Architectural Association School of Architecture Prospectus 2009-2010

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PREFACE

Welcome to this Prospectus for the and 2009/10 academic year of the AA School of Architecture. The following guide offers an introduction to the incredible diversity of courses and public programme activities that make the AA the world’s most global and influential school. It is divided into three simple parts: 1) An overview of the AA, including some of the key features that make it so unique; 2) AA Schools, including the full-time undergraduate and graduate courses located at our historic home in Bedford Square, London, as well as our Visiting School held in cities around the world and 3) Resources and information about every aspect of the school, from study to enrolment.

Unit Staff Valentin Bontjes van Beek, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, Nick Puckett Nathalie Rozencwajg, Martina Schäfer

Pont, Lap Heng Fung, Madoka Furuhashi, Max Hacke, Lyn Hayek, Yu Won Kang, Karl Karam, Ja Kyung Kim, Taeho Kim, Conrad Koslowsky, Saif Lassas, Stephen Marshall, Harpreet Marway, Eulalia Moran, Francisco de Borja Muguiro, Elisha Nathoo, Nora Nilsen, Aine O’Dwyer, Alex Osei-Bonsu, Jessica Pappalardo, Octave Perrault, Ryan Phanphensophon, Perrine Planché, Kristina Pokrovskaya, Costantino Rivetti, Elina Safarova, Kayvan Sarvi, Rebecca Spencer, William Stanley, Camille Steyaert, Anna

Ström, Luke Shixin Tan, Stefania Triantafyllou, Kassymkhan Ulykbanov Digital Workshop Jeroen van Ameijde, Monia De Marchi, Claude Ballini, Christopher Robeller, Adrian Tung, Michal Ciomek, Fredrik Hellberg, Kim Diego Azevedo

Video Workshop William Firebrace, Nic Clear, Dana Behrman, Joel Newman, Jesse Sabatier, Takanao Todo, Ina Kapitola, Colin Ashton, Rojia Abadeh, Jesse Randzio, Students of Oxford Brookes (Joel

Chappell , Mike Halliwell, Simon Houlden, Marina Illum, Eva Seljan, Justus van der Hoven) Fashion Workshop Flora McLean, Janice Turner

AA prospectus 2009/10

Students Eugenia Andersson, Faraz Anoushahpour, Uliana Apatina, Teeba Arain, Costantino Balbo Bertone di Sambuy, Frederik Bo Bojesen, Stefano Branca, Maria-Panagiota Brewster, Shu Susan Chai, Jin Chang, Hwui Zhi Cheng, Yeuh-Shen Chua, James Kwang-Ho Chung, Hussam Dakkak, Artemis Doupa, Gary Du

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Thames Hotel Lectures Dr John Bold, Fergus Henderson, Holger Kehne, Brett Steele Thank you to all our visiting critics

Architectural Association School of Architecture

CONTENTS

aa prospectus 2009/10 2 Introduction 33 AA Schools

Undergraduate School 36 Foundation–Open Studio 38 First Year 42 Intermediate 68 Diploma 98 Complementary Studies 100 History and Theory Studies 108 Media Studies 114 Technical Studies 120 Professional/Future Practice Graduate School 124 Design Research Lab 130 EmTech 134 Histories and Theories of Architecture 138 Housing and Urbanism 142 Landscape Urbanism 146 Sustainable Environmental Design 150 Conservation of Historic Buildings 152 PhD Programme 154 AA Interprofessional Studio 156 Design + Make 158 Projective Cities 160 Research Clusters 162 AA Course and Examination in Architectural Practice Visiting School 166 Summer School 168 Summer dLab 170 Spring Semester Programme 172 One-Year Abroad 173 Visiting Teachers’ Programme 174 Global Schools

179 Resources & Information

Resources 180 The AA: Participatory Democracy 181 Development Office 181 Library 181 Photo Library 182 Computer Room/ Electronic Media Lab 182 Audiovisual Lab 182 AAIR 183 Wood and Metal Workshop 183 Model Workshop 183 Digital Prototyping Lab 183 Hooke Park 184 Maeda Workshop 184 Drawing Materials Shop 184 AA Bookshop 184 Bar & Restaurant

Information 184 Undergraduate Admissions 185 Undergraduate Entry Requirements 186 Graduate Admissions 186 Fees 187 Scholarships and Bursaries 188 Required Qualifications 190

Staff List

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introduction

Welcome: The Year Ahead Welcome to this Prospectus for the 2009-10 academic year of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. The following guide offers an introduction to the incredible diversity of courses and public programme activities that make the AA the world’s most global and influential school of architecture. It is divided into three simple parts: 1) An overview of the Architectural Association, including some of the key features that make the AA School so unique; 2) AA Schools, including the full-time undergraduate and graduate courses located here at our historic home in Bedford Square, London, as well as our Visiting School held in cities around the world and 3) Resources and information about every aspect of participation in the school, from study to enrolment.

Now in its 162nd year, the AA is an incredibly fluid, dynamic and active learning environment. The 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. By design, this Prospectus offers only a summary guide to the AA’s activities: the best way to experience them is through direct participation – whether as a full-time student or by joining as an AA Member, by coming to any one of the dozens of evening lectures, exhibition openings, symposia or other special events that are open to the public; or by taking part in the many open workshops that will be held throughout the world this year. Expanding on the Prospectus, countless online and print materials, including a weekly Events List, will keep you updated on all these activities throughout the year.

The following sections of this introduction will, I hope, provide a sense of what makes the AA School so unique. It should also give you an idea of why 2009-10 promises to be a historic year in our continuing work to make every aspect of the AA better, as a school and as an organisation.

To all of you who are already at the school – whose hard work, intelligent insight and unbridled talent already lie at the centre of what we do – thank you. To those of you who have yet to enter our world, I hope the following Prospectus opens the door to the AA in ways that will encourage you to become a part of this school, and our world.

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<brett photo right>

Brett Steele Director, AA School aaschool.ac.uk, aalog.net, brettsteele.net

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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 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 architecture can and will be an essential aspect of public and political debates about our collective futures; and that architecture 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, 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 is important to stress 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; most especially, in adapting intelligently to the changing conditions of architecture at a time when the profession is facing a spectacular range of challenges.

The AA’s independence also means that we able to push boundaries, test new ideas and promote new ways of teaching and learning. The AA 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 least three important ways. Firstly, 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 organise ourself around two distinct kinds of activities, both of which are of immense value to our students and staff: our formal courses and programmes, 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.

Above: Frank Lloyd Wright outside the AA Below: John Hejduk’s Collapse of Time, Bedford Square

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introduction III. New Academic Units, Staff and Programmes Over the past four years, the Office of the Director at the AA School has brought in dozens of new teachers and lecturers to work in every part of our undergraduate and graduate courses – talented and committed architects and lecturers who are now taking the school forward in these early years of the twenty-first century. 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 intiatives and the invention of entirely new kinds of educational experiments, all of which figure prominently in our school today.

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 selfselected groups of students. In 2009/10 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 relaunch and redesign of our traditional AA Foundation Course continues with the appointment of William Martyr, Takako Hasagawa and Matthew Butcher as Studio Tutors, who this year will join Studio Master Saskia Lewis. All three of our new tutors are experienced teachers with important careers as artists. Their works and exhibitions will open up great opportunities for further growing the interdisciplinary arts orientation of the course, which is aimed at UK year-out students as well as mid-career individuals contemplating further education in architecture or other creative, arts fields.

In our Undergraduate School, we are pleased to announce the launch of several new units and the appointment of new teachers at every level of the five-year ARB/RIBA accredited AA Diploma Course, which is the historic home and centre of AA life.

In First Year, the departure of Nick Puckett (who leaves us to take up a professorship in architecture and robotics back home in the US) has been met with the appointment of Robert Stuart-Smith, a young London-based Australian architect and founder of Kokkugia. The work of Robert and his collaborators is emerging as a leading force in a generation of young network- and computation-oriented architectural offices. Histories and Theories in First Year will be taught by Maria Fedorchenko, who taught in the First Year Studio last spring, in a new experimental format designed to more closely relate the studio projects and agendas to a contemporary culture of architecture ideas.

In the AA Intermediate School, I am pleased to announce that this year will see the opening up of dedicated studio space for all of our Second and Third Year students. A slight increase in student numbers,

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Above: Maeda Workshop exhibition Below: Working in the AA’s Ching’s Yard modelshop

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introduction together with the departure of Intermediate Units 1 and 8 to the Diploma School, has allowed us to bring in a total of five new units this year. Inter Unit 1, led by Mark Campbell and Deane Simpson, will begin a three-year investigation of land-, sea- and air-based infrastructural networks. Mark knows the AA well and has taught Histories and Theories courses with us in recent years, developing interests related to his PhD work at Princeton, while Deane comes to the AA from the ETH Zurich, where he relocated a few years ago from New York. Inter Unit 8, led by Francisco Gonzales de Canales and Nuria Alvarez Lombardero, will explore the skin and surface aspects of urban architecture in a politically charged context, working on the iconic Ministry of Internal Affairs building in Havana, Cuba. Francisco continues in his role as a curator in AACP, and Nuria is already known to the school through her studies in the AA Graduate School, and both continue as partners of an office they run in Spain, where they have completed important, beautiful, new buildings. Inter Unit 11 is led by Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, who joins the AA from Brussels, where his architectural office ASY.EU is located. Together with Dora Sweijd he will lead a unit focusing on the rich potential for experimentation within the residual spaces of the contemporary European metropolis. Sam Jacob is Unit Master and Tom Klasssnik Unit Tutor of a new Inter Unit 12, which this year will focus on Pop Vernacular, or the idea of architecture as a media form. Sam is a partner and founder of the well-known office and collective FAT, working increasingly on buildings, exhibitions, installations and other events that engage architecture in a larger (public) culture of fashion and art. The final new unit to be launched in the Intermediate School in 2009/10 is Inter Unit 13, led by Miraj Ahmed. Miraj is a long-time, successful director of our Foundation Course, and is well known to many former Foundation students who have gone on to study in other parts of the school. Martin Jameson, an AA Dipl Honours winner who graduated from the school two years ago, will assist Miraj this year, on an agenda that will explore spatiality and subjectivity as part of a brief for London.

Paralleling new courses and lecturers in Histories and Theories and Media Studies, our new Intermediate School Technical Studies Master, Wolfgang Frese, will be bringing important new adjustments to the courses and topics of Technical Studies this year. Alongside these five new units, Inter Unit 5 Master Stefano Rabolli Pansera will be joined by longtime Media Studies tutor and former Unit Master Goswin Schwendinger, working on an agenda that focuses on performance as the basis for architectural knowledge, learning and argumentation. Inter Unit 6 Master Jonathan Dawes will be Dagobert Bergmans, founder of Pool Ruimte voor Architectuur en Stedebouw, and Unit Tutor Fumiko Kato, currently a director of Flowspace Architecture, with projects in Japan and the UK. The AA’s successful Inter Unit 2, led by Charles Walker and Martin Self, will shift its attention in dramatic new ways away from their well-known summer pavilion project to the design and making of a caretaker’s house, the first of the new structures at the AA’s Hooke Park campus in Dorset,

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Inter 2 Pavilion under construction at Hooke Park

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introduction where their small unit of eight students will be based for the second half of the academic year. Alongside these five new units and three new partnerships, please also look carefully at our five other established Intermediate Units, which are already doing great work and which this year will be pursuing new briefs for projects located worldwide as part of an incredibly diverse range of unit agendas, aims and interests.

A similarly exciting evolution in the personalities, projects and pedagogies of our AA Diploma School lies ahead for 2009/10. As previously mentioned, two of our Intermediate Units from recent years move over to the Diploma School to begin multi-year agendas. Marianne Mueller and Olaf Kneer transfer the success of their ‘Mineral Architecture’ interests to our new Diploma Unit 1, where they will continue their focus on architectural form-making as a basis for articulating relationships between physical formation and human processes. Mueller Kneer Architects are placed at the forefront of young architects in the UK, and the unit’s pursuit of measured drawings alongside digital modelling and architectural economy offers a valuable addition to the Diploma School. Diploma Unit 8, led by Eugene Han and Chris Yoo, will develop their investigation into logical frameworks, geometric infrastructures and architecture, working on the peculiar, complex realities of the former coal-mining centre of Hashima Island in Japan. A new Diploma Unit 4 launches, taught by John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Ronnskog, who in recent years have been at the ETH Studio Basel institute of urban research headed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Their interest in the political and spatial structures of Europe will be grounded in a unit brief exploring the coastline of Europe from St Petersburg to Athens. Diploma Unit 5 will be led by Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén Garcia Gínda, founders and partners of the well-known office Cero9 in Madrid. The unit will explore nature as a cultural, conceptual and technical context for architecture. Finally, a new Diploma Unit 14 led by Pier Vittorio Aureli will take as its theme the design of an ‘Immeuble Cité’ – a large-scale building with a critical mass comparable to that of the city, spanning across the infrastructural landscape of northwestern Europe. Pier Vittorio, who is a longtime studio teacher and head of the PhD programme at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, is already familiar to the students and staff of the AA as a lecturer in Diploma School Histories and Theories.

Alongside these new units and teachers, we are pleased also to note the appointment of Tristan Simmonds, a structural engineer and founding member of Arup AGU, as joint Unit Master of Diploma Unit 13, working with Oliver Domiesen on an agenda that will explore the unrealised potential of contemporary architectural ornament. Together with these three new units, two relocated units and one new unit partnership, nine other established Diploma Units offer new contexts, agendas and briefs as part of our much-expanded diversity of architectural experience, ambition and experience.

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Above: Inter 2’s completed ‘Driftwood’ pavilion, 2009 Below: AAIS salon conversations, 2009

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introduction In our AA Graduate School new studio, seminar and workshop staff join nearly every programme. Carrying forward her spring-time appointment to the design studio of the DRL Design Research Lab, Marta MaléAlemany returns to lead a studio of Phase 2 Design Thesis teams and to work with a new cycle of 2009/10 Phase 1 students. Christina Doumpioti joins the EmTech programme as a Studio Master, while Evan Greenberg and Kostis Karatzas are new Studio Tutors helping to support the existing academic staff, including longtime EmTech Studio Master Achim Menges, who will participate in a visiting role at key times during the year. In the Histories and Theories programme Director Martina Lathouri is continuing an important project of transforming the course and its enquiry into new forms of architectural knowledge and research, with an emphasis on writing as a critical practice of architectural thinking. Dominic Papa returns to the AA’s Housing and Urbanism programme, which is concerned with the interplay of urbanism, space and the political processes of the city. The Landscape Urbanism programme is pleased to announce the appointment of the landscape architect Tom Smith, who through his work at EDAW has been involved in many of Europe’s leading projects and masterplans. Tom takes over in the role of Studio Master following the departure of longtime course master Sandra Morris, who leaves the AA to pursue her PhD studies and independent research as a garden and landscape historian.

2009/10 also sees the launch of the first full academic year of our new AAIS Interprofesional Studio course directed by Theo Lorenz, which began life only six months ago with a first cycle of students from across creative fields related to architecture. AAIS has already realised a major installation and performance in Jena, Germany, as well as a successful Salon Series of cross-disciplinary conversations here at the AA. Each season the programme is organised around the realisation of a specific installation, performance or other public project that allows for the exploration of collaborative methods of design, teaching and learning. Finally, in the AA’s renowned Sustainable Environmental Design programme, Programme Director Simos Yannas and existing course staff will be joined by new Studio Master Joana Soares Gonçalves and new Studio Tutors including Gustavo Brunelli, Jorge Rodriquez Alvarez, Alberto Moletto and Barak Pelman.

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 2009/10. I am immensely pleased to announce the appointment and return to the AA of Charles Tashima, a London-based architect and former Diploma and Intermediate Unit Master who will work out of the Director’s Office as the Academic Head of the AA School. Charles both knows the AA well and brings to us a wide range of academic and professional experience gained in other settings. He has already taken up his post and in the coming year will work to provide support, guidance and advice to students and staff

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Above: Plywood panels from Inter 9’s milling workshop Below: First Year Open Day 2008

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introduction across the school. Charles takes over from Mike Weinstock, who steps away from his former role as Academic Head to focus not only on his ongoing role as Director of the AA’s EmTech programme but also on a new role as the AA Head of Research and Development, working from the AA School Director’s Office to secure academic and research funding for programmes and units across the entire AA School, in close collaboration with Esther McLaughlin, Head of the AA Development Office.

Existing Inter 2 Unit Master Martin Self has been appointed the first-ever Head of Hooke Park and the Director of the AA’s new MArch Design + Make programme, which will launch in the 2010/11 academic year. The programme’s teaching and learning will initially be focused on the realisation of alternative architectures as part of the AA’s Strategic Vision for Hooke Park. AA staff and students will make a new rural campus at Hooke that will dramatically expand the potential of the site not just for the entire AA community, but for local and regional communities as well. The architectural office of the AA’s Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Diploma Unit 10 Master, was appointed in 2009 to lead a group of consultants on the preparation of an outline design concept and the supporting material required to undertake the expansion of existing workshop, teaching and accommodation facilities at Hooke. The process will carry forward this year with the making of a planning application, the launch of the new Hooke-based academic programme and the securing of additional funding so as to make the AA’s ambitions realisable.

In other areas, we are pleased to confirm the appointment of Javier Castañon as Technical Studies Master in the Diploma School, and Wolfgang Frese as Technical Studies Master in the Intermediate School. Both will apply years of experience at the AA to bringing Technical Studies projects, courses and tutorials forward this year. In tandem with these appointments, our administrative staff has grown in both size and experience to better support the academic lives of our students and staff.

Against this background, all of us at the AA are looking forward to a year that will include a wealth of new and exciting teachers, academic projects and special events.

diploma honours 2008/09

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Clockwise from top: Edmund Fowles, Diploma Unit 10, Tarek Shamma, Diploma Unit 9, Adam Johnston, Diploma Unit 13.

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Student awards and prizes 2008/09

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8 9 1. Gergely Kovacs, Diploma Unit 15, William Glover Bequest; 2. Edith Wunsch, Intermediate Unit 9, Alex Stanhope Forbes Prize; 3. Yifan Liu, Diploma Unit 6, Henry Florence Studentship; 4. Ragnhildur Kristjansdottir, Diploma Unit 2, AA Travel Studentship; 5. George Alastair Barer, Intermediate Unit 1, Alexander Memorial Travel Fund;

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6. You Jin Calvin Chua, Intermediate Unit 4, AA Travel Studentship; 7. Max Hacke, Intermediate Unit 3, Alexander Memorial Travel Fund; 8. Fabrizio Matillana, Diploma Unit 2, Howard Colls Studentship; 9. Rory Pennant-Rea, Diploma Unit 10, Henry Saxon Snell Scholarship.

18 10. Scrap Marshall, Intermediate Unit 1, Ralph Knott Memorial Fund; 11. Antonia Papamichael, First Year, AA Prize; 12. Atsushi Iwata, Diploma Unit 11, Holloway Trust; 13. Marco Ginex, Diploma Unit 9, AA Prize; 14. Claus Loebner, Diploma Unit 13, Holloway Trust; 15. Uliana Apatina, Intermediate Unit 10, The Nicholas Boas Travel

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Scholarship; 16. William Paul, Foundation, Holloway Trust; 17. Alma Wang, Intermediate Unit 3, The Nicholas Boas Travel Scholarship; 18. Phung Hieu Minh Van, Foundation, Julia Wood Foundation Prize; 19. Harri Williams-Jones, First Year, The Nicholas Boas Travel Scholarship.

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introduction IV. The AA School: Full-time London and Part-time Global Visiting Schools The AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s five-year ARB/RIBA accredited AA undergraduate programme 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 studying in architecture or associated creative fields at the AA or elsewhere. The focus of our undergraduate studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 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 eight 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 in the Graduate School both offer options for part-time study; all other undergraduate and graduate programmes are full-time.

In 2009, among our 600 full-time students in London, the ratio of undergraduate to graduate students is approximately two to one. While admission to all parts of our full-time courses is very competitive, all interested prospective students are encouraged to visit the school 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.

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 schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historic and influential forms of teaching and learning in London.

In less than two years the Visiting School has arranged short design workshop courses in two dozen cities worldwide, allowing AA tutors, partners and outside teaching staff to come together to do work on important projects and problems related to the challenges of contemporary architecture, urbanism, culture and the environment. In Dubai, Istanbul, Turin, Singapore, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Pagu Book City and Daejon in Korea, Madrid, AA tutors have directed intensive two-week design studios which have attracted students from around the world. In 2009/10 the AA Visiting School, which includes established summer, springtime and year-long options in our main AA School, will add to this roster Visiting Schools in Santiago, Beijing, Bangalore and other destinations, as part of this key effort by the AA to reach out to creative partners, students and teachers worldwide.

AA Shanghai Summer School, 2008

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introduction IV. The AA in Bedford Square: An Architectural Project for an Architectural School In 2009/10, the AA will be carrying forward a transformation of our historic home in Bedford Square in London’s vibrant West End. This work is part of a long-term strategic plan, led by the Director of the School, which seeks to create far-reaching improvements to the learning resources of the entire Architectural Association in the coming years.

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. In addition, the neighbourhood contains major cultural institutions such as the British Museum.

A range of new teaching, learning, staff and other facilities have recently been put in place or are planned as part of our works throughout this year. These include, most importantly, a massive new expansion of student studio space in the 4 Morwell Street building, which will provide dedicated studio space for our Intermediate School. Elsewhere, new studio, teaching and staff places have been prepared in two other newly acquired buildings – at 39 Bedford Square and 16 Morwell Street – which form part of our Bedford Square Campus.

At the time of writing negotiations continue to progress on two other additional properties that will, if acquired, will allow the AA to finalise a plan for the consolidation and ultimate expansion of campus facilities to better serve the entire AA. Importantly, and for the first time in the modern history of the school, this long-term strategic vision is based upon a single, simple, core idea: that all elements of the school, including all students, staff, visitors, public programme spaces, membership activity and event venues, should be located together in a single, contiguous campus.

A next stage in realising this strategic vision is already underway. A 2009 consultation across the entire AA School and Association is intended to deliver, by the early part of 2010, a definitive client brief with which the AA will seek out design talent in order to prepare a masterplan for our campus, which will integrate and interconnect improved public programme, teaching/learning and staff spaces. During the coming months and years all members of the AA will be actively encouraged – as part of the participatory democracy that is essential to our organisation – to be involved in providing the kinds of feedback, ideas and aims through which the AA can better define its future Bedford Square campus.

Above: the AA Photo Library Below: Mini City Summer School

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Above: Le Corbusier at the AA exhibition, 2008 Below: Architectural Machines symposium, 2009

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introduction V. AA Student Projects: A Legacy of Units, Collaboration and Experimentation The modern and contemporary history of the AA School is bound up in the incredible legacy of architectural personalities, projects and pedagogies that have emerged from within the school during the past half century, and which have gone on to shape the architectural profession, and architectural culture more 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, to the provocative NATO collective of the 1980s, to the formalised, team-based experimentation across electronic design networks begun with 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 Leo 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.

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 on an increasingly collaborative, multidisciplinary approach.

Today the AA seeks to openly embrace, confront and transform the conditions of architectural practice and culture – as well the very idea of how an architectural school should be organised, operated and inhabited in an era of great change.

At the heart of the AA’s exploration of new approaches lies our belief that architecture will be transformed one project at a time. The school’s

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introduction 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 best direct their own path through a school that offers an intense diversity of possible paths; at the AA, 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).

2) AA learning is project- and portfolio-driven. At the AA, our 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 deeply 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). This process can best be witnessed visiting the school: at any one time its studios are filled with countless ‘live spaces’ or projects at various stages of testing, prototyping, interrogation or presentation.

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 unique 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 unique learning environment formed not only by the global range of experiences and expectations of the staff and students who inhabit it, but also by the unparalleled soft academic infrastructures that encourage individual experimentation and the communicating of these new discoveries to countless audiences.

Above: F R Yerbury at the AA in the 1950s Below: Pengium exhibition, AA Bar, 2009

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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 AA 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, scholars and others, as part of its global mission to operate at the forefront of contemporary culture.

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.

Lecturers during the past year have included architects and others at all stages of their careers. Last spring we saw Denise Scott Brown (AA’52) and Robert Venturi, the Belgian architect Pierre Hebbelinck, the American architectural curator and write 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.

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, Rafael Moneo, Peter Murray, Claude Parent, Bernard Tschumi, Jeffrey Kipnis, Zaha Hadid, Karl Chu, Julia Peyton Jones, Ken Frampton, David Greene, Jan de Cock, Peter Bouchain, Eric Own Moss, Stan Allen, Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, Felicity Scott, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Jürg Conzett, Peter Saville, Cistiano 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.

Another essential component of the school’s commitment to creating public audiences for contemporary architecture is its Exhibitions programme. In 2009/10 we will again arrange a dozen exhibitions at the AA School, including this autumn’s major retrospective of the 1960s and 1970s architectural avant-garde, curated by AA School Director Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzalez de Canales. The show brings together

A selection of AA Publications from 2008/09

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Above: Heather Lyons presents her 2008/09 AAIS work Below: Le Corbusier at the AA symposium, 2008

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seminal first works by 20 iconic architectural figures including Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Cedric Price, Michael Webb, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster & Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Stephen Holl and Jacques Herzog/Pierre de Meuron. In doing so it focuses on a topic that is once again crucial to architectural culture: namely, how careers begin at the vital moment when young students leave school to embark on a lifetime of architectural work, invention and experimentation. Alongside this there will be a major, multi-year retrospective of the AA’s own Diploma Unit 10 led by Carlos Villanueva Brandt, and another exhibition featuring a collaborative project

by AA DRL Co-Director Theo Spyrolopus and the artist Kristof Wodizco.

