of the project will be the city of Rome. A city of monumental exceptions, Rome will form the dialectical (back)ground to the idea of a common architecture. The extreme and conflicted history of the city will challenge the possibility of a common and generic architecture, and yet at the same time the very idea of the common and generic will be a return to the defining characteristic of ancient Roman architecture.

UNIT STAFF Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. His theoretical studies focus on architectural form, political theory and urban history. After graduating from the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia, he obtained masters and PhD degrees at the Berlage Institute/

Delft University of Technology. At the Berlage Institute he heads the ‘City as a Project’ PhD programme. He is the co-founder of Dogma, with Martino Tattara, a prize-winning architectural collective.

Barbara-Ann CampbellLange is a graduate of the Bartlett, AA, Cooper Union and Cambridge. She has practised, written on, taught, governed and examined in art and design since 1988, is a registered architect and a director at the CampbellLange Workshop.

Fenella Collingridge studied painting at Camberwell and architecture at the AA and taught architecture at the Royal College of Art. Her teaching and practice look at patterns of inhabitation and urban design. She is currently working on a housing project with Peter Salter.

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Pier Vittorio Aureli Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange Fenella Collingridge

Gerhard Richter with flag ‘Volker Bradke’ painted by himself, 1966

DIPLOMA 16 Adaptive Ecologies 3 – Composite RE-Formulation Dip 16 will be pursuing a primary interest in exploiting the host of complex relationships informing an overall architectural ecology that synthesises ideas of technology, nature and people across a range of scales. Drawing inspiration from the visionary work of Wolf Hilbertz, Dip 16 will embrace a time-based holistic ecological understanding of engendering spatial affects, eliciting a new sensibility via new technology. We are challenging standardised modes of production, materiality and conventional forms of representation and reductive models of topology and typology. The research of Dip16 will draw on two main sources. The first is the vision of the Dutch philosopher Marcel de Geus and specifically his book Ecological Utopia, describing how society could ideally be related to nature. The second is Global Scenario Group’s (GSG) essay titled Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, which outlines how different values regarding the environment, human well-being and global justice may lead to three different future scenarios: Conventional Worlds, Barbarisation and Great Transitions. Dip16 seeks to exploit rapidly changing environmental, economic and cultural conditions as a springboard for imaginative and innovative green design and a visionary aesthetic. We will be looking at Ruskin’s parameters of delicacy, intricacy, variety and irregularity in architecture, as outlined in his book Stones of Venice. This will be explored via a superimposition study projecting 2D artefacts to 3D space in the creation of a space object. This initial study will lead to the production of a prototype using a range of modes of representation, modelling and digital fabrication techniques. Subsequently, scale shifts, forms of building taxonomy and production techniques will be explored with the aim of making the structure and materiality both organisational and projective. The prototype, with its innate capacity for redeployment, will be territorialised as an architectural project and tested and evolved according to a range of criteria based around social, natural and technical conditions as well as GSG’s future scenarios. The research of Dip16 will be carried out using field studies, specialist consultancies, computational workshops, hands-on design workshops, a prototyping workshop at Hooke Park and collaborations with industrial manufacturers. Dip 16 encourages diverse research agendas, design briefs and choice of sites within the unit framework.

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Jonas Lundberg Andrew Yau Tom Tong

www.dip16.net

UNIT STAFF Jonas Lundberg, Andrew Yau and Tom Tong are members of Urban Future Organization, 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 recently featured in 10X10 v. 2.

Insub Lee. Reconstituted ship hull prototype

DIPLOMA 17

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Dora Sweijd

Latent Territories: Airside global metropolis Airports materialise the myths and ambitions of a globalised world. Airtravel used to be a privilege for the elite living in capital cities, but over the last decade it has gradually become accessible to a diverse array of people from all demographics. According to recent reports, each of the top 20 European airport hubs will reach capacity by 2012. New EU policy is encouraging the development of a regional network of 430 airports to facilitate decongestion – a multitude of airfields and surrounding territories that could take on absurd proportions, covering an area of land potentially larger than some European states, and all of it inaccesible to the public. In a period of increased mobility, airports have gradually acquired the full programmatic range of cities in order to accommodate ever-increasing transient populations. For example, Heathrow has a yearly transit population of 85 million and the new airport of Dubai has been designed for a capacity of 180 million people a year. Diploma 17 pursues a critical investigation on residual territories of transportation networks such as ports, airports, train and highway interchanges. This year we will be studying airports as part of a more global scheme: a transcontinental conurbation of airside cities. We will start by formulating the unspoken manifesto of this airside global metropolis from the perspective of history, journalism, anthropology and semiotics. During the first part of the year we will be using photomontage as a means of formulating speculative proposals or critiques. We will study the relationship between vehicular and navigation technology and how this affects the morphology of the airside territories, seeking a greater integration between aviation and the city. Based on our observations, anticipated technological changes as well as social evidence found in the real, students will be proposing possible futures for the airside of a regional airport. In a period of doubt and vanishing certainties, the unit proposes a critical view on urbanism, revisiting the critical engagement and playfulness of the 60s and 70s architectural avantgardes now re-invigorated by the added eloquence of the last decade’s computational design and materialisation processes.

UNIT STAFF Theo Sarantoglou Lalis and Dora Swejd are the principals of LA.S.S.A, a design practice based in London and Brussels working on commissions in Egypt, Greece and Korea as well as entering international competitions. Dora and Theo have lectured internationally,

led workshops and taught undergraduate studios in Sweden and more recently Intermediate 11 at the AA. Theo Sarantoglou Lalis has studied in Brussels and The Bartlett. He has taught postgraduate studios at Columbia and Harvard. Prior to founding

LA.S.S.A he worked at Future Systems and Asymptote in NY. In 2008 he led Asymptote’s European office as well as being one of the directors in charge of Yas Marina Hotel, in Abu Dhabi. Dora Sweijd graduated from the Bartlett. She previously worked in

London and NYC including REX and Foster + Partners before establishing LA.S.S.A. She has taught at Lund University in Sweden, published and lectured internationally. Her work has been exhibited recently at the Brussels Biennale.

Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Airside: A Forbidden Territory, 2002

DIPLOMA 18 Energy Attack Team: Architecture and the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ When we think about the causes of global warming at the forefront are discussions about the effects of air travel, cars and pollution caused by industrial processes. But what we often fail to consider is that one of the major contributors to global warming can actually be attributed to architecture. Diploma 18 looks to embrace the realities of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ – a term coined by Jeremy Rifkin, author of numerous publications on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the environment including The Hydrogen Economy. It is Rifkin’s belief that we are on the cusp of a revolution defined by new forms of transportation, construction and energy. Central to this revolution will be the explosion of new technologies that will transform buildings into power plants producing renewable energy that will be distributed by a smart grid. The unit will actively engage with architecture and its integral role in the reality of changes to our environment and adhere to the macro trend of GGG (Global Green Growth) with the aim of understanding the science of empathy, human-life and nature – solution: ‘Think Gaia’. Projects will be the result of an exploration of technologies that engage with seven different current conflicts associated with global warming: Caribbean islands vs hurricanes; Taipei vs river floods; Bahrain vs the end of the aquifer; Antarctica vs melting ice; Mongolia vs the methane landscape; Barcelona vs the death of marine life in the Mediterranean; and Los Angeles vs mobility. To inform the projects, the unit will travel to Spain and study architecture defined as ‘zero emission’, including the Media-TIC building in Barcelona, a solar farm in Catalonia and energy-free flying in the Pyrenees. We will then travel to Los Angeles and visit off-grid houses and universities while looking at mobility strategies, electric vehicles, sailing and hydrogen cars. The investigation will begin with students working in pairs, initiating research by analysing present conditions and local threads of global warming. Following this collective assignment each student will devise their own brief relating to one of the seven conflicted territories as a case study. This will act as the facilitator to the final project, a large-scale structure with a performative skin that provides local solutions to highlighted problems. Throughout the year technological, scientific and political consultants will assist the students with their research. The unit travel, research and design projects are devised to allow students to think about the possibility of a GGG and Gaia architecture.

UNIT STAFF Enric Ruiz Geli studied architecture in Barcelona. He founded Cloud 9 in 1997, an interdisciplinary architectural team in Barcelona that works at the interface between architecture and art, digital processes and technological material development.

Edouard Cabay graduated from the Architectural Association in 2005. He has worked for Foreign Office Architects and Anorak and is currently working with Cloud 9, where he runs various international projects.

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Enric Ruiz Geli Edouard Cabay Nora Graw

Nora Graw graduated from Greg Lynn’s Master Class at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. For Cloud 9, she compiles and directs the office’s research agenda. The Barrier-Cities powered by bio-etheric ovo-pacs that protect the remaining settlements of humans on earth against the phantoms. Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within.

DIPLOMA 19 Big Shed Diploma 19 this year will be a unique collaboration between the Diploma School and the newly established MArch Design & Make programme, developing design methodologies in which making is an integral part of the design process. The work itself will focus upon the design and prototyping of a lightweight long-span building – a 500m2 ‘big shed’ for a full-scale prototyping and fabrication facility for the AA at Hooke Park. This assembly workshop, to be completed in Autumn 2011, has precise functional requirements, giving us the oppurtunity to explicity test the relationships among form, function, material and construction, as well as the environmental and phenomenal conditions of this richly wooded site. The first term starts in London with intense design-and-fabricate studies through which relevant mechanisms for exploiting the directness of digital fabrication will be determined. In parallel, we will research the histories and technologies of lightweight clear-span sheltered space (for example, the principles and qualities of Ferdinand Dutert’s Palais des Machines, Pier Luigi Nervi’s hangars or Frei Otto’s gridshells) and visit other related projects. Next we shift in scale to test ideas at 1:1, designing and building site-specific occupiable structures in the Hooke Park woodland. The feedback generated by these physical artefacts, their representation and construction will lead to individual design propositions that qualify the nature of light, space and shelter. From the start of second term the unit will be based full-time at Hooke Park and will become increasingly collective, synthesising the propositions so as to develop a single schematic design, detailed documentation and a full-scale construction prototype. We will work with landscape architects to integrate the project within the Hooke Park masterplan and with consultant engineers on the technical systems. Each student will retain design responsibilities relating to their original proposition, which will also determine the theme of their final prototype piece and project documentation. We will be looking for technically and conceptually compelling solutions to what appears to be a simple brief.

UNIT STAFF Martin Self is an engineer and designer who has taught design and theory at the AA since 2004. He was a founder member of Arup’s Advanced Geometry Group, studied architectural theory at the AA, and has provided structural engineering and form-finding

consultancy within practices such as Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio.

Piers Taylor is a partner in award winning architects Mitchell Taylor Workshop, a unit master at the University of Cambridge, and the founder of the annual Studio in the Woods which is concerned with the testing of ideas through making.

UNDERGRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Martin Self Piers Taylor Kate Darby

Kate Darby is principal of rural architectural practice, KDA. She is a founder member of Studio in the Woods and has taught design studio at Bath University and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Interior of Ferdinand Dutert’s Palais des Machines, Paris, 1889

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. Third and Fifth Year students additionally 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 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 in-depth 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 allow students the opportunity to establish and develop their own individual interests and direction within the school.

UNDERGRADUATE: COMPLEMENTARY STUDIES

HISTORY & THEORY STUDIES History and Theory Studies courses run over all five years of a student’s 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 a function – writing. Architects are increasingly expected at a professional level to describe and analyse both designs and buildings in written form. Writing is a central skill for the architect and the lack of it would stunt 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 and through course requirements to develop 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. Such 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 students will be introduced to an understanding of the diversity of theoretical concepts and the history of architecture via a series of select themes that travel in time from antiquity to the present. 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 students will study a variety of seminal twentieth-century buildings. By studying plans and other forms of architectural representation students will develop experience and ways of critically understanding architecture. 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 Autumn Term only. These 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. Students, who wish, 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. History and Theory Studies organises evening lectures, special events and symposia. This year’s Friday lectures by Mark Cousins will be on Technology and the Subject. The course document proivdes a full account of courses and reading lists and will be available at the beginning of term. It contains relevant dates and new regulations concerning student work.

UNDERGRADUATE

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR Mark Cousins

Ornament: Reconstructing Architecture’s Battle Royal, HTS seminar, 2009/10

HISTORY & THEORY STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

First, Second and Third Year courses take place in Autumn and Winter Terms.

Diploma School courses take place in the Autumn Term only.

First Year: Constructs + Contexts An Introduction to Histories and Theories of Architecture and Urbanism Course Lecturer: Lara Belkind Course Tutor: Mollie Claypool Teaching Assistants: Daniel Ayat and Marlie Mul This course introduces foundational concepts and seeks to create a dialogue between contemporary practice and the history of architecture from antiquity to the present. Employing wide-view thematic lenses such as media, technology, utopia and fantasy, we will explore key moments in a global history of buildings, cities and texts. Although rooted in the western tradition, we will draw on case studies from a range of continents and cultures. Our approach will incorporate an analysis of evolving theoretical concepts of formal production and aesthetics and will also situate built environment constructs within their social and political contexts. Course readings will provide an orientation in key ideas while writing assignments emphasise the development of original arguments and criticism.

The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture Pier Vittorio Aureli The seminar starts by posing the question ‘What is Architecture?’ By highlighting and arguing six ‘projects’ in which the notion and the practice of architecture has been deeply theorised in its most essential aspects the seminar will not answer the initial question in a straightforward manner. The projects presented week by week will be the theories and work of Donato Bramante, Domenico Fontana, Andrea Palladio, Etienne Louis Boullée, Oswald Mathias Ungers and OMA. The seminar will maintain that the essential nature of architecture has emerged less in vacuo, meaning in the abstract space of treatises, and rules, and much more within the accidental, critical and precarious space of the city. Towards such space architecture has projected exemplary and paradigmatic forms. It is precisely by struggling with the city that architecture has revealed its absolute form.

Second Year: Architecture and its Pasts Course Lecturer: Mark Cousins Course Tutor: Ryan Dillon Teaching Assistant/s: Alejandra Celedon and Ivonne Santoyo 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: 16 Canonical Buildings and Texts + 16 Alternatives, 1900–68 Course Lecturers: Christopher Pierce and Brett Steele Teaching Assistants: Shumi Bose, Braden Engel and Emanuel Rocha Ferreira de Sousa The course will continue to recalibrate its 16 entries to a twentieth-century architectural canon while also introducing an equal number of alternative, less consensual, projects that signal other important architectural trajectories in this period. The course will start with the Amsterdam Bourse and Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime and finish with the Vanna Venturi House and Denise Scott Brown’s and Robert Venturi’s ‘On Ducks and Decoration’. On a week-by-week basis students will come to understand and interpret key texts and decipher their different terms and issues. At the same time, they will learn ways to comprehend and analyse wildly different architectural projects and consider and question the role of the architect in practice. Between design and architectural theory there is a constant exchange of categories and students will develop knowledge of these and the wide range of debates and practices defining modern architecture.

Flow Lara Belkind This seminar investigates the spaces and infrastructures of an emerging twenty-first-century urban paradigm: the polycentric mega-city or ‘city of flows’. Focusing on high-speed transport and communications links, we will employ frameworks from the field of science, technology, society studies (STS) and the work of Bruno Latour to explore the cultural complexity underlying technological mega-projects. On the one hand, splintering and specialisation have characterised the evolution of the city from node to network. The design of a network is itself a battleground upon which the form of the metropolis and its politics are determined – and the line between civil and social engineering is finely drawn. Yet infrastructure may open an ‘other space’ in the city: a heterotopia as conceptualised by Michel Foucault. Networks can also operate as liminal zones that invite participation or subversion in a dispersed and polarised metropolis. This is a new public sphere, appropriated by graffiti artists, political protest, flash mobs, teen subcultures and the subtle everyday exchanges of urban dwellers. This is not my Beautiful House Mark Campbell Scratch beneath the surface of normality and you are likely to find the complete opposite – the perverse, paranoiac, or maladjusted. This course will examine the architectural dynamics of normalcy and perversion in the post-war American suburb through a critical reading of a series of textural, cultural, and filmic references. As JG Ballard once offered, this architecture expressed his fear that ‘nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again, the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul’.

HISTORY & THEORY STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

The History of Homecoming Mark Cousins The history and nature of ‘home’ causes a great deal of trouble for architectural analysis. At one level the category of ‘home’ is related to the ‘house’ and thus to the nature of domestic space and architectural form. On the other hand, the term ‘home’ has importantly migrated in historical terms to include such things as the region or the nation of one’s origin. Clearly this has created important consequences for nationalism, and for political conflict. It also creates a condition of homelessness which refers not to just the lack of a house but to exile, migration and of inhabiting the planet without a visa. This course tackles these problems through the history of stories and aspirations to homecoming. It starts by considering the most famous homecoming of Homer’s Odyssey and looks at a twentieth-century version in the film of Jean Luc Godard, ‘Le Mépris’. The Jean-Eric (or ‘Eight lectures on everything Zaha hates’) Paul Davies Jonathan Meades’ ten-page essay (‘Zaha: The First Great Female Architect’; Intelligent Life, The Economist 2008) is the ‘best thing I’ve read about architecture for years’, said a good friend of mine, who was the best architect I knew till he started throwing so much coke up his nose. In that sentence resides the content of the course: a penetrating if oblique and over-stylish essay; a smart but inebriated and now dulled individual (lost); a hoity, self-aggrandising and often preposterous discourse to be slapped around; a concern for the everyday, for the wider facts (whatever they are) with Bukowskiesque leanings. Ornament: Between Virtue and Iniquity Oliver Domeisen The Rococo of the eighteenth century, the stylistic eclecticism of the nineteenth century, and the Art Nouveau of the early twentieth century have habitually been described as architectural periods of decline and decadence. But who is it that condemns such ornamental virtuosity? And what are their ulterior motives? Are there alternative points of view? Using source texts from all three periods we will discover how ornament had repeatedly become the battleground upon which the future of architecture was forged. Authors such as William Hogarth, Gottfried Semper, Owen Jones, Alois Riegl, John Ruskin, Louis Sullivan or Adolf Loos have all defined ornament for their own age and for their own wilful objectives. We will discuss the historical contexts, underlying pathologies and enduring legacies of these seminal texts, and we will determine their relevance in establishing a desperately needed contemporary theoretical framework. We will also discover how each author provides us with interpretative tools that allow us to critically assess contemporary ornamental production, be it by Herzog & de Meuron, Toyo Ito or you. This course will give you a glimpse into one of architecture’s biggest conspiracies and equip you with the knowledge and vocabulary to partake in a rapidly emerging discourse.

100

Error: The False Economy of Precision in Architecture Francesca Hughes If we put aside the dominant narratives of twenty-first-century architecture, an alternative account emerges that might go something like this: things just got more and more precise. Or did they? How precisely defined is the term ‘precision’ in the first place? Can we make a distinction between effective and redundant precision in its control of error? Why is error aligned with matter and not form? If effective precision was not always actually increased and the architect’s fear of error (with matter in tow) only symbolically assuaged, then what other undeclared agendas were served? And how exactly does the space of a margin for error operate within the greater spatiality of practice? This course argues that from the removal of ornament to the invention of standards and specifications, or later, the radical inflation of precision in digitalisation, the way architecture understands, fears and engages with error has silently steered its cultural and technological transformations. A critical analysis of the practical and symbolic performance of precision and the shadow category of error will bring us to understand differently what lies behind some of contemporary practice’s modus operandi: instrumentalism, parametricism and optimisation. Through a series of case studies of key cultural and technological shifts in twenty-first-century architectural production we will address the shifting role of error and chart the ever-increasing fetishisation and opportunistic colonisation of the false economy of the apparently precise. Polity and Space John Palmesino The seminar investigates the relations between the process of construction of inhabited space and the forms of polity in the twenty-first century. Using architecture as both the object and the method of enquiry, we will analyse a series of complex territorial transformations to reveal the underlying organisational processes in the theoretical junctures between notions of inhabitation, architecture, space, territory, government and intervention. The contemporary territory is the seat of a multiplicity of transformational patterns and evolutive rhythms wrought by concurrent and often distant interests and promoted by a number of actors. Their interplay and competition reshapes, carves, moulds and reorganises their spaces of operation. Natural, mineral, technological, linguistic, biological, economic, political, cultural, social and institutional factors constantly interact and form the materials that constitute the complex dynamics of the contemporary territory. The seminar will explore a series of transformations in the connections between organisation of contemporary politics and their spaces of operation with architecture and urbanism being agents of that relation.

101

HISTORY & THEORY STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

Architecture and Beauty, A Troubled Relationship Yael Reisner Good architecture and brilliant buildings are mostly judged by their capacity to produce an aesthetic experience. Yet people outside the profession are surprised to discover that architectural design is neither led by nor generated through a process that is engaged with aesthetic issues or visual thinking. Some of the reasons why architects are reluctant to generate architecture through its appearance are a result of a culture initiated in the early twentieth century, when the perception of the individual’s wide pallette of senses and judgments was substituted with a unified public opinion. Subjectivity became a taboo in architecture, and objectifying the design process was the main agenda. Focusing on technological aspects or on intellectualising the design process became equally attractive options for architects. Nevertheless personal expression is a reflection of one’s culture and, architecturally, a visual discrimination that comments on a broader, collective cultural spectrum. It is through culture that architectural poetics are evolving. The aesthetic capacity of architecture is charged by visual qualities that might evoke emotions in people. This is when beauty comes into the conversation. Landscape Patrick Wright The course concerns the recent work of Patrick Wright, whose writings express a long-held interest in the subject, both in the urban and rural landscape. Recently he has worked with the film director Patrick Keiller and this generates the starting point of the course. Patrick Wright is a writer, and author of, amongst other works, Living in an Old Country (1985), The Village that died for England (1995) and Tank – the Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000). He wrote a regular column for The Guardian in the 1990s and regularly contributes to the Washington Post, The Independent and The Guardian newspapers. Open Lecture Course: Technology and the Subject Mark Cousins Fridays at 5.00pm in the Lecture Hall This year’s lecture series will attempt to grapple with two different but related issues concerning technology. The first is concerned with the question of how the introduction of new technologies affects what we will call the experience of the human subject. How are we to assess their consequences? This section of the course will take a number of case histories as examples of the issues that such an analysis raises. The cases themselves will include writing, printing, telephony and phonography. The second half of the course will consider the inverse case – to what extent can we consider certain psychical organisations such as repression, projection, and conscience as a form of technology, a technology of the self.