In addition, the AA will host a show featuring work by the renowned Italian designer Enzo Mari and a group of artists recently commissioned to realise a seminal 1970s visionary project for the ‘self-build’ of design products, as well as another major springtime exhibition curated by Brett Steele and AA Art Director Zak Kyes titled ‘BoOMA: The Books of OMA’ – a survey of more than 30 years of the published output of one of the world’s most important architectural offices, encompassing hundreds of examples of architectural books and catalogues.

Work is well underway for another exciting year for AA Publications, with nearly two dozen books already in production. In addition to major monographs for three of this year’s exhibitions, we are working on a next cycle of our innovative AA Words and AA Agendas series. Four new volumes this year in our Words series includes translations of essays by the great mid-twentieth-century designer and educator Max Bill; a collection of political essays by the French theorist Bernard Cache; and collections of essays by Japan’s Toyo Ito and the American historian Detlef Mertins. The AA Agendas series, dedicated to documenting the work of our units and research clusters for a worldwide readership, will include titles on the AA’s Inter Unit 2 pavilion projects, the 2008 DRL pavilion competition and the work of AA Diploma Unit 14 led by Theo Lorenz and Peter Straub. In an exciting development for this series, the AA will open up the format for forthcoming volumes, seeking proposals that will capture some of the incredible depth and diversity of our student projects for new, distant audiences. Alongside these series we will see two new issues of AA Files, edited by Thomas Weaver, in a format that gives new life to this long-running journal, as well as other one-off books, including one on architectural editing that features contributions from 20 of the world’s leading editors, and is itself edited by AA PhD student Kirk Wooler.

Alongside 2009’s launch of the AA Bookshop managed by Charlotte Newman, the publication, exhibition, evening lecture and other public activities at the AA are essential aspects of a key conviction at the AA – that our job is not just to shape young architectural talent that will contribute to leading the future of architecture, but also to create new public architectural audiences through which architectural culture will itself be communicated and carried forward.

introduction

introduction VI. 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 3,000 members worldwide who join us in helping to shape the future of one of the world’s great organisations dedicated to promoting, discussing and debating the conditions of architectural practice, learning and education.

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 illuminaries 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 country’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 first half of the twentieth century and on the occasion of its centenary in 1948 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.

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.

Above: Barkow Leibinger exhibition, 2009 Below: AKT at Work exibition, 2009

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Above: Introduction Week picnic, 2008 Below: AA graduation ceremony, 2008

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AA schools undergraduate graduate visiting

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undergraduate school

undergraduate

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). Students join the school in October and attend three terms of study concluding the following July. Applications are accepted for admission to Years 1 to 4, depending on prior experience. For students who do not have an extensive visual or design background, the AA Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; Open Studio provides an opportunity to explore, and prepare for, a university-based course in architecture or the arts.

The Undergraduate School is divided into three distinct parts: First Year, Intermediate School (Second and Third Years), and Diploma School (Fourth and FIfth Years). First Year is organised as a studio-based programme of design projects undertaken with a group of teachers, exposing students to a range of interests, skills and knowledge. In the Intermediate and Diploma Schools independent units pursue their own highly individual year-long design agendas addressing contemporary architectural and urban projects, culture and programmes. Work within First Year and the undergraduate units is supported by Complementary Studies courses in History and Theory, Technical, Media and Professional Studies.

First Year studio Photo Valerie Bennett

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Foundation

The Foundation course offers a yearlong introduction to an art and designbased education. It allows students to develop their ideas through experimentation with a wide range of media and opens pathways towards a variety of creative disciplines from fine art to architecture. Students are taught in a studio environment that fosters both individual and group projects. Drawing on a number of pedagogical practices, experienced tutors and visiting practitioners, Foundation offers a unique cross-disciplinary education within an architectural institution.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

– Albert Camus Do it Yourself Inspired by the interactive installations of Robert Morris and the imagined characters in Cindy Sherman’s Film Still series, this year will explore scale, site, scenario and identity. The Foundation cohort will feature as both makers and players during the year.

Tool-up The first term will encourage students to discipline themselves to observe, research, explore, analyse and experiment by providing a series of work-

Foundation Master Saskia Lewis has taught at the AA since 2001 and also teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is co-author and photographer of Architectural Voices: Listening to Old Buildings, published by Wiley Academy in October 2007.

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Studio Staff Matthew Butcher runs his own practice, Post Works, whose work has been widely published and exhibited.

He recently designed a set for choreographer Rosemary Butcher and the 2008 Dance Umbrella festival, and he teaches at Nottingham University.

Foundation Master Saskia Lewis

Studio Staff Matthew Butcher Takako Hasegawa William Martyr

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shops, exercises and discussions that serve as an introduction to the methods and skills used in visual and verbal analysis and representation. Students will develop their strategies through photography, drawing, painting, modelmaking, casting, mapping, material studies, form and structure. The second term will extend investigations with respect to both scale and dialogue by investigating the body in place, looking at site and performance. Workshops will explore pattern-cutting, costume, weaving, textiles, performance, lighting and filmmaking. The third term will concentrate on using these techniques to develop a self-generated series of explorations and discoveries.

Know Your Place A series of trips will invite students to broaden their personal references to culture and context, taking the form of audio tours across London, gallery visits, residential stays in Hooke Park and a trip to Paris. Introductory lectures in history and theory will encourage a provocative dialogue among the students while talks from visiting artists will offer personal insights into a range of practices. Alongside studio and workshop exploration, students will be encouraged to develop and identify their own intellectual ambitions within and beyond the boundaries of their direct experience and context.

Takako Hasegawa was born in Tokyo and educated at the AA. Working on the periphery of architecture, art and performance, her interests focus on the ordinary and everyday.

A photographer and installation artist, she also teaches at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

Will Martyr is an artist and graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Royal College of Art, London.

His work features in many private and corporate collections worldwide.

Vasiliki Antonopoulou, Body Survey, 2009

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first year

Imagine yourself as a First Year student. You are an explorer of a planet we might call architecture. Your task is to find the things you need to pack for this journey. There are some things we all need, and others that only you think you need. There is a lot to pack for a journey without a clear destination.

The First Year at the AA introduces students to architectural design, critical thinking and experimental ways of working, with an emphasis on preparing young architects for the challenges facing the profession in the twenty-first century. In recent years architectural practice, learning and knowledge have been transformed by the arrival of new communication and information technologies which continue to change what it means to be an architect.

The AA’s First Year programme addresses this challenge by preparing students for the complexities of the professional, critical and cultural activities associated with architectural innovation and experimentation today.

Each year young students from around the world come to the AA and, joining those who have spent an initial year in the AA’s Foundation Unit, begin the five-year AA Diploma Course. In First Year students gain knowledge, skills and experience in a strategically diverse range of design ideas, agendas and interests from which they begin to form their own architectural identities and personalities. The year is organised around the combination of a year-long Design Studio, Technical Studies, History & Theory Studies and Media 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.

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First Year Staff Valentin Bontjes van Beek David Greene Samantha Hardingham

Tobias Klein Robert Stuart-Smith Martina Schäfer

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Requirements The principal course requirement is participation in the year-long design studio, including daily work and tutorials in the studio. All the developed work is presented at the end of each project and compiled in the year-long portfolio, which is the basis for the end-of-year final assessment of the course. In addition to the Design Studio each student selects four First Year Media Studies courses, two each in the autumn and spring terms from the list of those on offer. Students write three short essays throughout the year as part of the First Year History & Theory Studies Course, and prepare a project analysis submission as part of First Year Technical Studies. All Complementary Studies incorporate introductions to their specific areas and integrate with the studio project in the spring term.

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’, where established artists, writers and scientists 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.

First Year digital modelling/digital production workshop, 2008/09

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first year

Autumn Term In the Autumn Term students are introduced to a range of architectural concepts, techniques and working methods. The term is organised into a series of three projects and a week-long workshop which cover digital and physical means of design, material enquiries and production as well as conceptual thinking skills.

01. Introduction project – Residues

of a meal_building_beauty The year begins with a short individual design project in which students are asked to prepare/fix/invent/assemble/ rustle up a lightly industrious construction around the notion of the food (production) of a city – the city of food.

02. Localised scale – Making Scaling-Re-Scaling-Mis-Scaling This project will explore reconfiguration, placement and composition using a menu of materials (animal–vegetable– mineral) over various scales and locations. Working in groups, students will be introduced to three pre-selected ingredients for fabrication and modelling, examining what scale means in terms of materials and structure via inventive technical design.

03. Motions of Measurement –

Agnus Apparatus This project is in two stages and introduces students to methods of transposing information from one medium to another, specifically through measurement and drawing. It begins with explorations into technical drawings to address precision, proportion and materiality. In stage 2, we will expand our studies to different modes of representation and drawing techniques.

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Additive +1 During the AA’s Open Week the scaled formations are further explored through digital construction – an intensive workshop will introduce students to various digital software for drawing and model production.

Spring Term Spring Term begins with a project focused around video followed by an extended design project in which Technical Studies will play an integral role. Students will deploy ideas and lessons learned in previous projects to develop their individual approaches.

04. AA Speed Stop As starter on the menu of our term-long occupation with site, the AA will function as a testing-ground. An intensive video workshop will introduce film and editing tools as techniques for exploring the performative aspect of architectural space and its social context.

05. Design 1 – Site with

an ever-changing view –

the dining-car is now open.

For the extended design project, First Year students will begin by being introduced to the multitude of ways in which architects contemplate ‘site’ in the making of design proposals.

Students will explore and draw out a number of possible sites along the multi-storey route of the new East London line (due for completion in 2010). Fixed and transitory points, spatial configurations, programmatic convergences and ideological confections will inspire them to make new design proposals for a light-short-lifeurban-industrial typology.

first year

Additive + 2 The extended design project will be supplemented by a number of day trips (mostly by rail) to visit light-industrial areas in and around Greater London that accommodate everything from a school of architecture to a sushi factory.

Summer Term During the summer term students will divide into six groups, each working with one tutor, who will set a specific focus for revisiting the designs of the previous term. Open studio days will be used for cross-studio discussions that will relate the work back to the larger First Year learning experience.

Studio Staff Valentin Bontjes van Beek trained as a carpenter in Germany before attending the AA, from where he graduated in 1998. He has practised architecture in Berlin, New York and London, and has taught at the AA since 2001. He was a member of the AA’s Interim Management Group in 2004/05 and recently completed the ‘crossings’ project in Hooke Park, Dorset. He is in practice under the name vbvb.

David Greene, born Nottingham 1937, usual English provincial suburban upbringing, Art School, elected Associate member of the RIBA then down the motorway to London to begin a nervous twitchy career, swerving from big buildings to t-shirts for Paul Smith to freelance practical speculations for developers to conceptual speculations for Archigram which he founded with Peter Cook.

Over time a seemingly irresistible drift into teaching, writing, imagining and making projects on an ephemeral architecture for the third industrial age.

Has taught variously in Europe, Scandinavia, North America and Asia, work published and exhibited similarly. RIBA Gold Medal 2002 (Archigram). Joint Annie Spinks Award with Sir Peter Cook (2002).

Currently visiting Professor of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, research fellow at the University of Westminster/Experimental Practice, External Examiner on the MA in Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the BA in Architecture at Greenwich University.

Samantha Hardingham is an architectural writer and editor whose published work includes several editions in the original ellipsis architecture guide series and two volumes on

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06. Design 2 Each of the six studio groups will ask students to address specific topics and techniques in terms of their initial designs. This second phase demands that students are critical of their own work and find methods of applying what they have learned to their project.

07. Linking and Contrasting Following portfolio assessment students will work together as one group to develop a full-scale installation for Projects Review.

the work of Cedric Price.

She studied at the AA (1987–93), was a research fellow in the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster 2003-09, co-organising and authoring the Supercrit series of events and publications.

She is currently researching material for a ‘Complete Works of Cedric Price’ publication.

Robert Stuart-Smith is an AADRL graduate, co-director of the design practice Kokkugia and algorithmic design research consultant in Ove Arup’s Advanced Geometry Unit.

He has previously taught at RMIT University and the University of East London while working in the offices of Lab Architecture Studio and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners.

Tobias Klein studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and finished his diploma and MArch at the Bartlett, UCL. He has worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au, co-founded the experimental architectural design platform .horhizon and is currently researching narrative design in digital environments as a tutor at the Royal College of Art and as a First Year Unit Master at the AA since 2008.

Martina Schäfer is an architect and partner of Foresites, an architecture and design practice based in London. She has taught at the AA since 2004 and, before that, at Kassel University and the University of Kentucky. She received her professional education from the University of Stuttgart, Ecole d’Architecture de Lyon and SCI-ARC and has practised in Germany and the US.

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intermediate 1

The Lost Highway This unit begins a three-year investigation into the architectural possibilities of land-, sea- and air-based networks.

In 2009/10, we will study the Dwight D Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (STRAHNET) in the United States.

A relic of Cold War logistics, the US Interstate system extends for 46,837 miles, connecting all aspects of American life from the domestic to the transcontinental and supporting the majority of all commercial and private vehicle traffic. Stretching across 48 states, the infrastructure of freeways and highways, tributaries and underpasses lays out America as ‘flat as birdshit on a Buick’ (as Don Delillo once said).

The architectural implications of the Interstate are as pragmatic and manifest as they are symbolically and mythically resonant. The unit will examine how the serpentine stretch of this system allows new architectural and urban typologies, from the spontaneous communities of retiree RV enthusiasts which spring up in the desert, to the Walmart distribution network which re-routes trucks as they drive across the US according to fluctuating consumer demand and weather conditions. By critiquing representational precedents such as road maps and automobile manuals, as well as intellectual precepts such as Venturi

Unit Staff Mark Campbell is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. His research interests include American culture between 1960 and 1975, paranoia, cultural exhaustion and dreams.

A practising architect, he has taught at Auckland

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University, Princeton University, the Cooper Union and the Architectural Association.

Deane Simpson received his graduate degree in architecture from Columbia University and worked with Diller + Scofidio between 1997 and 2003, running

Unit Staff Mark Campbell Deane Simpson

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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 utilise – and distort – research during the design process.

As a unit based largely around 2D modes of representation, we will employ a range of graphic methods including drawing, mapping, photography, film and television advertising to explore the Interstate system and work toward defining a new type of research-based design studio. After collecting spurious research data, debatable information and seemingly irrelevant documents, students will reinterpret and design a ‘drive-thru’ – a junction between the driver, the vehicle and the Interstate which offers a rich variety of exchanges and architectural possibilities. Typically located in anonymous and neglected locations – outside city limits or in the blank expanses of the desert – these facilities are not so much destinations or points of departure as a pause along a never-ending route.

a number of projects and competitions. He has taught at the ETH Zürich and has published in Volume, Archithese, The Architectural Review and MONU and is co-author of The Ciliary Function (2007).

Stephen Shore, Parking Lot, Mount Blue Shopping Center, Farmington, Maine, 30 July 1974

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undergraduate

intermediate 2

Hooke Park Caretaker’s House Intermediate Unit 2 is breaking with its format of the last four years. Taking forward the design-and-make experience that has already been established, we will move beyond the experimental folly of pavilion building to fully embrace the process of architecture: we will design and build the new caretaker’s house at Hooke Park.

In part, this move has been motivated by a pent-up anxiety over the absence of a direct social purpose in the unit’s past work, combined with a feeling that perhaps the age of digital experimentation and showmanship is coming to an end. In a credit-crunched context we seek to apply ourselves directly to the minimal use of material for a maximal long-term measurable benefit for human occupation.

Our work will be no less ambitious or experimental. We hope to develop new techniques, test assumptions and challenge dogma, all at the scale of a human dwelling. Inspired by the Hooke Park project itself, as initiated by Frei Otto, we hope to visit Frei in Stuttgart.

We will research afresh the seminal ideologies of his Institute of Lightweight Structures, the pioneering work of Buckminster Fuller and the origins of the 1960s ecology movement.

The unit will be limited to eight students. In the autumn term we hope

Unit Staff Martin Self holds degrees in aerospace engineering and architectural theory.

He worked at Arup for several years as a structural engineer and was a founder member of its Advanced Geometry Unit. He currently provides geometrical and engineering consultancy to

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Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio.

Charles Walker is a chartered architect and structural engineer. A Unit Master at the AA since 2003, he has worked in design-based engineering offices Atelier One and at Arup, where he jointly

Unit Staff Charles Walker Martin Self

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to embed four pairs of students within Manser Medal-winning architectural offices as a mentorship programme (the medal is awarded to the best house design in Britain), and we will also work with engineers Buro Happold. At the end of the first term, four house designs will be presented to the Hooke Park Steering Committee, who will select one design for construction.

In the second term the unit will move to Hooke Park, living off-site in rented cottages in Beaminster. From the offices at Hooke we will produce drawings for submission to the planning authorities and cost estimates for AA Council approval. Access to the workshop and forest will allow prototypes to be built and tested. By term end we will have completed the construction drawings and prepared final bills of quantities.

In the third term construction will commence. Foundations will be poured as timber is cut in the workshop. The unit will complete the assembly of the structural frame and roofing before celebrating our accomplishment at an end-of-term topping-out ceremony.

After we leave, electricians and plumbers will install their first fix, and by autumn 2010 the new caretaker’s house will be watertight.

founded and led the Advanced Geometry Unit for eight years. He is also a founding director of formwork projects. He joined Zaha Hadid Architects in early 2007.

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

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intermediate 3

undergraduate

Myths of the Artificial

Sacred waters carry us beyond the marketplace into a world charged with myths and stories, beliefs and devotion, culture and celebration. – Vandana Shiva Focusing on life’s most precious resource, water, Inter 3 will journey from the poetics of the small and the crafted to the effectiveness of engineered architectural projects. We will research symbiotic building networks combining urban, technological and sacred narratives. The artificial will be explored as the interface between man and nature, city and resources, culture and environment. Local and global expertise will be learned and applied to highly personal and engaged designs. Between the myths of now and the rituals of how, the mythology of us will take shape.

The unit will investigate the crossbreeding of architecture and infrastructure in relation to different scales and disciplines. Incursions into extreme scales, from the microscopic to the global, will enable speculation and eccentric curiosity. Analysing cooperation networks between city and countryside, nations and the globe, we will discuss the growing demand for efficient infrastructures versus the need for architectural comfort and sensibility. In this broad canvas of interrelations, small spatial interventions will be our

Unit Staff Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos 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

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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.

Unit Staff Nannette Jackowski Ricardo de Ostos

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departure point. Students will create mechanical devices and design and build provocative spaces mixing lowtech and high-tech aesthetic expressions and functionality. Literary inspirations and architectural case studies will frame and assist each project. There will be lots of the personal, something of the familiar and much of the uncanny.

Following our discussions of cultural plurality, social need and collective ownership of water, we will travel to the world’s largest democracy – India.

While studying the current severe drought, we will draw inspiration from India’s ultra-rich urban rituals, ancestral water infrastructures, the sacred river Ganges, ceremonial baths and the extreme contrasts of India’s contemporary cities. In the first term students will define and narrow down their interests by investigating water-related infrastructures and architecture through drawing and model-making experiments. The final project over the second and third terms will build upon these initial ideas, personal observations and research. Over the course of the year we will team up with specialist consultants for a series of talks, workshops and tutorials. Through these interactions Inter 3 aims to stimulate an architectural debate based on constant production, with ideas being shaped into elegant and informative drawings, models, animations and prototypes.

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). naja-deostos.com Luke Tan, Penemue, AA Inter 3 2008/09

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intermediate 4

Envelop(e): inner beauty Inter 4 will pursue its investigation of creative limits by dwelling on the sectional conditions of building envelopes within a specific and speculative urban context. Our exploration through the seamless and highly regulated decorum of Paris will engage with the core of both the contrived building skin and the residual city block in order to understand how its richness eludes or concentrates its visible surfaces.

Considering the ‘envelope’ as a receptacle of forthcoming and past architectural statements, we will ask ourselves how this surface of stature, mediation and shelter can enter a new phase of evolution that will absorb the complex intricacies of urban conditions while commenting on the city’s immutable cosmetic image. Beyond its public face to the street, we will develop a sectional understanding of the envelope as a space that conceals, distributes, encompasses and reveals a convoluted and wrinkled inner life.

The internal pressures of urban life, combined with contextual and environmental factors, will feed our generative processes through a staged sequence of projective tools, yielding organisational patterns as the potential basis for new spatial and cultural interfaces within a regulated urban fabric. Based on a programme-less postulate, the unit will develop a collection of individual

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, based both in Paris and London.

The office emphasises work at different scales

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integrating research, design and experiment. r-are.net 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

Unit Staff Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel da Costa Gonçalves

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architectural vocabularies, considering form, material and narrative techniques for prospective building envelopes.

Formulating a design strategy by analysing and abstracting ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ information, proposals will emerge from the translation of these into creative parameters, revealing critical relations between predictive design and the richness of individual inventions and behaviours.

Inherent to our design process and methodology will be the development of individual modes of representation of form and data, and their relationship to each other, engaging the unit’s appetite for codified drawings and diagrammatic models. Throughout the year, workshops and collaborative design phases will be enriched by unit conversations to advance collective examination and cultural analysis. These will be exploited to develop design proposals and their potential to generate local phenomenal qualities, as well as a broader commentary on the urban streetscape. Individual design hypotheses and prospective strategies will inscribe projects in the unit’s questioning of the Parisian city block’s potential evolutions.

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 is coordinator of the AA Singapore Visiting Workshop since 2006.

Olafur Eliasson, Your House, 2006.

Published by the Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006. Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson © Olafur Eliasson 2006

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undergraduate

intermediate 5

Dwarf Village Intermediate 5 focuses on performance as the driving force for the development of an architectural argument. In a constant dialectic between making and unmaking, discerned production and critical assessment, we hope to define tectonic invention and spatial resolution. Through performance we will stage fictional dwelling scenarios, negotiating the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the physicality of architecture and its spatial implications.

The Making An awakening, a statement.

The making of a space: a house, a shelter. Live-scale installation: a perfect positioning into the urban context.

The Unmaking A repositioning, a critique.

Staging as a critical reflection, an evaluation of the making, a type of understanding. Performance as a fictional dwelling.

The Remaking An awkward revealing, a trauma.

Meeting the parents.

The Shooting A positioning, a deliberate act of violence. An image of the final scene, the final step of research. The beginning of a buildable place.

Unit Staff Stefano Rabolli Pansera is director of Rabolli Pansera Ltd. After graduating from the AA, he worked for two years with Herzog & de Meuron and has been teaching in Intermediate Unit 5 since 2007.

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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 artist Paul McCarthy on a Tate Modern publication.

Unit Staff Stefano Rabolli Pansera Goswin Schwendinger

undergraduate

The Trip Hollywood preceding London, Bedford Square preceding Los Angeles. Universal Studios, a fictional construction site.

The Dwarf Village A 1:2 installation in Bedford Square, a disruptive utopia. The construction of a place, a possible destabilisation, a down-sized architectural machine.

All gained in translation.

The End Performance, an opening, a beginning.

During the first term, the unit will schedule history and theory seminars in collaboration with Mark Rappolt, editor of Art Review, and other external contributors in order to investigate the purposefulness of staging and fiction as a force to reconfigure the idea of how we conceive space and formulate critical alternatives. In the second term we will organise workshops for mockups and the construction of the dwarf village. We will fully engage with 1:2 scale, where space is neither a real scale presentation nor a scaled re-presentation. Representation/translation techniques looking at the still and moving image and model making will be applied to question architectural conventions and modes of production.

Forward-Backward thinking. Yes.

Paul McCarthy, Bossy Burger, 1991 TV studio set, two monitors, various performance props and videotape, Hauser & Wirth Collection, St Gallen, Switzerland Š Paul McCarthy, photo Rachel Vaughn

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undergraduate

intermediate 6

Unit Staff Jonathan Dawes Dagobert Bergmans Fumiko Kato

Camouflage Camouflage patterns and forms in the animal kingdom are the outcome of both genetics and the physical conditions of the habitat: creatures mutate to ‘become’ their surroundings. We are interested in this interactive process of becoming, which is not uniquely about disguise but also about changes in our perception. We will study instances of camouflage, both artificial and naturally occurring, and investigate their potential relevance and application within architecture.

Lineage Our approach will be both experimental and analytical. Research will oscillate between the fabrication of material constructs and a critical evaluation of iterations and their effects. Specific surfaces, textures and geometries will be created using both digital and analogue fabrication techniques.

Repetition will be explored and applied through evolutionary processes such as unfolded nets or woven organisations.

The task will be to produce new tectonic patterns with inherent spatial qualities.

Disruptive Pattern Disruptive Pattern Material was first used as battle costume or applied to military vehicles or warships. Differing forms such as dazzle (borrowed from cubism) don’t actually conceal a ship’s presence but instead distort its perceived trajectory and proximity.

Buildings are generally inanimate, but inhabiting them engages the effects of stillness and motion. The unit will explore disruptive pattern as a device for making and evolving material approaches that are responsive to movement and light and applicable at various scales of operation.

Fieldwork Fieldwork in Tokyo will examine the complex pattern of the city and the roles of camouflage at the scale of a building.

A unit-wide catalogue of our findings will be published, classifying key principles for future spatial intervention and strategic use at an urban level.

Unit Staff Jonathan Dawes graduated from the AA Diploma School and the University of East London (where he taught from 2002 to 2006 as Degree & Diploma Unit Master). Founder of Flowspace Architecture (www.flowspace.com), he is currently Project Architect

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for Brentwood Sixth Form Centre at Cottrell & Vermeulen Architecture.

AA Unit Master since 2007.

Dagobert Bergmans studied at Technical University Eindhoven and at the AA with Pascal Schöning and Raoul Bunschoten.

He has worked for S333

undergraduate

Endgame The conflict of different uses and users will be the context in which we test building skins, morphologies and programmes. Polarised programmatic types will test effects such as concealment alongside models that highlight awareness. The objective will be to crystallise the sensation and effects of camouflage through the construction of tactile drawings, relief and sectional models and large-scale fabrications.

Architecture & Urbanism and founded Pool Ruimte voor Architectuur en Stedebouw. Won Europan 8 in Erfurt, Germany, 2006.

Design Tutor at the TU in Eindhoven from 2003 to 2005, he is now working for Dana Ponec Architects in Amsterdam.

Fumiko Kato studied at Osaka Institute of Technology in Japan and the University of East London.

She is currently a director of Flowspace Architecture, with ongoing projects both in the UK and Japan. aainter6camouflage. blogspot.com

Dazzle painting plan by Norman Wilkinson, British marine artist and inventor of dazzle.

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undergraduate

intermediate 7

The End of the World and Other Bedtime Stories

‘The End of the Universe is very popular’, said Zaphod… ‘People like to dress up for it… Gives it a sense of occasion.’

– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe We stare out through Hubble at the light from the creation of the universe. At CERN we hurl electrons at each other looking for clues to its beginning only to set in motion our collective anxieties about our demise in black-hole oblivion.

We sit in wait for the end of the world.

We have always regaled ourselves with unnerving tales of a day yet to come. Tomorrow is a dark place and our culture is full of tales of a natural world out of control. Whether it be nuclear apocalypse, viral epidemic, tumbling asteroids or eco catastrophe our anxieties about our future demise chronicle the flaws and frailties of the everyday.

This year Inter 7 continues to slip suggestively between the real and the imagined, in the space where architecture enters into new relations with the territories of science and fiction. It is an experience of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

Last year in the living wunderkammer of the Galapagos Islands, we explored the origin of the species and breathed life into a menagerie of archi-

Unit Staff Liam Young studied architecture in Australia and works as an independent designer and critic (liamyoung.variousartists. com.au). He has worked for offices including Zaha Hadid and LAB Architecture Studio and teaches design studios at schools in both

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Europe and Australia. He is a founder of the urban think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today which explores fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanisms. He is a regular contributor to a number of publications as well as self publishing works of architectural fictions and futures.

Unit Staff Liam Young Kate Davies

undergraduate

tectural monsters. This year we will once again investigate our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world but this time we embark on a voyage to bear witness to the alien landscapes of technology.

We have mused on evolution and now we will flirt with extinction.

We will set forth on a psychedelic road trip, a last chance saloon tour of sites at their point of collapse. We will clamber over the wreckage of the future to visit a no-man’s land between cultivation and nature and spin a cautionary tale of a new kind of wilderness. Here the radio crackles, skies darken, the weather warms, grey goo seeps from between the cracks, mutant crops roam free – it’s a beautiful day in the strange landscapes that lie behind the scenes of modern living.

Our projects may be militant solutions or last gasp redemptions; a call to arms or a head in the sand; swan songs, manifestos or glorious celebrations in the shadow of an imminent end. We will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentary and part science fiction, we will critically engage with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Standing at the brink we will contemplate an end that is laden with fears and inconsistencies yet at the same time proves to be ripe with unknown escapes and wondrous possibilities.

Kate Davies graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is a co-founder of Liquidfactory (liquidfactory.co.uk), a partnership that seeks to to explore the hinterland of art, architecture and performance. Kate has taught at London Metropolitan University and

Chelsea College of Art and has worked for a number of architectural practices in the UK and abroad.

Storm clouds on the horizon

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undergraduate

intermediate 8

The Politics of Skin Grafting This unit explores skin grafting as a sociopolitical tool able to infiltrate subjectivity into the urban fabric.

Politics, as it relates to contemporary cities, no longer conceives the social as a cohesive force but as a loose association of individual experiences scattered across the different surfaces that shape the urban experience. Design issues are no longer addressed to constituencies and social groups but to individuals and audiences. In this context, direct and reciprocal relations between individuals and building skins can provide the potential for political activation. Grafting processes, exchanges in flesh and skin – transposition and translation into multiple layers of action, inscription and projection of interests interwoven with the surface of the urban fabric – define intricate hybrid construction processes for active political inquiry.

The work of the unit will be framed by a specific, politically charged urban condition, La Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba, a place where city and national politics are particularly bound to everyday experience. This urban location embodies a richness of scales, social practices and political conflict, epitomised by the presence of the iconic Ministry of Internal Affairs. Constructed under the Batista dictatorship, the building is an archetypal example of colonial modernism (now turned into a

Unit Staff Francisco Gonzalez de Canales studied architecture at ETSA Seville, ETSA Barcelona and Harvard University, and worked for Foster + Partners and Rafael Moneo before establishing Canales & Lombardero.

An active architectural critic,

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

Unit Staff Francisco Gonzalez de Canales Nuria Alvarez Lombardero

undergraduate

monument to Ernesto Che Guevara).

The unit will take the Ministry as the ideal platform for showcasing plural responses to democratisation and political processes in Cuba.

Students are expected to work individually in developing rigorous investigation through consistent portfolios, although collaborative and group work in small workshops will also be required. They will develop a range of skin proposals for the Ministry, working across various phases of production.

Projects will address sociopolitical urban issues in combination with specific fabrication methods, continuously shifting from the urban scale to the level of fabrication, moving towards a final collapsing of both into a hybrid scalar practice. The unit encourages material experimentation – through drawings, images and models – only in relation to specific intellectual and theoretical enquiries. All students will be required to submit a mock-up of their final proposals.

Nuria Alvarez Lombardero studied architecture at ETSA Madrid and the Housing and Urbanism MA at the AA. She has worked for Machado & Silvetti in Boston, and was part of the editorial board of Neutra magazine. She has co-directed Canales & Lombardero since 2003

and 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.

Cuban Ministry of Internal Affairs, Havana

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undergraduate

intermediate 9

Ziga-Zaga This year will be the third of Inter 9’s projects located in sunny Barcelona. So far we have tackled two of the Catalan capital’s defining cultural allegiances – the sea and food. Last up (and relegating sex to fourth spot) is the city’s favourite pastime: football. In 2009/10 we will look to Lionel Messi, Xavi, Iniesta and any number of the city’s diehard Barcelona FC fans to offer us some kind of instruction, and we will regularly call again on Benedetta Tagliabue, John Outram and Peter Wilson. The club’s recent brief for the stadium redevelopment will be our programmatic basis, but our own architectural and drawing processes will determine whether you refashion the late-50s iron and concrete behemoth or start from a tabula rasa. Regardless, projects will be sited on the stadium’s current location, Avenida Arístides Maillol, 3km northwest of the tourist centre around the Ramblas.

We will continue to define and aestheticise the role of drawing, further exorcise our typological hang-ups and for the first time diagram flows, both of our programme and the players, people and transport in and around Camp Nou. Any typological critique of the existing and proposed stadium must start with the facts, which have obvious implications on how the building interacts with other urban typologies: between August

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 Cloud 9, ‘Sevenyear Itch: Another Note from Empuriabrava’ (2008);

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and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, ‘Three’s a Crowd’ (2009); and Jacob van Ruisdael, ‘Navel Gazing’ (2009). He formed Mis-Architecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Chris Matthews in 2000.

Unit Staff Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews

undergraduate

and June every other Sunday nearly 100,000 people empty this contemporary Colosseum at 11 at night to drink, dine, cavort or just go home.

We will generate ideas internally as well as externally and continue to blur the boundary between drawing and 3D printing. The objet trouvé, exquisite corpse and other Surrealist and Dadaist techniques are the backbone of our method. But so are the ‘thick 2D’ and 3D prints we have been producing over the last couple of years. Birch ply, cardboard and acrylic-based photopolymer are also three of the unit’s essential drawing tools. We are going to continue to expand on Libeskind, Webb and Wilson by making ever more sumptuous images; consider cross-programming tools and techniques to form a critique; and employ ceramics with ceramist to the stars, Toni Cumella. And as opposed to the £80 you would be spending to see a match in Manchester, in Barcelona nothing will cost more than £40. In this, as in everything, we will be more Vicky and a little less Cristina.

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,

the Lowry Centre and No 1 Poultry before setting up PMA in 2000.

1950s aerial photograph of Camp Nou in Barcelona © Revista Deportiva Barça

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undergraduate

intermediate 10

EcoMachines v3.0: Dubai Marine Life Incubators Inter 10 is an experimental unit and this year our urban laboratory will be the city of Dubai, where we will explore how architecture can co-exist and co-evolve with the natural processes of the local marine habitat.

In recent years Dubai has been the site of a series of highly ambitious projects, among them groups of artificial islands built along its coastline. The construction of the islands has provoked strong protests from environmental groups, who are concerned about the loss of marine biodiversity. The local government has rejected these criticisms, claiming that the islands are promoting an enhanced experience of urban living through a more direct relationship with its marine ecology.

The unit will address this claim and convert it into a manifest ambition: the design of a marine biodiversity leisure and research centre. Acting as an incubator for urban life, this building will contain both an educational public space and a research centre devoted to the development of techniques and models for the regeneration of the coral reefs that perform such a vital ecological role (providing food and shelter for a wide range of marine species, preventing coastal erosion and supporting commercial fishing and recreational activities).

Unit Staff Marco Poletto and Claudia Pasquero are directors of the experimental design practice ecoLogicStudio (ecoLogicstudio.com).

They have lectured and worked internationally, and have been AA Inter 10 Unit Masters since 2007.

For unit work see

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aainter10.wordpress.com (2007/08) and aainter10.blogspot.com (2008/09). Claudia and Marco have also directed AA Visiting Workshops in Turin (Prototyping the City) and Istanbul (Fibrous Structures); and together with Marie-Ange Brayer they curated the AA Architectural

Unit Staff Claudia Pasquero Marco Poletto

undergraduate

Students will start by working on material systems and experiment with the feedback loops that occur in every process of life. A dedicated workshop on ‘embodied intelligence’ will offer insights into the use of sensing and actuating mechanisms via both analogue and digital means (physical experiments and drawings).

The project site will be ‘the World’, a $14 billion development featuring 300 individual artificial islands arranged to mimic the shape of the globe’s landmasses. In January the unit will produce a group installation, masterplanning the island and research centre.

Individual projects will then continue with the detail design of the incubators and their testing models (through large maps and technical details).

In the third term each student will produce a final model and video illustrating the real-time qualities and effects of their own ecoMachine (prototypes and video).

The unit field trip will take us to the city of Dubai, where we will join local students, dive the coral reef, collect material samples, measure environmental forces, visit the project site and explore the city’s iconic projects and attractions.

Machines Symposium. ecoLogicStudio’s research projects have been exhibited at the London, Venice and Seville biennales in 2006 and 2008, and they recently completed a shopping mall eco-roof in Carugate, Milan.

‘The World’ artificial archipelago in Dubai Photo ©Nakheel

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undergraduate

intermediate 11

Latent Territories Intermediate Unit 11 will look at the contemporary European metropolis, focusing on the rich potential for experimentation that is emerging from the residual urban spaces around transport networks such as airports, harbours, rail and highway interchanges. Liberated from the tyranny of building codes, historical preservation and existing property law, these territories were originally planned for the periphery but have gradually been absorbed into the city. Inter 11 will explore the previously inaccessible archipelago of traffic islands adjacent to a highway interchange, investigating its potential new building typologies, programmatic and organisational opportunities and defining the level of connection with the surrounding city.

The unit will pursue its design methodology through the production of architectural prototypes at the small scale. This research will form the basis for the vocabulary, material strategy and distinctive aesthetic that will later be deployed at the urban scale of the archipelago. Such an approach was common practice in twentieth-century art movements, from de Stijl to Superstudio, through the development of environments, design/art or sculptural pieces. The unit is interested in the synergy between the critical engagement and playfulness of 60s/70s

Unit Staff Theo Sarantoglou Lalis and Dora Sweijd are the principals of LA.S.S.A, a design practice based in London and Brussels working on international projects ranging from furniture and architecture to landscape urbanism.

The office is focusing on

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commissions in Egypt, Greece and Korea as well as entering international competitions.

Theo Sarantoglou Lalis studied in Brussels and at the Bartlett. He has taught at Columbia and Harvard and prior to founding LA.S.S.A he

Unit Staff Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Dora Sweijd

undergraduate

architectural avant-gardes and today’s enthusiasm for computation and new manufacturing processes.

The year’s research will be structured in two complementary phases.

During the first, students will be encouraged to develop personal research agendas through architectural prototypes, which will be produced in the form of physical models and design/art pieces or constructed environments.

A series of workshops will introduce the digital design and fabrication techniques that will act as the catalysts for materialising these creative explorations. As part of the unit’s interest in the transfer of technologies, we will organise a series of short trips across Europe where we will be visiting artists’ and design studios as well as their fabricators from the aerospace, automotive and naval industries.

During phase two, each student will investigate strategies for deploying the architectural prototypes in more complex geometrical organisations. Conceptual models and material studies developed in phase one will have to mutate into an architectural proposition able to respond to different criteria such as programme, adjacencies and site conditions (disconnection, speed and flow, 3D infrastructure, wind, sound, etc.) as well as each student’s vision for inhabiting the latent territories.

worked at Future Systems and Asymptote in NYC. 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. He has also lectured internationally, led workshops and taught undergraduate studios in LTU Sweden.

Dora Sweijd graduated from the Bartlett. She previously worked at a number of practices in London and NYC including REX and Foster + Partners where she worked on the World Trade Center project.

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain, 2005

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undergraduate

intermediate 12

The Pop Vernacular The unit will explore the idea of architecture as a media form (communicating through the languages it employs).

In order to get to grips with architecture as culture, rather than architecture as technology, we need to engage with the idea of image or, more specifically, with the way the ‘image’ of architecture addresses issues of taste and meaning in contemporary culture. We might term this approach Pop Vernacular – pop in the sense of a collective, shared, contemporary folk; vernacular in the way it surrounds us, in the way the everyday landscape is altered by the imprint of surface media and information. Pop Vernacular draws on time and space – it’s both a graveyard for the superseded and the spawning ground of unexpected futures. The studio will pursue what Busta Rhymes calls ‘spectacular vernacular’ – a radically reanimated zombie postmodernism. To do this we will unravel the mechanisms of pop vernacularism – or how repro, neo and knock-off are used to create something that seems to glow with optimism and freshness where, as Douglas Coupland puts it, ‘nostalgia is a weapon’.

We will use varied graphic techniques to develop a language that becomes a significant and speculative architectural act, extending the possibilities of architectural representation.

Techniques of collage, juxtaposition,

Unit Staff Sam Jacob is a director of FAT (fat.co.uk) and a contributing editor to Icon and columnist for Art Review. Current projects include the design of schools in the UK and The Netherlands, an interior for Selfridges, London, contributions to

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exhibitions at Arc en Rêve and forthcoming Rotterdam and Shenzen/Hong Kong Architecture Biennials.

Tomas Klassnik is director of The Klassnik Corporation (klassnik.com), a design practice focused on architectural speculation.

Recent projects include

Unit Staff Sam Jacob Tomas Klassnik

undergraduate

overlay and montage will be employed to precipitate hybrid graphic languages.

The exaggerated stylisation of cartooning will also become a means of heightening communication. Equally, modelmaking will be a significant element in the unit’s activities. It will be used first at a small scale, to explore the strange transubstantive nature of Pop Vernacular, where ‘wood’, for example, comes in a thousand different flavours or ‘gold’ represents an idea rather than a chemical element. Secondly, large-scale modelmaking will construct explicit and expansive proposals, such as dolls’ houses with narratives that extend from the nostalgically domestic to confront complex issues of identity and meaning.

These models will become tools that resist the idea of architecture as abstraction. Borrowing from vernacular modelmaking techniques (model railways, craft kits and so on), the constructions will synthesise an iconographically rich, spatially complex idea of architecture.

To complement these studies, the unit will visit model villages and utopian towns where the relationship of image to ideology is made explicit. These will become the sites first for research and then for proposals, through which we will suggest how programme, typology and language can combine to address specific social and cultural issues.

proposals for a superheated London in 2035, fantasy bus stops and an arts strategy for the 2012 Olympics. UK correspondent for Deutsche Bauzeitung, he has also taught at Chelsea College of Art and the RCA. FAT, Sint Lucas Art Academy, Boxtel, The Netherlands, 2006

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undergraduate

intermediate 13

Heterotopia

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilisation, real places… which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.

– Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967 The unit works with the perception and cultural understanding of space. Our cultural reading of space is rooted in two aspects of the urban condition.

Firstly, the increasing social and cultural diversity of our cities. Secondly, our cities are already densely built.

These observations raise the question of how, as architects, we should think about the creation of spaces that embrace this condition of intense urban diversity – spaces that seek to serve or create the ‘other’ – and that at the same time are somehow grafted or inserted into an existing city fabric.

Unit Staff Miraj Ahmed is a practising painter and architect. He has taught at the AA since 2000 and also teaches as a Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

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Martin Jameson is an associate at Serie Architects. He studied for five years at the AA and received his Diploma with honours. He was a Building Design magazine ‘stand-out student’ in both his fourth and fifth years. Before studying architecture he was a business consultant

Unit Staff Miraj Ahmed Martin Jameson

undergraduate

We will explore what constitutes ‘other’ spaces in architectural terms.

Michel Foucault’s tantalising description of ‘heterotopia’ enumerates various typologies, from the museum to the asylum and the sacred to the profane.

This will form the springboard for the unit’s investigations and proposals for sites that are not only a part of the city fabric, but also create spaces that both mirror and challenge their locale.

Our methodology is to immerse ourselves in the seamier locales of central London in search of the ‘other’.

We will pay close attention to both atmosphere and to measured analytical description and will encourage the use of a wide range of representative techniques. Above all we will emphasise as the core of our architectural strategy the elucidation of programmatic responses. The result will be a diverse set of architectural propositions that are rooted in the contemporary urban context, that emphasise spatial and programmatic invention, that resist the mundane and celebrate the heterotopic.

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.

Heterotopia, noun Pathology.

1. Misplacement or displacement, as of an organ.

2. The formation of tissue in a part where its presence is abnormal.

Photo Miraj Ahmed, 2009

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undergraduate

diploma 1

Mineral Architecture Not quite a century ago the Crystal Chain Group led by Bruno Taut sought to give physical form to their mythical belief in a new type of architecture, as the expression of a new society. Their symbol was the crystal; their vision an earthly paradise founded on a new architecture of colour and glass.

Moving up to the Diploma School, Unit 1 continues its search for a mineral architecture that is socially and experientially relevant. This year we will attempt to write a genealogy of mineral manifestos and position ours within it.

Navigating between utopian models and the realities of building we will explore how this approach can challenge spatial and material conventions and radicalise architecture.

The current preference for complex geometries provides structures but not necessarily spaces. The unit focuses on the relevance of form-making as a way of articulating relationships between physical formations and human processes. We will work with mapping, scripting and modelling of crystalline properties to create a reservoir of formal and material systems. We will then use empirical experimentation to exploit their habits and capacities to produce physical and sensory effects.

Working obsessively to capture and control these effects, we will reintroduce such forgotten modes of represen-

Unit Staff Olaf Kneer and Marianne Mueller are directors of Mueller Kneer Associates (muellerkneer.com), currently working on a number of buildings for the arts.

The practice’s work has been recognised through a number of awards including the ‘AJ Corus 40 under 40’.

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Unit Staff Olaf Kneer Marianne Mueller

undergraduate

tation as the measured drawing. Physical and digital models utilising boolean operations will explore ideas of solids, mass, interiority and envelope.

Searching for an architecture of solidity, economy of form and construction, the unit focuses on monolithic construction and single material articulations. Grounded yet autonomous, the monolith radicalises ideas of programme and context. Mineral matter, silicates, clays, gypsum and amorphous solids are going to form the technical focus for the year, initiating a research into constructional consequences.

Students are expected to work coherently throughout the year on a single proposal for a public building.

We will involve specialists from geology, crystallography, neuroscience and contemporary art to develop the agenda across professional boundaries.

Marianne and Olaf are also Programme Directors of AA Berlin Laboratory and curators of the new ‘Concrete Geometries’ research cluster (concrete-geometries. net), starting in autumn 2009. aadip1.net Alexander Laing, proposal for Hastings Geology Research Centre, Intermediate Unit 1, 2008/09

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undergraduate

diploma 2

Choreographing Micro-Revolutions Continuing research conducted over the last four years, Diploma 2 sets out to invent a new social and aesthetic agenda for ecological architecture, using computation to calibrate environmentally responsive geometries that are able to choreograph both climatic and cultural flows within precarious urban conditions. The unit seeks alternative urban organisational structures to mediate between private interests and government bodies, as a way of transforming stagnant urban forms that are currently disconnected from the local culture and natural environment.

In ‘Molecular Revolution in Brazil’, Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik investigate how micro-political movements escape the ‘standardisation of desire’ imposed by capitalist and autocratic governments, so defining ‘completely original forms of expression’. We will collaborate with micro-organisations, networking between the public and private sectors to create multiplescaled ‘micro-infrastructures’ that mediate between formal and informal socio-economic, environmental and cultural forces.

Students choose their own site for intervention – a disused site in São Paulo’s centre or urban residue in any other city in the world – proposing their own programmatic, formal and aesthetic ‘protest’ against the dominant cult-

Unit Staff Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee (www.subdv.com) use computation to generate environmentally responsive geometries for architecture and urban design projects worldwide, primarily in Brazil and China. They previously taught at the Pratt Institute

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in New York, and received master’s degrees from Columbia University. They have published, exhibited and lectured on their work worldwide, including the Beijing Biennale, Rotterdam Biennale, Athens Synthasoris Exhibition, London Festival of Architecture and Festival

Unit Staff Anne Save de Beaurecueil Franklin Lee

undergraduate

tures controlling a specific urban phenomenon. We will propose new social programmes to empower inhabitants, collaborating with local governments, NGOs, and urban activists, such as the Union of Inhabitants of the Paraisópolis shanty-town’s Literacy School, or the champion boxer Garrido’s informal Sports Academy under the viaducts in São Paulo.

Informed by seminars on Guattari and Rolnik’s writing, and the films of Eliane Caffé, the unit will reject prevailing tendencies in favour of creating personal ‘formal revolutions’. For this choreography of aesthetic, programmatic and environmental negotiations, we will employ generative agency scripting and associative modelling.

There will be workshops on processing with Shajay Bhooshan; environmentally responsive parametric design with Adam Davis of Foster & Partners’ Specialist Modelling Group; and environmental structure integration and extensive physical modelling with Lawrence Friesen of Generative Geometry. The unit will collaborate with the AA’s Sustainable Environmental Design programme to conduct testing of environmental structures, including shadow and lighting studies and ventilation analyses.

of Electronic Language (FILE) in São Paulo. The work of Diploma Unit 2 has been featured in AD, ArchiCree and the AA Agendas 7 Articulated Grounds: Mediating Environment and Culture publication.

Residual Infrastructures, São Paulo: Moinho Fluminese–Luz and Piscinão–Taboão da Serra.

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diploma 3

undergraduate

Meta Urbanism 2/ Ecothetical Dwelling

Storytelling… does not aim to convey the pure essence of a thing, like information or a report, it sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.

– Walter Benjamin Architecture’s conservatism…does not exclude radicalism; on the contrary, architecture must reinforce our existential experience in a radical manner against the forces of alienation and detachment…

This dense authenticity enables us to dwell with dignity. – Juhani Pallasmaa This year Dip 3’s Metaurbanism will radically address collective, ecological urban housing and the role of masterplans in the aftershock of 2008’s global economic crisis. With reference to Felix Guattari’s 1989 text ‘The Three Ecologies’, the unit will build on the notion of ‘creative autonomy’ as a tool for responding to redundant models of urban development and increasing social isolation. Transformations in communication such as blogging, youtube and facebook have spawned vast new realms of creativity, connectivity and e-communities, but is the impact of these tools/networks reflected in our

Unit Staff Alison Brooks is a Canadianborn architect and director of the London-based practice Alison Brooks Architects (ABA), which she founded in 1996. ABA is the first UK practice to have won Britain’s three most prestigious awards for architecture – the

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Stephen Lawrence Prize; Manser Medal and the 2008 Stirlling Prize for Accordia, Cambridge. Alison has served as an RIBA awards juror and has taught and lectured on architecture internationally.

Unit Staff Alison Brooks Max Kahlen

undergraduate

urban environment, or the places where we live? Guattari argues that in order to resist the homogenising forces of visual/electronic media, rampant consumerism and the global climate change, societies should respond through highly individualised means of expression within a collective culturalenvironmental project. This work will contribute to ‘a widespread shift in current value systems’ – encouraging our evolution into a more deeply ecological society.

To respond to this challenge Dip 3 will devise individual strategies for experimental, ‘ecothetical’ housing in the abandoned site of OMA’s 2004 White City masterplan. Working from the small to the large scale, we will intensively interpret, collage and document current social networks and behaviours as seeds for re-inventing spatial and environmental paradigms for dwelling. The ‘living-room’ will be the initial point of reference. Subsequently experiencing the ‘abandoned’ site will both introduce a scale shift and will enrich our process of storytelling, enabling transformations of spatial/ organisational typologies into idiosyncratic dwelling ecologies. These will spawn a collective anti-masterplan, an alternative urbanism attuned to the crises of our time.

Max Kahlen graduated from the AA with Honours in 2007. He has recently worked with IJP (London), Information Based Architecture (Amsterdam) and developed a bar project together with APMT (Germany).