102

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR AND 2ND YEAR LECTURER Mark Cousins is Director of History and Theories. He has taught at the AA for many years in the Undergraduate programme, the Graduate programme and the PhD programme. He is a founding member of the Graduate School, the London Consortium, has been Visiting Professor at Columbia University and is currently Guest Professor at South Eastern University Nanjing China.

Brett Steele is Director of the AA School. His research and writings can be found online at brettsteele.net

COURSE LECTURERS Lara Belkind is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University where she also earned Master’s degrees in Architecture and in Urban Planning. She has taught at the Yale School of Architecture and at Harvard and has worked professionally creating large-scale design and redevelopment plans with public agencies in New York and Washington DC. Her publications include a study of bloggers and urban transformation on New York’s Lower East Side and a history of urban camouflage in that neighbourhood since the 1970s. As a Fulbright Scholar, she documented Paris’s Hôtels Industriels. Her dissertation examines infrastructure as a site of conflict and negotiation in contemporary Paris.

Ryan Dillon is currently working for EGG Office based in Los Angeles. He is a tutor in the Design as Research Laboratory programme at the Architectural Association. He is a graduate of the AA and Syracuse University School of Architecture. He has previously worked at Moshe Safdie and Associates.

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 Ron Arad’s Design Museum, ‘In Praise of the Harpoon’ (2010); EMBT’s Shanghai Pavilion, ‘Chinese Whispers’ (2010); and, with Tom Weaver, ‘In Conversation with Léon Krier’ (2010). He formed Mis-Architecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Chris Matthews in 2000.

COURSE TUTORS Mollie Claypool is an architect and educator. She is currently a tutor at the AA, the University of Reading and the University of Brighton, and is a Project Editor at Phaidon Press. She has previously worked at James Harb Architects, Werner Sobek NY, and ARX Kabul in New York.

PROGRAMME STAFF William Firebrace is an architect and author of Marseille Mix, recently published by AA Publications, and teaches in various London schools of architecture. CONSULTANTS Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. His theoretical studies focus on architectural form, political theory and urban history. After graduating from the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia, he obtained masters and PhD degrees at the Berlage Institute/ Delft University of Technology. At the Berlage Institute he heads the ‘City as a Project’ PhD programme. He is the co-founder of Dogma, with Martino Tattara, a prize-winning architectural collective.. Mark Campbell is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. His research interests include contemporary American

103

culture between 1960 and 1975, paranoia, cultural exhaustion and dreams. A practising architect, he has taught at Auckland University, Princeton University and the Cooper Union. Paul Davies has lectured at the AA since 1997, predominantly on the subject of Las Vegas and entertainment architecture. He writes for Modern Painters and other magazines, and is coeditor of The Architect’s Guide to Fame (2005). Oliver Domeisen studied at ETH Zurich and the AA. From 1997–2000 he worked as project Architect for Zaha Hadid; since 2000 as director of dlm ltd; from 2001–07 as Unit Master for Inter 9; and from 2005–07 as a Studio Master for AAVSP. Since 2007 he is the Unit Master for Dip 13. He currently writes and lectures – and has curated an exhibition – on the topic of ornament. Francesca Hughes joined the AA in 2003 where she has been unit master of Dip 15 since 2004 and intermittently taught HTS. She has lectured internationally and served as external examiner in numerous schools, both in the U.K. and abroad. Author/editor of The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press: 1996), she is currently completing a book entitled Error. Hughes Meyer Studio is an art / architecture practice whose work has been published by AR, ANY, Art Forum, Merrel, Routledge and Wiley and exhibited in the UK and abroad. John Palmesino is an architect and urbanist. He is a Diploma Unit Master at the AA and is currently Research Advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. He also teaches at the Research Architecture Centre, Goldsmiths in London

where he is pursuing his Doctoral research. He has established with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog Territorial Agency. He previously has been Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel and he is founding member of multiplicity, an international research network. Yael Reisner has a PhD in Architecture from RMIT in Australia, a Diploma from the Architectural Association in London and a BSc in Biology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She runs her own Studio of Architecture and Design. She currently teaches internationally (Sci-Arc in LA, Lund Univ. in Sweden). She has taught at the Bartlett (UCL). Her book with Fleur Watson, titled Architecture and Beauty, Conversations with Architects about A Troubled Relationship was published by Wiley UK in April 2010. She is one of the contributors to the AD Magazine on the issue of Exuberance, March 2010. Lately she was commissioned by the Karelic company to be the art director of a new porcelain lighting line – Ostracon. (www.yaelreisner.com) Patrick Wright is a writer, author amongst other works of Living in an Old Country (1985), The Village that Died for England (1995) and Tank – The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000). He wrote a regular column for the Guardian in the 1990s and regularly contributes to the Washington Post, Independent and Guardian newspapers. TEACHING ASSISTANTS Daniel Ayat Shumi Bose Alejandra Celedon Braden Engel Marlie Mul Ivonne Santoyo Emanuel de Sousa

MEDIA STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

HEAD OF MEDIA STUDIES Eugene Han

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, Media Studies offers a set of computer laboratory-based courses that focus on direct instruction in a series of significant digital applications in the architectural pipeline. Studio-based courses for Second Year students are also open to participation by all students 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, to the innovative skills associated with traditional forms of architectural media and representation, and to the today’s most experimental forms of information, communication and fabrication technologies. Media Studies emphasises the integration of established design techniques with progressive media and production methods, underlining the potential of production 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. Media Studies Lab Courses Working in close relationship with the AA Computer Lab, Media Studies offers a range of workshop-format courses that allow students to 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 for concise one-day courses that cover the fundamentals of many common computer applications, covering content such as 3D Modeling, Computer Aided Drafting, Imaging, Publication, Digital Computation and Scripting, and other relevant software. First Year Courses The Violet Hour Sue Barr, Autumn and Winter Terms Photographs made during the fleeting light of dusk present technical challenges but also the opportunity to explore the notions of transience and mysterious psychological states. This course will introduce students to the basics of photography and digital cameras whilst producing images shot within the parameters of this transient time.

104

Student: Song Jie Lim Course: Painting Architecture (Alex Kaiser), 2009–10

105

MEDIA STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

Translation Object to Drawing Shin Egashira, Autumn Term The links between procedures used in representing and making space are explored through the translation of objects into drawings and the interpretation of sets of drawing into models.

Colour and Light Antoni Malinowski, Winter Term The course focuses on the interaction of subtractive and additive colour. We will consider the micro-structure of pigments and other materials as a source of the perceptual interdependence of micro and macro scale.

One-to-One Instruments Shin Egashira, Winter Term Techniques for constructing performative instruments, including collage and bricolage, are tested through application to the city. We will be working on both drawings and physical assemblages to develop design concepts.

Object Organisation Marlie Mul, Autumn Term In a course focused on formal improvisation, we will work towards the creation of 1:1 scale functional objects made from styrofoam. Working according to a set of parameters, the object will be the site for finding a successful structure by means of both improvisation and calculation.

Life Drawing Trevor Flynn, Autumn and Winter Terms The figure will be used as a departure point as we work through several exercises that enable us to study tone, mass, line and simple underlying structures in a range of drawing media and in short and longer poses from male and female models. We will also explore concept sketches, viewpoint, biomorphic improvisations and remind ourselves of the Matisse maxim ‘exactitude isn’t truth’.

Substantial Coating Marlie Mul, Winter Term Further research and experiment with coatings will follow in the second term, allowing students who took the autumn term course ‘Object Organization’ to complete their object with a suitable coating. Students who did not participate in the earlier course will research strengthening and coating materials that can be applied to three-dimensional objects.

Painting Architecture Alex Kaiser, Autumn and Winter Terms Students will become confident in drawing with perspective – from quick sketching to more complicated perspective constructs. A set of drawings will be produced that constantly develop a better understanding of perspective, moving from one, two, and three-point perspective to orthographic translations and drawing complex curvatures within scenes and objects.

Video: First Year Joel Newman, Autumn Term Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world – Jean-Luc Godard In these sessions we will make a 1500-frame animation using video technology. That’s one minute in real time. After looking at examples of animated work will we embark on an exploration of techniques and methods. No techniques are excluded but students must create their own soundtracks.

Information Design Heather Lyons, Autumn and Winter Terms How does the way we present information influence the way it is perceived and understood? The aim of this course is to introduce students to different techniques for the presentation of information. Each session will look at different toolsets and devices, from the typographic through to graphing, charting and mapping tools, the iconographic and other representational devices and techniques.

Second Year Courses F2F Shany Barath, Autumn Term This course will experiment with systemic procedures and speculate on the possibilities of production modes as both performative and sensual aspects of digital craft. Focusing on subtractive fabrication processes, we will explore issues of non-sequential scalar growth, surface articulation and the fenestration of continuous non-repeating surfaces. Through our ability to design directly at the information level, we will seek a novel range of control sensibilities for each and every part of our geometrical design, and trigger a generative approach towards the craft of carving/contouring.

Materiality of Colour Antoni Malinowski, Autumn Term 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.

106

ColorCode/DataMurals Shany Barath, Winter Term This course observes BioImaging visualisation techniques as potential indicators for new computational methods revealing extreme high data resolutions and unique contemporary exposure of materiality. Within an architectural realm that is in itself composed of multi-scalar material properties, we will first expose the ghosted data sets of simple physical envi-

107

MEDIA STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

ronments in order to find correlating edges between the physical and the digital. Through the development of data-sorting techniques (geometry, colour, fabrication method, etc.) we will translate variables into design components of both performance and effect. Drawing(s) Animation Valentin Bontjes Van Beek, Autumn Term In this course we will animate ideas by creating and erasing drawings both in analogue and digitally. We will explore animation technique through the capture and erasure of drawings on a single canvas. Animation is that which gives life to the static. This distance between drawings and animations is what we wish simultaneously to explore, manipulate and convey. The course will culminate with a short animated filmic clip. Pending Structures Valentin Bontjes Van Beek, Winter Term Going beyond the scale of the standard model, this course focuses on developing a working understanding of fabrication through designing on the CNC for an actual scale. Throughout the term, students will develop 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. Replicas v.1 Monia De Marchi, Autumn Term This year’s investigation will create replicas of an initial architectural detail. In the first phase replicas will be manufactured with similar materials but differing forms producing a range of copies that transition from a reductive to exaggerated. With the use of varied fabrication processes such as CNC machining, we will manufacture flexible moulds in which different replicas can be originated. The final output will be a series of constructed details with the related drawings necessary for fabrication and manufacturing. Replicas v.2 Monia De Marchi, Winter Term During the spring term we will maintain the formal attributes of the detail such as shape and dimension while changing the materiality. Using different methods of manufacturing, students will investigate ways of replicating details within an economy of construction procedures. The final output will be a series of constructed details with the related drawings necessary for their fabrication and manufacturing.

108

Digital Ceramics Adam Furman and Marco Ginex, Autumn Term The course focuses on the conceptual and technical aspects associated with the fabrication of digitally controlled architectural ceramic surfaces designed with 3D modelling software. The aim of the course is to provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary to design and create fully fired and glazed, ceramic tiling elements. Digital Ceramics Adam Furman and Marco Ginex, Winter Term Building on the material investigations of the autumn term, the course will deepen the plane of experimentation to probe the possibilities of additional three-dimensionally complex forms, pushing the boundaries of what ceramic elements and surfaces can contain. Students will develop from digital design through to firing and glazing highly articulated and robust architectural details. Customised Computation Eugene Han, Winter Term This course will focus on the manipulation of digital geometry using scripted techniques within a NURBS modelling environment, using Python for Rhino. We will cover the basics of scripted logic to customise geometry using iterative logic. Students will 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 ongoing unit projects. Graphical User Interfaces Eugene Han, Winter Term In the spring term, students will be extending their knowledge in the scripting environment to include techniques in developing graphical user interfaces to control workflow strategies within Rhino using Python script, with associated .NET components specifically within the Windows environment. Students will produce and document relevant processes to determine the most effective customised workflows for design research projects. Rendering Environments Matej Hosek, Autumn and Winter Terms Using both 2D digital collage and 3D renderings, we will experiment with the genius loci phenomenon, aiming to achieve a seamless manipulation of the mainly photographic environment. The Invisible Visible Max Kahlen, Autumn and Winter Terms This course will explore two contrasting forms of representation through a sensible transition from the beautiful reality of the photograph to the fascinating abstraction of the drawing. In a series of workshops students will learn surreal but pragmatic techniques to produce one image and one drawing, capturing precisely one moment and one idea.

109

MEDIA STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

Painting Architecture Alex Kaiser, Autumn Term Students will become confident in drawing with perspective – from quick sketching to more complicated perspective constructs. A set of drawings will be produced that constantly develop a better understanding of perspective, moving from one, two, and three-point perspective to orthographic translations and drawing complex curvatures within scenes and objects. Ecclesial Anatomy Tobias Klein, Autumn Term This course seeks to cross medical voxel based softwares (used for Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with representational mesh-based 3D packages. We will investigate the geometries of the great churches of London, amalgamating properties of MRI-scans. We will then create models fusing sheet material technologies (CNC,laser-cutting,etc.) and 3D-printing techniques. Mundanities Tobias Klein, Winter Term Opposing a computational design trend of scripted logic, the course explores digital sculpting by the means of poly-modelling/mesh geometries modification. Using animation-derived software (3DS Max and Modo) this course seeks to fuse, hybridise and collage the vast 3D components freely available within the city of London creating a rich and unexpected landscape of oddities and digitally sculpted interventions. Video: Intermediate Joel Newman, Winter Term The course will investigate private, new spaces shaped by the audio components that you will create in the initial stages of the project. The piece and its structure, which may be without narrative, will be a minimum of three minutes in length and will incorporate live-action footage. Colour Photography: The Original Goswin Schwendinger, Autumn Term This year Colour Photography will again focus on the constructing of an desired image. We will dissect our personal life strategically to come up with an all encompassing scenario for a staged set. A constructed reality, using all means of photography at hand. ‘It changed my life’. Colour Photography: The Classic Goswin Schwendinger, Spring Term The Classic has all the ingredients of The Original plus some extra toppings. ‘One not to be missed’.

110

HEAD OF MEDIA STUDIES Eugene Han is the founder of AVA-Studio, researching and developing systems in industrial design, architecture and planning. eugenehan@ aaschool.ac.uk MEDIA STUDIES STAFFShany Barath studied architecture at TUDelft in the Netherlands, and completed her Post-professional Masters Degree at the Architectural Association Graduate program. She established together with Gary Freedman SHaGa Studio; an interdisciplinary design practice at the interface of architecture, visual art, ecology and computation. Shany has practiced Architecture with Ben van-Berkel _UNStudio in Amsterdam and Adriaan Geuze _West 8 in Rotterdam. Sue Barr heathcotebarr.org Valentin Bontjes Van Beek trained as a carpenter in Germany before attending the AA, graduating in 1998. He has practised architecture in Berlin, New York and London, and has taught at the AA since 2001, where he is currently a First Year Tutor. Monia De Marchi is an architect who studied in Venice and completed her M. Arch at the AA graduate programme. In addition to teaching the Media Studies course, she has been Unit Master at the AA since 2005, and she co-directs the Spring Semester Programme.

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 Trienalle 2000. He has taught at the AA since 1990 and is currently Unit Master of Diploma Unit 11. Trevor Flynn MFA Goldsmiths, is Course Director of Drawing At Work and is 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 R.I.S.D. Adam Nathaniel Furman is a director at Madam Studio. He studied at the Architectural Association, graduating with honours in 2008, and has worked at OMA in Rotterdam, and Boyarsky Murphy in London. Marco Ginex is a director at Madam Studio. He studied at the Architectural Association, graduating with the annual AA Prize in 2009, and has worked for Massimiliamo Fuksas Architetto in Rome, as well as for DLM Architects in London. Matej Hosek studied architecture at the Technical University of Liberec and has worked at MilkStudio Architects. He is a regular consultant on computational and imaging platforms. Anderson Inge studied architecture at the AA and at the University of Texas at Austin before completing additional academic training in structural engineering (at MIT) and sculpture (at St Martins).

111

Alex Kaiser graduated from Oxford Brookes University, and has worked in Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners. Following this he attended and graduated from the AA. He is currently obsessed with combining traditional painting techniques with experimental architectural drawing. Tobias Klein studied architecture at the RWTH (Aachen, Germany), the University of Applied Arts (Vienna,Austria) and the Bartlett School for Architecture (London, UK) and has worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au. He is a founder of .horhizon, an experimental architectural design platform and is researching narrative design in digital environments at the Royal College of Art and as a First Year Unit Master at the AA since 2008. Heather Lyons is an architect and interaction designer who has designed everything from mobile handsets to interactive kiosks and environments. Herfocus has been on mobile interactivity, designing handsets for companies like Vodafone, though she’s now researching interactive environments with an interest in kinetic architecture. Heather 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 in the UK and Europe, and his paintings are in most major collections, including 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 from The Netherlands, living and working in Berlin and London. She received a Masters Degree in Architectural Histories & Theories from the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London in 2009 and a Bachelors Degree in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht in 2003. She is an initiator of the online artists’ publication publishing platform www.xym.no that was launched in 2009 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 taught Video within Media Studies since 1998. Goswin Schwendinger was born in Belgium, became an architect in Switzerland, went to Spain to learn photography and moved to London to live. He has been teaching at the AA since 1999 and recently collaborated with Paul McCarthy on a Tate Modern publication.

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 that engage in a wide range of disciplines and current projects. It is founded on the provision of a substantial knowledge base, developed through critical case studies of contemporary fabrication processes, constructed artefacts and buildings. These studies include reflection and experimentation with the ideas and techniques taught. Knowledge acquired in this way generates a ‘means’, a set of precepts 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. In these years students concentrate on critical case studies, analysis and material experiments, undertaking two courses in each year. In the Third Year, lecture coursework, workshop experiments and technical ambitions are synthesised in a detailed Technical Design. 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, a substantial individual work that is developed under the guidance of Technical Studies. The Thesis is contextualised as part of a broader dialogue in which the technical and the architectural agendas that arise within the unit are synthesised. Its critical development is pursued through case studies, material experiments and extensive research and consultation. The Prospectus contains a brief summary of the courses offered. Full details of the courses and a statement of the course regulations will be found in the Complementary Studies Handbook, which will be available at the beginning of the Autumn Term.

UNDERGRADUATE

DIPLOMA MASTER Javier Castanon INTERMEDIATE MASTER Wolfgang Frese

First Year Workshop Introduction Making is an important part of the programme for the year, and students spend a significant portion of their time in the workshop. The induction sessions are run by the workshop staff and cover the use of tools, machines and facilities, including correct safety procedures. Case Study (Compulsory Course – Autumn Term) Marissa Kretsch with Ben Godber This introductory course teaches students the skills to examine a building with a critical and technical eye, ranging through research, analysis and drawing to first-hand experience, site visits and physical modelling. Assembled in groups, students will undertake a case study of a contemporary or iconic London structure. From analogies with nature through to case studies of ‘live’ projects (currently in the design process or construction phase), the core topics of structure, materials and construction will be

112

Barcelona ceramics, Rebecca Crabtree, 2009–10

113

TECHNICAL STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

explored in class. Each student group will build a physical model of their structure, testing it to failure. In the final class, each team will be required to present their case study. Structures (Compulsory Course – Autumn Term) Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge This course aims to develop a feel for forces in structures. Students will learn how shape and material influence the performance of real structures. Designing a structure requires choices about materials, assembly and performance in use, making it essential to have the tools to predict the behaviour of the unbuilt object while it is only an idea. After an introduction to the development of structural form through past centuries, common structural elements will be examined in order to gain an understanding of the behaviour of structures under load. During the lecture programme students will design, make and test a structural model as a competition. Intermediate School Second Year students take Structures and one of two other courses offered. Third Year students, in addition to the Structures course, undertake a Technical Design study as part of their main project, which synthesises their individual architectural ambitions with an account of the material production of the proposal. Structures (Second Year Compulsory Course) Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge This course examines how the structural elements of a building carry load. Well-known buildings are analysed to show how strength and safety can be predicted by calculation. Physical models are made and load-tested to illustrate deformation and failure. Emphasis is also placed on finding idealised conceptual models to demonstrate structural behaviour, in particular the stability of the whole building structure. Examinations are made of how forces create stresses and deformations in architectural structures taking account material properties. Material and Technologies (Second Year Optional Course) Carolina Bartram This course will conduct an investigation of the 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 (Second Year Optional Course) 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

114

immediate and quantifiable impact in terms of environmental performance. The course aims to provide 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. Structures (Third Year Compulsory Course) Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge This course introduces structural model analysis – inviting students to make and test scale models and 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 demonstrated and used to make predictions. Observed behaviour of physical models under load is used to establish the parameters of a detailed digital model that a computer can analyse. Third Year Design Project Wolfgang Frese with Dancho Azagra, Giles Bruce, Fernando Perez and Manja van de Worp Third Year students undertake a comprehensive design study 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 with support from technical teaching staff within the unit and from tutorials with Wolfgang Frese and the Intermediate TS staff. Seminars on specific relevant subjects are organised by the technical teaching staff and guest speakers as a means of further support. Diploma School Fourth Year Seminar Courses Fourth Year students choose two courses from the selection on offer and may attend others according to their interests: 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 ‘art of building’. We will focus on interdisciplinary collaboration since the architect, as lead consultant, has to constantly adjust and evaluate his designs to address these often contradict forces. Guest speakers from other consultantancy will discuss their own perspective on the importance of collaboration.

115

TECHNICAL STUDIES

UNDERGRADUATE

Small in Large – the Interrelation of Component and System Martin Hagemann For reasons of rationalisation, prefabrication, flexibility, exchangeability and maintenance the use of components in architecture has become very common. The course is aiming to give the designing architect an insight into the theory and practice of component based structures, their organisation, assembly, performance and the current and future research. Researchers from different European and American institutes will be invited to show 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 the most common types of constructions and is followed by detailed studies of structural principles and forms that describe the theory and potential of the various systems. The objective of the course 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. Technology Transfers or Technomimetics John Noel This course pushes the boundaries of precedence studies by exploring the relevance of the manufacturing of everyday life artefacts and the formation of living things to the technologies, processes and materials at use in the construction industry. Ranging from studies of food packaging techniques to automobile chain production processes to nanotechnology material research, the course will aim to expand the student’s technical awareness beyond the realms of traditional construction and encourage the application of these technology transfers to architectural designs. 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 territories where architecture and engineering meet. It examines the links between building form, energy and the micro/macro environment and reviews the development of building skin. An investiga-

116

tion of sustainability issues, passive energy design and renewable energy sources are examined through real projects that can generate exciting 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. Sustainable Urban Design Ian Duncombe A new course will be presented in the 2011/2012 academic year Fifth Year Technical Thesis Javier Castañón with Giles Bruce, Kenneth Fraser, Martin Hagemann, Paul Loh and John Noel The Technical Design Thesis is a substantial individual work developed under the guidance of Javier Castañón and the Diploma TS staff. The central interests may emerge from current or past design work, or from the many lecture and seminar courses the student has attended in previous years. The thesis is contextualised as part 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. Assessment is by a panel of Technical Studies tutors and unit staff, and full details are set out in the Complementary Studies handbook.

DIPLOMA MASTER Javier Castañón is in private practice as director of Castañón Associates (London) and Castañón Asociados (Madrid). INTERMEDIATE MASTER Wolfgang Frese studied at Stuttgart and the Bartlett. He is an associate at Alsop Architects working on many international projects. PROGRAMME STAFF Dancho Azagra is a chartered structural engineer. He has written about the subject of collaboration between architects and engineers in the design process. Giles Bruce is an architect specialising in environmental performance. He is director of A_Zero architects and in consultancy with BDSP

partnership. He studied in Ireland and Norway, and at the AA SED programme. Philip Cooper is technical director of Cameron Taylor Bedford, Consulting Engineers, in Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge Universit, Leeds University and at the AA. Kenneth Fraser has taught at the AA since 2007 and is a director of Kirkland Fraser Moor Architects (k-f-m.com). He has also served as an RIBA external examiner, an advisor to the Department of the Environment Construction Research and Innovation Strategy Panel. Martin Hagemann is an architect at Grimshaw’s, where he is a member of the computational design

117

research and biomimicry research groups. Anderson Inge studied architecture at the AA and at the University of Texas at Austin before completing additional academic training in structural engineering (at MIT) and sculpture (at St Martins). Paul Loh is educated in Singapore, Melbourne, at the University of East and the AADRL in 2000. He has previously worked for Ken Yeang and Zaha Hadid Architects. He has taught at the University of East London and is currently an associate at NEX. John Noel studied mathematics and physics in Clermont-Ferrand before completing a civil engineering degree at Imperial College, London

and the RWTH Aachen, Germany. He is a structural engineer at Buro Happold. Manja Van de Worp is a graduate of the AA’s Emergent Technologies & Design programme. Fernando Perez Fraile studied architecture in Spain and has worked at Frank O. Gehry and Associates. He joined IDOM in 1993 and set up IDOM UK. He has taught at the University of Navarre and has collaborated with the Technical Studies since 2002. CONSULTANTS Carolina Bartram Ian Duncombe Ben Godber Marissa Kretsch Emanuele Marfisi Simos Yannas Mohsen Zikri

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE Developing an understanding of architectural practice is a mandatory requirement within 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 and post-Part 2 students to help with work experience. Developing practice experience is essential preparation for the final Part 3 examination. 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 I. 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. Four additional lectures cover a wide range of subjects illustrating issues with real-life examples and well-known case studies. 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 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. 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 related 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

118

UNIT STAFF Javier Castañon Hugo Hinsley

UNDERGRADUATE

Alastair Robertson Robert Sparrow

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 approximately 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 2 require evidence of Professional Studies. Fifth Year students must achieve a pass in this course and include the assessed paper in their final portfolios. Professional Practice 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, UKBA liaison, as required. Review and sign-off of PEDR records – the Professional Education and Development Record (PEDR – 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.

119

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

UNDERGRADUATE

Part 3 AA Course and Exam in Professional Practice Leading to exemption from the ARB requirements for Part 3 Alastair Robertson and Robert Sparrow Each year, the AA provides two courses and examination programmes, that are approximately 10 weeks long, one beginning in March and the other in mid-September. Alastair Robertson, the AA’s Professional Studies Advisor (PSA) and Rob Sparrow, the Architectural Practice Coordinator, advise and help students through the process. There are currently 25 places available for each course and examination programme. Candidates are drawn from the AA, other UK schools and others who have had their initial architectural training outside the UK. Typically, pass rates exceed 75 per cent and any lack of success is generally caused by a lack of preparation or exposure to key practice activities such as contract administration. The ‘gold’ standard is to pass the ‘Part 3’ and thus be recognised as competent in architectural practice. The AA’s examination is formally recognised by the Architects Registration Board (ARB) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), meaning not only that students can become registered without further examination and use the title ‘Architect’ but also that employers, potential clients and insurers in the UK and most other countries in the world will recognise that they have reached the most critical benchmark in their career. An intensive full-time, two-week 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 delivered by experts from the world of architectural practice who are current with the latest changes in practice and procedure. It is not a foundation course, but the AA provides an extensive bibliography, lecture notes and past papers that are on a CD. The AA Part 3 programme uniquely brings together a group of many graduates from the AA, other UK schools, schools outside the UK and qualified practitioners involved in the course as Continuing Professional Development (CPD) The examination is a two-step process. First, candidates must establish their eligibility by submitting an essay and related documentation to the PSA for an Initial Assessment. Second, they must submit four written papers in a scenario-based examination and 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 years’ practice experience (three to four years is more usual), of which one year must be after passing Part 2 and one year must be working in the UK on UK-based projects and under the supervision of a UK-registered architect. All of these

120

details, including fees, are documented in the AA’s Part 3 Prospectus, which can be downloaded from the professional practice section on the AA website (www.aaschool.ac.uk/architecturalpractice). Although the Part 3 process at the AA follows the same standards adopted by all other recognised schools in the UK there are some differences. For example, the AA does not, like most other schools, require a case study. Our approach to grading examination papers follows the legal system where everything the candidate presents to the examiners forms part of a single ‘body of evidence’. The examiners can weight the component parts of the exam however they wish, to reach their decision of ‘competent’ or ‘not yet competent’. To support Part 3 candidates, a 48 week/year advisory and support programme is provided for students out in the practice environment. Meetings with the PSA are by appointment, through Rob Sparrow, and meetings are usually in the AA Members’ Room over a cup of coffee. Alastair will also visit students in their offices if the situation warrants it. For Part 3, the essential starting point of the process is to register with the school (through Rob Sparrow: sparrow_ro@aaschool.ac.uk) as soon as possible after completing Diploma School/Part 2. The registration fee for 2010/11 is £250, which covers the costs of practice monitoring, PEDR review and sign-off, an initial Part 3 Assessment and tutorials with the PSA, as required. For those subject to visa regulations, this is critical because the AA School cannot otherwise meet its sponsorship obligations to the UK Borders Agency. The PSA also cannot sign PEDR forms unless the student is registered with the AA School.

PROGRAMME STAFF Javier Castañón 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 housing, community buildings and urban development projects.

He also teaches in the Housing & Urbanism programme in the Graduate School. 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

121

Business School and has taught at the AA since 1971. As a senior consultant he has worked on several English new towns and St Katherine’s Docks in London and currently advises industry sector organisations in the UK and several governments in the Middle East on vocational training and qualification systems and policies.

The AA Graduate School includes eleven postgraduate programmes offering advanced studies in one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most dynamic learning environments. All enrolled students join the school in October 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 (AADRL), the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innovative team-based course in experimental architecture and urbanism, offers a Masters (MArch). Emergent Technologies & Design (MArch/MSc) emphasises forms of architectural design that proceed from innovative technologies. Sustainable Environmental Design (MArch/MSc) introduces new forms of architectural practice and design related to the environment and sustainability. Landscape Urbanism (MA) investigates the processes, techniques and knowledge related to the practices of contemporary urbanism. Housing & Urbanism (MA) rethinks urbanism as a spatial discipline through a combination of design projects and contemporary theory. History & Critical Thinking (MA) encourages a critical understanding of contemporary architecture and urban culture grounded in a knowledge of histories and forms of practice. 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. A new PhD by Design programme, provides a setting for advanced research and learning for architects, designers and other qualified professionals. The part-time Building Conservation course offers a two-year programme leading to an AA Graduate Diploma. All graduate degrees at the AA are validated by the Open University.

122

GRADUATE SCHOOL

DESIGN RESEARCH LAB Design Research: Experimentation and Innovation (v.14) 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.

DRL DIRECTOR Theodore Spyropoulos FOUNDER Patrik Schumacher

DRL PROGRAMME TUTORS Marta Malé-Alemany Alisa Andrasek Yota Adilenidou Shajay Bhooshan Lawrence Friesen Hanif Kara

Riccardo Merello Yusuke Obuchi Christos Passas Robert Stuart-Smith Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon

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 thesis design 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: Proto Design (v.3) In autumn term the DRL will continue to pursue its design research agenda, Proto Design, investigating digital and material forms of computational prototyping. Parametric and generative modelling techniques are coupled with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic feedback processes. New forms of spatial organisation will be explored that are not type- or context-dependent. The aim is to detect scenarios that challenge the parameter-identification that allows systems to evolve as ecologies of machines, as material and computational regulating systems, towards an architecture that is both adaptive and hyper-specific. This performance-driven approach seeks to develop novel design proposals concerned with the everyday. The iterative methodologies of the design studio will focus on the investigation 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.2) Proto-Design systems developed in Phase I will be tested in site-specific testing scenarios. Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Digital Materialism, examines behaviour as a catalyst to explore adaptive and deployable models. Yusuke Obuchi and Robert Stuart-Smith’s studio, Proto Tectonics, investigates the life-cycle of buildings. Patrik Schumacher and Christos Passas’s studio, Proto-Tower, is focusing on the design of inherently adaptive, parametric proto-types that intelligently vary general topological schemata across a wide range of parametrically specifiable site-conditions and briefs. Alisa Andrasek’s studio, Agentware, is exploring the potential of rewriting material agency via the agency of information. Marta MaléAlemany’s studio Machinic Control, examines architectural design processes incorporating novel digital fabrication.

124

Anon_SoftCast Tutor: Theodore Spyropoulos Team: Omrana Ahmed [USA – India] Mustafa El Sayed [Egypt], Sara Saleh [Italy – KSA] Nick Williams [Australia]

125

GRADUATE

DESIGN RESEARCH LAB

GRADUATE

Phase I Design Studio: Proto-Architectures Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa Andrasek, Patrik Schumacher, Theodore Spyropoulos, Robert Stuart-Smith Five design studios will continue to challenge the notion of the design project driven exclusively by contextual and programmatic parameters. Each design 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 2011/12, and applied to a series of specific briefs and sites for each studio. Phase I Design Workshops: Material Behaviour Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa Andrasek, Theodore Spyropoulos, Robert Stuart-Smith, Autumn Term Autumn term 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 Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa Andrasek, Yusuke Obuchi, Christos Passas, Patrik Schumacher, Robert Stuart-Smith, Theodore Spyropoulos, Autumn Term This five-week workshop in the midstage of Phase II addresses a detailed part of the spatial, structural, material and environmental systems of each team’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 II Design Studio: Urban Protocols Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa Andrasek, Yusuke Obuchi, Christos Passas, Patrik Schumacher, Robert Stuart-Smith, Theodore Spyropoulos, Autumn Term Design teams in five studios will carry forward their Phase I work on generative design systems, structures and prototypes in developing thorough Phase II design proposals. The aim is to develop adaptive models through proto-versioning that affords generative, transformative and parametric controlled systems that can be deployed on multiple sites. Systems will be developed to construct context-specificity, developing models of spatial practice that are hyperspecific rather than generic. The ambition is to design open systems that have the capacity to rethink conventions of practice through the design and fabrication of architectural prototypes and processes. Contemporary fabrication protocols will be explored to create correlations of nonstandard elemental distributions through an active engagement with digital and material interaction.

126

Phase I Core Seminars: Design as Research I – Open Source Robert Stuart-Smith, Autumn Term 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. Phase I Core Seminars: Embodied Patterns Alisa Andrasek, Autumn Term This seminar will investigate key ideas from the history of computation and contemporary sciences and their reverberations in the domain of architecture and design. It will probe concepts such as generative design, algorithmic information theory and key ideas from quantum physics, biology and systems theory as a knowledge resource and means of production. A productive dialogue will be instigated with experts from other fields, including mathematics, computer science, quantum physics and engineering, under the larger collaborative platform of Computational Salon. Synthesis: Project Submission, Writing & Research Documentation Mollie Claypool, Ryan Dillon, Autumn and Winter Terms These weekly sessions will review the basics of writing and research related to DRL course submissions. Presentations will cover resources in London, 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, Winter Term This core seminar will articulate Proto-Design as 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.

127

DESIGN RESEARCH LAB

GRADUATE

Design as Research II: Computational Space Alisa Andrasek, Winter Term 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. Digital Tools: Maya, Rhino, 3D Studio, Catia, Processing, Arduino & Macromedia – Software & Scripting Shajay Bhooshan, Brian Dale, Mustafa El Sayed, Chikara Inamura, Jose Manuel Sanchez, Diego Perez-Espitia, Robert Stuart-Smith, Paul Jeffries, Torsten Broeder, Autumn and Winter Terms 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.

DRL DIRECTOR Theodore Spyropoulos is director of the experimental architecture and design practice Minimaforms which published Minimaforms: Experiments in Communication in 2010. He is a visiting research fellow at MIT and has previously taught at the graduate schools of University of Pennsylvannia and the Royal College of Art Innovation Design Engineering Department. He has previously worked as a project architect at the offices of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid Architects. theo@minimaforms.com FOUNDER Patrik Schumacher is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. He studied philosophy and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart, 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. patrik.schumacher@ zaha-hadid.com DRL PROGRAMME TUTORS Marta Malé-Alemany is Co-director of the Masters Programme of the IAAC Institut d’Arquitectura Avancada de Catalunya. She previously taught at Sci-Arc and UCLA School of Architecture. marta@ male-alemany.com Alisa Andrasek is an experimental practitioner of architecture and computation in design and director of Biothing. She studied at the University of Zagreb and Columbia University and has taught at Columbia, Pratt, UPenn, RMIT Melbourne and RPI. andrasek@gmail.com

128

Yota Adilenidou studied at A.U.Th. and Columbia University. She has previously taught as an Adjunct Lecturer at AUTh and worked for Eisenman Architects, Evan Douglis and Sakellaridou & Papanikolaou Architects. yota@arch-hives.net Shajay Bhooshan is a researcher in the Computation and Design (co|de) group at Zaha Hadid Architects. He is a graduate of the DRL, and has taught computational design at various schools. Lawrence Friesen studied at Dalhousie University, Canada, and worked at a number of architectural practices in Canada before setting up the design geometry studio at Buro Happold. Over the past nine years he has participated in a number of complex projects whose innovative realisation has entailed digital fabrication. Hanif Kara is a co-founder of Adams Kara Taylor, a design-led structural engineering practice. He has assisted various diploma units at the AA since 1998 and is currently an examiner for the Institute of Structural Engineers and CABE Commissioner. Riccardo Merello specialises in developing innovative design methodologies based on multi-disciplinary systems optimisation. He has a MEng in structural engineering from MIT. He works in the Advanced Technology and Research Group and Arup Associates’ Unified Design Research Unit and other R&D teams at Arup.

129

Yusuke Obuchi studied at Princeton, Sci-Arc and the University of Toronto. He has worked at ROTO Architects and Reiser + Umemoto and is cofounder of Foresites, based in London. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky and New Jersey Institute of Technology. yobuchi@gmail.com Christos Passas studied at the AA, completing the AAGradDes in 1998. As Associate Director at Zaha Hadid Architects, he led the design for the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, among many other prestigious projects. Robert Stuart-Smith is a Design Director of Kokkugia, and former graduate of the AADRL. He has worked in the offices of Lab Architecture Studio and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners and previously taught at RMIT University, the University of East London. He is a consultant to Cecil Balmond on algorithmic design research. Mollie Claypool is an architect and educator. She is currently a tutor at the AA, the University of Reading and the University of Brighton, and is a Project Editor at Phaidon Press. She has previously worked at James Harb Architects, Werner Sobek NY, and ARX Kabul in New York. Ryan Dillon is currently working for EGG Office based in Los Angeles. He is a tutor in the History and Theory Studies department at the Architectural Association. He is a graduate of the AA and Syracuse University School of Architecture. He has previously worked at Moshe Safdie and Associates on projects such as the Peadbody Essex Museum and Khalsa Heritage Complex.

EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES

DIRECTORS Michael Weinstock George Jeronimidis

STUDIO MASTERS Christina Doumpioti Toni Kotnik

TUTORS Evan L Greenberg Suryansh Chandra

The Emergent Technologies and Design Programme is open to graduates in architecture or engineering with interest in architectural design that proceeds from innovative technologies, who wish to develop skills and pursue knowledge in design research that is located in new production paradigms. There are two phases: Phase 1 contains the taught courses, studio workshops and projects and supervised research within the studio; Phase 2 is the Design Dissertation for the MSc or the Design Thesis for the MArch. The programme is focused on the concepts and convergent interdisciplinary effects of emergence on design and production technologies, and on developing these as creative inputs to new architectural design processes. Seminar courses and workshops of Phase 1 provide the theoretical context, setting out the origins, theories, instruments and practices of Emergent Technologies and exploring relations to the discourses of contemporary architecture. Outputs from the seminar courses are critical and technical analysis, digital experiments, computational design systems and material strategies are driven by industrial processes and production. The Core Studio consists of design experiments and projects that together comprise an integrated evolutionary development of a population of active material systems. The outputs from Phase 1 provide the aims, techniques and conceptual armature for Phase 2, the Design Thesis or Design Dissertation developed in spring term and finalised in summer term. Core Studio: Active Systems Studio Masters Christina Doumpioti and Toni Kotnik, with support from Wolf Mangelsdorf, Evan Greenberg and Suryansh Chandra Autumn and Winter Terms The Core Studio course runs for two terms and has three modules â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Induction Studio (Boot Camp), Studio 1 and Studio 2. Each student has access to the archive of previous successful dissertations and theses, comprehensive manuals for constructive geometry, manuals and video tutorials for scripting, and examples of computational fluid dynamics and structural analysis of natural and constructed systems. Students work in small groups that will change with each rotation of the three studio modules. The Core Studio concludes with the presentation of the evolutionary series of materially constructed and digitally modelled artefacts, the full documentation of their structural and environmental characteristics and of the role played by material properties and fabrication techniques in the development of their individual and group morphology, along with a critical assessment of their potential for deployment in spatial and programmatic architectural scale applications. Core Studio 1 Evolutionary strategies and computational techniques are used to develop the architectural qualities of different material systems. Built 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

130

Branching Strategies for Microclimates: A computational fluid dynamics analysis studying the existing turbulent wind patterns at the Waterloo Railway Terminal site. Shuai Feng â&#x20AC;&#x201C; MArch with Distinction

131

GRADUATE

EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES

GRADUATE

control growth processes. The studio will conclude with fully fabricated and digitally modelled, doubly curved material systems that exhibit fully integrated structural and environmental properties along with comprehensive documentation and assessment of their individual and group potential for further development towards architectural scale applications. Core Studio 2 Genetic algorithms for the optimisation of computer-controlled fabrication will be developed and integrated with further development of the evolutionary morphogenetic techniques. With the parameters developed previously, exploration and development over succeeding generations will also include spatial organisations and environmental behaviour. We will work towards fully fabricated and digitally modelled, doubly curved material systems that exhibit advanced and integrated material properties, and structural and environmental properties with optimal computer-controlled fabrication. Comprehensive documentation will include critical evaluation of their individual and group potential for spatial and programmatic organisations across a range of architectural scales. Emergence Seminar Course Michael Weinstock, Autumn Term 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 to population dynamics and pressures. Applications to structural and architectural design are explored in The Generative Design Experiments. The experiment will conclude with the detailed modelling and analysis of the set of forms, surfaces and structures evolved in the experiment. Biomimetics Seminar Course George Jeronimidis with Evan Greenberg, Autumn Term An introduction to the ways in which organisms have evolved their form, materials and structures in response to varied functions and environments will be followed by an account of engineering design principles that have been abstracted from nature in current research projects for industry and material science. An in-depth study of a natural system (general form, anatomy, energy flows and behaviour) will be carried out, the interrelations explored and the engineering principles abstracted. (Analysis continues into winter term.) Design Research Studio and the Thesis/Dissertation, Spring and Summer Terms Three main fields of design research are offered – 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 emer-

132

gent 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. Master Classes, Autumn Term The MArch fourth term runs simultaneously with the autumn term for the new students of the 2010/11 cohort. The MArch studio will be supported by a series of master classes delivered by invited guests and the Visiting Professors. The master classes provide design inspiration and knowledge of implemented techniques in the professional field, and deliver an extended presentation of work to all students (incoming Phase 1 students and summer term MArch students). Further studio sessions are then delivered in seminar and workshop format to the MArch students, concentrating on how their projects were produced and delivered – their digital techniques, operative constraints, and optimisation techniques for structural and environmental performance and fabrication.