Above: The American Family Below: Niklaus Paegle, Lea Valley Housing Fields, Diploma Unit 3, 2008/09

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undergraduate

diploma 4

The Coast of Europe The work of Diploma Unit 4 will be a project for the re-modernisation of the coast of Europe, exploring the layered modalities of change – combining intensification, preservation, modernisation, stagnation, downturn, stasis, decay, growth, conservation, dispersal, abandonment, erosion, consolidation, densification – that are reshaping the shores of Europe and its seas in the twenty-first century.

The work will examine the possibilities of integrated spatial transformation in the complex contemporary maritime territories of Europe. Relating architecture and urbanism to other disciplines, it will investigate the current condition of coastal regions from St Petersburg to the Kattegat, from Norway to Finisterre, from the Strait of Gibraltar to Naples, from Venice to Athens, from the Golden Horn to Odessa.

Our research and design work will focus on how architecture and urbanism can interact with the multiple natural, mineral, social, technological, economical, political and cultural processes that mould the form of the inhabited territory to elucidate the potential lying within their physical and spatial structures.

Architecture is used as both the object of investigation and the method of enquiry into the many ways in which European coastal territories are adapting and reconfiguring their specific

Unit Staff John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog are founders of Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that combines architectural analysis, projects, advocacy and action for the integrated spatial transformation of contemporary territories.

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Ann-Sofi was a researcher and John head of a research group on a series on international cities at ETH Zurich, Studio Basel/ Contemporary City Institute with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

John is the co-founder of multiplicity in Milan. He is currently pursuing a PhD at

Unit Staff John Palmesino Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

undergraduate

forms, bodies and structures. The 136,106 kilometres of Europe’s coastline, ranging over four seas (the Mediterranean, North Sea, Baltic and Black Sea) and two oceans (the Atlantic and the Arctic), are almost equal in length to the Equator. They represent the liminal zone between territories undergoing rapid transformation – a liquid space crossed by a multiplicity of trajectories, populations and economies. Accommodating almost 50 per cent of the EU coastal countries’ 500 million inhabitants, the coast of Europe is a vital and strategic element in the well-being of its populations.

A number of primary investigations will focus on the physical aspects and implications of territorial transformations and their relation to new modes of inhabitation. These investigations will help to single out specific territorial structures where the project will experiment with innovative strategic integrated spatial plans, working towards concrete architectural and urban proposals.

The unit work will be accompanied by a History and Theory seminar that analyses the contemporary relations between polities and space.

the Research Architecture Centre at Goldsmiths, where he also teaches. Ann-Sofi has studied architecture in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Zurich.

Territorial Agency, Studies for Helsinki

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undergraduate

diploma 5

Third Natures: Carnal and Mundane Assemblies The redefinition of the global post-capitalist model of society, new forms of social interaction, digital fabrication procedures, the current economic meltdown, ever-improving object performance and concerns about the consequences of everyday actions on the conditions for survival call for a rethinking of the role of buildings in our culture and even the nature of what we typically call a building.

Once it was easy to draw a line between humans, non-humans and objects. Now, however, the blurred interrelations between these categories offer an exciting field for research. This year, Dip 5 will focus on the role of architecture as assemblies or complex ecologies that act as linking mechanisms between living beings, social groups and technological objects.

The unit will explore the notion of buildings as third natures – deliberate material and intellectual manipulations of our biotope. To encourage a deep 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. A series of typological investigations on decontextualised historical examples will be carried out, ranging from the ecstatic

Unit Staff Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda are both architects, regular contributors to El Croquis and founders of the Madridbased office amid.cero9 (cero9.com). Since 1998 they have taught at ETSAM and ESAYA, and have been visiting teachers at Cornell,

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Unit Staff Cristina Díaz Moreno Efrén García Grinda

undergraduate

space of a disco to the translation of complete ecosystems inside greenhouses, in a quest for surreal and excessive ideas of beauty.

Students will begin by selecting a social group as the context and scenario for their research. From this, they will develop a technically inventive material system and process of fabrication that will ultimately be applied to the project at various scales. The unit will travel to Budapest to study built examples of congregational spaces related to water.

Our working methods will be an adaptation of those of an experimental design office involved in the development of buildings. They will include brainstorming sessions, collective seminars, constant pin-ups, micro-lectures, work with consultants, presentations by special guests and ‘fast architecture’ workshops designed to stimulate creativity. Advanced digital analysis and design techniques will be integrated into a combination of systems and tools that will come close to a ‘methodological anarchy’ propelled by novelty, the unconventional, innovative thinking, audacity and fresh solutions.

This will extend the range of areas covered, from programmatic, social, structural and climatic interests to representational, contextual or conceptual ones.

Paris-Malaquais, ESARQ and EPSA. 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. Max Peintner, Die ungebrochene Anziehungskraft der Natur (The Unswerving Appeal of Nature), 1970-71

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undergraduate

diploma 7

School Grammar When deciding priorities for rebuilding the destroyed town of Cabra in Kosovo the town chose to rebuild the school first. Schools are amongst our most important public buildings and the experience of school offers a defining and enduring moment in our personal and cultural development. Yet school design remains largely indifferent to recent approaches to teaching, technology and the broader agenda of the role of education within the social structure of communities â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as a result, perhaps, of a certain antipathy towards any new kind of paradigm.

Our interest lies in extending the design of schools to shape the many reciprocal relationships that can be established through all aspects of their settings â&#x20AC;&#x201C; ecological, hydrological, material, climatic as well as cultural and aesthetic. The projects developed by the unit will survey a broad range of interactions to generate interventions at differing scales. Optimistically, we will also pursue a rigorously green agenda, one which by its nature is transdisciplinary and reliant on collaboration and context.

The typological studies will be tested on a territorial level in multiple locations and climates, led by developing collaborative networks and partners. The set-piece focus is southern Lebanon, where the school building

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.

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Kenneth Fraser is a principal of Kirkland Fraser Moor (k-f-m.com). He previously worked with Renzo Piano Building Workshop, where he was project leader for the Rome Auditorium and the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church.

Unit Staff Simon Beames Kenneth Fraser

undergraduate

is a focus for restoring communities and a safe haven in an area that has always known conflict.

Diploma 7 will explore the philosophical, social, political and technical response to the provision of long-term development through the legacies of disaster-relief. Working with a research group that includes technologists, theorists and NGOs responsible for live-field projects, we will apply the emergent strategy in response to their requirements.

Two technical ambitions will guide the unitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work and research. The first involves an investigation into digital toolmaking (with the inherent obsolescence of high-end fabrication machinery broadening the scope for re-appropriating these machines and adapting them into low-cost analogue tools).

Secondly, we will research methods of accurately predicting the behaviour of natural light, restoring (to the architect) an operational means of calculation and manipulation through digital and reality modelling. Expressed in these terms, the expectations of the unit are technical, social and critical, emphasising the development of workable systems for addressing a scarcity of resources.

School Building in Bint Jbeil, near the World Heritage site of Tyre, South Lebanon. Torn apart during the 2006 IsraelLebanon conflict.

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undergraduate

diploma 8

Divide and Conquer Diploma 8 will continue its investigation of logical frameworks within the context of geometric infrastructures to develop the basis on which architectural proposals can be founded. By examining the design of an underlying organisational stimulus of infrastructural development – the framework – the unit seeks to validate the medium on which architecture operates, refining the input signals of projects to more accurately process and output a set of developed design motives. In past years, the unit has approached its interest in the structure of organisation through briefs such as the development of urban network systems, central transportation hubs and, most recently, the redesign of a large-scale dam. Due to the magnitude of scale at which the unit sets itself, project proposals inherently offer common applicability to a range of contemporary architectural concerns.

To most effectively integrate the design of a logical framework in relation to an architectural proposal, the unit will appropriate a parallel investigation of the anatomy and behaviour of logic. By examining the vast works of logicians in related fields alongside contemporary models of logical processing, students will be responsible for the constitution, construction and deployment of assertions that validate an architectural thesis. Fundamentally, such an ambi-

Unit Staff Eugene Han runs AVAStudio, researching and developing systems in industrial design, computation, and architecture.

Unit Staff Eugene Han Chris Yoo

undergraduate

tion would necessitate the study of logic itself, or simply, the logic of logic. Only once an ontological development of a branch of architecture is established can students then utilise such a framework as an effective design tool and foundation.

To apply such studies, the unit will set as its brief the reconsideration of an abandoned coal-mining facility on Hashima Island in Japan’s Nagasaki Prefecture. Continuing the unit’s agenda of relatively time-independent project proposals, students will develop their designs adopting a novel critique towards the failures that the historical infrastructural administration of the island facility produced, most notably in its precarious, narrow objectives of industrial production and management.

This redesign will focus primarily on the logistical dynamics and behaviour of infrastructural proposals as an adaptive template for an evolving architecture.

By researching the nature of the facility’s inability to sustain its function and relevance, students will develop projects that present alternative speculations applicable as a prototype for infrastructural development to a general range of architectural contexts.

Chris Yoo studied at Columbia University and the University of Auckland.

He previously worked at FOA and NOX and is a co-director of the Londonbased architectural practice poly.m.ur.

Hashima Island (Gunkanjima), Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan

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undergraduate

diploma 9

New Iconic Architectures 3 Iconic Fictions Architects have long used fiction as a tool: first to explore and design uncharted territories, and second as a presentation device. Fiction, both written and visual, is an experimental practice to try out spatial and relational ideas in the unconfined territory of an imagined world. This year we will invent fictions to theorise and visualise space and form.

This third year of the Iconic series will hover between fiction and reality, as the unit sets out to imagine our possible futures. While economic and cultural ambitions generally have shrunk drastically since we first introduced this agenda two years ago, the unit’s projects have followed a decidedly contrary path – becoming increasingly bold and far-fetched as the Dow Jones decreased. And so this year we will carry the momentum forward as we blur the line between the real and the imaginary, weaving fictional stories around and through our projects as we develop truly fantastical iconic proposals.

The unit believes that the icon is not only still possible, but is crucial at a time of waning optimism. The unit demands above all an unselfconscious and highly personal belief in architectural potential, imagination, criticality and profundity. This year we will push this to extremes as we use fiction as a device to stretch architectural, spatial and

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.

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Unit Staff Natasha Sandmeier Monia De Marchi

undergraduate

cultural boundaries. As in previous years, we will demand highly individuated student investigations into a deliberately broad spectrum of project considerations, including context, publicity, programme, image and beauty.

The students of Diploma 9 begin the year with the making of a highly personal, individual manifesto, whose expression frames the year ahead. This year your manifesto will also set up the fiction that will weave around your personality, project, site, and cultural context as you shape your icon. Taking account of the optical dominance of the way we view our environment, we place a heavy emphasis on the deliberate construction of images and scenarios to illustrate the manifesto. These images will exaggerate – even downright lie – in the telling of their tales, a quality we feel is a fundamental aspect of designing and manipulating an iconic image alongside its proposal and story.

Students will choose their own sites as they relate to the first project of the year. They will be real sites in real cities.

Seminars on the topic will be held in collaboration with students from the MA in Histories and Theories throughout terms 1 and 2.

Monia De Marchi is an architect who studied in Venice and completed her MArch at the AA graduate programme. In addition to being a Unit Master at the AA since 2005, she teaches Media Studies and codirects the Spring Semester programme at the AA. Tarek Shamma, Circus Lumens, Diploma Unit 9, 2008/09

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undergraduate

diploma 10

Direct Urbanism: Interactive Rules The interactive city and composite space.

Last year we focused on ‘current events as urbanism’ in order to design interactive hubs for London. ‘Food’ led to an interactive interface in Hackney Central that injected a new social dimension into the food supply chain and ‘Sex’ led to a series of points and two redesigned public squares that serviced the different vice cultures of Soho. Current events are inseparable from the urban fabric and together form the reality of urban space: the real city.

Diploma 10 will continue to experiment with the relationship between physical and social structures and further develop the concept of direct urbanism.

This year we will concentrate on rules and the role they play in making architectural and urban space.

We will work with urban, spatial, social and interactive rules.

What is the relationship between rules and the physical structures of the city?

We will devise methods for working with and communicating the interactive spaces that allow for the overlap of rule systems and mediate between the internal and external spaces of the city.

We will work in London and in a contrasting capital city.

We will design the following social

Unit Staff Carlos Villanueva Brandt has been Diploma 10 Unit Master since 1986 and was awarded the RIBA President’s Silver Medal Tutor Prize in 2000.

The varied work of Carlos Villanueva Brandt Architecture (villanuevabrandt.com),

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Unit Staff Carlos Villanueva Brandt

undergraduate

structures: a constructed situation, an interactive perimeter and a strategic circle of influence.

We will design the following physical structures: a building, an interactive perimeter, an expanded perimeter and adaptations to the urban fabric within the circle of influence.

The emphasis will be on space.

Space that expands beyond its physical boundaries into the urban condition.

What is the relationship between an architectural structure and its perimeter?

What is the relationship between the architectural perimeter and an urban perimeter?

What is the relationship between these perimeters and their surrounding territory or circle of influence?

The aim is to experiment with rules and structures, the emphasis is on the spatial, but the intention is to design spatial interventions that work with live situations, conditions, fabric, strategies and rules that make up the live realm of the city. How do interactive rules inform direct urbanism?

formed in 1984, has been published widely and exhibited internationally.

Food: without food there is no urbanism; re-centralising distribution in Hackney Central (Edmund Fowles); Sex: the complex arrangement of interwoven vice layers in Soho (Amber Wood); Fear: inclusion, identified mechanisms for social belonging (Larissa Begault), 2008/09

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undergraduate

diploma 11

Micro City Phase 3 The unit continues its preoccupation with developing architectural design strategies for the post-infrastructural landscape, learning from the ‘innerperiphery’ of London and in particular the area around Whitechapel. The effects of the economic downturn are becoming increasingly evident in the speed of production as well as the erasure of London’s buildings. The city has been left with an assortment of different territories with strange adjacencies, an increase in the uncertainty of spaces, delayed infrastructure and accidental architectures within the city.

As architects, we will respond to this condition as the city’s metabolism slows – and before it actually starts to shrink. Our research will begin by reinterpreting the city as a catalogue of beautifully incomplete objects that have been excluded from urban gentrification. We will gather fragments of textural detail, leftover gaps, exposed edges and subsidiary service networks: the unwritten histories that generate the city’s present-day interiority. We will then reclassify, de-collage and aggregate these resources, condensing them into small families of micro-components in anticipation of a smaller city.

These assemblages increasingly and perhaps accidentally become architecture of a city inside the city: a micro city.

We will experiment by making

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 documentation of the workshop he has organised

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Unit Staff Shin Egashira

undergraduate

models which will un-make the architecture of the city, borrowing the notion of reverse urban engineering. Material studies will be made in non-scale, 1:5 and 1:10, and we will develop a new structural and formal vocabulary as well as textural expressions of chosen materials, mixing digital analysis and material qualities, in particular in relation to qualities revealed through various methods of fabrication.

While observing the realities of Whitechapel through direct sampling methods, we will examine existing urban development plans as well as earlier masterplans. Moments of disjunction during infrastructural transition will be a particular focus, revealing the adjacencies of textures, scales, structures and programmes.

Final proposals should demonstrate diverse architectural resolutions in response to the future scenarios of chosen areas in un-planned Whitechapel; they will speculate on the intricate cross-utilisation of service infrastructures and public facilities in the making of inner-city-based prototype architecture, contextualised by the uncertainties of its future histories.

Our objects of study this year also include a revisiting of the Endless House by Frederick Kiesler; a Tokyo study with research on urban erasure; and material experiment sessions at Hooke Park.

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

Diploma 11 exhibition space, Projects Review, 2009 Photo Sue Barr

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undergraduate

diploma 12

Nip and Tuck Since 2003 Diploma 12 has pursued an agenda to develop and construct new spatial and social constellations from an engagement with infrastructure.

This year we will develop a visionary network of public bridging systems for the Los Angeles Metropolitan region.

Before modernism and the development of regional planning practices such as those notoriously enacted by Robert Moses in New York, infrastructure was integrated within the experience and performance of cities and buildings. By contrast – in accordance with the modernist paradigm which conceives urban space as a series of rationalised and functionally distinct operations – infrastructural projects built to network transport at a regional or national scale tend to sever connections at a local scale. The resulting disjunctions and social fragmentations have produced what Stephan Graham and Simon Marvin term a condition of ‘splintering urbanism’, where the local public realm is ill-served by privately funded and monoprogrammatic largescale projects.

In response to this condition, and in the context of the multi-billion dollar investment in infrastructural renewal currently underway in the US, we will explore alternative futures for infrastructure, using Los Angeles – one of the most radical, innovative and yet

Unit Staff: Holger Kehne is a founding partner of Plasma Studio (plasmastudio.com) and GroundLab (groundlab.org) and winner of the Next Generation Architects Award, The Young Architect of the Year Award, The HotDip Galvanising Award, the ContractWorld

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Award and Europe 40 under 40. Plasma Studio is lead designer for the International Horticultural Fair in Xi’an, China with a wide range of buildings due to open in 2011.

Unit Staff Holger Kehne Jeffrey Turko

Technical Tutor Federico Rossi

undergraduate

fragile of urban ecologies – as our location. Here the unit will address the potential of architecture to mediate across the different scales of networked infrastructures, while also exploring their capacity to respond to an array of local and public interests as well as the demands for more global forms of connectivity. To this end, the typically linear trajectory and narrow functionality of the bridge typology will be reoriented towards a field condition in which multiple programmes are articulated.

The unit will travel to LA to study the complex conditions surrounding infrastructural settings, visiting a wide range of modernist and contemporary buildings as well as some of the most exciting architectural practices currently working in this region.

Each student will select and study a condition that runs along, over, under and/or across an existing freeway in terms of structure, topography, geometry, programme and potential. Accordingly, we will again employ the diagram and the index as methodological tools for reading and reconfiguring these conditions. Exploiting architecture’s capacities to fuse the functional, the projective and the spiritual, we will propose visionary material structures that will transpose the term ‘freeway’ into a sustainable and inclusive future.

Jeffrey Turko founded JEFF TURKO – NEKTON (nekton.org) and is a member of the Ocean group (ocean-designresearch.net).

He also teaches at the University of East London School of Architecture and Visual Arts where he has taught since 2001.

Aerial photo of Los Angeles by Bureau of Reclamation (aquafornia.com/archives/2701)

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diploma 13

undergraduate

The Reformed Grammar of Ornament

Great ornament neither negates strife nor moves to anesthetise or homogenise passion with a colorless veil of morbid geometry. To the contrary, it resides and revels in the convergence of differences, dislocations and conflict.

– Kent Bloomer, The Nature of Ornament The bible of ornamental design, Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856), consists of 37 propositions outlining its principles and 100 plates illustrating motifs from various civilisations. Thus it proclaims ornament to be a truly global language, subject to shared maxims; but it also demonstrates its power as an emblematic expression of diverse cultural identities.

This year Dip 13 will not only question the nineteenth-century rules of ornament but also test their capacities in establishing contemporary national, geographic and political identification.

Beyond Jones’s world of Moorish, Chinese or Elizabethan ornament Dip 13 will reform his Grammar. Our contemporary iterations of iconographic, naturalist, materialist and geometric ornament for a glocalised world will be free of defunct patriotism and vulgar symbolism. With the elegance and ferocity of an art nouveau whiplash curve Dip 13 will turn its back on optimi-

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 200507 as a Studio Master for AAVSP. He currently writes

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

Tristan Simmonds studied Structural Engineering at Bath University. From 1995-2008 he worked as a specialist engineer at Arup AGU (founding member), and now runs

Unit Staff Oliver Domeisen Tristan Simmonds

undergraduate

sation, homogeneity and singularity.

Instead we will revel in tactile beauty, savour aesthetic plurality, and pursue a meaningful complexity that is not exclusively formal. The fantastical nature of our ornamental designs will only be eclipsed by the realism of their technical resolution.

The Reform: As an extension to Jones’s catalogue you will devise a system of ornament for a new embassy/ high commission of a country of your choice in central London. The client, site, programme and choice of contextual materials will infuse these initial graphic plates.

The Verification: You will produce a catalogue of architectural elements pertaining to the structure, circulation, surfaces, joints, openings and services of your building employing your ornamental grammar. Chosen details will be constructed as material prototypes.

The Resolution: As an inversion of traditional methods, your building will emerge from the detail scale – and as such will be an adaptation of your ornamental strategy. Only ornamental aspects of the final design will be revealed at appropriate scales.

The unit will be accompanied by a Diploma History and Theory course and lectures on the topic of ornament.

Drawing workshops will also be held.

Ornamental treasure hunts will take us to Paris, Brussels and Munich.

his own company Tristan Simmonds Studio providing geometry and engineering services to artists and architects including Antony Gormley. Specialist in form generation and digital sculpting.

Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1856, chromolithograph half-title to the first edition.

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undergraduate

diploma 14

Making the City: The Immeuble Cité In recent years complex form, parametric systems of design and diagrams have become the norm in architecture.

If these devices promise endless differentiation and adaptability to multiple situations, identities and performances, the results in fact contribute to a monotonous landscape of (value-free) diversity. Against this landscape, Diploma 14 proposes a return to simple forms – not as retreat into the vacuum of self-referentiality (as in the glossy minimalism of contemporary architecture), but as a polemical way to confront (and understand) the insurmountable complexity of the city. Instead of naively mimicking urban complexity with architectural complexity, the unit proposes to critically understand urbanity as something that provides architecture with its very raison d’être, while being itself irreducible to architectural form. For this reason the unit encourages a rigorous (but not cause-and-effect) relationship between enquiries on the nature of the contemporary city and the development of architectural forms based on the composition and estrangement of physical space’s most literal attributes, such as walls, rooms, openings, connections and obstructions.

The aim of the unit is to define an intelligible vocabulary of forms as a basis for rethinking the form of the contemporary city. Consequently, the

Unit Staff Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator.

After graduating from the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia, he obtained masters and PhD degrees at the Berlage Institute/Delft University of Technology.

His theoretical studies focus on the relationship between

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architectural form, political theory and urban history.

He currently teaches at the Berlage Institute, where he heads the ‘City as a Project’ PhD programme. Together with Martino Tattara he is the co-founder of Dogma, a prize-winning architectural collective focusing on the project of the city.

Unit Staff Pier Vittorio Aureli

undergraduate

use of diagrams, gratuitous iconic gestures and parametric complexity is strongly discouraged.

The theme for this year will be the design of an ‘Immeuble Cité’ – a largescale building with a critical mass comparable to that of the city. The simple premise for such a building will be to reduce the footprint to a minimum impact on the ground, thus countering the sprawl of urbanity. The Immeuble Cité must go beyond the commercial form of towers or any facile iconic or utopian gesture: instead, it is to be conceived as a radical (architectural) test for a number of spatial and political issues such as the relationship between living and work space, new forms of welfare and systems of bio-political government, the will to community or segregation, urban government and the possibility of conflict. The impulse behind this design problem is twofold: on the one hand it aims at a critique and revision of architecture and its specific history, on the other it challenges the present state of architectural form vis-à-vis the politics of the city. The context for this exercise will be the NorthWestern Metropolitan Area (NWMA), a region of 137 million inhabitants encompassing the old core of the EU (France, Belgium, UK, Germany and The Netherlands). The unit will consider this region as one city and, as such, the framework for the Immeuble Cité.

Photograph by Oswald Mathias Ungers of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Berlin, 1956.

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undergraduate

diploma 15

Antique Futures II I should like to describe the novel and unusual things I noticed during my stay on the moon. – Verae Historiae, Lucian (AD 120–180) Back to the Future While nineteenth-century Grand Tourists were visiting Pompeii and the Pantheon by candlelight, Charles Babbage’s analytical machine, Wallace Farmer’s electric dynamo and Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope (precursors of the computer, the lightbulb and the movies) were being unveiled back home, within the purposebuilt pyramids and pantheonic domes of the London, Paris and Philadelphia World Fairs. The artifice of the antique has always been embedded with mappings of the present’s desired futures and, conversely, the future has often dressed itself in antique trappings. Two supercontexts – Antiquity and The Future – are again engaged with this year via the vehicles of the Grand Tour and the World Fair, focusing on the extraordinary nineteenth-century moment when the two coexisted. If, as our research last year demonstrated, the Grand Tour can be understood as a generative cultural infrastructure connecting a set of technological, cultural and natural contexts which organised and reconstructed our relations to the Antique past, then the

Unit Staff Francesca Hughes joined the AA in 2003. She has lectured internationally and served as an external examiner both in the UK and abroad. Author/ editor of The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (MIT Press, 1996), she is currently completing a book

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entitled False Economies: The Architecture of Error.

Hughes Meyer Studio is a multidisciplinary practice whose work has been published by AR, ANY, Art Forum, Merrell and Routlege.

Unit Staff Francesca Hughes Noam Andrews

undergraduate

World Fair similarly reorganised our relations to the technologically promiscuous future, transplanting and centralising a set of destinations, events and technologies into a hyper-condensed, singular event – such as an entire Madagascan village for the Human Zoo exhibit (Paris Fair, 1889). The future and its relations to the past were never more multiple than at this contentious site of empirical performance, scientific quackery and seemingly promising technologies.

The political visions of the twentieth century were the undoing of The Future as an effective category: architecture no longer knows how to use it without burdening it with (now vacuous) utopian or ideological content. The unit’s continuing research into the performance of post-digital ‘context’ and the instrumentalisation of its role in contemporary architectural production and epistemology takes us this year to the artifice-laden fabrication of Antique Futures. We will mine the ancient past for alternative models to both the failed heroics of the twentieth century and the dubious historicism of the nineteenth in order to evade the cul de sac of ‘future now’. The acrobatics of historicity will be our trade, its saturated artifice the nemesis of the instrumentalist rationale. The unit maintains relations with structural engineer and historian of civil engineering, Matthew Wells.