DIRECTORS 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 School of Architecture since 1989. Founder of Emergent Technologies Masters Programme. 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. He has been visiting professor at Rome, Barcelona 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, book and conference contributions, including keynote lectures. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Colloid and Interface Research in Golm, Germany and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Virtual and Physical Prototyping. STUDIO MASTERS Christina Doumpioti [Dipl Arch/Eng MArch AA RIBA II Architect GR TCG] studied Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and is a registered architect in Greece. She received her

133

MArch with distinction from the AA Emergent Technologies and Design, and followed this with a postgraduate course on Computing and Design at UEL. She is an architect and computational consultant at Arup Associates. Toni Kotnik is founder of Kotnik.architects, a Zurich-based architectural office, and principal researcher in OCEAN. He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, the University of Tübingen, and the University of Utah, and received his doctoral degree from the University of Zurich. Currently, he works as senior researcher at the ETH Zurich. TUTORS Evan L Greenberg, BSc AAMSc (Dist) is an architectural designer and co-director of the research collaborative Network Research +

Design. He has worked in architecture and engineering offices and with product designers and artists in both New York and London, and is currently an architectural designer at Populous. Evan earned his Master of Science with Distinction in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA School of Architecture in 2008, and his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia in 2005. Suryansh Chandra is a research architect at Zaha Hadid Architects where he developed parametric design systems at the architectural and urban scale that explore new paradigms of the design process. His specialised teaching includes associative modelling in Rhino with Grasshopper and scripting in VB.net. VISITING PROFESSORS Achim Menges Fabian Scheurer Wolf Mangelsdorf

HISTORY AND CRITICAL THINKING History and Critical Thinking (former Histories and Theories) provides a platform for 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; to enquire into new forms of knowledge, research and practice. Central to the 12-month programme is an emphasis on writing as practice of thinking. Different forms of writing such as essays, reviews, short commentaries, publications and interviews will allow students to engage with diverse forms of enquiry and to articulate various aspects of their study. A common concern of the different courses is to investigate the relations of theoretical debates to particular projects and practices in order to develop a critical view of the arguments underpinning the design and the knowledge produced through its mechanisms and effects. To this aim, the programme is involved with the design work produced by the graduate design courses and Diploma units through joint events, and HCT students act as jurors during reviews, and comment in current AA publications. The programme also provides research facilities and supervision to research degree candidates (MPhil and PhD) registered under the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s joint PhD programme, a cross-disciplinary initiative supported by all of the Graduate programmes. Term 1 has three main objectives: to help students understand the discipline of architecture and the critical role of writing in the process of its formation; to interrogate the writing of history; to investigate the question of modernity and emergence of the modern subject.

DIRECTOR Marina Lathouri

STAFF Mark Cousins Francisco Gonzalez de Canales John Palmesino Thomas Weaver

VISITING TUTOR Pedro Ignacio Alonso CONSULTANT Braden R Engel

Histories of Modernism, Marina Lathouri This seminar series re-visits several key texts and examines the role they played in the construction and critical assessment of a canonical history of architectural modernism. Through an examination of forms of architectural writing, it will interrogate a particular account of architectural and urban modernity that was propagated during the first half of the twentieth century but came to be dismantled in the years immediately prior to 1968. Aesthetics and History, Mark Cousins This course provides an account of the intellectual bases of architectural theories within a modern field of aesthetics. Starting with the traditional understanding of the relation of architecture to beauty through a brief summary of theories of the fine arts in Antiquity and in the Renaissance, it focuses on the fundamental text of aesthetics, Kantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Critique of Judgment. This argument lays the foundation for the modern idea of art based upon the idea of a subjective aesthetic response. Architecture Knowledge and Writing, Marina Lathouri / Thomas Weaver This course, organised around a series of lectures, writing sessions and conversations with invited authors, critics, journalists and editors, has two parts. The first part discusses the rise of architectural history, theory and

134

History and Critical Thinking in Architecture thesis seminar, Seville, May 2001. Photo Troy Conrad Therrien

135

GRADUATE

HISTORY AND CRITICAL THINKING

GRADUATE

criticism in relation to the emergence of the architect, the notion of the architectural project, the concept of space and the establishment of architecture as distinct discipline and profession. It seeks to show how a knowledge specific to architecture emerged and developed. The second part looks at the multiple formats within which this knowledge is being generated and communicated, including drawings, treatises, pattern books, essays, manifestos, journals, exhibitions, and among others. Term 2 provides a platform for critical enquiry into contemporary theories, design research and forms of architectural and urban practice. Organised around lectures, seminars, debates and events, it enables the students to engage with a diversity of approaches and discuss disciplinary knowledge in a broad cultural and political arena. Reinventing the Contemporary Part 1: Critical Theories, Marina Lathouri This series of four seminars considers the conditions in which architecture organises its particular responses to current debates and investigates how these either reinforce or displace processes traditionally inherent to architecture. Terms, concepts and themes used in current debates and practices will be investigated in order to clarify the ways in which they are put in arguments and projects. Part 2: Critical Practices, Francisco Gonzales de Canales These seminar-based sessions examine specific contemporary architectural projects, recovering a role for architectural theory, which has been involved with cultural studies, philosophical thinking and media and literary studies that it has distanced itself from explicitly assessing the work of the architectural practices of its own time. Rather than denying the validity of these different ways of criticism, this course refocuses attention on the production and design strategies employed by architects. Part 3: Critical Fabrications, Pedro Ignacio Alonso These three lectures and seminars investigate the ways in which the contemporary notion of ‘fabrication’ has come to acquire the status that the notion of ‘construction’ had in accounts of modern architecture. The Post-Eurocentric City, John Palmesino This lecture and 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. Investigating the subtle and nuanced modes of streamlining architectural and urban differences to reorganise sovereignty in contemporary human territories, the course articulates notions of the post-colony, extraterritoriality and world-systems away from the traditional model of expansionism and diffusionism of the European city.

136

HCT Debates: City, politics and spaces Hosted by Marina Lathouri Many of the emerging urban formations and forms of urbanity are partially or completely novel institutional orders or systems of relations. What is it, then, that we are trying to name with the term city? 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 against a background of a recent political philosophy that has questioned the communal? These are some of the questions, which will be addressed in this year’s debates with invited architects, scholars, critics and historians. Term 3: Thesis Research Seminar The thesis is the most significant component of the students’ work. The choice of topic, the organisation of research and the development of the central argument are discussed within the Research Seminar which may be supplemented by individual tutorials. Central to the development of the thesis, however, is the collective seminar where students learn about the nature of a dissertation from the shared experiences of the group. The unit trip at the beginning of the third term includes intense sessions to help students solidify their topic, field and argument. At the end of term, the thesis outline and argument is individually presented to a jury of invited critics. In term 4 the students further develop and complete their thesis to be submitted in September.

DIRECTOR Marina Lathouri studied architecture in Greece and the Berlage Institute and philosophy of art and aesthetics at the Université de Paris I, Sorbonne. She taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania where she also completed her PhD on the multiple forms of engagement of modern architecture with the city focusing on the conceptual and design tools developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Since 1999 she has been teaching architectural history, theory and design at the AA and at Cambridge University. Her current research concerns contemporary forms of architectural research and emerging urban practices.

STAFF Mark Cousins directs the AA’s History and Theory Studies at the undergraduate level. He has been Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and a founding member of the Graduate School at the London Consortium. Francisco Gonzalez de Canales studied architecture at ESTA Seville, ETSA Barcelona and Harvard University, and worked for Foster + Partners and Rafael Moneo. He has lectured in England, Mexico, Spain, and the USA, and was director of the Spanish Magazine Neutra. He completed his PhD on the radical experimentations on the domestic in the 1940s and 1950s.

137

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, Goldsmiths in London where he is pursuing his doctoral research. He has established Territorial Agency with Ann Sofi Rönnskog. Thomas Weaver is the 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.

VISITING TUTOR Pedro Ignacio Alonso studied architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile and completed his PhD on the rhetorical and discursive strategies of assemblage in modern architecture at the Architectural Association. Since 2005 he has taught architectural theory at the AA and worked for Arup’s Urban Design. He currently teaches at the Universidad Católica de Chile. CONSULTANT Braden R Engel studied environmental design and philosophy in the USA and Histories and Theories at the AA. Since 2008 he has been teaching history and theory at the AA and the University of Greenwich.

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, in developing far-reaching strategies and generating novel urban clusters. This programme 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, it is balanced between cross-disciplinary research and design application. Students’ 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.

DIRECTORS Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley

PROGRAMME STAFF Lawrence Barth Nicholas Bullock Kathryn Firth

Dominic Papa Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith

Lecture Courses and Seminars: Design Workshop, Autumn, Winter and Spring Terms 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: the Group Workshop, in which small teams of students and teachers explore and develop design responses to well-defined urban challenges, and the Urban Seminar, which opens up a debate on different approaches to key themes in the programme’s areas of research. While each of the Group Workshop teams will pursue distinctive lines of investigation, the Urban Seminar and individual work provide the opportunity to evaluate and reflect on different approaches to key issues in urbanism today. The H&U 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. Our main site for design investigation will be an inner-peripheral area of northeast London. We will engage with this site within the larger frame of London and the metropolitan region. We will also hold an intensive design workshop in Taiwan, taking the opportunity to collaborate with other urbanism programmes and to test our design and conceptual approaches in a different context. Cities in a Transnational World, Autumn Term 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 global internationalisation of the economy, placing strong emphasis on issues of policy and planning and on current reforms in systems of urban governance. Urban Study: Fitzrovia – business incubator and training centre

138

139

GRADUATE

HOUSING & URBANISM

GRADUATE

The Reason of Urbanism, Autmn Term This lecture and discussion series provides the foundations for an engagement with the urban as a problem-ﬁeld in western governmental reasoning. The course will trace the twentieth-century development of urbanism to highlight the inherent political issues, and will develop a theoretical perspective through an engagement with the work of Arendt, Foucault, Sennet and others. Through this, students will investigate the relationship of key political concepts to the generation of new urban spatiality. Critical Urbanism, Autumn and Winter Terms This course will explore urbanism’s role as an instrument of diagnosis and critique. Beginning with lectures and readings in the first term and building toward a seminar format in the second term, 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, Autumn and Winter Terms 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 post-1945 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, Winter Term 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 despatialisation of strategies to deal with urban informality and its associated social conditions and explores the role of urbanism and spatial design in addressing those conditions. It draws from the extreme circumstances of irregularity and socio-spatial segregation in the cities of the developing world. With reference to relevant projects, it attempts to identify appropriate tools and instruments of spatial intervention and design and examine their articulation through the redesigning of urban institutions and rules. Domesticity, Winter Term This seminar series explores trends in contemporary multi-residential housing against the background of a discursive formation linking domesticity and urbanism. Taking Mies van der Rohe’s patio houses of the 1930s

140

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 course include theoretical and historical writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot and Nikolas Rose. Thesis Seminar, Spring Term 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 Hamburg in the Spring Term. The programme also invites a number of academics and practitioners from all over the world to contribute to its activities during the year. Students are encouraged to attend complementary courses offered by other Graduate School programmes and by History & Theory Studies. www.aaschool.ac.uk/hu

DIRECTORS 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 and national 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 housing design, community buildings and urban development projects. He has a wide range of practice experience in the UK, and 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; urban policy and structure in European cities; and rethinking density for housing and urban development. PROGRAMME STAFF 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, cities and governments on large-scale strategic projects, and is engaged in research on urban intensiﬁcation, innovation environments and the transformation of workspace in the knowledge economy. Nicholas Bullock studied architecture at Cambridge University, and completed a PhD under Leslie Martin. His research includes issues of housing reform with a special interest in Germany; post-war housing design and policy; and the architec-

141

ture and planning of reconstruction after World War II. Kathryn Firth is the Director of Urban Design at PLP Architecture in London, where she leads international projects in masterplanning, urban design and urban regeneration. She has worked on research projects on urban design policy and practice, and lectures internationally on issues of urbanism and urban design. She taught in the Cities Programme at the LSE, the GSD at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Toronto. Dominic Papa 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 who has worked in London and South Africa on large housing and urban regeneration projects. Her research focuses on the development of spatial tools for urban strategies, and the role of institutions in promoting urban transformation. She is a core member of the AA research cluster on the architecture of the informal city, and has participated as a design tutor in numerous international workshops on design and urbanism. Alex Warnock-Smith is an architect and urban designer. Alex trained at the University of Cambridge and the Architectural Association, and has a range of experience in practice, teaching and research. His work is concerned with the relationship between social experience and urban space. He has taught at the AA, London Metropolitan University and University of Brighton.

LANDSCAPE URBANISM Landscape Urbanism is, by definition, transdisciplinary. Whilst drawing on 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 of 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.

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR Eva Castro STUDIO MASTERS Alfredo Ramírez Eduardo Rico

PROGRAMME STAFF Douglas Spencer Tom Smith

WORKSHOP TUTORS Clara Oloriz Enriqueta Llabres Nicola Saladino Teruyuki Nomura

Prototypical Urbanities: Iterations China’s economic boom, combined with migration from the countryside to the cities, is boosting a high-speed urbanism that produces new cities in the shortest imaginable time, changing the faces of older towns. This directional urbanisation, propelled from the coastal zones into the countryside, has brought the smallest villages face to face with the phenomenon of globalisation – and its foreign capital and generic architecture. Framework 2010/11 The course will focus on China’s ambitions to build 400 new cities by the year 2020 as the basis for its brief. We will engage opportunistically with the generation of ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomena of mass-produced urban sprawl. Our test bed will be the urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta – including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Ningbo – with students focusing on the emergence of three benchmark issues: 1. Metabolic rurbanism: the emergence of ‘desakota’ (urban villages) in which urban and rural processes of land use are combined, and the potentials it presents for the origin of industrial ecologies 2. Tactical resistance: where generic, top-down masterplanning collides with informally developed urban cores, there may be the potential to locate the fault lines of this dynamic as a space from a tactical urbanism that is qualitatively informed and territorially specific. 3. Material identities: the inadequacy of providing new urban settlements with an instant ‘identity’, through application of either vernacular or western styles of building, in the context of ‘post-traditional’ urbanisation. Design Studio 1. Indexical Models: Mediation Between Typical Organisational Paradigms and Local Conditions The autumn term 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.

142

This drawing explores the flooding and pollution levels through the territory and sets a primary strategy of flood planes and irrigation canals.

143

GRADUATE

LANDSCAPE URBANISM

GRADUATE

2. Sensitive Systems: Development of a Prototype The second term begins with a field trip to China, providing us with the opportunity to engage with a real large-scale urban project and local planners and architects. Central to this phase will be the development of a prototype, a malleable model capable of continuous transformation. 3. & 4. Network Urbanism: Global Behaviour During the third term work develops different logics of proliferation while mastering degrees of self-differentiation, 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: Douglas Spencer, Autumn and Winter Terms This lecture series and seminar unit is designed to synergise with its workshops, projects and field trips. Over its two terms it introduces the student to the transdisciplinary origins of landscape urbanism whilst defining its unique configuration and potential in the context of contemporary urban conditions. Machining Landscapes Tom Smith, Autumn and Winter Terms Félix Guattari, in his essay ‘On Machines’, proposed that the concept of the ‘technological machine’ be expanded to one of ‘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, Autumn Term This lecture series by experts from the Ove Arup Environmental Unit addresses environmental concerns, introducing a wide range of techniques aimed at ensuring sustainable management and design. Landscape Urbanism Guest Lecture Series 04, Winter Term These lectures, which are open to the public, allow the Landscape Urbanism programme to continue to refine its own transdisciplinary approach by inviting an international and diverse range of speakers to offer new perspectives on the issues that concern its practice. Workshops: Indexing Territories Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramìrez, Eduardo Rico, Autumn Term This workshop aims ito develop the students’ capacity for reading information from fields and then decoding, synthesising and systematically processing it into indexical models. There will be tutorials on software packages such as Maya, Rhino, Land-desktop and Space Syntax.

144

DFC (Digitally Fabricted Cities) Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramìrez, Autumn Term The workshop explores digital fabrication techniques to acquire an instrumental deployment of these tools and to create a feedback loop to overcome the traditional bi-dimensional reading of the city. Scripting Prototypes Alfredo Ramìrez, Eduardo Rico, Clara Oloriz, Winter Term Differing scripting techniques will be explored as a means of creating flexible design tools that are capable of accommodating change and a degree of indeterminacy within the design process. Relational Urbanism Eduardo Rico, Enriqueta Llabres, Winter Term This workshop will deal with the mediation of bottom-up readings and strategic decision-making concepts. The overall arrangement of the material components produced will be adjusted and further articulated to respond locally to specific conditions and globally to relational strategies. Lu_ In The Field 10–11 Eva Castro, Eduardo Rico, Alfredo Ramìrez + Trento University Easter break This is the fourth of a series of workshops to be held each year during the spring break in conjunction with different LU collaborators. Its aim is to serve as a quick and intense test-bed for the application of the techniques acquired into a real project within a new political context. A final public presentation of the project will be given to the clients.

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR Eva Castro has been teaching at the AA since 2003. She studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and subsequently completed the AA Graduate Design programme with Jeff Kipnis. 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. Her work is published and exhibited worldwide. Plasma and GroundLab are currently lead designers for the International Horticultural Fair in Xi’an, China a 37ha landscape with a wide range of buildings due to open in 2011.

STAFF Douglas Spencer has studied design and architectural history, cultural studies, and critical theory, and has taught history and theory at a number of architectural schools. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, film and critical theory has been published in journals including The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy, AA Files and Culture Machine. He is currently researching for a book that formulates a Marxian critique of contemporary architecture and ‘control society’. Tom Smith is a landscape architect and urban designer currently at EDAW AECOM. His work

145

has been diverse, ranging from masterplanning for the Chelsea Flower Show, to developing networks of rural communities on the Portuguese coast, to large-scale multidisciplinary landscape, engineering and architecture projects. He has been instrumental in the design of the London 2012 Olympic and Legacy Masterplan. He is currently focusing on leading the design and delivery of the Olympic and Legacy Parklands, as well as the development of the Legacy Masterplan framework. Alfredo Ramírez is an architect and co-founder of GroundLab, He studied Architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and

subsequently completed the AA graduate programme Landscape Urbanism in 2005. He has practised in Mexico City, Madrid and London. Alfredo is also collaborating with Fundacion Metropoli. Eduardo Rico studied civil engineering in Spain and graduated from the AA’s Landscape Urbanism programme. He has acted as consultant and performed research in the fields of infrastructure and landscape in Spain and the UK. Currently he is involved in the development of infrastructural strategies for large-scale urban projects within the Arup engineering team as well as being part of the collective GroundLab.

SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

DIRECTOR Simos Yannas UNIT STAFF Klaus Bode Gustavo Brunelli

Paula Cadima Joana Carla Soares Gonçalves Jorge Rodríguez Álvarez Rosa Schiano-Phan

The main research object of the master’s programme in Sustainable Environmental Design is the relationship between architectural form, materiality and environmental performance, and how this relation evolves in response to climate change and emerging technical capabilities. Sustainable environmental design is not a fixed ideal but an evolving concept to be redefined and reassessed with each new project. Observation, measurement and computer modelling and simulation are fundamental techniques that underpin the programme’s design research. These are applied at various levels of detail and intensity, extending the understanding of theoretical principles to inform the design process. The MSc option runs over 12 months (from October 2010 to September 2011) and is offered to both architects and engineers. The MArch option is addressed to architects and teachers of architectural design. Its 16-month duration (from October 2010 to January 2012) enables the exploration of detailed design agendas that can include the realisation of experimental structures. The taught programme is in two parts. The first half (Phase I, October– March) is common to both the MSc and MArch candidates and is structured around a series of joint studio projects undertaken in teams combining the two groups. Projects are supported by weekly lectures, seminars and workshops. The second half of the course (Phase II, April to September 2011 for MSc, April 2011 to end January 2012 for MArch) is organised around candidates’ dissertation projects. Studio Projects: Phase I Studio: What Can Buildings Tell Us, What Can We Tell Back, Autumn and Winter Terms During the autumn term building studies in London combine occupant and designer interviews with on-site observations and environmental measurements. Some 15–20 buildings will be selected for study, highlighting changes taking place in environmental standards and benchmarks, the large potential for environmental improvements across the housing stock and the challenges of zero-carbon design and climate change. The findings from these case studies provide starting points for design briefs to be developed over the spring term. The objective of the spring term studio will be to explore innovative and performative designs that address climate change and maximise use of natural resources, aiming at zero-carbon buildings. Phase II Studio: MSc Dissertation Projects, Spring Term Phase II of the MSc encompasses an extended six-month summer term that accounts for half of the total duration of the taught programme. During this term MSc candidates are expected to undertake a significant piece of research that addresses the programme’s areas of research as well as the student’s background, professional interests and special skills. Research topics are decided by the end of the spring term and are subsequently grouped into thematic clusters which provide areas of joint research that can be developed in teams of 2–4 students as well as individually.

146

Katerina Pantazi MArch Dissertation Project 2010 Urban Mataphors : Making rooftops work for the city and its inhabitants. Proposals for an urban block in Athens

147

GRADUATE

SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN Phase II Studio: MArch Dissertation Projects, Autumn, Winter and Spring Terms In the autumn term and first part of the spring term 2010–11 the MArch studio will host the final stage of Phase II dissertation projects begun in the previous academic year. This comprises fifteen projects set in a dozen countries in different climatic regions. They are due for completion in early February, to be followed by a new group of over 20 MArch Phase II dissertation projects starting in April. Focusing on housing design and refurbishment, the MArch studio will expect to contribute a selection of projects for exhibition and publication. Lectures, Seminars and Workshops: Myths & Theories of Sustainable Architecture, Autumn Term Many architects and students take sustainable design for granted, as if it were now 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, Autumn and Winter Terms The course deals with key topics in environmental design research, focusing on adaptive responses as instrumental properties of intelligent buildings and sustainable cities. 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 and other related topics. Lessons from Practice, Winter Term The course looks at both historical and contemporary approaches with case studies from the research and practices of the programme’s teaching staff and visiting lecturers to highlight design strategies and assess environmental performance in practice. Environmental Analysis Tools, Autumn and Winter Terms This technical course is on methods and tools applied before and during design to test ideas and environmental targets, simulate and compare the likely performance of alternative designs, assess predictions of environmental conditions against measured data and benchmarks, fine-tune design proposals and inform final design decisions.