Noam Andrews is director of Wunderkammer (wk-studio.com). He previously worked in New York and Paris, including spells at Studio Daniel Libeskind and Atelier Seraji, and is currently writing a dissertation at the London Consortium on space in parametric design.

Karl Kjlestrup-Johnson, Temporal GIS of Hannibal crossing the Alps, 2009

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undergraduate

diploma 16

Adaptive Ecologies 2: Composite Production Dip 16 will pursue its research into environmentally specific yet highly articulated spatial production. Our areas of investigation will range from recent developments in environmental science, digital design/manufacturing and material science, through processes of industrialised building and industrial production economies, to new organisational models and methods of procurement.

We will continue our search for a new architectural aesthetic and spatial qualities based on the idea of the composite. Our end goal: an increasingly articulated, context-specific architectural space arising from an environmentally conscious ecology of industrialised architectural production, with an innate capacity for redeployment and adaptation. We view new environmental conditions, building standards and legislation as a springboard for imaginative and innovative environmentally conscious design.

After revisiting traditional forms of building taxonomy and production techniques in a range of materials – stone, concrete, metal, timber, fabric and polymers – Dip 16 will consider more high-tech means of fabrication including milling, folding, laminating, sewing, stacking, interlocking, hanging, injection moulding, compositing,

Unit Staff Jonas Lundberg, Andrew Yau, Jonas Runberger and Tom Tong are part of Urban Future Organization, an international architecture practice research collaborative. UFO has won a number of international competitions, exhibited its work at the Venice and

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Unit Staff Jonas Lundberg Andrew Yau

Assisted by Jonas Runberger Tom Tong

undergraduate

extrusion, weaving and bundling.

Spatially and programmatically this will entail various degrees of articulation from the standardised, low-tech component to the highly articulated formal element, avoiding self-similar repetition in favour of the diversity of the composite.

The year will initially evolve around a series of intensive project-based digital design workshops focusing on parametric modelling and simulation. There will also be a strong emphasis on the development of individual research consultancies and an individual formal research abstract. We will go on an extended unit trip, and strongly encourage an individual site trip as well.

As always Dip 16 will engage with the question of how to nurture environmentally conscious design talent by exploring how one goes about appropriating and developing individual design techniques and directing one’s own research. The choice of site and brief will remain entirely open.

Beijing Biennales and was recently featured in 10X10 v.

2. An overview of Diploma Unit 16’s work can be seen online at dip16.net.

Maryam Pousti, Inhabitable Bridge, Istanbul, Turkey

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undergraduate

complementary studies

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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.

Technical Studies, Second Year bridge test Photo Valerie Bennett

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history & theory studies

History & Theory Studies courses in the First Year and Intermediate School will undergo further changes in the coming year. They continue to provide students with a fundamental introduction to the concepts and categories which inform architectural design and architectural practice, and are particularly concerned to demystify the often complex forms of argument within design so that students can quickly enter the field of architectural debate. This year a particular emphasis is being placed on helping students to acquire the writing skills which they will need not only in professional practice but also if they wish to make an individual contribution to architectural discussion. Students are encouraged to contribute to and question the lectures and classes which they attend. In the first term the focus will be on writing, particularly essay writing, and in the second term attention will be given to acquiring the skills to present projects in a clear and rational manner.

In the First Year students are introduced to the elements of architectural discourse and practice so that they can readily understand questions of architectural representation (plans, sections, etc) as being a crucial part of architectural design. In the Second Year this is developed by looking at architecture and its pasts. This is radically different from an architectural history course and bases itself upon the way in which architects – rather than historians – look at the past. In the Third Year a number of concepts and strategies for architecture are examined with a view to clarifying them and enabling students to enter into critical exchanges with

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each other without feeling excluded by what can seem to be the technical character of much current architectural discourse.

The courses each term are delivered in two blocks of four with a week’s gap between them. This is designed to enable students to participate actively in schoolwide activities but also to allow time during the term to work on their History & Theory submissions. The submissions have a renewed significance in the new courses and a full range of seminar and tutorial times will be provided to help with this. In addition to the weekly lectures a new system of class work is provided in which students will be set small writing tasks linked to their preparation of the term’s essay, and this work will be included in the overall assessment. The programme of the Intermediate School is now fully integrated and aims to provide a clear common ground of knowledge for all students approaching Part 1.

The Diploma School continues to offer both new courses as well as more established ones that bear upon work and issues which are influential within the school. These courses are more specialised and their range intends to demonstrate the breadth of interests represented by the units. But as in the Intermediate School it is important that students use the courses to develop their own writing. Diploma students are required to successfully complete three courses and their essays, or alternatively they can complete one course and elect to develop and write a longer thesis which must be completed by January of the Fifth Year. History & Theory Studies only run courses in the

Programme Director Mark Cousins

first term of the Fourth and Fifth Years so that students have adequate time to devote to their architectural design during the rest of the year.

The value of the programme as a whole must be judged by its capacity to help students think about architecture as well as to express their ideas in a clear but critical fashion. In a culture where it can seem to students that their work for design is paramount it should not be forgotten that an ability to write about architecture and to present projects in an intellectually and coherent manner is of vital importance.

History & Theory Studies also organises an evening programme of lectures, workshops and discussions, conferences and symposia as well as a full programme of freestanding lectures. In May 2010 there will be a major international conference on ‘Architecture and its Pasts’.

The Prospectus contains a brief summary of the timetabled courses on offer. Full details of the syllabuses and a statement of the submission requirements will be found in the ‘HTS/TS/ Communications Studies Handbook’ available at the beginning of the autumn term. All events organised by History & Theory Studies are advertised in the weekly Events List: aaschool.ac.uk/diary aaschool.ac.uk/lectures

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The courses in First, Second and Third Year take place in the Autumn and Spring Terms.

First Year

Architecture and its Fundamentals

Maria Fedorchenko This course looks at elements of architecture that are so inherent to both theory and practice that their influence is frequently taken for granted, while their changes go unchallenged. It approaches a series of architectural concepts not simply as technical issues but as embodiments of contemporary assumptions as well as outcomes of long histories. The aim of the course is not to find a fixed meaning for each term but rather to investigate how it has been used in theoretical arguments and practical experiments, and to discuss its relevance to the built environment. A related target is to contrast the definitions architects and theorists have given to the word ‘architecture’ and how it has been associated with specific elements. Students will be able to expand their understanding of key conceptual categories in order to inform individual design attitudes. The course is organised thematically with selected readings each week. The first term will examine highlights of architectural discourse and their expressions in practice. The second term will develop the student’s ability to analyse symptomatic projects in both words and graphic presentation and to channel analysis into design. A weekly lecture will be followed by a seminar and/or workshop where students will have a chance to discuss theoretical texts. In addition, assigned exercises will help them

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engage with the topics on both abstract and concrete levels by relating readings to case studies. Course material will be aligned with the First Year Studio projects in order to bridge thinking and making.

Second Year

Architecture and its Pasts

Mark Cousins This is not a course on architectural history. It aims to present something that is more directly relevant to architecture and design. Firstly we look at the relation of architects to buildings of the past, starting with the relation of Le Corbusier to the Parthenon. From there we look at how architects have understood the classical both in the Renaissance and in the Modern period. This enables us to pass on to the question of style: we look at how architects have interpreted national traditions, religious traditions and political ideologies as the basis for design proposals. This will include architects’ interpretations of vernacular architecture and also of modernism itself. All these will be shown to have a relation not strictly to architectural history but to the way architects experience the past. In conclusion the course will consider the nature of the city as a site for the coexistence of contemporary and past architectures. Students will be required to fulfil a number of exercises and projects to demonstrate an understanding of the various types of relations to the past. These exercises will include drawing, the interpretation of buildings, and for example the appreciation of how film and novels represent aspects of the architectural past.

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Third Year

16 Canonical Buildings and Texts

Chris Pierce and Brett Steele This course will tackle head-on the canonic architectural projects and theories in the twentieth and twentyfirst century. From the Amsterdam Bourse to CCTV we will closely scrutinise the buildings and texts that have defined modern and contemporary architecture. On a week-by-week basis students will come to understand and interpret the key texts and decipher their different terms and issues. At the same time, they will learn ways to comprehend and analyse some of the most important architectural projects and consider and question the constantly changing role of the architect in practice. Between design and architectural theory there is a constant exchange of categories and students will develop a knowledge of these and the wide range of debates and practices defining this period. In short, this course will make the discourse of modern and contemporary architecture more intelligible and ground the idea of an experimental or critical modern/ contemporary practice and the relationship between architectural theories and projects.

Diploma Courses In the Diploma School students are able to choose to satisfy their coursework obligation to be satisfied either by taking three courses and completing the coursework component for each of them OR by taking one course with its coursework component in addition to producing a thesis of 7,500 words, for which the HTS will provide appropriate tutorial assistance. Diploma Courses take place in the Autumn Term only

history & theory studies

The Possibility of an

Absolute Architecture

Pier Vittorio Aureli ‘What is Architecture? – the seminar will begin to answer this question, not in a straightforward way, but by considering six ‘projects’ in which the notion and the practice of architecture has been deeply theorised in its most essential aspects.

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 not so much in vacuo – meaning the abstract space of treatises and rules – as in the accidental, critical and precarious space of the city. It is precisely through its struggle with the city that architecture has revealed its absolute form.

Don’t Look Now

Mark Campbell Paranoia is usually understood as a suspiciously hostile experience of the world and the people within it. While strictly speaking a severe psychiatric disorder, paranoia has become a cultural reference for describing a state of malign influence in which the paranoiac imbues everything and everyone with an undue significance. This reference, despite its delusional character, can elicit a unique understanding because, as William Burroughs once quipped, ‘paranoia is the state you enter when you realize what’s going on’.

Following a reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, this seminar will argue there is something inherently modern about the paranoiac, especially in his relation to cause and effect, and this disjunction

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can have distinct architectural consequences. Extending the argument to an examination of America during the 1970s, including the Watergate scandal and a number of paranoid genre films, such as the Parallax View, The Conversation and Jaws, the seminar will explore the architectural dimensions of the paranoid state of mind.

Curating Fashion

Judith Clark Judith Clark curated the major V+A exhibition ‘Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back 2005’. In this course she will discuss the curatorial process and the initial reactions to the exhibition.

This will provide the basis for looking at the international conversations about curating dress.

The History of Homecoming

Mark Cousins Part of the definition of Home stems from the drama and the thematics of Homecoming. This course traces the history of Homecoming from Homer’s Odyssey to Godard’s remake of the epic, Le Mépris. The course covers issues of exile, dwelling and returning.

The Jean-Eric (or ‘Eight lectures

on everything Zaha hates’)

Paul Davies Jonathan Meades’ 10-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

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dulled individual (lost); a hoity, selfaggrandising and often preposterous discourse to be slapped around; a concern for the everyday, for the wider facts (whatever they are) with Bukowskiesque leanings.

Ornament: Reconstructing

Architecture’s Battle Royal

Oliver Domeisen The resurrection of architectural ornament in current practice remains largely unfettered by a concurrent discourse or historical awareness. This course will test the suitability of past ornamental theories from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as interpretative tools for the critique of contemporary buildings by Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, Toyo Ito, et al. Throughout the history of architecture battles over the definition of the term ornament have occurred during stylistic transitions, paradigm shifts and technological revolutions. We will see how in these moments of crisis writers such as William Hogarth, Gottfried Semper, Owen Jones, Alois Riegl, John Ruskin, Louis Sullivan or Adolf Loos exploited the equivocal nature of ornament to their own ends. We will discuss the underlying pathologies and resultant legacies of these seminal conflicting texts, and will determine their relevance in establishing a desperately needed contemporary theoretical framework.

Some of the issues addressed include the geometric obsessions of the rococo, tectonic shifts, stylistic eclecticism, the victory of the machines in the nineteenth century, the puritan legacy of modernism and postmodern obsessions with patterned surfaces. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

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Wandering in the Open Plan

Brian Hatton This course goes in search of the imaginary subject of modern architecture, the conjectural denizen of ‘the open plan’. Buildings are fixed objects, but their builders are mobile subjects.

Therefrom springs a tension that has racked architecture from the first settlement. Myths of Arcadian days and yearnings to rove again haunt the stories of farmers and townsfolk fenced in by routines, rituals and laws. Yet dreams of escape are shadowed by fears of exile and disorientation. Odysseus eventually made his way home; not so the Flying Dutchman or the Wandering Jew. Ranging from cave art to cubism, Joyce’s Ulysses, film and topology, we will set out to trace the ‘divagations of the wanderer’.

Projective Cities

Christopher Lee/Sam Jacoby Since the nineteenth century, the discourse of architecture in relation to its larger context has been predominantly discussed and reasoned through concepts of urbanism, with little or no relevant new architectural theories.

However, in the recent past a number of theories on the contemporary city have emerged that promise an alternative to the traditional history of urban planning.

The course will identify and discuss these theories and their potential to rewrite the role of architecture to participate in the formation of the city, and examines how the idea of the city increasingly becomes a critical contemporary field of theory that reconnects architecture with the larger challenges and questions raised by ongoing relentless urbanisation.

history & theory studies

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 inquiry, 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, governmental territory, 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 growing 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 with 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.

Anti-(Anti-)Rationalism

Martin Self Movements in architecture are traditionally positioned relative to the concept of the rational, and consequently perceived as favouring either ‘the objective’ or ‘the sensual’. This course will explore the sources, implications and dangers of this distinction, testing its validity. It will challenge the assumed rationality of engineering and scientific

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practice – where intuition, instinct and aesthetic judgement all have a place – and inspect the phenomenological argument that corporeal, embodied experience is necessary for architectural judgement. We will debate how these issues inform judgement of today’s formal expressionism and explore how these arguments are reframed by the dominance of computation in design practice.

BoOMA: The Bookspace of OMA

Brett Steele/Zak Kyes For more than 30 years OMA has been dedicated to the production of experimental architectural ideas through the thinking, making and production of experimental architectural publications.

This seminar – foregrounding an AA retrospective exhibition in 2010 – will survey this oeuvre and consider how it relates to the twentieth-century legacy of monographs, magazines and manifestos which are largely the location of modern architecture’s invention, communication and evolution.

Cold War Architecture and its Ghost

Ines Weizman The course introduces students to the history of Cold War architecture and its urbanisms. It shows how opposed political ideologies determined architecture both at the level of the city and its cultural production. It focuses particularly on the 1980s, a period of the meltdown of the Cold War and its aftermath.

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Landscape and Mobility

Patrick Wright This course is the report of work in progress on a project shared by the writer Patrick Wright and the filmmaker Patrick Keiller, which will lead to both a book and a film. The course deals with Keiller’s films and with Wright’s writings on landscape and place.

Myths and Theories of

Sustainable Architecture

Simos Yannas Many architects and students take sustainable environmental design for granted, as if it were now standard practice. Others see environmental performance as a mere genetic corollary of the digital revolution. For others still, energy and environment are technicalities best dealt with outside architecture. The course will start by dispelling such myths, which continue to obscure the architectural discourse of sustainable design. Far from being an issue of engineering, the environmental performance of buildings is fundamentally a matter for architecture, being a direct outcome of programmatic, formal and operational choices made – or ignored – by design. Sustainable environmental design requires essential architectural knowledge that recent generations of architects simply have not received. The course will introduce its key concepts and criteria, providing the grounding and critical framework required for design research and applications.

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Open Courses/Lecture Series

The Neighbour

Mark Cousins

Fridays at 5pm in the

Autumn and Spring Terms Since the emergence of agriculture and the appearance of the city, human proximity has been a central issue for culture. Most religious thought has privileged the idea of the neighbour as expressing the supreme religious value of Love Thy Neighbour. This is common to Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In philosophy it has emerged more in terms of the ‘polis’ and then as the idea of a community. At the same time it has always been noticed that relations with neighbours have been particularly tense and have frequently been the basis for outbreaks of hostility.

The lectures consider arguments in the twentieth century that cast doubt on the value of the idea of the neighbour as a guiding principle for ethics and for social solidarity. It pursues these arguments in an analysis of the way in which hostility and antagonism frequently erupt between neighbours, and then links this to the continuing failure of architecture and urbanism to provide an alternative approach to human proximity.

Artist Lectures Fridays at 7pm in the Spring Term Organised by Parveen Adams

In the spring term there will be a series of Artist Talks. A full schedule will be published during the autumn term.

history & theory studies Programme Director and 2nd Year Course Lecturer Mark Cousins directs the AA’s History & Theory Studies programme. In addition he is visiting professor of architecture at Columbia University and visiting professor designate at the University of Navarre, Pamplona. He is a founding member of the Graduate School at the London Consortium. markcousins@ aaschool.ac.uk 1st Year Course Lecturer Maria Fedorchenko 3rd Year Lecturer 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 Cloud 9, ‘Sevenyear Itch: Another Note from Empuriabrava’ (2008); and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, ‘Three’s a Crowd’ (2009); and Jacob van Ruisdael, ‘Navel Gazing’ (2009).

He is Unit Master of Intermediate 9, and formed Mis-Architecture (misarchitecture.co.uk) with Chris Matthews in 2000.

3rd Year Lecturer and Diploma Course Lecturer Brett Steele is Director of the AA School. His research and writings can be found online at brettsteele.net

Course Lecturers (Diploma Consultants) Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator.

After graduating from the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia, he obtained masters and PhD degrees at the Berlage Institute/Delft University of Technology.

His theoretical studies focus on the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history.

He currently teaches at the Berlage Institute where he heads the ‘City as a Project’ PhD programme. Together with Martino Tattara he is the co-founder of Dogma, a prize-winning architectural collective focusing on the project of the city.

Mark Campbell is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. His research interests include American culture between 1955 and 1975, paranoia, cultural exhaustion and dreams.

A practising architect and critic, he has taught at Princeton University and the Cooper Union.

Judith Clark is the Director of the MA in Fashion Curating and Reader in Fashion and Museology at the London College of Fashion. She works internationally and opens a new exhibition in Rotterdam this autumn.

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 200507 as a Studio Master for AAVSP. He currently writes and lectures – and has curated an exhibition – on the topic of ornament.

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Brian Hatton has taught at the AA for more than 20 years. A critic for many art and architecture journals, he has written studies of Dan Graham, Cedric Price, Zaha Hadid and Langlands & Bell, among others.

Sam Jacoby graduated from the AA and is an architect in private practice in London. Before becoming an architect he trained as a cabinet-maker in Germany.

Has taught at the AA since 2002 and at the University of Nottingham since 2007. Currently a doctoral candidate at the TU Berlin.

Christopher CM Lee graduated with the AA Dipl (Hons) and has taught in the AA since 2002. He is the principal of awardwinning Serie Architects in London, Mumbai, Beijing and Chengdu. His practice is working on numerous projects worldwide including a 440-unit residential complex in Bratislava, a 20Ha masterplan in Pune and a floating pavilion in Marina Bay Singapore.

He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Berlage Institute inRotterdam. serie.co.uk John Palmesino is a cofounder (with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog) of Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that combines architectural analysis, projects, advocacy and action for the integrated spatial transformation of contemporary territories.

He previously led a research group on a series on international cities at ETH Zurich, Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

Co-founder of multiplicity in Milan, he is currently researching for his PhD at the Research Architecture Centre at Goldsmiths, where he also teaches.

Martin Self holds a degree in aerospace engineering.

He was a founder member of the Advanced Geometry Unit at Arup, where he has worked as a structural engineer with many internationally prominent architects.

Ines Weizman was trained at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and the Ecole d’Architecture Belleville, Paris. After graduate work at Cambridge she completed her PhD at the Architectural Association in 2004. Since then she has taught a graduate course at London Metropolitan and continues with her architectural practice.

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.

Simos Yannas is Director of the AA’s MSc & MArch programmes in Sustainable Environmental Design and the academic coordinator of the school’s PhD programme.

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media studies

Media Studies courses are a required part of the First Year and Intermediate School, providing students with the knowledge and skills associated with a wide range of contemporary design, communication and fabrication media.

Studio-based courses offered to Second Year students are also open to participation by Third and Fourth Year students, while laboratory-based courses are open to students throughout the entire school.

These weekly courses are taught by AA unit staff, the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s AV department, workshop and computing staff, as well as by invited outside architects, artists, media and other creative specialists. Each course focuses on the conceptual and technical aspects of a specified topic of design media, and emphasises the sustained development of a studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to use design techniques as a means for conceiving, developing and producing design projects and strategies.

As digital design technologies have now matured as an integral part of architectural education, Media Studies works closely with the AA Computer Lab to provide concise one-day courses that cover the fundamentals of the most common computer applications, including 3D Modelling, Computer Aided Drafting, Imaging, Publication, Digital Computation and Scripting, various Physics-Based Analyses and other relevant software.

Together the many classes and special events comprising Media Studies expose students to the work of architects, artists and other practitioners, the innovative skills associated with traditional forms of architectural media and representation, and todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most experimental forms of information,

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Head of Media Studies Eugene Han

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communication and fabrication technologies. Media Studies works to integrate established techniques in design with the potential of progressive media and production methods.

First Year Courses

The Violet Hour

Sue Barr

Autumn & Spring Terms Photographs made during the fleeting light of dusk present technical challenges but also an opportunity to explore the notions of transience and mysterious psychological states that this time of the day suggests. Throughout the history of art this liminal state has inspired images that suggest both an ambiguous, fleeting beauty and the growing elusiveness of once hard facts.

After an introduction to the basics of photography and digital cameras students will produce images shot within this transient time.

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.

One-to-One Instruments

Shin Egashira

Spring Term Techniques for constructing performative instruments, including collage and bricolage, are tested through their application to the city. We will be using both drawings and physical assemblages to develop design concepts.

Georges Massoud, First Year Course: The Violet Hour, Sue Barr

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Life Drawing

Trevor Flynn

Autumn & Spring Terms The figure will be used as a point of departure 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’.

Introduction to Information

Eugene Han

Autumn & Spring Terms Students will be introduced to the management and communication of quantity-dependent numerical systems, and will learn to develop techniques to manage, utilise and explain information based environments.

Materiality of Colour

Antoni Malinowski

Autumn Term The course focuses on the potential of subtractive colour in creating/manipulating space. In a series of workshops students will develop sensitivity to the use of colour and tone in relation to the dynamics of space and movement.

Colour of Light

Antoni Malinowski

Spring Term The emphasis in the spring term will be on the interaction of subtractive and additive colour. We shall be considering microstructure of pigments and other materials as a source of the perceptual interdependence of micro and macro scales.

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Video: First Year

Joel Newman

Spring Term Students taking this course will be required to make a one-minute animation. We will start by looking at and discussing various techniques, softwares and directions. Any soundtrack must be composed by the student, while the final piece itself must be submitted as a DVD.

Second Year Courses

Coding As Thought Process/

Emergence

Shajay Bhooshan

Autumn & Spring Terms As ‘creative’ code-writing and computational tools increasingly become part of the architectural repertoire, the seminar will provide, over two terms, a sound conceptual footing into the world of computation and design. The seminar will use processing as an easy-to-use software platform to make this foray.

Drawing(s) Animation

Valentin Bontjes Van Beek

Autumn Term In this course we will animate ideas by creating and erasing drawings both analogue and digitally. Animation is what gives life to the static. This distance between drawings and animations is what we wish to explore, manipulate and convey simultaneously. The course will culminate with a short animated filmic clip.

Pending Structures

Valentin Bontjes Van Beek

Spring Term Going beyond the scale of the standard model, this course focuses on developing a working understanding of fabrica-

media studies tion 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 course will culminate with the fabrication of a final project at Hooke Park.

Tagging Contours

Monia De Marchi

Autumn & Spring Terms This year’s investigation will focus on how to superimpose streams of figures on a formulated context. After defining an organisational method, you will use the CNC machine to scratch out material to allow for the positioning of distant figures and objects. Employing specific toolpaths and methods of manufacturing, you will investigate ways of tagging contours between different figures, moving from the seamless and homogenous to a lush and distinct outcome.

The final output will be a relief investigating a systematic objectification of contours between incongruent figures and operations.

Customised Computation

Eugene Han

Spring Term This course will focus on the manipulation of digital geometry using scripted techniques within a NURBS modelling environment. We will cover the basics of scripted logic to customise geometry using iterative logic. Students will also be introduced to the basics behind the theory of computation as a means to establish intelligent geometrical systems that can be applied to their ongoing unit projects.

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Driving Miss Data

Eugene Han

Spring Term Students will extend their knowledge of scripted techniques, learning how to request from and return to value-driven databases using Rhino as the primary platform. Various representational media will be used to document the process of individual design projects.

Rendering Environments

Matej Hosek

Autumn & Spring 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.

Embodied Landscapes

Tobias Klein

Autumn Term This course seeks to cross voxel-based software (used for Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with representational meshbased 3d packages. In particular we will use Osirix and 3dmax to manipulate voxel body data and create/render hybrid embodied landscape models.

Voxel Cathedrals –

Contoured Embodiment

Tobias Klein

Spring Term A continuation of the investigation into the realms of voxel-based medical data geometries and traditional poly-modelling/mesh geometries. In the spring term the focus will shift to the manufacturing of manipulated data sets fusing sheet material technologies (eg, CNC,laser-cutting) and 3D-printing volumetric techniques.

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Publish On Demand

Zak Kyes

Autumn & Spring Terms What happens when the designer assumes the role of editor, publisher and distributor? This course will provide an introduction to the history, graphics and production of architectural publications. Each student will edit/publish/ distribute a small publication printed on Bedford Press, a private press recently established at the AA.