148

GRADUATE Modelling & Simulation Workshop, Autumn and Winter Terms Following the weekly sessions of the Environmental Analysis Tools course, this is a hands-on workshop that provides training in the application of digital tools and procedures, helping to build the necessary knowledge and skills under close supervision. Research Seminar, Autumn, Winter and Spring Terms This seminar fosters the development of the research, presentation and writing skills required for studio projects, dissertations and professional work. A primary aim is the acquisition of a shared visual language for communicating the principles and outcomes of sustainable design. Other Events Study trips to Spain will undertake fieldwork as part of the spring term studio, collaborating with research teams there. All of this year’s students, and many of the programme’s recent graduates, will attend the PLEA 2011 international conference on Architecture & Sustainable Development to be held in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium in July 2011. There will be continued collaboration over the next two years with six other schools of architecture and several professional institutes of architects in the development of environmental design and architectural training in Europe.

DIRECTOR Simos Yannas received his doctorate for research on low energy housing design, and has undertaken projects on sustainable design with awards from national and international organisations. He was a Sir Isaac Newton Design Fellow in Architecture at the University of Cambridge and has lectured as visiting professor in some thirty countries. His book Roof Cooling Techniques was shortlisted for the RIBA Book Award in Architecture and Lessons from Traditional Architecture is due for publication this year. He was awarded PLEA Awards in 2001 and 2008. STAFF Klaus Bode co-founded BDSP Partnership, a London-based environmental engineering firm with offices in London, Lisbon and Belgrade. He was project engineer on Foster + Partners’ Commerzbank and on Rogers/Piano’s Potsdamer Platz developments in

Berlin. He has collaborated with the Rogers Partnership on the Welsh Assembly building in Cardiff, with the sculptor Antony Gormley on the engineering of the Blind Light exhibition and is working with Hopkins Architects on schemes for the London Olympics.

A practising architect she chaired the Sustainable Architecture Working Group of the Architect’s Council of Europe in 2009 and will be taking over as president of PLEA later this year. She has been working for the European Commission in Brussels since 2005.

Gustavo Brunelli graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo and won an Alban scholarship to the MA in Environment & Energy Studies 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.

Joana Carla Soares Gonçalves completed her MA in Environment and Energy Studies at the AA and a PhD on the sustainability of tall buildings at the University of São Paulo, where she has taught since 1998. She has practised in Rio de Janeiro with Ana Maria Niemeyer and has worked as an environmental consultant on projects in Brazil and won design competition awards. She is the author of The Environmental Performance of Tall Buildings published by Earthscan in June 2010.

Paula Cadima has taught at the Technical University of Lisbon, where she created and directed the master’s course on Bioclimatic Architecture, and at the AA Graduate School where she completed her PhD.

149

Jorge Rodríguez Álvarez graduated from the Architectural School of A Coruña, Spain and was

awarded an MA in Building Conservation and Urban Regeneration from the University of Santiago. He completed the MSc in Sustainable Environmental Design at the AA with Distinction in 2008. He co-founded SAAI in 2009, an environmental consultancy firm with projects in Europe, Asia and America. Rosa Schiano-Phan studied architecture in Italy and completed her Masters and PhD studies in environmental design in the UK. She has worked with WSP Environmental and at Brian Ford & Associates, and was a Research Fellow 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. VISITING LECTURERS Nick Baker Catherine Harrington Raul Moura

CONSERVATION OF HISTORIC BUILDINGS

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR Andrew Shepherd

GRADUATE

PROGRAMME STAFF David Hills David Heath

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 and modern value systems of assessing significance are investigated. The programme includes site and craft workshop visits that are connected to current conservation issues of interest. The First Year engages the students in developing their own conservation philosophies, allied with the study of early and medieval building types. Students learn about causes of defects to buildings, as well as their diagnosis and repair. 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, further developing the students’ philosophies. The principal work for the student is a thesis of 15–20,000 words on a subject of their choice to be approved by the staff. This is developed with the assistance of a specialist external tutor for submission to external examiners. 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 to current students. For 35 years the AA’s Building Conservation Programme has been recognised as one of the leading courses of its kind. The course is designed to meet the ICOMOS Guidelines for Education and Training and is informed by current developments in conservation best practice. The course is accepted by the RICS and IHBC, meeting the standards for members involved with conservation works.

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR Andrew Shepherd is an architect and has run a practice specialising in conservation work, principally in the ecclesiastical field for over 30 years. He is involved in international training programmes. He is a past graduate of the course.

PROGRAMME STAFF David Hills is an architect with a major conservation practice. He has a special interest in the conservation of modern architecture with heritage significance. He is a past graduate of the course.

David Heath was latterly Chief Conservation Architect to English Heritage. He is also the Thesis Tutor. He is the current Chairman of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He is also a past graduate of the course. Church Fabric Survey site visit

150

151

DESIGN & MAKE

DIRECTOR Martin Self

GRADUATE

PROGRAMME STAFF Piers Taylor Kate Darby

Design & Make is a full-time 16-month graduate design programme, located at the AA’s Hooke Park woodland campus in Dorset, southwest England. It is open to post-graduate students of architecture who wish to pursue studio, workshop-based design and alternative rural architectures. On a yearly cycle, the programme designs and constructs experimental buildings at Hooke Park. In 2010, the AA gained outline planning consent for new workshops, accommodation buildings and other teaching facilities. The core aspiration of the programme is to close the gap between design and making in architectural education, by placing students in an unique environment that physically combines design studio, workshop and building site. The studio is located within a forest that provides building material, and in a rural community famed for its rich craft traditions. The Design & Make programme consists of Design Studio projects and seminar courses, the construction-based Make Studio and individual production of the Design & Make Thesis. The induction project provides an intensive introduction to the programme’s key design methodologies; the core project is dedicated to individual, full-scale, site-specific design-andmake explorations at Hooke Park. Design approaches and skills developed in the first term are applied in the collective design of the Hooke Park project in the second. The four seminar courses are focused on the cultural theory of making as design; sustainability theory and practice; fabrication and construction technologies; and the theories of collective design. The Make Studio consists of hands-on workshop-based fabrication and on-site construction work. Learning is acquired experientially through collaboration with the project’s tutors, engineers, contractors and tradespeople. Concluding the course, the Design & Make Theses form individual analyses and critiques of the built project and present propositional arguments concerning the role of making with architectural design. This year Design & Make will be a unique collaboration between the Diploma School (Diploma 19) and the MArch Design & Make programme. The work itself will focus upon the design and prototyping of a lightweight long-span building – a 500m2 ‘big shed’ for a full(-)scale prototyping and fabrication facility for the AA at Hooke Park. This assembly workshop, to be completed in Autumn 2011, has precise functional requirements, giving us the opportunity to explicitly test the relationships among form, function, material and construction, as well as the environmental and phenomenal conditions of this richly wooded site.

DIRECTOR Martin Self is an engineer and designer who has taught design and theory at the AA since 2004. He was a founder member of Arup’s Advanced Geometry Group, studied architectural theory at the AA, and has provided structural engineering and formfinding

consultancy within practices such as Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio.

and the founder of the annual Studio in the Woods which is concerned with the testing of ideas through making.

PROGRAMME STAFF Piers Taylor is a partner in award winning architects Mitchell Taylor Workshop, a unit master at the University of Cambridge,

Kate Darby is principal of rural architectural practice, KDA. She is a founder member of Studio in the Woods and has taught design studio

152

at Bath University and the Bartlett School of Architecture. STUDIO TUTORS Kostas Grigoriadis Barak Pelman Geraldine Dening MAKE TUTOR Charley Brentnall

Dartmoor Arts Project installation 2010, led by Piers Taylor and Charley Brentnall

153

PROJECTIVE CITIES

GRADUATE

PROGRAMME DIRECTORS Christopher C M Lee Sam Jacoby

The new Projective Cities Programme is dedicated to a research-and design-based analysis of the emergent and contemporary city, leading to an MPhil in Architecture. It proposes the City as an architectural project and as a projection of the possibilities of architecture. The programme recognises the City as a new contemporary field, area of study, design and research agenda, and pursues through architectural experimentation and speculation the meaningful production of new Ideas for the City. The focus of the course is the formation and design of cities explicated within its dominant types and large-scale architectural artefacts. It systematically examines and speculates on the design challenges of the contemporary city through both theoretical and specific architectural design enquiries. By providing a unique integrated research platform dedicated to the examination and research of the future of the City, the taught MPhil programme unites theoretical and practical design research. This research will be demonstrated in a distinct contribution to scholarship in an integrated design and written dissertation. A Contemporary City For the past two decades, the discourse of architecture in relation to its larger context has been predominantly discussed and reasoned through concepts of urbanism and articulated by complex form, with little or no relevant alternative overarching theories for its existence and relentless proliferation. The Idea of the City, on the other hand, can be seen as distinctly different from urbanism and is directly concerned with the emergent phenomena of the contemporary city. The current area of investigation will be the contemporary city itself. The contemporary city is understood here as the expansion and cumulative construction of the city in progress, for example witnessed in the emerging and fast expanding cities in the Far East and Middle East. This understanding will focus on the conception and articulation of the city through its dominant types. The aim of this investigation is to arrive at a proposal for a Contemporary City as an architectural project. Implicit in such a proposal is the role of the dominant type as the embodiment of the Idea of the City – its raison d’être – and as a deep structure and pliable diagram of the city.

PROGRAMME DIRECTORS Christopher C M Lee graduated with the AA Diploma (Hons). He previously taught at the AA in the History and Theory Studies (2009–10) and was the Unit Master for Diploma School (Unit 6, 2004–09) and Intermediate School (Unit 2, 2002–04). He is

the co-founder and principal of the award winning Serie Architects (serie.co.uk) and is currently conducting his doctoral research in the Berlage Institute Rotterdam on the topic of type and the city.

154

Sam Jacoby trained as a cabinet-maker, graduated from the AA, and is an architect in private practice. He is a co-director of the Spring Semester Programme at the AA. Previously taught at the AA in the History and Theory Studies (2009–10), Diploma School (Unit 6, 2004–09),

Intermediate School (Unit 2, 2002–04), and at the University of Nottingham (BArch Unit 6, 2007–09). Currently pursues a doctoral degree at the TU Berlin.

Yifan Liu, The Great Flight Forward, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China, 2008

155

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. The preferred entry route is through one of the AA School’s post-professional MA, MSc or MArch programmes which provide the theoretical grounding and appropriate tools for engaging in advanced research in their respective fields. Applicants from outside the AA School must hold a post-professional master’s degree in their proposed area of PhD research. Study for the PhD is full-time, with a minimum duration of two calendar years and a maximum of four years. The Architecture & Urbanism Management Group set in partnership with the Open University administers PhD research degrees.

PROGRAMME STAFF Lawrence Barth Paula Cadima Mark Cousins Jorge Fiori

Hugo Hinsley George Jeronimidis Toni Kotnik Marina Lathouri Rosa Schiano-Phan

Patrik Schumacher Thomas Weaver Michael Weinstock Simos Yannas

PhD in Architectural Design From the last academic year applications are also considered for the PhD in Architectural Design – a studio-based option for qualified architects with experience in design research and an interest in relating theory to design practice. This is a full-time, post-professional research degree option aimed at enabling candidates from an architectural background to make creative use of their design skills within the scholarly tradition of doctoral research. Entry requirements are a five-year professional degree in architecture and a master’s degree from one of the AA School’s postgraduate programmes, or equivalent academic qualifications. Applicants will be assessed on design portfolio, reference letters, research statement and an interview. The PhD in Architectural Design can be taken over a minimum of two calendar years and a maximum of four years. Seminars and Special Events While preparing their research proposals under the supervision of two of the programme’s teaching staff, PhD candidates are expected to attend postgraduate courses related to their areas of research. The PhD programme will run seminars serving its different areas of study on practical issues of research and on the writing and presentation of dissertations and research papers. An international event is organised annually by research students in the summer term on topics of current interest within the school. A new, short course will be offered this year as part of the AA School’s summer programme for students completing PhDs this year and to postdoctoral applicants who wish to train as PhD supervisors and examiners.

Emanuel de Sousa, Photomontage: Teatro del Mondo by Aldo Rossi / Arrival to Dubrovnik, August 1980

156

157

GRADUATE

AA INTERPROFESSIONAL STUDIO

GRADUATE

UNIT STAFF Theo Lorenz Tanja Siems

The AA Interprofessional Studio is a post-professional course leading to a Graduate Diploma in spatial performance and design. The course researches and applies alternative forms of collaboration between the multiple creative professions through the research, conception and implementation of a series of genre-defying spatial performances and constructions. The novelist, dramatist and game designer Thomas M Disch defines creativity as the ability to see relationships where none exist. As a continuation of this observation the agenda for the AAIS aims to expose a hidden ‘worknet’ between multiple professions and their products. Contrary to typical interdisciplinary design approaches, where individual professions remain in their respective field of expertise, AAIS seeks to place students outside their normal comfort zone, learning knowledge from other disciplines that will ultimately extend and adjust their own practice technique. To achieve this overlapping of disciplines, the studio will continue to build up its network of professionals and experts within performance, design, music and film through workshops and symposia. With this network in place we will organise, design and construct a series of interdependent spatial performances. Events will commence in March 2011 with the performative installation ‘In Motion’ in Madrid. A collaboration with the ‘Matadero’, the dance group ‘New Movement’ and music producers ‘Music Technology’, the projects will attempt to merge fashion, dance, music and architecture to form one continuously changing environment. We will test these performative interactive spaces through a design and construction at the 2011 C’n’B convention in Cologne. Our focus will investigate the required configurations for a commercial environment where the border between the producer and consumer (‘prosumer’) seems not to exist. The series will conclude in September with a two-week event titled ‘A Little Communication’ in London that reappropriates previous happenings in Madrid and Cologne through dance performances, cultural and political salon talks and musical projects in one overall construction. By creating unique events that form the basis for continued discussion, the AAIS provides students with a starting point for individual careers within a new overarching discipline, and continues its attempt to make the impossible possible.

UNIT STAFF Theo Lorenz is a registered architect in England and Germany, as well as a painter and media artist. Trespassing between art and architecture, his interest lies in the relation of digital and physical space and the 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 and infrastructural planner and the director of the interdisciplinary practice T2 spatial work (to.spatialwork.net).

158

The office tackles social, political, economic and environmental problems as fuel to the design process and the development of a dialogue that can lead to an enhanced built proposal or solution rather than a reduced compromise. She co-leads the AAIS programme and is Professor

of Urban Design at the BUW, Germany.

Performance of ‘New Movement’ at the AAIS ‘Seed 2 Scene’ Festival. Image by Takako Hasegawa

159

INDEPENDENTS GROUP

GRADUATE

DIRECTOR Alan Dempsey

A Global Network of Independent Organisations in Digital Design and Manufacturing   The Independents Group is a new programme at the AA that will establish a four-year experimental learning network comprising design and industrial leaders at the forefront of new computational thinking in architecture. The group seeks to harness the collective knowledge and experimentation of each of its partners to inform a larger, global network of expertise operating at the forefront of today’s revolution in design, collaborative platforms and manufacturing capability. Initiated by the AA School, the proposed partners for the Independents Group (IG) include five of the world’s leading independent architecture and design schools: Pratt School of Design in New York, Sci-Arc in Los Angeles, Control Shift at Hong Kong University, Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing and SIAL at RMIT in Melbourne. Each of the IG’s five proposed academic partners are independent bodies operating research initiatives outside of the conventional bureaucratic setting that now dominate university research. Their independence and smaller size allows them to be more responsive to cutting-edge computational design and manufacturing. The programme will enable collaborative project-based research and experimentation through a new annual residency programme open to graduates from any of the partnered schools. The 24-week residency will be a new formally acknowledged position within the school and the awards will be offered on a competitive basis to the most outstanding graduates from all six academic partners. Housed in a dedicated studio space at the AA School, residents will be given the opportunity to develop prototype projects for public presentation, exhibition and publication in collaboration with consultants and manufacturing partners and with guidance from the IG team. The programme will be launched at the first global conference for the group held at the AA in the autumn term. The conference will be a public event bringing all partners together for the first time to discuss the status of recent work, the year’s research agenda and to announce the brief for the first competition.

DIRECTOR Alan Dempsey is founding director of NEX, a multidisciplinary design office with an international profile that works at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure and urban design. He was selected by the British Council as one of the six most significant

Design Entrepreneurs in the UK in 2008, and as one of the 40 most significant architects under 40 in the EU in 2010. Alan’s work has been widely published in the US, Europe and Asia, and he was selected to represent the UK at the Beijing Architecture Biennale in 2008.

160

Independents Group five proposed academic partners

161

RESEARCH CLUSTERS AA Research Clusters are a programme of year-long special projects, activities and events that bring together diverse groups of AA staff, students and outside partners for the purpose of realising a body of focused research. As originally conceived in 2005, Research Clusters are mechanisms for triggering and integrating discussion and exchange across the school. Operating in part as ‘vertical units’, they are intended as platforms through which to consolidate expertise within the school, exploring and enhancing existing and new territories and modes of research. It is the ambition of the clusters to take the lead on enhancing the culture of applied research in the school. Each year the AA Research Cluster Group, managed by the AA’s Academic Head, Charles Tashima, in consultation with existing cluster curators, takes applications from across the school for a new cycle of research areas; so that there are approximately four clusters operating at any one time. The deadline for new Research Cluster proposals this year will be in January 2011, with the expectation of their launch in the Spring of 2011. In addition to developing diverse areas of expertise and projects, Research Clusters are expected to challenge existing forms of research and presentation – exploring alternative ways in which work can be produced. These methods have been in the form of events, symposia, conferences, workshops, performances, publications, off- or on-site exhibitions, fabrications and inter-disciplinary collaborative research and competitions. Research Clusters not only bring audiences, researchers and specialists into the school, they are effective platforms in which the school’s teaching staff gains valuable experience and develops expertise by connecting to research activity outside the AA.

COORDINATOR Charles Tashima

CLUSTER CURATORS Stefano Rabolli Pansera Marianne Mueller Olaf Kneer

Marina Lathouri Jorge Fiori Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith

GRADUATE

Active Research Clusters are as follows: Beyond Energy: When Energy Becomes Form Directed by Stefano Rabolli Pansera The cluster attempts to fuse science, architecture and artistic collaboration in order to develop new ways of thinking about energy. The 12th International Exhibition in Venice marked the end of the first year and brought together work, research material and ideas from the eight research groups for display and public debate. http://beyondentropy.aaschool.ac.uk Concrete Geometries Directed by Marianne Mueller and Olaf Kneer, The research investigates the intimate relationship between spatial form and human processes, whether social, aesthetic or material. The cluster launched an international call for submissions in January 2010, attracting 415 entries from the fields of art, architecture, design and the humanities. A symposium was held in October 2010 with invited guests drawn from the submissions. From this a final shortlist of works will be selected for an exhibition and publication. www.concrete-geometries.net City Cultures Initiated by Marina Lathouri The research seeks to develop new conceptual frameworks that redefine what historically has been constructed and institutionalised as the ‘city’. During 2008/09 the cluster held an open seminar that brought together AA tutors and outside visitors to identify a range of contemporary positions on the city. The ideas generated in this seminar fed into a 2010 conference seeking new manifestos on the city. http://aacitycultures.blogspot.com Urbanism and the Informal City Launched by Jorge Fiori, Elena Pascolo, and Alex Warnock-Smith The aim of the cluster is to explore the concept of the ‘ìinformalî’ as a parallel modality that shapes the urban condition. With particular emphasis on spatiality, the cluster is seeking to discover ways in which ‘ìinformalî’ processes contribute to a radical rethinking of the city and its institutions. The team is identifying unexplored themes and contradictions for designers, thinkers and practitioners to consider at a series of Unit ‘ìopen-mikeî’ sessions, talk-shops and a symposium at the AA. The results of these findings will initiate an international design workshop in 2011, followed by an exhibition and publication.

162

163

VISITING SCHOOL

164

VISITING SCHOOL

Launched in Dubai in January, 2008, the AA Visiting School (also known colloquially as the A(A) Longitudinal School) includes a global network of design workshops, symposia and public forums organised for international visiting students, teachers, architects and others interested in experiencing the AA’s unique learning model, which is based on combining the highly focused agendas and interests of small design units with a prominent public programme, audience and outside visitor participation. Launched by the AA School Director Brett Steele, the AA Visiting School, directed by Christopher Pierce, seeks to invent a new, elastic 21st-century educational infrastructure able to quickly realign and reconfigure partnerships, location and focus. By doing so, the AA School is growing its ability to rapidly adjust to the fast-changing, unpredictable realities and challenges confronting global architectural and design cultures today. The AA Visiting School is an extension of the AA’s ongoing commitment to actively participate in the shaping of global architectural culture and develop its belief in a fundamentally experimental approach to architectural education. With nearly 90 per cent of its 650 full-time students arriving in London each year from 65 or more overseas countries, and with an equally high percentage of foreign teachers and tutors leading design, learning and research activities, the AA’s Visiting School offers a new dimension to the AA’s existing make-up as the world’s most international school of architecture: one able to enhance the flow of architectural ideas, knowledge and talent – outward from, and not only into, our historic London home. In the 2010/11 academic year the AA will organise more than two dozen unique short courses and other events and programmes as detailed in this section these will engage hundreds of new visiting students and bring together AA tutors, local educators, architects and other experts from throughout the world, for the purposes of exchanging information, ideas and critical speculation on subjects at the forefront of architectural discourse. Additional programmes are also currently being planned in Tenerife, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Moscow, Costa Rica and Delhi; Koshirakura/ Tokyo will continue with a new programme; and SummerMake will expand its series of programmes to include a new spring course. All of the AA Visiting School programmes, both in London and internationally, will be fully detailed in the AA Visiting School Prospectus, published in early November 2010. To obtain further information and register for any of the programmes please go to the Visiting School section of the AA website or contact the Visiting School at visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

VISITING

ONE YEAR AT THE AA

SPRING SEMESTER PROGRAMME

Autumn, Winter, Spring 2010–11 The AA offers places to students from schools of architecture overseas who wish to participate in the activities of the AA as a year away from their home institutions. Students are accepted into the Second, Third or Fourth Year, depending on their previous experience and the portfolio of work they submit as part of the application process. The three-term, 32-week programme involves students in all aspects of undergraduate life at the AA, including participation in Intermediate or Diploma School units, Complementary Studies courses and the AA’s evening lecture series, exhibitions and other special events. Many overseas schools are will grant credit to their students for their study at the AA and we will help to advise on these arrangements during the admissions process.