WireForm/Skin Form

Anne Save de Beaurecueil

Autumn & Spring Terms Digital fabrication course developing variable algorithmic organisations and their translation into ornamental structural physical models using Rhino, in combination with laser-cutting and rapid prototyping technologies.

Physico-Logical Parametrics

Toni Kotnik

Autumn Term The course explores the permeability of the boundary between the physical and the digital realms by investigating patterns of movement of bodies in space and the architectural utilisation of these patterns by means of parametric and geometric variation. Grasshopper will be the major tool for exploring themes such as parametric control, material behaviour, structural integrity, tessellations and component systems, or spatial organisation.

Architectural Geometry

Toni Kotnik

Spring Term Taking up the relationship between geometry and architecture, this course will examine the architectural potential

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of geometry on an individual basis, using geometric problems related to the unit design work. Rhinoscript and Grasshopper will be used to investigate formal systems and their phenomenological behaviour.

Video: Intermediate

Joel Newman

Spring Term This course gives students the opportunity to plan, shoot, edit and author a video. Special attention will be paid to the use of sound this year.

All Fake/Parts One and Two

Goswin Schwendinger

Autumn & Spring Terms This colour photography course scrutinises notions of the space of identity and the identity of space, exploring the fake as a substitution for the real.

Photography becomes a tool of private investigation as well as the orchestrator of a rehearsed drama. Students use a personal camera to reshape their own life-story, moving towards a false identity through repetitive recordings.

Ultimately, the real is altered not through digital means but exclusively through desire.

The first term’s investigation cultimates in an all-encompassing image, constructed according to all things fake. The second term requires the remake of a Fake. Students become counterfeiters of term one’s final images, working backwards, reinventing identities, spaces and biographies, moving towards an all-encompassing remake of a given image in all its artificiality.

media studies 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 Staff Sue Barr heathcotebarr.org Shajay Bhooshan is a researcher in the Computation and Design (colde) group at Zaha Hadid Architects. He is a graduate of the DRL (v.8) and has taught computational design at various schools.

Valentin Bontjes Van Beek trained as a carpenter in Germany before attending the AA, from which he graduated in 1998. He has practised architecture in Berlin, New York and London, and has taught at the AA since 2001, where he is currently a First Year Tutor.

Monia De Marchi is an architect who studied in Venice and completed her MArch in the AA graduate design programme. In addition to teaching in Media Studies, she has been an AA Unit Master since 2005, and 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 Trienale 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 a freehand drawing tutor at several architectural and engineering offices including Foster & Partners, Future Systems and Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners. He is visiting tutor at Central St Martins College of Art and Design and RISD. 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.

Toni Kotnik is founder of Kotnik.archForm, a Zurich-based architectural office, and principal researcher in OCEAN. He studied architecture and mathematics at the ETH in Zurich and the Universities of Tübingen and Utah, and received his doctoral degree from the University of Zurich. Besides teaching at the AA he works as senior researcher at the ETH Zurich with a focus on the interplay of architectural design, geometry and structural system.

Tobias Klein studied architecture at the RWTH (Aachen), University of Applied Arts (Vienna) and the Bartlett in London, 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 as a tutor at the RCA and a First Year Unit Master at the AA since 2008.

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Antoni Malinowski is an artist whose practice comprises painting and large-scale drawing installations. He has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, and his paintings are in most major collections, including the Tate’s. He is currently working as artist-colourist with MJP Architects on the redevelopment of the BBC’s Broadcasting House.

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.

Anne Save de Beaurecueil (subdv.com) uses computation to generate environmentally responsive geometries for architecture and urban design projects worldwide, primarily in Brazil and China. Along with partner Franklin Lee, she previously taught at the Pratt Institute in New York and received a master’s degree from Columbia University. Subdv have published, exhibited and lectured about their work worldwide.

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. aa-mediastudies.net

Zak Kyes is a SwissAmerican graphic designer working in London. Kyes is the Art Director of the Architectural Association and runs his own studio Z.A.K.. He is visiting faculty at ECAL, University of art and design Lausanne.

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technical studies

The Technical Studies programme offers a coherent technical education that develops a creative collaboration with the material demands of individual unit agendas over a five-year period.

The programme continues to evolve from discussions with leading engineering practices and research institutions and is founded on the provision of a substantial knowledge base of contemporary fabrication processes, constructed artefacts and buildings.

Information acquired here 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, when students concentrate on critical case studies, analysis and material experiments, undertaking two courses in each year.

In the Third Year, lecture coursework and workshop experiments are synthesised in a detailed Technical Design. Students conduct research and experiments to explore and resolve the technical issues of the main project of their unit portfolio.

Fifth Year students undertake a Technical Design Thesis, contextualised as part of a broader dialogue in which the technical and architectural agendas that arise within the unit are synthesised, and its critical development pursued through case studies, material experiments and extensive research and consultation.

This Prospectus contains a brief summary of the courses offered. Full details of the courses and a statement of the regulations will be found in the Complementary Studies Handbook.

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Director Michael Weinstock

Intermediate Master Wolfgang Frese

Diploma Master Javier Castañón

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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)

Marissa Kretsch This autumn term course teaches students the foundation skills required to examine a building with a critical and technical eye, ranging through research, analysis and drawing to firsthand experience, site visits and physical modelling. Assembled in groups, students will make a case study of a London structure. Students will explore the core topics of structure, materials and construction and identify how these relate to their specific building. Each student group will build a physical model of their structure and in the penultimate class will test it to failure.

In the final class, each team will be required to present their case study.

Structures (Compulsory Course)

Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge This spring term course aims to develop a feel for forces in structures. Basic structural behaviour is demonstrated through models and theory, so that students can see how shape and material influence the performance of real structures. To design a structure requires making choices about materials, assembly and performance in use, so it is essential to have the tools to predict the behaviour of the unbuilt object when it is still only an idea.

During the programme students will

Second Year Technical Studies model investigations, 2008/09 Photo Valerie Bennett

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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 which synthesises the individual architectural ambitions of their unit project with an account of its material production.

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 An investigation of the use in contemporary structures of a range of materials including concrete, timber, brick and blocks, glass, fabrics and composites.

Material properties, methods of manufacture, durability, cost and appearance are all factors that will be reviewed, leading to an understanding of how different materials can be used in a variety of applications.

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Engineering the Future

(Second Year Optional Course)

Ian Duncombe This course informs students about the broad and fast-evolving role of environmental engineering in architecture, inspiring them to develop concepts for their own projects. As well as teaching some fundamental principles, lectures demonstrate ways in which cuttingedge technologies and computer simulations can be used to develop design concepts through an iterative process of ‘virtual prototyping’, similar to design methods already used for many years in the car and aircraft industries. Case studies are used to illustrate principles and techniques.

Structures (Third Year

Compulsory Course)

Phil Cooper and Anderson Inge In this introduction to structural model analysis students make and test scale models to predict the static and dynamic behaviour of structures under load.

The model testing demonstrates the theory and practice of the effects of scale and promotes the analytical skills required for predicting the behaviour of real, full-size structures.

Third Year Design Project

Wolfgang Frese, Manja de Worp

and Phil Cooper 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

technical studies 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, Manja de Worp and Phil Cooper. Seminars on specific relevant subject are organised by the technical teaching staff and guest speakers as a further means of support.

Fourth Year Seminar Courses Fourth Years choose two courses from those 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. Particular attention is paid to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, since the architect as lead consultant has constantly to adjust and re-evaluate his designs in response to competing forces. Guest speakers from a range of consultancies and specialist manufacturers will also offer their own perspective on the importance of collaboration within a project team.

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 aims to give the designing architect an insight into the theory and practice of component-based structures – how they are organised and

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assembled, how they perform, where research currently stands and where the journey can potentially go. Researchers from different European and American research 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 and stability to buildings.

This course will analyse these systems by disassembling them into finite components, examining the geometry, boundary conditions and material properties that define each element and its behaviour within the global context.

The approach, which has parallels in element-based computer analysis methods, provides a simple means of understanding even the most complex structures.

Technology Transfers or

Technomimetics

John Noel This course pushes the boundaries of precedence studies, exploring the relevance of both the manufacture of everyday artefacts and the formation of living things to the technologies, processes and materials used in the construction industry. Through studies ranging from 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.

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Sustainable Urban Design

Randall Thomas This course provides a detailed examination of the concepts and techniques associated with the idea of the sustainable city, beginning with urban morphologies and densities, particularly in relation to energy. The design of individual buildings is studied in this context, as are the urban effects of spatial planning, energy, materials, light and water. The course includes a case study of a large urban regeneration project.

Environmental Modelling

& Simulation

Simos Yannas This is a hands-on technical course 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.

The course starts with an introduction to fundamental environmental design parameters and with manual computations that illustrate the range of values that these parameters take and the effect they can have on the environmental performance and energy balance of buildings. This is followed by study of adaptive comfort mechanisms relating to the different climatic, programmatic and operational conditions characterising unit projects. All of the above then becomes input to modelling and simulation studies using software aimed at achieving thermal and visual comfort with minimum use of non-renewable energy sources. Students should bring their laptops so that software demonstrations can be followed by workshop sessions.

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Form, Energy and Environment

Mohsen Zikri The course explores territories where architecture and engineering meet. It examines the interesting links between building form, energy and the micro/ macro environment and reviews the development of building skins in relation to their critical influence on building behaviour and occupant comfort, as well as in terms of their carbon-footprint. In parallel with an investigation of passive energy design and renewable energy sources, diverse methods of exploiting natural forces are presented through the example of real projects.

The application of computer modelling tools is explored in the context of stretching the design boundaries for buildings. Completed buildings that benefited from modelling by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are critically reviewed in terms of human comfort and energy use. To conclude the course, students will be asked to undertake a design assignment that will involve researching case studies of completed buildings in different climatic zones. Students will also be given the opportunity to conceive a futuristic building that extends design and social boundaries.

Fifth Year Technical

Design Thesis The Technical Design Thesis is a substantial individual work developed under the guidance of Michael Weinstock and supported by Javier Castañón, Martin Hagemann, Toni Kotnik, Wolf Mangelsdorf, John Noel and individual unit staff. The central interests and concerns may emerge from current or past design work, or from one of the many lecture and

technical studies seminar courses the student has attended in previous years. Assessment is by a panel of Technical Studies tutors and unit staff, and full details are set out in the Complementary Studies handbook.

Open Courses In addition to the syllabus, students are invited to attend the following open courses:

Physico-logical Parametrics

Toni Kotnik (Autumn Term) Digital design is not about working in virtual space. It’s about informing the physical reality of buildings and materials, production process and assembly logic. Accordingly, this course engages with the question of the permeability of the threshold between the physical and the digital realms. Grasshopper, an algorithm editor for Rhinoceros, will be the major tool for our formal explorations of the threshold. Digitally controlled machines will be used in order to set physical constraints on the computational design process and build prototypes of the design. This year’s design proposal will involve the design and

Director Technical Studies Michael Weinstock mweinstock@ aaschool.ac.uk Intermediate Master Javier Castañón is in private practice as director of Castañón Associates (London) and Castañón Asociados (Madrid).

Diploma Master Wolfgang Frese studied at Stuttgart and the Bartlett.

As an associate at Alsop Architects he has worked on the Theatres on the Bay in Singapore and Federation Square in Melbourne, among other projects.

Technical Studies Staff Philip Cooper is technical director of Cameron Taylor Bedford, Consulting Engineers, in Cambridge.

He has taught at Cambridge University and at Leeds University (as Professor of Structural Design) as well as at the AA. Martin Hagemann is an architect at Grimshaw’s, where he is a member of the computational design research and biomimicry research groups.

Anderson Inge studied architecture at the AA and at the University of Texas at

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production of a series of lamps. Addressing problems of parametric control, material behaviour, structural integrity, tessellations and component systems, spatial organisation and inaccuracy, this task raises many of the same issues that are involved in the design and production of large-scale architectural elements.

Architectural Geometry

Toni Kotnik (Spring Term) The historian Robin Evans pointed out that geometry is one subject, architecture another, but there is geometry in architecture. Its presence is assumed, much as the presence of mathematics is assumed in physics, or letters in words. The course will take up this intimate relationship and look for the architectural potential of geometry embedded within the design. Using geometric problems related to individual unit work we will be examine formal systems and their phenomenological behaviour through Rhinoscript and Grasshopper. Ideally integrated with your design projects, this investigation will act as a geometric input in support of the unit brief.

Austin before completing additional academic training in structural engineering (at MIT) and sculpture (at St Martins).

Manager and Project Leader at Buro Happold for projects including the Battersea Power Station, London, and the Museum of Transport, Glasgow.

Toni Kotnik is founder of Kotnik.archForm, a Zurich-based architectural office, principal researcher in OCEAN, and senior researcher at the ETH, focusing on the interplay of architectural design, geometry and structural system.

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.

Wolf Mangelsdorf studied architecture and civil engineering at Karlsruhe University. He is Group

Manja Van de Worp is a graduate of the AA’s Emergent Technologies & Design programme.

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professional/ future practice

Developing an understanding of architectural practice is a mandatory requirement within the Intermediate and Diploma schools. Architectural practice is also the focus of a final Part 3 examination that students take after they have spent at least a couple of years gaining experience on live building projects during their ‘year out’ after Part 1 and after they have completed the AA Diploma and Part 2 (see pages 162–63 of the Graduate School).

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. In giving an idea of what working in an architectural practice entails, this course aims to teach students how to ‘make themselves useful’, the idea being that the sooner they are perceived as useful, the sooner they will become part of the action in the office and the more they will get out of 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

Unit Staff Javier Castañon is in private practice as Director of Castañón Associates (London) and Castañón Asociados (Madrid). He has taught at the AA since 1978.

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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

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 example 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.

Future Practice for Fifth Year Hugo Hinsley The context and conditions of architectural work are changing rapidly. Practice needs to adapt, both conceptually and practically. Being a good designer is not, in itself, enough to succeed in practice. This course provides an opportunity to investigate how design work is implemented in the real world, and the implications of this for developing a practice of architecture. There is no standard model of practice, and each student should address the question of how to design a concept and structure of practice that will best support the type of work they aim to achieve. A series of lectures and discussion sessions explores issues relating to the changing context of design and

Programme Staff Javier Castañón Hugo Hinsley

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production of the built environment, and different concepts and models of practice. These issues include the changing context in which projects are realised; different responsibilities towards clients and users; economic and cultural impacts; political and legislative considerations; environmental issues and ethical implications.

There are also more practical points, including ways to collaborate with other disciplines and consultants; effective ways to engage with the construction process; and suitable models and scales of an ‘office’. Students work with a tutor to develop a critical paper of around 3,000 words. This should discuss, in relation to the issues covered in the course, some implications for developing a practice of design, as well as potential techniques and structures to support the evolution of the most effective future practice. ARB/ RIBA validation procedures for Part II require evidence of Professional Studies. Fifth Year students must achieve a pass in this course and include the assessed paper in their final portfolios.

Docklands; European urban policy and design; and housing and urban density.

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graduate school

graduate

The AA Graduate School includes eight postgraduate programmes offering advanced studies in one of the world’s most dynamic learning environments. All 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 AA’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. Histories & Theories (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. In 2009/10 the school will launch a new PhD by Design programme, providing 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.

PhD ‘one minute, one manifesto, one beer’ summit, 2009

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Design Research:

Experimentation and

Innovation (v.13) The DRL is a 16-month post-professional design programme leading to a master’s of Architecture and Urbanism (MArch) degree. The DRL develops design skills with which to capture, control and shape a continuous flow of information across the distributed electronic networks of today’s rapidly evolving digital design disciplines.

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.2) In autumn term the DRL will continue work on its design research agenda, Proto Design, investigating digital and material prototyping as both the methodology and the primary design outcome of studio work. Parametric modelling and coding systems are emphasised as the vehicles in this new field of experimentation on multiple, sequential and recursive prototypical systems and spaces. Far from heralding the end of the design project as a form

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of research, this new performance-driven approach aims for more specific design proposals concerned with concrete design problems. The iterative methodologies of the studio will be targeted at the investigation of new spatial, structural and material organisations as well as the formulation of new discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism.

Phase II design research agenda:

Proto Design (v.1) Proto-Design systems developed in Phase I will be tested in site-specific scenarios. Yusuke Obuchi’s studio, Proto Tectonics, investigates material systems and multi-scalar fractal logic for large-span structures. The Theodore Spyropoulos studio, Digital Materialism, explores new forms of prototypical housing through innovative morphologies. Interiority, the studio led

by Patrik Schumacher and Christos Passas, develops complex, layered and highly differentiated tectonic systems that can start to compete with the best historical examples in terms of their richness, coherency and precision of formal organisation. Alisa Andrasek’s studio, Wetware, pursues computation through the development of poly-scalar coastal infrastructures within highpressure flooding zones. Marta MaléAlemany’s studio with Jeroen van Ameijde, Machinic Control, examines architectural design processes incorporating novel digital fabrication methods that are not optimised (as in the current, industrial, repetitive modes of production) but instead can be itinerant, adaptive and highly specific.

Directors Yusuke Obuchi Theodore Spyropoulos Founder Patrik Schumacher Course Masters Marta Malé-Alemany Alisa Andrasek

Course Tutors Jeroen van Ameijde Shajay Bhooshan Kristine Mun Christos Passas Robert Stuart-Smith

Team Chimera (Pierandrea Angius, Alkis Dikaios, Thomas Jacobsen, Carlos Parraga), an urban model of ecology based on the social principles of the mangrove plant

Technical Tutors Lawrence Friesen Hanif Kara Andrew Murray Riccardo Merello

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Phase I Design Studio:

Proto-Architectures

Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa

Andrasek, Yusuke Obuchi, Patrik

Schumacher, Theodore Spyropoulos 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 2010-2011, and applied to a series of specific briefs and sites for each studio.

Phase I Design Workshops:

Material Behaviour

Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa

Andrasek, Jeroen van Ameijde,

Lawrence Friesen, Riccardo Merello,

Yusuke Obuchi, 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 5-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.

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Phase II Design Workshop:

Adaptive Systems and Structures

Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa

Andrasek, Yusuke Obuchi, Theodore

Spyropoulos, DRL technical tutors,

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 design 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, Patrik

Schumacher, Theodore Spyropoulos, 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 between digital and material interaction.

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Phase I Core Seminars:

Design as Research I:

Open Source

Theodore Spyropoulos,

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 reading.

New Anatomies of Architecture:

Examining the Parametric

Theodore Spyropoulos,

Autumn Term An examination of key concepts of parametric design through the interplay between physical and digital forms of computation and experimentation. The works of Otto, Le Ricolais, Fuller and Dieste will be analysed in relation to contemporary research on computation and information systems. Team-based presentations will examine these methods and resultant outputs as case studies for studio experimentation.

Synthesis: Project Submission

Writing & Research Documentation

Kristine Mun, Autumn and

Spring 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.

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Proto-Design: Case Studies

Alisa Andrasek, Spring Term Under the umbrella topic of Proto-Design, this seminar will investigate different specimens, from material and structural prototypes found in the work of Antoni Gaudí and Frei Otto, via poly-scalar proto-worlds of Daniel Libeskind’s Micromegas, Karl Chu’s morphogenetic proto-languages, John Frazer’s computational proto-entities, Gramazio-Kohler’s proto-behaviours for the robotic construction, François Roche’s proto-narratives, towards the acute singularisations in proto-architectures carried by the emerging generation of designers working with explicit protocols in code and generative protoecologies.

Design as Research II:

Computational Space

Yusuke Obuchi, Spring Term 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.

Phase I Optional 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,

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algorithmic information theory, key ideas from quantum physics, biology, systems theory and similar 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.

Discourses on Proto-Design

DRL Directors and guests,

Spring Term Following on last year’s ‘Discourses on Innovation’ seminar series, with invited guests including Bernard Cache, Charles Jencks, Philippe Morel and others to discuss issues of innovation and urbanism. The DRL will focus on a series of lectures and seminars examining contemporary issues of fabrication and prototyping through agency, machinic protocols, cnc technologies and material behaviour.

Digital Tools: Maya, Rhino,

3D Studio, Catia & Macromedia –

Software & Scripting

Shajay Bhooshan, Kristof Crolla,

Robert Stuart-Smith,

Autumn and Spring 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.

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design research lab DRL Directors 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 Theodore Spyropoulos is director of the architecture and design practice Minimaforms and a visiting research fellow at MIT. He has taught at the graduate schools of UPenn and Royal College of Art and has previously worked with 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.

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. She has won many awards, including FEIDAD 2004, and has published and exhibited extensively. andrasek@gmail.com Jeroen van Ameijde studied at the Delft University of Technology and has worked in various offices in Holland, New York and Hong Kong.

Has taught at the University of Pennsylvania with Ali Rahim. Head of Digital Prototyping at the AA and taught various courses and workshops in London, Innsbruck and Singapore.

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.

Kristine Mun received her master’s from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the AA. She previously worked at NOX with Lars Spuybroek and is a cofounder of ASPX, an experimental architecture studio in London and Italy.

graduate 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 graduate of AADRL and RMIT, and codirector of the design practice Kokkugia.

He is a consultant in Arup’s Advanced Geometry Unit and has previously worked in the offices of Lab and Grimshaw & Partners while teaching at RMIT. Workshop Consultant Kristof Crolla is a graduate of the AADRL, currently working at Zaha Hadid Architects, London. He has led digital fabrication workshops internationally with Jeroen Van Ameijde.

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.

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emergent technologies

The Emergent Technologies and Design programme is open to graduates in architecture, engineering and industrial design who wish to pursue design research that proceeds from innovative technologies. The programme is focused on the development of skills and knowledge located in new production paradigms.

Course Structure The EmTech programme takes place over four terms (from October 2009 to October 2010) for MSc candidates and over five terms (October 2009 to January 2011) for MArch candidates.

Phase 1 offers a wide range of theories, concepts, methods and techniques that are designed to help students develop their skills, explore across the boundaries of contingent disciplines and practices and engage with the theoretical discourses in Emergent Technologies. Students are also encouraged to attend relevant courses in Technical Studies and those offered elsewhere in the Graduate School.

Successful completion of Phase 1 is a precondition of progress to Phase 2 of the programme. At the end of Phase 1 students present their dissertation proposals to programme staff.

Once these are approved, they commence the dissertation phase. During Phase 2 students develop a dissertation in teams of two, working with programme staff and external advisers.

Experimentation

and Construction Construction experiments are an important part of the programme â&#x20AC;&#x201C; over the last three years two material constructions have been installed on the

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Programme Director Michael Weinstock Codirector (Cohort 08/09) Michael Hensel

Studio Master Christina Doumpioti

Studio Tutors Evan Greenberg Kostis Karatzas

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upper terrace at the AA. A shelter/ viewing platform and a pedestrian footbridge (the Net-bridge) have also been constructed at Hazienda Quitralco in Chilean Patagonia.

Core Studio Michael Hensel and Michael Weinstock with Christina Doumpioti and visiting staff

Performance-oriented Design

and Structural Morphologies

Terms 1 & 2 The Core Studio begins with an intensive period of knowledge and skill-building sessions. Studio discussions focus on concepts such as morphogenesis, emergence and self-organisation, while a first module focuses on skills in Rhino NURBS modelling, parametrics, scripting and skills in the Rhino plugin â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Grasshopperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. An intensive module introduces concepts and methods of analysis and simulation before the design charrette commences. In the manufacturing and assembly module the designs are further elaborated, and designs evolve in the context of digital and handcrafted construction processes.

Material characteristics and behaviour, manufacturing and assembly logics, together with the behaviour and performance of the designed system, are key elements of the integral design approach introduced in the Core Studio.

Modelling and analysis of natural and manufactured systems are introduced to provide the techniques necessary for the development of morphological complexity and performance in designs for the built environment.

EmTech terrace canopy, 2009

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Seminar Courses

Emergence and Design

Term 1

Michael Weinstock with

Evan Greenberg and Kostis Karatzas ‘Emergent’ is defined as that which is produced by multiple causes, but cannot be said to be the sum of their individual effects. It has been an important concept in biology and mathematics, in artificial intelligence, information theory and computer science, and in the newer domains of weather and climatic studies, the material sciences, and in particular biomimetic engineering.

The seminar course will begin with a survey of the origins of the science and technologies associated with emergence, commencing with D’Arcy Thompson and Alfred North Whitehead, through Turing’s work on cryptographic analysis and on the mathematics of biological development, to the development of evolutionary algorithms. The conceptual structures and philosophies of Emergence in Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life will be reviewed, and the course will conclude with a series of digital experiments in algorithmic design.

Natural Systems and Biomimetics

Term 1

Michael Weinstock with Dr George

Jeronimidis, Evan Greenberg

and Kostis Karatzas This course examines the ways in which biological organisms achieve complex ‘emergent’ structures and performances from simple components, relating this to an exploration of current architectural/industrial component design, prototyping and production.

The course will show how the boundary between the ‘natural’ and the manmade has been reconfigured by biomimetic engineering, and will introduce students to the thinking that has led to the evolution of new materials that may play a significant role in shaping the future of our built environment. It aims to explain how materials can be designed to produce varied properties, such as concrete that can ‘heal’ itself, glazing that can change its optical properties, and materials that have a memory. 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 the way in which engineering design principles have been abstracted from nature in current research projects for industry and material science. An in-depth study of articulated shell morphologies (general form) and anatomy (structure) will be carried out, and their interrelations explored, using digital geometric modelling and digital structural analysis. Exact geometric models created in Rhino and Maya will then be converted and imported into the ‘ANSYS’ analysis software.

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Design and Technology

Term 2

Michael Weinstock with

Kostis Karatzas This course aims to provoke a re-examination of the theories and practices of design from the point of view of their embedded material implications, so as to reveal the ways in which ‘design’ and the ‘technical’ exist within the general culture of architecture, the processes leading to technological innovation in material objects, and the particular role of the protoype in the design and production of artefacts and buildings of different scales. An examination of the prototype in the small, the massproduced and the individually crafted architectures in contemporary production will be presented. The relations of

EmTech Director 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 Architectural Association and has taught there since 1989. Founder and Director of Emergent Technologies master’s programme.

Master of Technical Studies since 1997, and Academic Head of the AA from 2006 to 2009. He has lectured and published widely, and has been Visiting Professor at Rome, Barcelona and Yale. He is currently international advisor to the Delft School of Design PhD programme and editorial board member of AD Wiley.

Codirector (Cohort 08/09) Michael U Hensel [Dipl Ing Grad Dipl Des AA Architekt AKNW] is an architect, researcher and writer. He is

a member in the independent, interdisciplinary and international research network OCEAN, professor for research by design at AHO – the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, innovation fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney, board member of BIONIS – the Biomimetics Network for Industrial Sustainability, editorial board member of AD Wiley and JBE – Journal of Bionic Engineering, Elsevier Scientific Press.

Senior Professor George Jeronimidis is the Director of the Centre for Biomimetics in the School of Construction Management and Engineering at the University of Reading. He is an active member of the Smart Materials and Structures Committee of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IoM3).

He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Max Planck Institute for Colloid and Interface Research in Golm,

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material forms and formulations of thought in architectural projects of the twentieth century will be set out, and a discussion opened up around the ways material practices are currently undergoing a substantial reconfiguration.

The historical context of these forces is examined through the work of Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames and Jean Prouvé: the identification of their material agendas will be focused on the contradictions and oppositions of the universal and the individual, of the mass-produced object and the ‘tailored’ craft product.

Germany, and of the editorial board of the International Journal of Virtual and Physical Prototyping.

Studio Master Christina Doumpioti [Dipl Arch/Eng MArch AA RIBA II Architect GR TCG] studied architecture at the Aristotle Univeristy of Thessaloniki and is a registered architect in Greece. She earned her MArch with Distinction in Emergent Technologies and Design, and followed this with a postgraduate course on Computing and Design at UEL. Since 2008 she has been working as an architect and computational consultant at Arup Associates, as part of a multi-disciplinary team aiming at integrated solutions across different design fields.

Studio Tutors Evan Greenberg is an architectural designer and co-director of the research collaborative Network Research + Design, exploring the convergence

of architectural, biological and cultural systems. He has worked in architecture and engineering offices and with product designers and artists in both New York and London, and is currently a design consultant for Plasma Studio. Evan earned his MSc with Distinction in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA in 2008, and his BSc in Architecture from the University of Virginia in 2005.

Kostis Karatzas is an engineer and a researcher, with research interests in smart materials, biomimetics, lightweight structures and advanced simulation and analysis techniques. He was awarded the MSc in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA in 2009, and his Diploma in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2008.

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histories & theories

Histories & Theories provides a platform for critical enquiry into theoretical debates and forms of architectural and urban practice. The aim is threefold: 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, including the AA School; to enquire into new forms of knowledge, research and practice.

The 12-month programme is designed to enable students to develop critical thought in the context of architecture and city culture as well as design speculation rigorously grounded in knowledge of histories and practices.

The investigation of the question of the modern and modernity and the critical reassessment of modernism in terms of its narratives and controversies is our point of departure towards an understanding of contemporary architecture and debates.

Central to the course is an emphasis on writing as critical practice of thinking. Different forms of writing, such as essays, reviews, short commentaries, publications, interviews, allow students to engage with diverse forms of enquiry and articulate the various aspects of their study.

The Histories & Theories 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 the graduate programmes.

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Programme Director Marina Lathouri

Programme Staff Mark Cousins Pedro Ignacio Alonso Francisco Gonzalez de Canales

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Autumn Term The first termâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lectures, seminars and conversations aim to help students acquire a clear understanding of the development of the question of modernism and the modern subject as well as engage with tools of investigation and analysis specific to architecture.

Narratives of Modernism

Marina Lathouri This seminar series revisits several key texts and examines the role they played in the formation and critical reception of a modernist architectural canon.

Through a detailed consideration of the texts, the seminar will provide a forum to assess how an identifiably modernist vocabulary and agenda was constructed during the first half of the twentieth century and then came to be dismantled in the run up to 1968.

Architectural Form and History

Mark Cousins This course addresses the issue of how architecture is experienced and judged.

After looking briefly at the contribution of thought in antiquity and in the Renaissance, it moves directly to the central role of Kantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Third Critique, which establishes a discourse of aesthetics that becomes a test for any doctrine of the experience of art within modernity.

Architecture Criticism and Writing

Marina Lathouri This course is organised around a series of conversations with invited architects, critics and scholars and writing sessions. Architectural ideas are seen to circulate within diverse economies which extend beyond the academic and professional domains. Architects

Histories & Theories MA students present their thesis proposals to an invited panel of scholars, May 2009.

Photo Valerie Bennett

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participate in a broader public culture both by drawing and by writing.

The course has two aims. The first is to discuss conceptual, verbal and visual tools in relation to the emergence and transformations of the discipline and clarify their different usages in order to move towards a contemporary sense of these operations; without this, students would lack the historical terms necessary for the analysis and interpretation of architecture and urbanism.

The second aim is to look at examples of ways to generate and write about, represent and communicate architectural knowledge. Each of these examples will be understood not only as a specific mechanism for the dissemination of architectural ideas but also as the basis for architectural production.

Spring Term The spring term provides a platform for critical enquiry into contemporary theoretical debates, modes of design research and practices. Organised around a number of seminar courses, lectures and events, it offers students a range of approaches to investigating the contemporary from historical, theoretical and cross-disciplinary points of view.

Reinventing the Contemporary

Critical Theories and Fabrications

Marina Lathouri/Pedro Alonso Architecture has been transformed by its appropriation of thinking from other disciplines and discourses, but at the same time it has in turn started to transform that very thinking. The course considers the terms, issues and mechanisms that are used in current architectural debates and practices in order to provide a clear historical sense

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of their emergence and the ways they are used in arguments and architectural projects. The course has two parts. It begins by considering the distinct conditions of the production of architectural knowledge that organise its particular responses to current debates, investigating the way they either reinforce or displace mechanisms traditionally intrinsic to architecture. The second part builds on this basis to provide a means of understanding how the contemporary notion of ‘fabrication’ has come to supplant the status once held by notions of ‘construction’ (and the ‘new construction’) within modernist narratives.

Reinventing the Contemporary

Critical Practices

Francisco Gonzalez de Canales Largely involved with cultural studies, philosophical thinking and media and literary studies, architectural theory has distanced itself from explicitly assessing the work of the most influential architectural practices of its own time.

More than denying the validity of these different forms of criticism, this course makes use of a heterogeneous baggage of cultural references to refocus attention on the production and design strategies employed by architects. The final objective of this seminar is to recover the capacity to exercise judgement on recent architectural production and to develop consistent theoretical tools for its scrutiny and installation.

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Histories and Theories Debates:

The City, Politics and Spaces

Organised by Marina Lathouri To enable students to pursue certain questions in an informal setting, the H&T programme holds the debates series with invited architects, urban planners, theorists and historians.

A theme that will cut across the discussions this year is the city. Although continuing urban growth has prompted arguments on economic policies, new organisational models, environmental strategies and sustainable development patterns, there seems to be a lack of reflection on the fundamental question of the city as a composite environment and political space.

Many of the emerging urban formations 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

H&T Director Marina Lathouri an architect and critic, studied architecture in Greece and the Berlage Institute and philosophy of art and aesthetics at the Université de Paris I, Sorbonne. She previously taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed her PhD on the urban debates and architectural arguments that reorganised the knowledge on the modern city in the 1940s and 1950s.

Since 1999 she has taught

at the AA and the School of Architecture at Cambridge University. Her current research focuses on contemporary forms of architectural and urban practice. Most recently, she co-authored and co-edited the book Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Routledge 2009).

H&T Staff Mark Cousins directs the AA’s History and Theory Studies at the undergraduate level. He has been Visiting Professor of

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political philosophy that has questioned the communal? Is it possible that the various regimes of the architectural project might still engage conceptions of space, conflicts of appropriation and norms of use nearing the juridical delimitation of the public and private domains? These are some of the questions which will be addressed this year.

Summer Term

Thesis Research Seminar The thesis is the most significant component of students’ work within the overall MA structure. The choice of topic, the organisation of research and the development of the central argument are all organised within the Research Seminar, which may be supplemented by individual tutorials. Central to the development of the thesis 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 is presented to a jury of critics, and it is developed and completed over term 4 in the summer.

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. A practising architect and critic, he has previously lectured in England, Mexico, Spain and the USA, and was director of the Spanish magazine Neutra. He recently

completed his PhD on the radical domestic self-experimentations of the 1940s and 1950s.

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 AA. Since 2005 he has taught architectural theory at the AA and worked for Arup’s Urban Design on a number of projects in the UK, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

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housing & urbanism

The Housing & Urbanism programme is concerned with the interplay of the spatial discipline of urbanism and the political processes of the city. It addresses the relation between spatial design strategies and the redesigning of urban institutions through a critique of dominant practices in urbanism and experimentation with alternative methods and tools of spatial design.

Design Workshop 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 explore and develop design responses to well-defined urban challenges, and the Urban Seminar, which opens up a debate on approaches to key themes in the programme’s areas of research. The course consists of individual and group projects, and students present both design and written work.

While each of the Group Workshop teams pursues distinct lines of investigation, the Urban Seminar and individual work gives the opportunity to evaluate and reflect on different approaches to key issues within 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, giving each project a distinctive style and character.

Our main site for design investigation

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Programme Directors Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley

Programme Staff Lawrence Barth Nicholas Bullock Kathryn Firth

Dominic Papa Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith

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will be an inner-peripheral area of northeast London. We will engage with the urban process of this site in the larger frame of London and of its metropolitan region. This will involve considering the site’s connections both to inner-city districts and the eastward expansion of London; and to the knowledge-economy environments around Cambridge and the growing airport at Stansted. We will also hold a shorter intensive design workshop in Taipei, Taiwan, which gives us the opportunity to collaborate with other programmes and to test our design and conceptual approaches in a different context.

Lecture Courses and Seminars

Cities in a Transnational World

Term 1 This course explores the social and economic context of housing and urbanism as it interacts with the formulation and implementation of strategies of urban development and with the reshaping of the role of architects and planners in the making of cities. It offers a comparative analysis of the restructuring of cities in the context of the current stage of internationalisation of the world economy, placing strong emphasis on issues of policy and planning and on current reforms in systems of urban governance.

The Reason of Urbanism

Term 1 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 so as to highlight the inherent political issues,

Hybridity study, part of an exploration of the Lower Lea Valley as a ‘productive city’ in the rapidly changing eastern periphery of London, 2009

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and will develop a theoretical perspective through an engagement with the work of Arendt, Foucault, Sennett and others. Through this perspective students will investigate the relationship of key political concepts to the generation of new urban spatialities.

and living patterns. It will also review the development of ideas about housing form and production.

Critical Urbanism

Terms 1 and 2 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’ ability to critically analyse contemporary urban projects: background readings will include Koolhaas, Rowe, Rossi, Eisenman and Tschumi, extending into present-day writings on postcriticality by Somol and others.

Housing and the Informal City

Term 2 This course uses housing as a strategic vehicle for investigating the evolution of ideas and approaches to the informal and irregular processes of city making.

In particular, it reviews critically the growing despatialisation of strategies to deal with urban informality and the social conditions associated with it, and explores the role of urbanism and spatial design in addressing those conditions. It draws from the extreme circumstances of irregularity and socio-spatial segregation of the cities of the developing world. With reference to relevant projects and programmes, it attempts to identify appropriate tools and instruments of spatial intervention and design and to examine their articulation through the redesigning of urban institutions and rules.

Shaping the Modern City

Terms 1 and 2 This course explores the various national and local strategies evolved by the state to meet the challenge of urban expansion during the twentieth century.

Rather than presenting a continuous narrative history, the lectures and seminars will look at key events, projects and texts that illustrate contemporary responses to the opportunities and problems created by growth.

The course will focus on 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

Domesticity

Term 2 This seminar series explores trends in contemporary multi-residential housing against the background of a discursive formation linking together domesticity and urbanism. Taking Mies van der Rohe’s patio houses of the 1930s and Karel Teige’s 1932 critique of the minimum dwelling as opening counterpoints, this course investigates the broad spatial and political domain upon which the challenge of securing personal autonomy is drawn into engagement with the forces of urban living. The lectures draw on the theoretical and historical writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot and Nikolas Rose.

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Dissertation Seminar

Term 3 This seminar is organised around students’ work towards the final dissertation and provides a forum for them to discuss work in progress with members of staff and invited critics.

H&U 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 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. fiori@aaschool.ac.uk Hugo Hinsley is an architect with expertise in housing design, community buildings and urban development projects. He has a wide range of practice experience, mainly in London, 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 and Spitalfields; urban policy and structure in European cities; and rethinking density for housing and urban development.

H&U 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, most recently collaborating with Zaha Hadid Architects and s333 Studio on large-scale projects. He is engaged in research on urban intensification and innovation environments.

Nicholas Bullock studied architecture at Cambridge University and completed a PhD under Leslie Martin.

Research on questions of housing and housing reform with a special interest in Germany; on postwar housing design and policy; and on the architecture and planning of reconstruction after World War II. Kathryn Firth is a Senior Associate Principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates in London, where she has led many international projects in masterplanning, urban design and urban regeneration. She has been involved in research projects that inform urban design policy and practice, and lectures internationally on issues of urbanism and urban design. She has taught in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics, and at Harvard GSD, Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Toronto.

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Other Events We will make a study trip to Hamburg in the spring term. Students are encouraged to attend complementary courses offered by other Graduate School programmes and by History & Theory Studies. The programme also invites a number of academics and practitioners from all over the world to contribute to its activities during the year.

Dominic Papa is an architect and urban designer with experience in urban and architectural projects and also on teaching and research. He is a founding partner of s333 Studio for Architecture and Urbanism which has won awards for projects across Europe. He is also a Design Review Panel member for CABE and the West Midlands and has been a jury member for several international competitions.

Elena Pascolo trained and practised in the fields of housing, urban planning and policy development, both in South Africa and London.

She is a practising architect in London, and is developing research on transactive urbanism and on irregular and informal urban conditions.

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 broadly concerned with the relationship between social experience and urban space. He has taught at the AA, London Metropolitan University, and London Southbank University. aaschool.ac.uk/hu

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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 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 is a 12-month studio-based programme 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.

Prototypical Urbanities 03:

The Yangtze River Delta Building on a body of research established over the past two years, the 09/10 design agenda will focus on ‘Prototypical Urbanities’. Our testbed will be the urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta – including Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo – with students focusing on three benchmark issues:

Metabolic rurbanism: the emergence of ‘desakota’ (urban villages) combining urban and rural processes of land use

Tactical resistance: as generic, top-down masterplanning collides with informally developed urban cores, it opens up the potential for a territorially

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Programme Director Eva Castro

Programme Staff Eduardo Rico Alfredo Ramirez Tom Smith Douglas Spencer

Workshop Tutors Jorge Alaya Bridget MacKean Teruyuki Nomura Enriqueta Llabres Clara Oloriz

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specific tactical urbanism

Material identities: the inadequacy of attempts to provide new urban settlements with an instant ‘identity’ by applying either vernacular or western styles of building.

Framework 2009/10

1. Indexical Models: mediation

between typical organisational

paradigms and local conditions The autumn term is based on a series of intensive workshops that aim to initiate a dialogue between the techniques being acquired and their application in the development of new organisational – or indexical – models. At the end of this term a field trip to China will provide us with the opportunity to engage directly with a real large-scale urban project and a body of consultants including local planners and architects.

2. Sensitive Systems: development

of a prototype In the spring term, following the field trip, the organisational models will acquire a sense of local ‘urgency’ informing both top-down strategic intentions and allowing for a fluid negotiation with bottom-up local conditions. Central to this phase will be the development of a malleable prototype capable of continuous transformations. An intensive workshop in Barcelona during the Easter break will allow students to synthesise their prototype’s formative process and investigate its scalar limitations.

3. & 4. Network Urbanism:

global behaviour During the third term work is directed towards developing different logics of proliferation. By this point, projects will

Hossein Kachabi. AALU 07/08. Intercropping city The project focuses on the productive capacity of urban agriculture as a means of exploring the new ways of colonising the rural or the urban while providing self-

sustaining local food sources. Productive urban agricultural lands are integrated with new developments and add diversity to tourist attractions.

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have acquired a certain relevance based on a tangible argument and will be clearly positioned within the field.

Over the summer, the aim is to definitively formulate the operating rationale for the projects. A grounding logic directly related to the existing political framework is developed, so that the work acquires the character of a time-based plan.

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 Each year, an international and diverse range of speakers are invited to offer new perspectives on the issues that concern the practice of Landscape Urbanism. Past speakers have included: Charles Waldheim, Andreas Ruby, Kelly Shannon, Richard Weller, David Cunningham, Matthew Gandy, Douglas Spencer and Gareth Doherty. In addition, the programme offers the core courses and workshops outlined below.

Landscaping Urbanism

Douglas Spencer,

Autumn & Spring Terms This unit – the theoretical core of the programme – is designed to synergise with its workshops, projects and field trips. Over its two terms it introduces the transdisciplinary origins of Landscape Urbanism whilst defining its unique configuration and potential in the context of contemporary urban conditions. In addition to lectures, it includes seminars with student presentations (both individual and group) and contributions from other specialists, researchers and graduates of the AALU programme.

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Machining Landscapes

Tom Smith, Autumn & Spring Terms This new lecture series introduces students to a range of construction techniques related to the design of landscape projects. Rather than a remedial or problem-solving approach, then, it addresses the generative potential of technical methods and their capacity to produce new territories openly engaged with environmental, social and subjective conditions.

Ecology & Environment

Ian Carradice & Ove Arup

Associates, Autumn Term Lectures by experts from the Ove Arup Environmental Unit will address environmental concerns, introducing a wide range of techniques aiming to ensure sustainable management and design.

Workshops

Diagramming Cities

Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez,

Eduardo Rico Students will learn how to conceptualise urban conditions through diagramming. They will investigate the underlying logics and complexities of urban networks, exploring various representational techniques for establishing clear and specific readings of the urban supra-organisation.

Indexing Territories

Eva Castro, Teruyuki Nomura,

Bridget MacKean This workshop aims to develop students’ capacity to read information from fields and then decode, synthesise and systematically process it into indexical models. There will be tutorials on software packages such as Rhino, Maya, Land-desktop and Space Syntax.

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Scripting Prototypes

Eduardo Rico, Clara Oloriz Different scripting techniques will be explored as a means of creating flexible design tools that are capable of accommodating change and a degree of indeterminacy in the design process.

Relational Urbanism

Eduardo Rico, Enriqueta Llabres This workshop deals with the mediation of bottom-up readings and strategic decision-making concepts. The overall arrangement of the material components produced in the previous workshop will be further articulated to respond locally to specific conditions and globally to relational strategies.

DFC (Digitally Fabricated Cities)

Eva Castro, Jorge Ayala This workshop goes beyond the repre-

Director Eva Castro is the director of the Landscape Urbanism programme and has been teaching at the AA since 2003. She studied architecture and urbanism 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. Awards include the Next Generation Architects Award, the Young Architect of the Year Award, the ContractWorld Award and the HotDip Galvanising Award. Her work has been 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.

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sentational capacity of different digital fabrication techniques, exploring instead their creative potential. The aim is to acquire an instrumental deployment of these tools and create a feedback loop between the digital and the physical that will overcome the traditional bidimensional reading of the city.

Metropolis_ 09-10

AALU + Fundacion Metropoli This is the third of a series of workshops held each year during the spring break in conjunction with different LU collaborators. Its aim is to serve as a quick and intensive testbed in the application of techniques to a real project in a new political context. The workshop will conclude with a final public presentation of the project to the body of clients.

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 has contributed chapters to collections on urban design, utopian literature and contemporary architecture, and is currently researching for a book which formulates a Marxian critique of contemporary architecture and ‘control society’.

joining EDAW AECOM Tom has developed into one of EDAW AECOM’s leading designers. His work over the last 11 years 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.

Over the past five years 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, and on the development of the Legacy masterplan framework.

Tom Smith is a landscape architect and urban designer whose expertise ranges from detailed landscape design to large complex masterplans. Since

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 engineerig team as well as being part of the collective Groundlab.

Alfredo Ramirez studied Architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where he received his Diploma in Architecture 2000, and subsequently completed the AA graduate programme Landscape Urbanism in 2005. He has practised in several architectural offices and institutions in Mexico City and London where he focused on architectural and urban design projects.

Curretly he is involved in the Olympic Park design for London 2012 as well as being part of the collective Groundlab.

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sustainable environmental design

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 2009 to September 2010) 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 2009 to January 2011) enables the exploration of detailed design agendas that can include the realisation of experimental structures.

The taught programme is in two parts. The first part (Phase I, OctoberApril) 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 part of the course (Phase II, May to end September 2010 for MSc, May 2010 to end January 2011 for MArch) is organised around candidates’ dissertation projects.

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Programme Director Simos Yannas

Programme Staff Klaus Bode Gustavo Brunelli Joana Soares Gonçalves

Raul Moura Jorge Rodríguez Álvarez Alberto Moletto Barak Pelman

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Studio Projects

Phase I Studio: What Can Buildings

Tell Us, What Can We Tell Back

Autumn & Spring Terms Autumn term building studies around London combine occupant and designer interviews with on-site observations and environmental measurements.

These provide a first glimpse of the dynamic interactions between building, occupant and outdoor environment.

Measurements help calibrate digital models which are then applied to simulate environmental performance as a first stage of parametric analysis and design research. The findings of this fieldwork provide starting points for the following term’s design research agendas. The objective of the spring term studio is to explore innovative as well as performative designs that address climate change and maximise use of natural resources, aiming at zero-carbon buildings.

MSc Dissertations

Summer Term Phase II of the MSc takes place over an extended summer term of some 24 weeks representing 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 their own backgrounds, professional interests and special skills. Dissertation topics are decided by the end of the spring term.

Top: Ekachai Sophonudomporn, roof component optimised for uniform daylighting in Art Gallery in Bangkok, MArch Phase II Dissertation Project, February 2009

Bottom: SED students preparing to start the presentation of their project exhibition at PLEA 2009 International Conference in Quebec, 24 June 2009

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MArch Dissertations

Autumn, Spring & Summer Terms In the autumn and early spring terms the MArch studio hosts the final stage of Phase II dissertations begun in the previous academic year. In the coming year these comprise eleven individual projects encompassing a wide range of design briefs and climates, including proposals for emergency housing in Chilean Patagonia, a low-income community in Bangkok, sustainable urban development in Reykjavik andfaçade design for office buildings in Belgrade. These projects are due for completion in early February 2010. The MArch studio will then resume in the summer term with a new group of Phase II projects.

Lectures, Seminars & Workshops

Myths & Theories of

Sustainable Architecture

Autumn Term The environmental performance of buildings is fundamentally a matter for architecture, being a direct 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 key concepts and performative criteria are introduced in this course, providing the cognitive grounding and critical framework needed for design research.

Environmental Design Primer

Autumn & Spring Terms The course deals with key topics in building science drawn from current thinking and research in sustainable environmental design as it applies to architecture and urbanism. Lectures

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will look at the relationship between climate and architectural evolution; people, buildings and sustainability; occupant environmental comfort and thermal performance of buildings; daylight in architecture; daylight, artificial light, and energy; natural and mechanical ventilation; health and energy expenditure in buildings and related topics.

Lessons from Practice

Spring Term The course looks at both historical and contemporary approaches using built examples from the research and practices of the programme’s teaching staff as well as guest lecturers to discuss design concepts and environmental performance in practice.

Environmental Analysis Tools

Autumn & Spring Terms This is a technical course 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, finetune design proposals and inform final design decisions.

Design Research Workshop

Autumn & Spring 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 introduced in the course, helping to build the necessary knowledge and experience in stages under close supervision.

sustainable environmental design

Productive Research

Autumn, Spring & Summer Terms The purpose of the seminar is to foster the development of the research skills required for studio projects and professional work in this master’s programme.

These include selecting research topics for papers and dissertation projects, writing technical papers and reports for presentation and publication, and developing a visual language for communicating the principles and outcomes of sustainable environmental design.

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Other Events Forthcoming events in 2009/10 include the PALENC 2010 Cooling the Cities conference, to be held on Rhodes in late September and collaboration in a new project on environmental design and architectural training in Europe.

co-founded SAAI in 2009, an environmental consultancy firm with projects in Europe, Asia and America.

SED Director Simos Yannas is currently a Sir Isaac Newton Design Fellow in Architecture at the University of Cambridge and visiting professor at Queensland University of Technology. His book Roof Cooling Techniques was shortlisted for an RIBA Book Award and Lessons from Traditional Architecture is due for publication in 2009.

He was awarded the PLEA (Passive and Low Energy Architecture) International Awards in 2001 and 2008.

Joana Carla Soares Gonçalves is an architect and urbanist from Rio de Janeiro where she practised with Ana Maria Niemeyer before undertaking an 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 been teaching since 1998.

She has worked as an environmental consultant on projects around Brazil and won awards in a number of design competitions.

SED Staff Klaus Bode co-founded BDSP Partnership, a London-based environmental engineering firm with projects the world over. He was project engineer on Foster + Partners’ Commerzbank and on Rogers/Piano’s Potsdamer Platz developments in Berlin.