Applications should be made via the main undergraduate application form. For further information please contact: Meneesha Kellay on undergraduateadmissions@aaschool.ac.uk

Winter, Spring 2011 The AA Spring Semester Programme (SSP) is a full-time, 15-week studiobased programme open to talented undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. SSP sets a challenging and exciting design agenda, which includes the core studio as well as electives from the AA undergraduate history and theory seminars, media and technical studies courses. The programme is specifically designed to allow transferable study credits and the AA School awards a Certificate of Completion. Agenda 2011: London Calling combines conceptual and material design research with the production of architectural projects in the form of comprehensive design proposals. As in previous years, the programme will focus on the city of London as a site for architectural speculations.

UNIT STAFF Monia De Marchi Sam Jacoby

166

SUMMER SCHOOL

SUMMER MAKE Summer 2011 The Hooke Park visiting school programme provides short residential courses at the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset, south-west England. Through access to the timber workshop, design studios and the working forest, these courses provide handson engagement in workshop-driven design and production. In the annual two-week programme participants design, build and test full-scale architectural propositions. By engaging in a challenging cycle of conception, fabrication, prototyping and testing, they are introduced to the methods of an architecture focused on making. Additionally, a new programme in spring 2011 will design and build refurbishment modifications to the existing student accommodation building located on the campus.

Summer 2011 The AA Summer Architecture School is a three-week, full-time programme consisting of challenging design studios, field study, seminars and lectures that emphasise the importance of both practice and theory in contemporary architecture. Based on the AA’s unit system, it offers participants a selection of varying design approaches, agendas and techniques. Rooted in London, each of the school’s units creatively use the city’s surroundings as their focus of research. Past school themes have included speed, visions of the future, disaster and micro-strategies for difficult financial times. Tutors, lecturers and critics include past and present AA unit masters as well as professionals pooled from diverse disciplines. Creative collaboration is encourage with over 80 students working in distinct groups hailing from more than 35 countries.

UNIT STAFF Luke Olsen Martin Self

UNIT STAFF Natasha Sandmeier

167

VISITING

SUMMER DLAB

VISITING TEACHERS

Summer 2011 The AA Summer dLab offers visiting architects and students an opportunity to be involved in a two-week workshop that openly experiments with the potential of innovative digital design and its relationship to prototyping, manufacturing and communication technologies. The programme introduces participants to a changing array of computational platforms and a forum to openly discuss progressive ideas on digital design. dLab participants will be introduced to the basics of digital modelling and scripting, laser cutting, CNC-milling, 3D printing and other forms of computational tools will also be explored. The course combines seminars and design exercises with presentations and discussions with dLab staff and visiting critics. The Summer dLab is open to current architectural students, recent graduates and mid-career professionals wishing to further their understanding of digital and computational design concepts and their applications.

BEIJING

DUBROVNIK

Spring 2011 The AA’s innovative model as a place of education and debate attracts 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 provides the opportunity for detailed discussion of ideas and methods of education during meetings with the school’s students and teachers. Participants will present work for debate in a seminar and visits are organised to important examples of architecture and planning in London. The three-week programme is open to a small group of participants who are currently teaching architecture or related subjects and begins at the end of May 2011. Applicants will be selected on the basis of a brief written statement outlining the issues of architectural education. There is no fee for the programme.

HYPERLINK Tsinghua University Winter 2011 Despite the global economic downturn the city of Beijing is rapidly expanding. This is nowhere more evident than in the proliferation of motor travel and the city’s response of widening the streets to dissipate traffic congestion. The entire city fabric has been profoundly modified and as a direct consequence crosswalks have become an unsafe and frightening proposition for pedestrians to traverse. Through the invention of ‘proactive prototypes’ the Beijing-based workshop will propose alternative crossing patterns and structures to alleviate the increasing congestion and foster experimental interaction and events through complex programming.

MITTELMEERLAND Winter 2011 Mittelmeerland is investigating the future of the Mediterranean as a territory of water. Over three years we will investigate six different Mediterranean cities located near the coast starting with Dubrovnik. The coastline from Dubrovnik to Ploce stretches 113 km, producing a liquid context that spawns a conflict between the natural landscape and the shipping industry. This conditon forces us to ask: how is the rapid growth of global trade affecting Mediterranean ports? Can each city along the Mediterranean turn one of the world’s largest hotspots into a vibrant ecospot? We will analyse existing conditions such as Tangier Med, playfully utilise small-scale phenomena, translate conditions into large-scale urban interventions and envision future changes of the port area.

UNIT STAFF Hugo Hinsley

UNIT STAFF Yan Gao

UNIT STAFF Medine Altiok

168

169

VISITING

ISTANBUL

MEXICO CITY

OMAN

PARIS

COMPUTED CRAFTS Istanbul Technical University, School of Architecture Winter 2011 Computed Crafts will focus on integrating local Turkish craft-making methods with digital computation. The workshop’s main challenge is to identify and interpret the unique artistic and historical periods of Istanbul via its craft production and transform these artefacts through current discourse and the use of the latest fabrication techniques based on algorithmic tools. Throughout the workshop we will take advantage of Istanbul’s geographic diversity by inhabiting and making in many of its different spaces. Parallel design projects and non-overlapping units will support this urban mobility.

RECOVERING WATERSCAPES Universidad Iberoamericana Winter 2011 Historically the lack of water has always been a major concern for the viability of Mexico City, posing a huge challenge on the metropolitan scale, with infrastructural, social and urban implications. The workshop will explore the idea of recovering waterscapes and the potential they can offer Mexico City in its quest to reassess the present and rethink the future. The course will aim at defining different strategies based on the exploration of local conditions, specific material processes, experimentation with digital and representational techniques and the use of prototyping concepts. Diversity in design proposals is encourage a way of opening up critical discussions and facilitating new and exiting ideas for Mexico City’s waterscapes

PATTERN German University of Technology, Muscat Winter 2011 Pattern will occupy the space between the contemporary and the traditional. It will draw on Oman’s historical precedents to investigate new typologies for Muscat. Historically, Oman has been careful in its urban expansion; however, the growing tourist trade and the profits it brings are forcing a rethink this philosophy. In 2003 the sultan’s ‘Diwan’ of Royal Court Affairs circulated a pattern book for architects – ‘Elevational Guidelines for Buildings in Oman’. It suggests that architects look to the existing buildings of Oman’s cities and environs as their models for creating an Omani character. With this book as our guide we will invent ways of filling the void in architectural thinking and identity, which is a critical aspect of the urban growth of Oman.

F(AA)SHIONS Musée des Arts Decoratifs Winter 2011 The fashion scene today has become an ensemble of ‘socio-morphological forces’ connecting people and catalysing experimental, open-ended design. Fashion, and its affinity for transformation, is a complex terrain of architectural identities, scenery and performance. These dynamic spaces are the field where vanguard ideas incubate. From right within fashion’s creative nexus F(AA)shions will foster ‘integral spatial qualities’ by harnessing the surprising typologies intrinsic to temporal bodies, fluid matter(s), and singular proportions. On the edge of couture’s technological transformation, we will rapid prototype templates that stage sharp, raw, urban, experimental and alien spatial apparel logics.

UNIT STAFF Elif Erdine

UNIT STAFF Jose Alfredo Ramirez Galindo

UNIT STAFF Omid Kamvari

UNIT STAFF Jorge Ayala

170

171

VISITING

RIO DE JANIERO

SANTIAGO DE CHILE

TEHRAN

BANGALORE

MATERIA PRIMA Winter 2011 The design workshop in Rio de Janeiro will collaborate with artist Ernesto Neto and the Gentil Carioca Gallery located in the SAARA neighbourhood market. The area is characterised by its raw materials – from the colourful plastic confections used in carnival costumes to the vibrant displays of bags of spices and beads used by Ernesto Neto in his performative fabric structures. The workshop will employ these analogue modelling techniques to inform parametric design generation and digital fabrication techniques that will create a feedback loop between manual physical models and computational derived forms. The programme’s agenda is to create a series of interventions to help revitalise the dilapidated public squares of the old centre of Rio de Janeiro.

DESERTA Catholic University School of Architecture Winter 2011 Deserta will daringly approach a very harsh climatic and geographical condition – the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The workshop will address the revision and redesign of its urban and architectural layout based on the new demands of the upcoming industries of lithium extraction, desert agriculture and concentrated solar power (CSP). Evening lectures, site visits to the Loa Oasis and extraction sites will provide an insight into the surrounding landscape of Atacama. The 10-day workshop is open to students and professionals interested in exploring alternative forms of practice.

MANUFACTURING SIMPLEXITIES_ 002 Summer 2011 In recent years Iran has emerged as a cultural and economic hub within the Middle East. With its illustrious history in architecture it offers a fertile ground for research and investigation. Tehran, its capital city, has become a major laboratory for contemporary cultural production. Continuing the agenda of last year’s workshop we will engage with algorithmic thinking through prototyping and experimenting at the 1:1 scale. This year the investigations will be developed into site-specific strategies occupying abandoned construction sites. Drawing upon Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino we will seek to understand how simple methods of manufacturing are present within historical Iranian structures and will attempt to influence today’s construction and design projects.

HYPERTHREADS 2011 B M Sreenivasaiah College of Engineering Summer 2011 The objective of HyperThreads is to expand on applied design research with two main focal points. First, we will explore how to use modelling to streamline the multi-stage processes of a design concept through to its physical manifestation. Second, we will investigate the synthesis of computational design research with its constraints to give an emergent labour-effective economy. The workshop will continue its agenda of exploring the following: physics-based design methods, integration of form and structure, computational methods of optimisation for fabrication and adaptation to local means, methods and crafts.

UNIT STAFF Anne Save de Beaurecueil Franklin Lee

UNIT STAFF Pedro Alonso

UNIT STAFF Omid Kamvari

UNIT STAFF Shajay Bhooshan

172

173

VISITING

BEIRUT

BLACK MOUNTAIN

MONTERREY

MONTREAL

BEIRUT AND BEYOND Lebanese American University Summer 2011 This year’s two-week Beirut visiting school, hosted by LAU in Lebanon, will focus on the production of spatially stimulating and fully usable structures for public gathering. Students will indentify misused niches in the city as opportunities to revitalise public space. The workshop aims to push the boundaries of producing large and elaborate structures within a limited timeframe and budget. Our objective is to hybridise the last decade of digital design culture with local ingenuity and craftsmanship. Selected designs will be made available on a shared platform for anybody to download, customise and experience.

EXPERIMENTAL COMMUNITIES Black Mountain College Summer 2011 Black Mountain is the first of an annual series of ‘in situ’ workshops exploring past models of architectural and artistic communities within the context of the rich cultural landscape of the United States. In collaboration with a motley crew of leading practitioners and theorists we will explore methodologies and materials specific to Black Mountain College (1933– 1957) and develop design strategies that operate at the juncture of historical research and the act of making. The programme will give participants the opportunity to experience the environment that inspired Albers, Cage, Fuller, Gropius and Rauschenberg and explore its untapped potential as a resource for contemporary production.

POLITICS OF FABRICATION LABORATORY Politécnico de Monterrey Summer 2011 Politics of Fabrications Laboratory (PFL) is a research-through-design initiative that explores the changing political implications of material experimentations when applied to public urban space. PFL is a series of speculative workshops in Latin America which experiment with politically charged material constructions in actual city sites. The workshop will be structured over 12 days in which students will construct innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday activities and a particular material organisation. Working in groups students will fabricate one scheme on-site as a temporary prototype.

OH CANADA McGill University Summer 2011 Mis-Architecture’s annual summer workshop will develop innovative methods for synthesising drawing and 3D methods of digital fabrication. We will test 2D, ‘thick 2D’ and 3D digital printing techniques according to three agendas: (1) As hybrid laboratory scientists/fine artists we will invent an ‘atlas’ of volumes, surfaces and textures through intricate sampling and testing procedures; (2) as contemporary archaeologists we will construct architectural souvenirs of the worlds that we see existing in the interstices of representational abstraction; and (3) as interpreters we will abstract, reduce, layer, fold, print and scan to challenge the boundaries between 2D and 3D drawings, which will be the platform to develop modular systems.

UNIT STAFF Dora Sweijd Theo Sarantoglou Lalis

UNIT STAFF Noam Andrews

UNIT STAFF Nuria Álvarez Lombardero Francisco González de Canales

UNIT STAFF Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews

174

175

VISITING

ROAD SHOW

SAN FRANCISCO

SÃO PAULO

SEOUL

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE... Summer 2011 Where The Wild Things Are will throw open the doors of the institution and set off on an annual road trip studio that will voyage to the edge of the world, visit unreal landscapes, alien terrains and strange ecologies. The studio will be a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling exhibitions, and impromptu tutorials. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science fiction soothsayer as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios. We will clamber over the wreckage of the future to visit noman’s lands between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

BIODYNAMIC STRUCTURES California College of the Arts Summer 2011 Biodynamic Structures will explore active systems in nature and investigate biomimetic principles in order to analyse, design and fabricate prototypes that respond to environmental stimuli. Students will work in teams to research specific biological systems, extracting logics of organisation, geometry, structure and mathematics. Advanced analysis, simulation, modelling and fabrication tools are introduced in order to apply this information to the design of both passive and active responsive architectural systems. The course is a 10-day workshop, co-taught by the faculty of Emergent Technologies and Design (Emtech) at the AA and the faculty of Architecture and MEDIAlab at California College of the Arts.

HIGH-LOW Summer 2011 The aim of this programme is to rehabilitate marginalised populations and disused materials through the use of innovative computational design and digital fabrication processes. With this tactic we will define a new generation of digital design that employs both high-tech and low-tech strategies. Parametric design generation and digital fabrication techniques will be used to computationally redesign low-tech recycled `found objects` and to develop assemblage techniques that can be adapted by local inhabitants. The work will be inspired by the Brazilian tradition of creative use of simple materials, embodied in works like the Campana Brothers, Ernesto Neto and even the Nilson Garrido Sports Academy.

SEOUL LAND-INGS Summer 2011 Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence. – Nam June Paik Seoul is in constant transformation – a city condemned to be authentic. Present-day Seoul is full of contradictions and complexities that global gentrification is trying (hard) to iron out. In a city where land is at a premium, its presence is constantly eroding. This workshop will explore Seoul’s DNA–LAND. The prestigious topographical setting of Seoul forged a sacrosanct relationship between man and nature. However, this connection evaporated with modernisation and the advent of concrete, which has forever inverted Seoul’s connection with the landscape. This workshop will be led by six AA tutors, each developing their own position on Seoul and how technology is altering its landscape.

UNIT STAFF Liam Young

UNIT STAFF Evan Greenberg Christina Doumpioti

UNIT STAFF Anne Save de Beaurecueil Franklin Lee

UNIT STAFF Peter Ferretto

176

177

VISITING

SHANGHAI

SINGAPORE

CITY OF THE SEA University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture Shanghai Study Centre Summer 2011 The topic for this year’s programme concerns an imminent crisis facing the megalopolis of Shanghai (which translates as ‘City of the Sea’) – its rising sea levels. This condition is exacerbated by the insatiable demand for land that causes urban densification. Design proposals will negotiate the paradoxical dynamic forces of urban development and environmental change. The nine-day studiobased course will investigate new computational design approaches in architecture and urbanism within the context of Shanghai, one of the world’s most rapidly growing, emblematic twenty-first century cities.

FRAGILE School of Design, Singapore Polytechnic Summer 2011 Fragile offers an introduction to the AA’s unique approach to architectural education and design. This year our migration to southeast Asia will explore the fragile state of our surroundings and inform alternative uses for the banal. Within this unique urban setting we will investigate how new forms and uses can emerge from ordinary mass-produced elements. The workshop will build on the diversity of approaches brought by the participants to propose new design strategies that emerge from the particularity of everyday Singaporean commodities, thus blurring the delicate boundaries of different scales between objects and the city.

UNIT STAFF Tom Verebes

UNIT STAFF Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel Da Costa Gonçalves

178

RESOURCES AND INFORMATION

RESOURCES

THE AA: PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AND MEMBERSHIP

The AA is more than a school of architecture. In its constitutional structure it is ﬁrst and foremost an association of members, originally established by students in 1847. Currently there are 4,400 members of the AA internationally, including some of the world’s leading architects, who play a vital role in shaping the identity and assisting in the development of the school. Registered students and staff of the AA automatically become members, and membership is open to anyone with an interest in architecture. Members participate in lectures and events, visit exhibitions and make use of the AA’s facilities. For further information contact: T +44 (0)20 7887 4076 membership@aaschool.ac.uk AA COUNCIL

The AA council – the governing body of the Architectural Association (Inc) – is elected each year by the membership of the Architectural Association including staff and students. The Architectural Association is governed constitutionally as a charitable company, the primary object of which is the running of a school of architecture. The Architectural Association (Inc) is both a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee and its council are the trustees of the charity and directors of the company. The council of the Architectural Association for 2010/11 is as follows: President Alex Lifschutz, BSc Vice Presidents Julia Barfield, MBE RIBA Hans Henrik Lønberg, AADipl Honorary Secretary Christopher Libby, AADipl RIBA Honorary Treasurer Sadie Morgan, BA(IntDes) MA(RCA)

Past President Jim Eyre, OBE BA(Hons) AADipl RIBA Ordinary Members John Andrews, AADipl Daniel Aram, MA MBA Michael J P Davies, CBE AADipl MArch RIBA FRSA FRGS FICPD David Jenkins, BA(Arch) DipArch FRSA Julia King, AADipl Sophie Le Bourva, Ceng MIStructE Diana Periton, MPhil DipArch Kenneth Powell, MA HonFRIBA Christina Smith Rebecca Spencer Jerome Tsui Jane Wernick, BSc(Hons) FICE FIStructE FRSA The council meets at least six times each academic year in order to monitor the Association’s financial health, approve new business and review current initiatives and activities. The meetings are open to all AA members (including staff and students), and the minutes of past meetings are made available for viewing in the library. On a yearly basis, the council endorses the school’s academic agenda, reviews the educational and cultural development of the school and Association, and considers and approves the Association’s financial statements and proposed budgets. On an ongoing basis, the council confirms the appointment of all staff, approves new applications to the membership, ratifies all AA Diplomas and other academic awards, and promotes the work of the Architectural Association through participation in its cultural events and support of its fundraising initiatives. The council appoints a company secretary to execute and administer the Architectural Association’s legal and statutory affairs. DECISION-MAKING IN THE SCHOOL COMMUNITY

As trustees and directors, the council carries ultimate responsibility for the proper conduct and execution of the Architectural Association’s affairs. Day-to-day responsibility for the running of the school, however, is delegated to the AA director.

180

Since 1971, council has chosen to exercise these responsibilities in a triangular relationship between itself, the director of the school and the school community, a structure which has become an important hallmark of the school’s independent status. The council also consults the school community on important governance decisions, such as the selection of the director of the school. Although the director is fully accountable to the council, his contract with the council is dependent on maintaining the confidence of the school community. The process of decision-making between director, council and school community makes the school unique in the world of architectural education. Along with the council itself, all registered students and contracted members of staff (with the exception of the director of the school) are constituents of the school community, where every individual has an equal vote. The school community has, at particular times, influenced the future direction, not just of the school but of the association as a whole. School community meetings are therefore a very important part of the Architectural Association’s governance. The Architectural Association is proud to have the benefit of an active and participatory democracy. Through membership participation in its governance, as well as student and staff involvement, the Architectural Association has maintained and developed as an independent, self-governing democratic body. It is this independence from state and institutional control, at times fiercely fought for, which has allowed it to sustain continual success and renewal. For information concerning the AA’s council, or its charitable status, contact Kathleen Formosa, company secretary, on +44 (0)20 7887 4018. Information on the AA’s constitution, minutes of council meetings, and the rules governing school community meetings, can be found in the AA library.

DEVELOPMENT OFFICE

Since its founding in 1847, the AA has remained both independent and self-supporting. A pioneering higher educational UK educational charity, the AA School receives no statutory funding either for its teaching activities or for its acclaimed cultural programme, which operates one of the world’s largest calendars of lectures, exhibitions and other public events dedicated to contemporary architectural culture. Each year the AA attracts the world’s foremost architects, engineers, designers, critics, theorists, artists and other leaders as part of its academic and cultural programmes. The AA takes very seriously its role as an independent setting for the teaching, learning, discussion and debate of architecture, including the vital role it can play in bridging between public, professional and political interests in the future of the world’s cities and built environment. Like the city of London that is its home, the AA is distinguished by its international and multicultural make-up. Maintaining the AA’s independence is the key to the school’s ability to remain at the forefront of architectural education, and its leading position is made viable and enhanced through the generous support, both financial and in-kind, provided by many individuals and organisations throughout the world. The AA’s development office cultivates mutually beneficial relationships between the school and individuals, organisations, institutions and corporate companies. Interested parties are actively encouraged to join the AA’s international network of supporters and partners, and can gain more information by contacting Esther McLaughlin, Head of Development at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, on +44 (0)20 7887 4090. Direct funding or sponsorship enquiries can also be sent to: development@aaschool.ac.uk.

LIBRARY

Term-time hours: 10am–9pm Monday to Friday 11am–5pm Saturday www.aaschool.ac.uk/library The AA library was founded in 1862 with a stock of ten books, various societies’ Transactions and Proceedings, and a number of journals. It now has almost 46,000 volumes, with books and journals on the history of architecture of all countries and periods, current architectural design and theory, building types, interior design and landscape design. It holds rare and early works – the earliest is the Nuremburg Chronicle of 1493 – and special collections on the modern movement, the AA, international exhibitions, the nineteenth century and garden cities. A large collection of CDs/ DVDs is available. In addition to online access to the Avery Index, the Art Index (full text), JSTOR, and the Construction Information Service, the library has full text subscriptions to a number of art and architecture journals. The library also receives print editions of more than 137 periodicals and holds a substantial number of key historical magazines, including Wendingen and L’Architecture Vivante. The library has recently begun the process of organising the Archives of the Architectural Association, and making it available to users. The Archives (approximately 450 cubic feet of documents) primarily contains the organisational and administrative records of the Association and the school. Dating back to 1847, it also holds a wealth of AA ephemera including posters, leaflets, photographs and medals, together with over 250 plans, drawings and paintings. The Archives contains the institutional memory and history of the AA and serves as a key resource for the study of architectural education over the last 160 years.

181

The library’s loan, reference and information services are available only to staff and registered students and members of the Association. Most materials may be borrowed from the library, although periodicals and some books are for reference only. Up to eight books at a time can be borrowed by members and undergraduate students. Graduate students can borrow a maximum of ten books. The library website provides information about opening hours and policies and acts as a portal through which research can be undertaken on the internet. The online catalogue allows users to check the library’s holdings and their availability, as well as to reserve and renew books online.

PHOTO LIBRARY

10am–1pm and 2pm–6pm Monday to Friday www.aaschool.ac.uk/photolib The Photo Library holds around 150,000 slides of both historical and contemporary buildings, 25,000 slides of AA student work and several valuable photographic archives by F R Yerbury, Eric de Maré, Reyner Banham and Ahrends Burton Koralek. The unique collection was originally created by AA students and staff returning from school trips and other travels. Many were members of the AA Camera Club (founded in 1893, relaunched in 2006 to encourage current students to contribute images to the library). AA students and staff can download low-res images from a fully searchable website featuring 8,000 images from the collection. We also publish cards and postcards from the collection which are available from the AA Bookshop and hold regular exhibitions featuring the work of photographers who have made the biggest contributions to the collection in recent decades. The

RESOURCES photo library also holds archive recordings of over 1,500 AA lectures and conferences dating back to the 1970s that include titles by Cedric Price, Peter Cook, Robin Evans, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. A broad selection of the 08/09 lectures are available online (www.aaschool.ac.uk/ lectures). There is also a collection of over 1,000 films and documentaries which can be viewed in the Cinema or borrowed overnight. The AA Film Club holds weekly film nights, showing filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Alfred Hitchcock and genres that this year will include Bollywood and Film Noir.

COMPUTER ROOM

Term-time hours: 9am–9pm Monday to Friday 10am–4.30pm Saturday The proliferation of digital design technologies has had a profound effect on architecture. As part of its educational remit, the AA equips its students to use current design systems and software packages to their fullest extent. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, AutoCad, Microstation, 3DS Studio Max and Maya will be introduced through one-day workshops in the autumn term. Software introductions will consist of six-hour teaching sessions and will be held in Morwell Street Studio Room 101 and the electronic media lab back room. The spring term programme offers introductions to the advanced use of selected software packages for interactive presentations, digital 3D modelling and the preparation of files for digital fabrication. There will be eight full-day Saturday workshops in the Morwell Street Studio Room 101.

It is important to note that all students need to register for the software workshops online. The registration for each term will be in the second week of term. More specific details about the workshops and registration can be found in the Course Booklet.

AUDIOVISUAL LAB

Term-time hours: 10am–6pm Monday to Friday for video editing 2pm–5pm Monday to Friday for student equipment loans enquiries: Manager/tutor joel@aaschool.ac.uk Technician nick.wayne@aaschool.ac.uk www.aaschool.ac.uk/avlab The audiovisual department is concerned with video, sound and display technology, supporting teaching and events throughout the AA. It lends equipment to staff and registered students, assists guest speakers presenting lectures, documents and digitally archives public events and operates a video-editing resource studio presently located in the Computer Room. Equipment for teaching and the Event series is booked through an established procedure. Staff and students should liaise with their relevant coordinator at least one week prior to when the equipment is required. The department is unable to provide support for late or impromptu classes or events. The video studio is an open area for those undertaking video and sound work. Courses run within Media Studies allow students to develop skills in this area. For those not able to take these courses, instruction can be found with the AV Manager / Video tutor. Software commonly used includes Final Cut Pro Studio, Adobe CS, After Effects and Garage Band; additional software is sourced based on demand. Outside of

182

teaching times, the area is run on a booking system that allows students to work in a focused manner. Staff and students must be aware that this area is for video and sound work only, and that they may not occupy the space without prior agreement. Unit-based projects (those outside of Media Studies) are possible if arranged in advance; teaching staff should speak to the AV Manager with regards to technical instruction. Students are advised to discuss proposals at an early stage to assess their viability. Students wishing to borrow equipment (such as video cameras or sound recorders) should speak to the AV technician to check availability and discuss conditions. Those borrowing equipment from the AV department are fully responsible for its security and care. An agreement form must be signed to this effect. Groups may borrow equipment as part of a well-deﬁned unit project on or off school premises only after discussion with the AV Manager. Students are reminded that loan requests should be made between 2pm and 5pm and that most equipment is lent for a period of two days.

WOOD AND METAL WORKSHOP

DIGITAL PROTOTYPING LAB

Term-time hours: 10am–6pm Monday to Friday 10am–2.30pm Saturday www.aaschool.ac.uk/ workshop The workshop is equipped with machine and hand tools for wood and metal. Facilities are available for working in steel and nonferrous metals, and for precise working in hardwoods, softwoods and panel products. Facilities may be used by all registered students and staff members; external registered students may do so at the discretion of the workshop staff and on payment of a prearranged fee. Hand tools and portable power tools may be borrowed when available. All First Year and new students will be required to attend a short induction course on safe working practices before they can use the workshop. Staff have a broad range of experience and their aim is to support individual projects as well as units whose programmes depend upon the use of the workshop.

Term-time hours: 10am–6pm Monday to Friday www.aaschool.ac.uk/ digitalprototyping The Digital Prototyping Lab offers a number of digital fabrication technologies including five laser-cutting machines available to individual students, four CNC milling machines and two 3D printers operated by lab staff. Students interested in using the laser cutting machines are first required to attend an induction course, after which they are able to reserve machine-time through an online booking system. People interested in using CNC or 3D printing do not need an induction but are recommended to follow the guidelines as listed on the website. In addition to the online tutorials, the lab offers inductions on file preparation for digital fabrication to groups and individual students and organises independent workshops open to students across the school.

AAIR

www.aaschool.ac.uk/radio radio@aaschool.ac.uk Created and produced by AA students, AAIR broadcasts music, interviews, events, documentaries, field and found recordings, compositions, spoken word and various other shows contributed by listeners. AAIR projects include Radio Anacapri (radioanacapri. com) and AAIR Salon evenings at the AA with live performances by students and invited artists.

MODEL WORKSHOP

Term-time hours: 10am–6pm Monday to Friday Saturday by appointment www.aaschool.ac.uk/ modelshop The model workshop offers assistance and equipment to construct small-scale objects. It specialises in casting, plastics and small-scale modelmaking, and has an adjoining yard for larger work. All registered students are able to use these facilities. New students must attend a short induction course.

HOOKE PARK

www.aaschool.ac.uk/hookepark Hooke Park is a 350-acre woodland site in an area of outstanding natural beauty in west Dorset, approximately four miles from Beaminster, near the village of Hooke, and 12.5 miles from Dorchester. Hooke Park provides the AA with a platform from which to research future material concepts in the building industry and operates as a showcase for

183

experimental sustainable construction. The facilities were originally developed by an institute researching new uses for working with wood in modern construction. This ‘laboratory of experimentation and research’ will be further developed in a way that takes account of the biodiversity of the natural environment, which includes woodlands, wetlands, boundary banks and meadows. The spacious facilities and outdoor environment provide a setting for workshops and projects that might be problematic to carry out in the conﬁnes of central London. Students are able to explore techniques ranging from modelmaking to object fabrication and prototyping and to produce work on a larger scale, supported by specialist staff based at the site. The existing structures at Hooke Park were designed by teams dedicated to pushing the boundaries of building with wood. The workshop, a collaboration by Frei Otto, ABK and Buro Happold, experiments with bending ‘green’ wood and carrying loads across large spans on small-diameter roundwood beams. The refectory, by the same team, is a prototype for a house in which the structure hangs like a tent on four A-frames. Westminster Lodge, by Edward Cullinan and Buro Happold, features a grass roof and the use of unmilled, untreated timber. Located around a central common room are eight double studybedrooms, each with its own shower and toilet, in pods that penetrate the exterior wall of the building. In addition there is accommodation for another two people in a cabin close by. Hooke Park is open to registered students and staff from all sections of the school. The A V Custerson Annual Award provides funding to carry out projects associated with timber at Hooke Park. Projects are open to all registered AA students in the Undergraduate or Graduate Schools. See the Scholarships & Bursaries section of this Prospectus for more details.

RESOURCES/INFORMATION

AA BOOKSHOP

MAEDA WORKSHOP

Generously supported by the Maeda Corporation in Japan, who have sponsored exhibitions and other events at the AA for more than a decade, the Maeda Workshops have brought in a series of visiting artists who have worked closely with registered AA students and staff on intensive short-term projects leading to installations within the school. Workshops have been led by internationally renowned artists including Richard Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tadashi Kawamata and others. A second three-year cycle has focused on the use and longterm development of Hooke Park as a vital part of the school.

10am–6.30pm Monday to Friday 11am–5pm Saturday bookshop@aabookshop.net www.aabookshop.net T +44(0)20 7887 4041 F +44(0)20 7887 4048 The AA Bookshop stocks a wide range of recent books on architecture, including all titles published by the AA. The bookshop is able to supply recommended course books and any title that is in print.

10am–5.45pm Monday to Friday www.aaschool.info/ drawingmaterials It stocks a wide range of stationery, drawing instruments, computer consumables, videotapes and other essential equipment and supplies – all at very competitive prices. This includes a range of AA merchandise items. The shop also runs an overnight ordering facility for items not regularly kept in stock. Additional services include large-scale printing on the plotter and fax sending.

STUDENT LOANS

Student loans are available to home students, or those who have lived in the UK for three years prior to embarking on higher education, for living expenses. The SLC website is www.slc.co.uk At the present time EU students are not eligible for student loans for living expenses, unless they have been resident in the UK for three years prior to embarking on higher education. UNDERGRADUATE ENTRY REQUIREMENTS

BAR & RESTAURANT

DRAWING MATERIALS SHOP

further up-to-date information students should go to the student finance section of the website www.direct.gov.uk bearing in mind that the AA is a private institution and so not all this information applies. New students who have been offered a place should apply to their LEA/SLC. Those transferring from other British schools must inform their LEA/SLC.

www.aaschool.ac.uk/restaurant The bar and restaurant are open in term time to students, members, staff, friends and guests from Monday to Friday. Coffee, tea, pastries, sandwiches, snacks and drinks are served in the bar on the ﬁrst ﬂoor from 9.15am until 9.00pm Monday to Friday during term time. Lunch is served from 12.15pm to 2.15pm Monday to Friday and 10am to 4.30pm on Saturday during term time in the dining room in the basement.

INFORMATION UNDERGRADUATE ADMISSIONS

LEA and EU Awards The following information applies to undergraduate students on the five-year RIBA/ARB undergraduate course only and is subject to current government legislation. TUITION FEE LOAN

New AA students (2010/11 onwards) from the UK and EU are eligible for a Tuition Fee Loan (non-income assessed). For

184

All applicants are expected to submit a bound portfolio of art/ design work (no larger than A3 and between 10 and 30 pages) accompanied by a CD/DVD of additional material if so desired. Upon signature of the applic ation form applicants certify that the work submitted is entirely their own. Plagiarism is unacceptable in the academic setting. Students are subject to penalties including dismissal from the programme if they commit an act of plagiarism. Applications and portfolios will be assessed by the admissions panel, and applicants will be informed if they are invited to an interview at the AA. The interview takes the form of a discussion around the applicant’s range of interests and focuses on the portfolio of work in architecture, the arts or related areas. Students are strongly encouraged to visit the AA before applying. Students are admitted into the Undergraduate programme at any level except the Fifth Year. Both school-leavers and mature applicants with previous experience are encouraged to take advantage of the wide range of possibilities offered within the school. Scholarships are available for new First, Second and Fourth

Year applicants who demonstrate both outstanding merit in their portfolio and financial need. For further information see: www.aaschool.ac.uk/admissions The minimum academic requirements for students entering the First Year of the course are two passes (grade C or above) at A level with at least five passes (grade C or above) in other subjects at GCSE. If one A level is in an art/design subject, it must be accompanied by at least one nonart/design subject. Maths and a Science subject, together with English Language, are compulsory at least at GCSE level. The AA Foundation course is recognised by the RIBA as the equivalent of an Art A level. Therefore the minimum entry requirements for students entering the Foundation course are as above for GCSE level, but only one A level pass (grade C or above) in a non-art/design subject is required, although two A level passes are preferred. Foundations in art and design must be accompanied by one A level (or equivalent) in a non art/design subject. Applicants for Fourth Year who have studied for Part 1 in the UK (or other countries using the same grading system) must have gained at least a 2:2 in their degree. Overseas applicants are required to have the recognised equivalent to the above examinations, such as the International Baccalaureate, Abitur, etc, plus the required English language qualification. Applicants without conventional entry qualifications are also considered, provided they are able to provide acceptable alternatives. ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Qualifications accepted: IELTS 6.5 (academic), O level, GCSE, IGCSE, Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English Grade C, SL IB English and SAT reading 550. Please note we do not accept TOEFL. For applicants to Diploma School we can accept three years of study in a UK university instead of an English language qualification, subject to conditions below. The AA reserves the right to ask you to gain an appropriate level of English before you apply or are interviewed. The AA reserves

the right to make a place in the school conditional on gaining a further English language qualiﬁcation if deemed necessary. A recognised English language qualiﬁcation is required by 6 May prior to entry to the school.

In order to be eligible for the AA Diploma and the AA Final Examination (RIBA/ARB Part 2), the Fourth and Fifth Years (minimum six terms) must be successfully completed. ENTRY TO FOUNDATION

PORTFOLIO GUIDELINES

Suggestions on preparing your portfolio can be found online at: www.aaschool.ac.uk/ portfolioguidelines ENTRY TO FIRST YEAR

Students applying for First Year are not necessarily expected to submit an ‘architectural’ portfolio. The panel particularly likes to see evidence of current interests and activities in the form of freehand sketches, drawings, essays or photographs. ENTRY TO SECOND OR THIRD YEAR (INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL)

Students with previous design or architectural experience may apply to enter the Intermediate School. They will be expected to submit a portfolio of their work to date, including not only ﬁnished drawings but also sketches, photographs and independent interests. Evidence of full-time architectural study is essential. Students entering the Third Year must be registered for a period of one academic year (three terms) to be eligible to submit for the AA Intermediate Examination (RIBA/ARB Part 1, the professional qualification) through the school.

It is hoped that all applicants will include in their portfolios a good selection of work that reveals their individual interests and skills. Essays, photographs, video, photos of 3D objects or selfgenerated projects can all be included. Offers of admission are based on evidence of motivation as well as intellectual and practical creative ability. ACCEPTANCE OF PLACES

To accept a place, a completed signed admission form and a one term non-refundable deposit must be received by the Registrar’s Ofﬁce by the due date stated on the admission form. OPEN DAYS

Foundation/First Year: Monday 8 November 2010 Fourth Year: Monday 6 December 2010, Monday 7 February 2011 Further details will be available on the AA website closer to the dates. Individual or group visits for those interested in applying can also be arranged with advance notice. For further details please contact the Undergraduate Admissions Coordinator (see below). APPLICATIONS

ENTRY TO FOURTH YEAR

Many students apply to enter the Fourth Year from other schools after completing Part I. Applicants wishing to enter the Diploma School to gain the AA Final Examination (RIBA/ARB Part 2, the professional qualification), must have the AA Intermediate Examination (RIBA/ARB Part 1) or have gained exemption from RIBA/ARB Part 1. This can be gained either by successful completion of Third Year at the AA for a period of one academic year (three terms) as a full-time student, or by applying directly to the ARB for Part 1 exemption. Part 1 must be gained by 15 July prior to entry to the school.

185

The AA does not belong to UCAS, and all applicants must complete an AA application form. These forms can be downloaded from the website or are available from the Registrar’s Ofﬁce. The closing date for applications is 14 January 2011 (application fee £40); late applications will be accepted up to 11 March 2011 (fee £65). Applications made after this date will be accepted at the discretion of the AA School. Enquiries to: Undergraduate Admissions, Registrar’s Ofﬁce undergraduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk T +44 (0)20 7887 4051 F +44 (0)20 7414 0779

INFORMATION GRADUATE ADMISSIONS

FEES

SCHOLARSHIPS AND BURSARIES

Application Procedure: Mandatory Requirements All applicants are required to complete an application form, accompanied by the appropriate registration fee and original evidence of qualiﬁcations and the standard attained (copies will not be accepted). Academic and/or work references should also be provided. With the exception of Histories & Theories, and in addition to the previous requirements, applicants to all programmes are required to submit a portfolio of design work (no larger than A4 format) showing a combination of both academic and professional work (if applicable). All applicants are encouraged to attend a personal interview. All documentation is to be provided in English. Upon signature of the application form applicants certify that the work submitted is entirely their own. Plagiarism is unacceptable in the academic setting. Students are subject to penalties including dismissal from the programme if they commit an act of plagiarism.

Fees are reviewed annually. For the academic year 2010/11 they are as follows:

The AA is committed to giving as many talented students as possible the opportunity to study at its school in London. Around one in six AA students receive ﬁnancial assistance from the Scholarship, Bursary and Assistantship programme.

Undergraduate School Foundation: £14,595 Five-year undergraduate programme: £16,173 Graduate School 12-month MA and MSc: £18,960 16-month MArch: £25,305 PhD: £15,747 Graduate Building Conservation Diploma (day-release course): £5,475 AAIS £14,595 full time, £5,838 part time (2 days per week) MArch 16-month Design & Make £18,960 (for 2010/11 intake only) MPhil 24-month Projective Cities £22,650 (for 2010/11 intake only)

Scholarships are offered to new First, Second and Fourth Year applicants who demonstrate academic excellence and ﬁnancial need. They are available for two or three years, subject to continuing progress. Bursaries are offered to existing AA students and new Graduate students, and must be applied for on a yearly basis. HOW TO APPLY FOR A SCHOLARSHIP

Visiting School Spring Semester Programme: £7,990 One year at the AA: £16,173 dLab: £1,750 Summer School: £1,545 Global programmes: see AA website for individual programme fee updates

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Overseas students from nonEnglish-speaking countries will be asked to demonstrate their fluency in written and spoken English, and will be required to pass the IELTS academic examination with a grade of not less than 6.5, Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English Grade C or three years’ study in a UK university instead of an English-language qualification, subject to the conditions below. TOEFL is not accepted. The AA reserves the right to make a place in the school conditional on gaining a further English language qualification if deemed necessary. Any student without the required IELTS grade (6.5 or above) must register in an English-language school, and book and pass the examination before 6 May 2011 prior to entry in the Autumn Term.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SCHOLARSHIP AND A BURSARY?

There is an additional £50 member ship fee and £35 student forum fee per year. AA ASSISTANTSHIPS

A limited number of assistantships are offered to full-time registered students who are experiencing ﬁnancial hardship. Students work between seven and ten hours per week, providing administrative or secretarial assistance in return for an agreed remission of part of their fees. New students wishing to apply will be told the procedure when they register at the beginning of the academic year.

Undergraduate applicants must complete the main application form no later than 14 January 2011, stating their interest in an AA Scholarship in the ‘Scholarships and Awards’ section. Students whose work is considered to be of scholarship standard will be asked, after an entry interview, to complete a scholarship application form, provide ﬁnancial information and prepare a portfolio for the scholarship committee. For further information contact: T +44 (0)20 7887 4051 undergraduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk HOW TO APPLY FOR A BURSARY FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Bursary application forms are available from the Registrar’s Ofﬁce from the end of March and should be returned by mid-May. The Undergraduate Bursary Committee, which meets in June/ July to distribute the awards, bases its decisions on academic performance, recommendation from the tutor and ﬁnancial need. Named Scholarship and Bursary Awards, with their 2010/11 recipients, are listed below. See also: www.aaschool.ac.uk/admissions HOW TO APPLY FOR A BURSARY FOR GRADUATE SCHOOL STUDENTS

Bursary application forms are available from the Registrar’s

186

Office upon an official offer of a place. Completed bursary forms to be returned by beginning of March. The Graduate Bursary Committee, which meets in March/April to distribute the awards, bases its decisions on academic performance, tutor recommendations and financial need. (Bursary awards range from one to one and a half terms, covering a proportion of student fees per year.) David Allford Scholarship Adam Holloway This full-fee (three-term) scholarship has been set up to honour the memory of David Allford, a partner of YRM Architects and trustee of the AA Foundation. It is funded by David Allford’s friends and family and is awarded to a British student who demonstrates excellence and a need for ﬁnancial aid. Baylight Scholarships Dessislava Lyutakova, John Ng, Emily Thurlow Thanks to the generosity of the Baylight Foundation, headed by AA Past President Crispin Kelly, a number of full-fee scholarships are available to British students entering the Diploma School. Candidates need to demonstrate both outstanding merit and financial need. Alvin Boyarsky Scholarship Sayaka Namba As AA Chairman from 1971 to 1990, Alvin Boyarsky transformed the AA into an internationally respected school and a forum for architectural experiment and debate. The scholarship is for one term’s fees. Martin Caroe Memorial Scholarship Established in memory of Martin Bragg Caroe, whose collaboration with the AA was instrumental in establishing the postgraduate course in Conservation of Historic Buildings. Made possible through the support of Martin Caroe’s practice, Caroe & Partners, the scholarship is awarded to a second year student of the Conservation of Historic Buildings course based on an assessment of merit and ﬁnancial need.

Stephen Lawrence Scholarship This award, in memory of the young man who was murdered in a racist attack on 22 April 1993, has been established with the support of Stephen Lawrence’s family, the Stephen Lawrence Trust and a number of generous private donations. Applic ations are particularly welcome from members of ethnic minorities entering the First Year. Applicants must demonstrate both merit and the need for financial aid. Eileen Gray Fund The Eileen Gray Fund for AA students was established in 1980 by the distinguished architect and furniture-designer’s niece Prunella Clough-Taylor. A bequest received from Ms Clough-Taylor in 2000 has expanded the scope of this fund, which now awards a series of bursaries and scholarships every year to talented students in need of financial assistance. Marjorie Morrison Bursary Umberto Bellardi Ricci Marjorie Morrison MBE, AA Slide Librarian from 1935 to 1975 and researcher until 1985, bequeathed a generous sum to the AA Foundation. The sum was increased by donations from among Marjorie’s friends. Enid Caldicott Bursary A bursary was established in 1978 in memory of Enid Caldicott, who was involved with the AA first as a student and then as a member of staff, working for 35 years in the library. It is awarded annually to British students. Max Lock Bursary Max Lock studied at the AA from 1926 to 1931 and taught at the school during the late 1930s. The bursary is funded by his generous bequest to the AA Foundation. Elizabeth Chesterton Bursary Fund AA alumna and former Councillor Dame Elizabeth Chesterton OBE left a generous bequest in support of bursaries for British students at the AA. Anne Gregory Bursary Charlotte Moe A bursary is offered each year in

187

memory of Anne Gregory, who died while in her first year of studies. R D Hammett Bursary Rebecca Crabtree This bursary is funded by the generous bequest of graduate R D Hammett. Nicholas Boas Travel Award Akhil Bakhda, Wiklor Kidziak, Jerome Tsui A travel award open to AA students who wish to study Roman architecture and urbanism has been established in memory of AA graduate Nicholas Boas (1975– 1998). It provides funds for a onemonth study visit based at the British School in Rome. A V Custerson Award Anthony Custerson was passionate about Hooke Park and the use of indigenous and sustainable sources of timber, and he left a generous legacy to support students working in this area. Open to all AA students, the annual award of £7,500 provides funding to carry out projects at Hooke Park. Anthony Pott Memorial Award As trustees of this fund, the AA offers an award to assist a study project related to architecture and design. The award is intended to fund original study or the publication of completed work. Further details available from the AA Secretary’s Office. Michael Ventris Memorial Fund This award is open to candidates of at least RIBA/ARB Intermediate status or equivalent. The fund was established in 1957 in memory of Michael Ventris and in appreciation of his work in the fields of Mycenaean civilisation and architecture. It is intended to promote study in those areas and is available to support a specifically defined and achievable project. The closing date for applications is 31 October 2009. Further details are available from the AA Secretary’s Office. Mike Davies Bursary Fund Thomas Fox, Nathaniel Mosley This bursary fund, established in 2008 in support of British or UK-

INFORMATION based students within the AA’s five-year architecture programme, will reward innovative thinking and application in design. It is generously supported by AA alumnus Mike Davies CBE, founding partner of Richard Rogers & Partners (now Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners) and current AA council member. Fletcher Priest Foundation Bursary Jack Self The Fletcher Priest Foundation, established by AA alumni Keith Priest and Michael Fletcher, has initiated a generous commitment to the AA Foundation to support over the coming years a number of bursaries for deserving AA undergraduate students in need of financial assistance. Henry Florence Studentship Zachary Fluker Established in 1916 in the name of AA President (1878–1879) Alex Stanhope Forbes Prize Lara Lesmes For work in the field of colour AA Travel Studentship James Kwong-ho Chung To travel in the UK or abroad Howard Colls Studentship Alma Ying Yi Wang For best drawings at the end of 4th year Alexander Memorial Travel Fund Max Hacke Henry Saxon Snell Scholarship Amber Wood To encourage design, construction of hospitals, convalescent homes and asylums William Glover Bequest Huida Xia Established in 1913 Ralph Knott Memorial Fund Yheu-Shen Chen For necessitous students with promise AA Prize Camille Steyaert For significant contributions to the AA

Holloway Trust James Rai, Erlend Skjeseth, Elliot Krause Traditionally awarded for work related to the building and construction industry Julia Wood Foundation Prize Albane Duvillier Foster + Partners Prize Aimee O’Carroll For infrastructure and sustainability Nicolas Pozner Prize Award Frederik Hellberg For best single drawing Dennis Sharp Prize Simon Whittle For outstanding writing REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

MA 12-month courses in Histories & Theories Housing & Urbanism Second Class or above Honours degree in architecture or a related discipline from a British university, or an overseas qualiﬁcation of equivalent standard (from a course lasting not less than three years in a university or educational institution of university rank). MA 12-month course in Landscape Urbanism Professional degree or diploma in architecture/ landscape architecture or urbanism. MSc 12-month course in Sustainable Environmental Design Professional degree or diploma in architecture, engineering or other relevant disciplines. MSc 12-month course in Emergent Technologies & Design Professional degree or diploma in architecture, engineering, industrial/ product design or other relevant disciplines. MArch 16-month course in Architecture and Urbanism (Design Research Laboratory) Five-year professional architecture degree (BArch/Diploma equivalent).

188

MArch 16-month course in Emergent Technologies & Design Five-year professional degree or diploma in architecture, engineering, industrial/product design or other relevant disciplines (BArch/Diploma equivalent). MArch 16-month course in Sustainable Environmental Design Five-year professional architecture degree (BArch/Diploma equivalent). MArch 16-month course in Housing & Urbanism Five-year professional architecture degree (BArch/Diploma equivalent) or other related discipline. MArch 16-month course in Design & Make Five-year professional degree (BArch/Diploma equivalent). MPhil 24-month course in Projective Cities Five-year professional architecture degree (BArch/Diploma equivalent). AA Graduate Diploma in AA Interprofessional Studies 12 months full-time 12 months part-time (2 days per week). Applications assessed individually upon receipt if a CV, a short statement and original evidence of qualification. AA Graduate Diploma in Conservation of Historic Buildings This two-year part-time (day release) course is open to students or professionals with Part 2 (RIBA/ ARB) or equivalent recognised qualiﬁcations. Suitably qualiﬁed members of other disciplines (eg, surveyors) may be considered. MPhil/PhD Candidates for MPhil/PhD research degrees are expected to have reached a level equivalent to that of an MA/MSc or MArch and must show evidence of previous experience in their proposed areas of research.

APPLICATION DATE

Students are asked to apply by 14 January 2011 (application fee £40). Late applications will be accepted up until 11 March 2011 (late fee £65). Applications made after this date will be accepted at the discretion of the school. Enquiries to: Graduate School Admissions Registrar’s Ofﬁce T +44 (0)20 7887 4067 F +44 (0)20 7414 0779 graduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk OPEN DAY

Friday 21 January 2011 Further details will be made available through the AA’s website nearer the date. Individual or group visits can also be arranged with advance notice. For further details please contact: Graduate School Admissions Registrar’s Ofﬁce T +44 (0)20 7887 4067 F +44 (0)20 7414 0779

registered at the AA School are also encouraged to contact the Registrar’s Office and/or their Programme Director, Unit Master/ Tutor or Complementary Studies Course Master to assess what support would be available. This is an ongoing process throughout the academic year, to ensure that if a student omits to declare a disability/learning difficulty prior to or during registration, or becomes disabled during the course, appropriate support is put in place so that the student can achieve maximum success in their studies.

Full information will be given in the Student Handbook 2010/11. EQUALITY

PLAGIARISM

The AA aims to create conditions to ensure that students are treated solely on the basis of their merits, abilities and potential, regardless of their gender, colour, religious/ political beliefs, ethnic or national origin, disability, family background, age, sexual orientation or other irrelevant distinction.

Plagiarism is treated as a serious offence and the AA may impose all or any of the following penalties on a student found guilty of it: • expulsion from the school • suspension from registration at the school or from particular courses for such period as it thinks ﬁt • denial of credit or partial credit in any course or courses • an ofﬁcial warning

DISABILITY AND LEARNING DIFFICULTIES

The Architectural Association School of Architecture aims to provide a high-quality personalised service tailored to the individual student’s needs. Support and information is provided at every opportunity to encourage students to disclose their circumstances and thereby access the most appropriate support for their needs. Prospective students are encouraged to contact or visit the Registrar’s Office to discuss their needs and to assess what support is available prior to starting the course. Students who are

Foundation undergraduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk Undergraduate School Admissions undergraduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk Graduate School Admissions graduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk Visiting School visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk Spring Semester Programme visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

DATA PROTECTION

Upon registration in the school students will be required to sign a statement consenting to the processing of personal information by AA Inc in compliance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998. Data will only be disclosed internally to members of the AA staff who need to know; and when required, to third parties outside the AA in accordance with the Act. Data will not be provided to third parties for direct marketing purposes.

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE ASSESSMENT

CONTACTS

DOOR SECURITY POLICY

From time to time it may be necessary to amend the AA’s normal open-door policy for Bedford Square. Entry may be gained at these times by using the AA Membership swipe card or the entry buzzer.

189

One Year at the AA undergraduateadmissions@ aaschool.ac.uk Professional Studies (Year Out & Part 3) psco@aaschool.ac.uk Interprofessional Studio aais@aaschool.ac.uk

STAFF LIST DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

Director Brett Steele Personal Assistant Roberta Jenkins Academic Head Charles Tashima Deputy Academic Head Barbara Campbell-Lange REGISTRAR’S OFFICE

Registrar Marilyn Dyer Assistant Registrar Belinda Flaherty Registrar’s Office/ External Students Administrative Coordinator Sabrina Blakstad Admissions (Undergraduate) Coordinator Meneesha Kellay Admissions (Graduate) Coordinators Claire Perry Imogen Evans Undergraduate School Administrative Coordinator Victoria Bahia

Unit 3 Nanette Jackowski Ricardo de Ostos Unit 4 Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel da Costa Gonçalves Unit 5 Stefano Rabolli Pansera Roz Barr Unit 6 Jeroen van Ameijde Olivier Ottevaere Unit 7 Maria Fedorchenko Unit 8 Francisco González de Canales Nuria Alvarez Lombardero Unit 9 Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews Unit 10 Claudia Pasquero Marco Poletto Unit 12 Sam Jacob Tomas Klassnik Unit 13 Miraj Ahmed Martin Jameson

FOUNDATION

DIPLOMA SCHOOL

Course Director Saskia Lewis Studio Staff Matthew Butcher Takako Hasegawa Flora McLean

Unit 1 On Sabbatical Unit 2 On Sabbatical Unit 3 Peter Karl Becher Matthew Barnett Howland Unit 4 John Palmesino Ann-Sofi Rönnskog Unit 5 Cristina Díaz Moreno Efrén García Grinda Tyen Masten Unit 6 Liam Young Kate Davies Unit 7 Simon Beames Kenneth Fraser Unit 8 Eugene Han Unit 9 Natasha Sandmeier

FIRST YEAR

Studio Staff Valentin Bontjes van Beek David Greene Samantha Hardingham Tobias Klein Sarah Entwistle Ingrid Shröder INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL

Unit 1 Mark Campbell Stewart Dodd Unit 2 Takero Shimazaki Ana Araujo

Unit 10 Carlos Villanueva Brandt Unit 11 Shin Egashira Unit 12 On Sabbatical Unit 13 Oliver Domeisen Unit 14 Pier Vittorio Aureli Barbara Campbell-Lange Fenella Collingridge Unit 15 On Sabbatical Unit 16 Jonas Lundberg Andrew Yau Tom Tong Unit 17 Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Dora Sweijd Unit 18 Enrique Ruiz-Geli Edouard Cabay Nora Graw Unit 19 Martin Self Piers Taylor Kate Darby GRADUATE SCHOOL

Administrative Coordinators Clement Chung Jenny Devine DRL Director Theodore Spyropoulos Founder Patrik Schumacher Programme Tutors Alisa Andrasek Yota Adilenidou Shajay Bhooshan Lawrence Friesen Hanif Kara Riccardo Merello Yusuke Obuchi Christos Passas Robert Stuart-Smith Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon Emergent Technologies Directors Michael Weinstock George Jeronimidis Studio Masters Christina Doumpioti Toni Kotnik

190

STAFF LIST Studio Tutors Suryansh Chandra Evan L Greenberg History and Critical Thinking Director Marina Lathouri Programme Staff Mark Cousins Francisco González de Canales John Palmesino Thomas Weaver Housing & Urbanism Directors Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley Programme Staff Lawrence Barth Nicholas Bullock Kathryn Firth Dominic Papa Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith Landscape Urbanism Director Eva Castro Studio Masters Alfredo Ramirez Eduardo Rico Programme Staff Douglas Spencer Tom Smith Workshop Tutors Clara Oloriz Enriqueta Llabres Nicola Saladino Teruyuki Nomura Sustainable Environmental Design Director Simos Yannas Programme Staff Klaus Bode Gustavo Brunelli Paula Cadima Joana Carla Soares Gonçalves Jorge Rodriguez Alvarez Rosa Schiano-Phan Conservation of Historic Buildings Director Andrew Shepherd Programme Staff David Hills David Heath Design & Make Director Martin Self

Programme Staff Piers Taylor Kate Darby Projective Cities Programme Directors Christopher C M Lee Sam Jacoby PhD Programme Programme Staff Lawrence Barth Paula Cadima Mark Cousins Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley George Jeronimidis Toni Kotnik Marina Lathouri Rosa Schiano-Phan Patrik Schumacher Thomas Weaver Michael Weinstock Simos Yannas Interprofessional Studio Programme Staff Theo Lorenz Tanja Siems Independents Group Studio Director Alan Dempsey Research Clusters Coordinator Charles Tashima Cluster Curators Stefano Rabolli Pansera Marianne Mueller Olaf Kneer Marina Lathouri Jorge Fiori Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith COMPLEMENTARY STUDIES

History & Theory Studies Administrative Coordinator Belinda Flaherty Director Mark Cousins Course Lecturers Lara Belkind Mark Cousins Christopher Pierce Brett Steele Course Tutors Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon Programme Staff William Firebrace

Consultants Pier Vittorio Aureli Mark Campbell Paul Davies Oliver Domeisen Francesca Hughes John Palmesino Yael Reisner Patrick Wright Teaching Assistants Daniel Ayat Shumi Bose Alejandra Celedon Braden Engel Marlie Mul Ivonne Santoyo Emanuel de Sousa Media Studies Head Eugene Han Programme Staff Sue Barr Shany Barath Valentin Bontjes van Beek Monia De Marchi Shin Egashira Trevor Flynn Adam Furman Marco Ginex Matej Hosek Max Kahlen Alex Kaiser Tobias Klein Heather Lyons Antoni Malinowski Marlie Mul Joel Newman Goswin Schwendinger Technical Studies Administrative Coordinator Belinda Flaherty Diploma Master Javier Castanón Intermediate Master Wolfgang Frese Programme Staff Dancho Azagra Giles Bruce Phil Cooper Kenneth Fraser Martin Hagemann Paul Loh Anderson Inge John Noel Fernando Perez Manja van de Worp Consultants Carolina Bartram Ben Godber Marissa Kretsch Emanuele Marfisi

Director Chris Pierce Coordinator Sandra Sanna

Wood and Metal Workshop Supervisor Will Fausset Technician Robert Busher Head of Digital Prototyping Jeroen van Ameijde Prototyping Lab Technician Kar Leung Wai Hooke Park Bruce Hunter-Inglis Charles Corry Wright Chris Sadd Admin Coordinator Merry Hinsley

MEDIA SERVICES

ASSOCIATION

Audiovisual Manager Joel Newman Audiovisual Technician Nick Wayne Head of Computing Julia Frazer Assistant Head of Computing Mathew Bielecki Computer Engineers Amos Deane Andrew Ennis David Hopkins Syed Qadri Kevin Seddon Computing Course Coordinator Eugene Han Digital Photo Studio Sue Barr

Secretary Kathleen Formosa Secretary’s Office Personal Assistant Cristian Sanchez Gonzalez Head of Membership Alex Lorente Membership Coordinator Jenny Keiff

DIGITAL PLATFORMS

AA FOUNDATION

Simos Yannas Mohsen Zikri Architectural Practice Professional Studies Advisor Alastair Robertson Professional Studies Coordinator Rob Sparrow Part 1 Javier Castañón Part 2 Hugo Hinsley VISITING SCHOOL

Head of Digital Platorms/ Web Designer Frank Owen Web Designer/ Developer Zeynep Görgülü Content Editor Rosa Ainley Images & Videos Joel Newman

DEVELOPMENT OFFICE

Head of Development Esther McLaughlin Research and Proposal Development Manager Nicola Quinn

Secretary Marilyn Dyer Administrator Alex Lorente AACP

Shumon Basar Staff Francisco González de Canales EXHIBITIONS

WORKSHOPS

Model Making Trystrem Smith

Head of Exhibitions Vanessa Norwood Exhibitions Project Manager Lee Regan

191

Exhibitions Coordinator Luke Currall

DRAWING MATERIALS SHOP

Manager Maria Cox

LIBRARY

Librarian Hinda Sklar Deputy Librarian Aileen Smith Archivist Edward Bottoms Cataloguer Beatriz Flora Serials/Library Web Developer Simine Marine PRINT STUDIO

Print Studio Manager/Editor AA Files Thomas Weaver Publications Editor Pamela Johnston Editor, Events List Rosa Ainley Editorial Assistant Clare Barrett Art Director Zak Kyes Senior Graphic Designer Wayne Daly Graphic Designers Claire McManus Phill Clatworthy AA PUBLICATIONS

Marketing & Distribution Kirsten Morphet Marilyn Sparrow BEDFORD PRESS

Directors Zak Kyes Wayne Daly Print Technicians Phill Clatworthy Claire McManus

FACILITIES

Manager Anita Pfauntsch Assistant Manager Peter Keiff Maintenance & Security Matthew Hanrahan Lea Ketsawang James McColgan Adam Okuniewski Colin Prendergast Leszak Skrzypiec Mariusz Stawiarski Bogdan Swidzinski Sebastian Wyatt FRONT OF HOUSE

Reception & Switchboard Mary Lee Hiroe Shin Shigemitsu Public Programme/ Graduation Administrator/ Outside Events Philip Hartstein CATERING/BAR

Manager/Chef Pascal Babeau Deputy Manager/ Barman Darko Calina Catering Assistants Brigitte Ayoro Daniel Swidzinski Miodrag Ristic Marie Abdou HUMAN RESOURCES

Head of Human Resources Tehmina Mahmood

PHOTO LIBRARY

Librarian Valerie Bennett ACCOUNTS OFFICE

Manager Steve Livett Assistants Lauren Harcourt Linda Keiff Eve Livett Fozia Munshi

AA BOOKSHOP

Bookshop Manager Charlotte Newman Bookshop Assistant Luz Hincapie

COLOPHON The Prospectus is issued for guidance only, and the AA reserves the right to vary or omit all or any of the facilities, tuition or activities described therein, or amend in any substantial way any of the facilities, tuition or activities for which students may have enrolled. Students shall have no claim against the AA regarding any alteration made to the course. The School is part of the Architectural Association (Inc.), which is a company limited by guarantee and a registered charity. Company no 171402. Charity no 311083. Registered Office as below.

The Prospectus is produced through the AA Print Studio Editor: Ryan Dillon Editorial Assistant: Clare Barrett Art Director: Zak Kyes Design: Claire McManus, Wayne Daly Printed in England by Beacon Press Architectural Association School of Architecture 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES T + 44 (0)20 7887 4000 F + 44 (0)20 7414 0782 info@aascchool.ac.uk www.aaschool.ac.uk

Reader Assistance Clause AA Members wishing to request a black and white and/or larger print version of specific printed items can do so by contacting Mary Lee (reception@aaschool.ac.uk/ 020 7887 4000), or by accessing the AA website at www.aaschool.ac.uk. For an audio recording of AA Events List, please call 020 7887 4111.

192

ACADEMIC YEAR 2010/11 KEY DATES Autumn Term (12 weeks) 27 September – 17 December 2010 Introduction Week: Monday 20 – Friday 24 September Open Week: Monday 1 – Friday 5 November Christmas Party: Friday 17 December Winter Term (12 weeks) 10 January – 1 April 2011 Easter Party: Friday 1 April Spring Term (10 weeks) 26 April – 17 June 2011 2nd Year End of Year Reviews: Tuesday 31 May 4th Year End of Year Reviews: Tuesday 31 May – Wednesday 1 June Foundation End of Year Reviews: Wednesday 1 June 1st Year End of Year Reviews: Thursday 2 – Friday 3 June Diploma Honours Presentations: Friday 10 June Graduation Ceremony & Projects Review Opening: Friday 17 June

2010/11 AASCHOOL.AC.UK AALOG.NET