Raul Moura studied architecture and urbanism at the Technical University of Lisbon and worked for the Department of Strategic Planning of Lisbon City Council before moving to London. He was awarded the MA in Environment & Energy Studies from the AA in 1998 and has been teaching in the programme since 1999. He has worked as a sustainability consultant since 2002.

Barak Pelman studied architecture in Tel-Aviv University and at Helsinki University of Technology, and trained in traditional and contemporary crafting techniques, working with various building materials including iron, wood, concrete and earth. He won several design awards and has exhibited works at the Helsinki Museum of Architecture and at the International Biennale of Architecture in Bat-Yam.

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

Visiting Lecturer Nick Baker studied physics but has spent the majority of his professional life working in building physics as a teacher, researcher and consultant. His particular interests lie in energy modelling, thermal comfort and daylighting. He is author of the LT Method, an energy design tool, and has

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 on projects in the UK and abroad.

Alberto Moletto studied architecture in Chile where Ramirez-Moletto, his Santiago-based architectural practice, has completed a wide range of building projects and had its work published and exhibited extensively in Chile and abroad.

written and contributed to several books including Daylighting Design and Sustainable Refurbishment.

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

Working for the European Commission in Brussels since 2005, she is involved in the promotion of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

Catherine Harrington is an associate with the London office of Architype, winners of the RIBA Sustainability Award in 2007 and the Ashden Award in 2009.

Since 1999 she has been responsible for a wide portfolio of low-energy buildings and competitionwinning schemes, including the Chiltern Hills Visitor Centre, Singleton Environment Centre and a number of educational and cultural buildings.

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Conservation of HIstoric buildings

The stewardship of the historic environment requires heritage practitioners with special skills in understanding, managing 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, so as to become more effective 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 why we conserve, what it is that is being conserved and how the artefact is to be conserved. Philosophical issues and craft techniques are explored and modern value systems of assessing significance are investigated. The programme includes site visits connected with study exercises and current conservation issues of interest, together with visits to craft workshops.

The First Year engages the students in developing their own conservation philosophies, allied with the study of early and medieval building types.

Students begin to 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

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

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Programme Staff Judith Roebuck is an archaeologist and an ancient monuments inspector for English Heritage. She is also a past graduate of the course.

Programme Director Andrew Shepherd

Programme Staff Judith Roebuck David Heath

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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, the introduction of services into historic buildings and ongoing philosophical developments. The principal assignment for students is a thesis of 10â&#x20AC;&#x201C;15,000 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 also benefit from the expertise of its advisors, Richard Halsey, Elain Harwood, John Redmill, Clive Richardson and Robert Thorne. Many former students show their continuing commitment to the course by returning to lecture to current students. There are informal links with practitioners, and there is usually an annual study tour.

For over 30 years the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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, but is also informed by more recent developments in conservation practice.

David Heath was latterly Chief Conservation Architect to English Heritage, and is the Thesis Tutor. He is also a past graduate of the course. aaschool.ac.uk/bc Students on site visits

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phd programme

The AA School’s PhD programme fosters critical discourse and innovative research in architecture and urbanism.

Within these fields the thematic and methodological origins of current projects derive from three main areas of research: architectural theory and history (mainly the critical reassessment of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism); architectural urbanism (its role in addressing central issues in contemporary urban conditions and debates); and sustainable environmental design (its critical dimension and innovative applications in architecture and urbanism). From this academic year eligible candidates may also enrol for the PhD in Architectural Design, an option for qualified architects with experience in design research and an interest in relating theory to design practice.

The 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 school must hold a post-professional master’s degree in their proposed area of PhD research.

Study for the PhD at the AA is full-time, with a minimum duration of two calendar years and a maximum of four years. PhD (and MPhil) research degrees are administered by the AA Graduate School’s Research Committee in conjunction with the Architecture

Academic Coordinator Simos Yannas

Programme Staff Lawrence Barth Mark Cousins

Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley Marina Lathouri

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& Urbanism Management Group in partnership with the Open University.

PhD in Architectural Design The purpose of the new option of the PhD in Architectural Design is to enable as well as encourage candidates from an architectural background to make productive and creative use of their design skills within the scholarly tradition of doctoral research. This is a full-time, post-professional research degree option that can be taken over a minimum of two calendar years and a maximum of four years. 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 and experience in the area of the proposed research. Applicants will be assessed on design portfolio, reference letters, interview and research statement.

Seminars & Special Events Seminar series are commonly of one or two terms’ duration. Topics reflect the evolution of research interests and training requirements. PhD candidates may take one or more seminars. An international symposium is held regularly in the Summer Term.

Marina Lathouri leads a PhD history and theory discussion group

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AA Interprofessional Studio

Launched in 2008/09, the AA Interprofessional Studio operates in the areas between Art, Architecture and Performance reaching professions, partners and students who would not normally have the opportunity to study at the AA School. AAIS can provide either a full-time year of studying (leading to an AA Graduate Diploma) or a part-time two days a week option (leading to an AAIS certificate ).

Real applied projects within creative fields serve as generators for the year’s work; collaborations guarantee a high level of focus, outcome and public participation. The aim of the course is to explore the area between the disciplines and therefore it seeks works as experimental and independent as possible. The AAIS offers itself as a forum for discussion beyond the immediate scope of the studio and as an interdisciplinary project office realising creative, collaborative work. The AAIS will invite a huge variety of people throughout the disciplines to be part of our workshops, events and discussions.

This year we will be organising, designing and curating a festival of Spatial Performance in London. This project will be not just a single framed activity but a series of events of differTheo 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.

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Tanja Siems is an urban designer and infrastructural planner and the director of the interdisciplinary practice T2 spatial work (to.spatialwork.net). 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

Studio Director Theo Lorenz

Studio Master Tanja Siems

Studio Tutor Jan Brüggemeier

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ent scale, media and scope with each realisation initiating and promoting the next. We will develop urban interventions that manifest themselves in performances, exhibitions and constructions that will be used as a staging of events, as platforms of discussion and finally as an urban film set.

The work of the studio will be divided into four distinct phases: Act One: Knowledge Exchange In a series of workshops, looking at interactive design, writing, performance and curation as well as theatre and film production, we will explore various knowledge transfers.

Act Two: Design The second term focuses on the design of various elements for the Spatial Performance festival, the scale and scope of which will vary considerably.

Act Three: Construction The third term will concentrate entirely on the delivery of these projects.

Act Four: Conclusion After the events in June and July AAIS participants will have time to document their specific take on the interprofessional work in the form of an essay or thesis.

co-leads the AAIS programme and organises the programme’s support and funding.

since 2001 he has curated a number of art and media festivals across Europe. aais.aaschool.ac.uk

Jan Brüggemeier graduated in Media Art and Design at the Bauhaus University Weimar and his work focuses on sound art, new media and participatory urban projects.

He has presented this internationally at festivals and numerous exhibitions and

Laura Boffi, Projection of Breath3, Theatherhaus Jena, 2009 Photo Takako Hasegawa

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design + make

AA Design & Make is a new full-time 16-month residential graduate design programme, located at the AA’s Hooke Park forest estate in Dorset. Starting in Autumn 2010, AA D&M is open to graduate students of architecture and related disciplines who wish to pursue studio- and workshop-based design and realisation of alternative rural architectures. On a yearly cycle, the programme will design and construct experimental buildings at Hooke Park, in the process creating a new rural AA campus as a demonstrator of ecologically sustainable design.

The course is based on the philosophy that architects today learn best by imagining, developing and realising full-scale prototype structures through which ideas can be tested, documented and communicated. Through actual engagement in making and building, students have a unique opportunity to develop a rich phenomenal understanding of architecture. Similarly, through realising real-world sustainable solutions within the environmental context provided by Hooke Park, a deep individual appreciation of ecological issues can be gained. The course is uniquely placed to benefit from exposure to the AA’s design culture, the workshops and working forestry of Hooke Park, and the expertise of a body of consultants and advisors engaged at the leading edge of design thinking.

Programme Director Martin Self holds degrees in aerospace engineering and architectural theory.

He was a founder member of Arup’s Advanced Geometry Unit. He currently provides geometrical and engineering consultancy to Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio.

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Programme Director Martin Self

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The four-term course starts with a series of seminars to build a theoretical foundation, and a core studio in which students engage in relevant contemporary design practices. Workshop-based experimentation proceeds in parallel with studio-based design explorations.

Design studios, planning submissions and on-site construction form the heart of AA D&M’s project-driven pedagogy.

Students will live in a village community near Hooke Park. Ideas will be shared through engagement with that community, with visiting students and tutors, and the wider school community in London. The aim is that the student intake will produce, as a group, a compelling local response (in the form of both discourse and artefact) to the global challenges facing architecture.

This will be informed by their studies in ecological thinking, the theories and practices of sustainable architecture and new philosophies of design.

Through access to the forest and workshop, the opportunity is presented to reinvent traditional timber building techniques using the current technologies of computer-aided design and manufacture. By maximising the building material provided by the forest, and aiming towards resource autonomy for the Hooke Park project, students will directly experience, in microcosm, the wider challenges of achieving self-sufficiency in the built environment.

The existing structures at Hooke Park were designed by teams dedicated to pushing the boundaries of building with wood. Westminster Lodge, by Edward Cullinan and Buro

Happold, features a grass roof and the extensive use of unmilled, untreated timber. There are other structures by Frei Otto and Ahrends Burton & Koralek.

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projective cities

The Projective Cities programme is dedicated to the study of the city as a projective site for new architectural knowledge. Through a distinctive mix of taught and research components, it aims at redefining and reclaiming the role of architecture as the essential element to theorise, conceptualise, describe, form, organise and ultimately project new ideas of and for the city.

The focus of the programme is the formation and design of the city, explicated within its dominant types and large-scale architectural artefacts.

The rapidly emerging phenomena – and design challenges – of the contemporary city are systematically examined through both theoretical and specific architectural design investigations, which are developed into a rigorous Design Thesis.

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, with little reference to alternative overarching architectural theories. By contrast, this programme pursues a meaningful production of new ideas by overlaying the conjectural potential of architectural experimentation onto the city itself, as the overt site of new architectural knowledge. Instrumental to this approach is a process of design and research that is premised on a renewed

Programme Staff Christopher CM Lee graduated with the AA Dipl (Hons) and has taught in the AA since 2002. He is the principal of awardwinning Serie Architects in London, Mumbai, Beijing and Chengdu. His practice is working on numerous projects worldwide including

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a 440-unit residential complex in Bratislava, a 20ha masterplan in Pune and a floating pavilion in Marina Bay Singapore.

He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. serie.co.uk

Programme Staff Christopher CM Lee Sam Jacoby

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typological reasoning and experimentation, enabling architecture to re-engage with the city in both a critical and conjectural manner.

Course Structure The Projective Cities programme is a two-year full-time MPhil course open to postgraduate students with a minimum five-year professional architectural degree (BArch, Diploma or equivalent).

In the first year – the taught phase – seminar courses provide the theoretical foundation and research methods for analysing cities and researching and discussing their histories, theories, instruments and practices. All courses are extensively cross-linked, thematically and instrumentally, with the core design studio and are developed into a proposal for a Design Thesis. During the second phase in year two, students carry out individual research under close supervision, leading to a Design Thesis complemented by a written dissertation of around 15,000 words.

The programme will be launched in autumn 2010. For more information please contact: Graduate School Admissions Registrar’s Office AA School of Architecture 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES T: +44 (0)20 7887 4067 gradinfo@aaschool.ac.uk

Sam Jacoby graduated from the AA and is an architect in private practice in London. Before becoming an architect he trained as a cabinet-maker in Germany.

Has taught at the AA since 2002 and at the University of Nottingham since 2007. Currently a doctoral candidate at the TU Berlin.

Udayan Mazumdar, Zero Ground, Diploma Unit 6, 2007/08

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research clusters

AA Research Clusters are a programme of year-long special projects, activities and events that bring together diverse groups of AA students, staff and outside partners for the purposes of realising research initiatives inside the AA School. The programme itself was initiated in 2005 as a means to connect different parts of the diverse, unit- and programme-oriented academic life of the AA, as well as to generate greater levels of outside partnership, support and funding.

Each year the AA Research Cluster Group, managed by the AA’s Academic Head in consultation with existing cluster curators, takes applications from across the school for a new cycle of clusters; so that at any one time there are four clusters operating at different stages of their 18-month programme.

Since their launch four years ago, cluster catalogues and publications have been produced taking this work to a larger audience. These include Cities from Zero, edited by Shumon Basar and Environmental Techtonics, edited by Steve Hardy. Other past clusters have included, ‘New Media: Design Systems & Tools’, ‘Architectural Urbanism’, ‘Future Practice’ and ‘The Architecture of Innovation’.

For 2009/10 Research Clusters include ‘FAB: A Platform for Material and Manufacturing Innovation’ curated

by Alan Dempsey and Theo Sarantoglou Lalis. The cluster has organised an international design competition, and in recent months has commissioned prototypes by competition winners that will be exhibited in London during autumn 2009.

Coordinator Charles Tashima

Cluster Curators Alan Dempsey Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Stefano Rabolli Pansera

Marianne Mueller Olaf Kneer Marina Lathouri

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‘Art, Architecture and Energy’, curated by Stefano Rabolli Pansera, was launched at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale as a new cluster that will organise a series of workshops bringing together AA students and staff with outside architects, artists and scientists to explore the connected cultures of science and the arts in the twenty-first century. Conferences, installations and a publication are planned.

‘Concrete Geometries’, curated by Marianne Mueller and Olaf Kneer, will explore an area of research currently under-represented in architectural culture – geometry as a site for human interaction and bodily experience.

Exhibitions, public conversations and live experiments are planned this year.

‘City Cultures’, curated by Marina Lathouri, looks at the contemporary idea of 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 will feed into a 2010 conference seeking new manifestos on the city.

During 2009/10 the school will again seek proposals from interested students and staff, which will be coordinated and announced by Charles Tashima, AA School Academic Head.

‘New Media: Design Systems & Tools’ cluster meeting, 2008

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aa course and exam in architectural practice

The AA provides two architectural practice programmes each year, each lasting for around ten weeks. One begins in March, the other in mid-September. Alastair Robertson, the AA’s Professional Studies Advisor (PSA) and Rob Sparrow, the Architectural Practice Co-ordinator are there to advise and to help students through the process.

To pass the ‘Part 3’ and thus be recognised as competent in architectural practice is the gold standard. The AA’s examination is formally recognised by the Architects Registration Board (ARB) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and means that students can not only 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.

The intensive, full-time two-week course that introduces the examination process 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

Tutor Alastair Robertson trained at the AA and Manchester Business School and has taught at the AA since 1971.

As a senior consultant he has worked on several English new towns and St Katharine Docks in London and currently advises industry sector

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up-to-date with the latest changes in practice and procedure. It is not a foundation course, but the AA does provide an extensive bibliography, lecture notes and past papers, all on a CD-ROM. The AA Part 3 programme is unique in that it brings together a group of around 30 graduates from the AA, other UK schools, from schools outside the UK and also qualified practitioners doing the course as part of their continuing professional development.

The examination itself is a two-step process: firstly, candidates must establish their eligibility by submitting an essay and related documentation to the PSA for an initial assessment. Secondly, candidates must undertake 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 a student’s record of professional experience (normally a PEDR record – see pedr.co.uk), documents submitted for their initial assessment and exam papers.

To be eligible to sit the exam, candidates must have exemption from the ARB/RIBA Part 1 and 2 Examinations and at least two year’s practice

Tutor Alastair Robertson

experience (three to four years is more normal) of which one year must be after passing Part 2 and one year must be working in the UK on UK-based projects under the supervision of a UK-registered architect. All of these details, including fees, are documented in the AA’s Part 3 Prospectus that can be downloaded from the professional practice section of the AA website.

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 also follows a legal model 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, Alastair Robertson and Rob Sparrow provide a 48-week advisory and support programme for students out in the practice environment. Meetings with Alastair are by appointment, through Rob Sparrow, and usually take place in the AA Front Members’ Room over

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a cup of coffee. Alastair will also visit students in their offices if the situation warrants it.

For those embarking on the Part 3 process, the essential starting point is to register with the AA School (through Rob Sparrow – sparrow_ro@aaschool.ac.uk ) as soon as possible after completing the Diploma School/Part 2. The registration fee for 2009 is £250 which covers the costs of practice monitoring, the PEDR review and sign-off, an initial Part 3 assessment and tutorials as required. For those subject to visa regulations, this is critical because the AA cannot meet its sponsorship obligations to the UK Borders Agency without this. The PSA also cannot sign PEDR forms unless the student is registered with the AA School.

organisations in the UK and several governments in the Middle East on vocational training and qualification systems and policies.

Alastair Robertson

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visiting

visiting school

visiting

The AA Visiting School features a wide variety of courses, programmes and workshops for visiting and international students, from short, oneweek courses in London or abroad to an entire year of full-time study.

The AA’s Summer Architecture School, held over three weeks every July, is aimed at those who wish to explore a possible career in architecture, enhance their existing studies, or contemplate a change in their current career by sampling the AA’s way of teaching and learning.

Now in its fifth year, the Summer dLab is a well recognised two-week workshop in early August that introduces and advances digital and computational design and fabrication skills. International students interested in a longer-term participation in the AA undergraduate school can apply for admission to the 15-Week AA Spring Semester or the One-Year Abroad programme, both of which allow for the transfer of study credits. In June each year the AA Visiting Teachers’ Programme provides an opportunity for teachers from around the world to experience at first hand the AA’s unique teaching and learning strategies.

In the 2007/08 year the AA launched an exciting new initiative for a series of Global Schools in cities around the world. Attended by a mix of local students, architects and designers and visiting overseas participants (including current or recent AA graduates), these intensive courses are based around a tightly focused design programme and supported by a series of seminars and presentations by AA and eminent local experts on topics related to the setting. Projects are pursued in the format of the AA unit system. Over the past year these courses have been held in Tel Aviv, Madrid, Singapore, Daejon, Shanghai and Berlin. In the coming year, Santiago de Chile, Beijing, Bangalore and Tokyo are among the new destinations.

To obtain further information and register for any of the programmes listed here please go to the Visiting School section of the AA website or contact the Visiting School Director, Christopher Pierce, at visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

Final jury, AA CSI 2009 workshop in Tel Aviv

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summer architecture school

5–23 July 2010 The three-week, full time AA Summer Architecture School presents a challenging programme of 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, and represents a uniquely intensive and intimate environment that aims to expand formal and intellectual resources.

Based in London, each of the school’s units creatively use the city’s surroundings as their focus of research.

Past themes for the Summer Architecture School have included speed, visions of the future, disaster and, most recently, modest micro-strategies for difficult financial times.

Tutors, lecturers and critics include past and present AA unit masters as well as professionals pooled from disciplines as diverse as fashion, art, graphics, industrial design, urbanism and film. Dynamic group work is encouraged, with over 80 students working in distinct groups hailing from over 35 countries. Numerous techniques of working are promoted that include both analogue fabrication as well as digital production.

Tutors Natasha Sandmeier is an architect and partner of Big Picture Studio. She is Unit Master of Diploma 9 and co-directs the AA Summer Architecture School. She was project architect for the Seattle Public Library at OMA, and at other offices in the US.

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Shumon Basar is a writer, editor, curator and director of the AA’s Cultural Projects.

Co-founder of sexymachinery magazine, and contributing editor at Tank and Bidoun magazines. Recent books include Cities from Zero and The World of Madelon Vriesendorp (with Stephan Trüby).

Tutors Natasha Sandmeier Shumon Basar

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With fees of £1,500, the course is aimed at undergraduate architectural students who would like to experience the AA environment and/or those who are considering a change of school; and newcomers to architecture, both recent school leavers and those considering a career change.

Final catwalk jury for the AA Summer School 2009

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summer dLab

2–13 August 2010 The AA Summer dLab offers visiting architects and students an opportunity to be involved in an intense 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, while providing a forum to openly discuss and exchange ideas on progressive takes on digital design. dLab participants will be introduced to the basics of digital modelling, scripting, portability between applications and experimentation in the integration of software-based environments to prototyped production. They will also explore laser cutting, CNC-milling, 3D printing and other forms of design output, pursuing an opportunity to work directly with these and other advanced design technologies while furthering their knowledge, skills and understanding of some of today’s most advanced computational tools.

The course itself is organised as an intensive two-week workshop combining seminars and design exercises with presentations and discussions with teaching staff and visiting critics.

Students will be enrolled in one dLab unit in which they will continue throughout the course of the programme. Each

Tutor Eugene Han

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student group’s work will be guided towards a design proposal presented as a finished design project at the end of the two weeks. These projects will provide a solid foundation for the further development of their interests and abilities.

The AA Summer dLab is open to current architecture students, recent graduates and mid-career professionals wishing to further their understanding of digital and computational design concepts, operations and their applications. Interested applicants should have a working knowledge of computers and some previous software modelling experience is preferred. It is recommended that participants bring their own laptop, however use of the school’s Computer Lab may be allowed. Computers and equipment, software and prototyping materials will be provided.

Tutor Eugene Han is the founder of AVA-Studio, researching and developing systems in industrial design, architecture and planning.

4+1 Yijun Huang, Georgios Manousis and Revano Satria, Component Parameter Design and Global Configuration Demonstration, Summer dLab 2009

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spring semester programme

18 January – 14 May 2010 The AA Visiting School Spring Semester Programme is a 15-week intensive studio-based course open to talented undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. The programme gives visiting students the opportunity to gain exposure to the international life of the AA and its unique unit system and provides a challenging design agenda supported by complementary workshops and seminars. All participants in the course enjoy full attendance in the AA’s Public Programme of exhibitions, evening lectures, publication launches, symposia and other special events.

The programme’s curriculum includes the core design studio alongside elective courses from the AA’s undergraduate history and theory seminars, media studies workshops and electronic media courses. Students study alongside other full-time AA students working in design units and complementary study courses, whilst attending regular weekly individual and group design tutorials within their dedicated studio inside the AA’s premises on Bedford Square.

The course is specifically designed to allow study credits to be transferable as a complete semester abroad programme. This transfer is the responsibility of individual students and is subject to approval by their affiliated

Tutors Monia De Marchi is an architect and graduate of the Venice and AA schools of architecture. In addition to teaching the Spring Semester Programme, she has been an AA Unit Master since 2005 and also teaches in the Media Studies programme.

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Sam Jacoby trained as a cabinet-maker in Germany before graduating from the AA. He has taught in the school since 2002 and at the University of Nottingham since 2007.

He currently works as an architect in private practice in London and is a doctoral candidate at the TU Berlin.

Tutors Monia De Marchi Sam Jacoby

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school but the AA provides letters and other documentation to assist with this process. An AA School Certificate of Completion and a final written report with a recommended grade will be awarded at the end of the programme including submission assessments for other required elective courses.

The Programme: London Calling The programme combines conceptual and material design research with the rigorous production of architectural projects and ideas, tested and presented in the form of comprehensive design proposals. Project briefs engage with the rapidly changing conditions found in London, a world city undergoing radical transformations in its built environment, public spaces and urban infrastructures. All are conditions that give the Spring Semester Programme a strong identity as an internationally-recognised London study abroad programme.

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

Spring Semester Programme trip to Moscow

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one year abroad

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.

Students are expected to stay for the entire three terms of the AA’s academic year, which begins in October and concludes the following July.

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. As part of the programme students have access to the full range of resources at the AA, including the workshops, libraries, digital prototyping, computing and audio-visual labs and other facilities.

During the four-week break between terms, students (subject to their visa status) are able to travel abroad, experiencing the architecture and cities of Europe.

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

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Many overseas schools are prepared to grant credit to their students during their study at the AA, and arrangements for this should be made by the students prior to their arrival in the programme. This will help to clarify the kinds of Complementary Studies courses, in addition to the unit work, they will be required to attend.

Coordinator Hugo Hinsley

visiting teachers’ programme

The AA’s innovative teaching tradition attracts the interest of academic visitors from all over the world. In response to this interest we offer a short programme to give teachers of architecture an opportunity to engage with the teaching and research of the school, and to develop a debate about the aims and strategies of teaching architecture.

The programme offers meetings with students and teachers, involvement in the review and assessment activities throughout the school and the opportunity for detailed discussion of ideas and methods of education. Participants will present work for debate in a seminar on educational ideas and methods and immersion in the culture of the school through its programme of lectures, seminars and exhibitions is encouraged. Visits are also organised to important examples of architecture and planning in London, a city that offers a rich historical and contemporary record and is a laboratory of urbanism and architecture.

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The programme is open to a small group of participants who are currently teaching architecture or related subjects, and will run for three weeks in June 2010. There is no fee for the programme. Applicants will be selected on the basis of a short written statement outlining the issues of architectural education that they find particularly interesting and challenging, and which should include details of their teaching and research experience.

Coordinator Hugo Hinsley is an architect with expertise in community buildings, housing design and urban development projects. He has a wide range of practice experience, mainly in London, and with Jorge Fiori he currently directs the AA’s MA in Housing & Urbanism.

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Santiago de chile

Beijing

Bangalore

Tel Aviv

Game (On) Catholic University 6 – 15 January 2010 In Chile the construction of a new sports infrastructure to house the 2014 Pan-American Olympics – ODESUR – is being treated as an unparalleled opportunity to transform a range of environments. By taking a critical look at the ambitious plans currently under development, and proposing design alternatives, the workshop aims at defining strategies applicable to urban processes in different cities. Participants will approach this project by integrating different scales and fields of architectural action. This design research will encourage explorations ranging through material properties, construction processes, parametric design and digital fabrication, right up to the urban and landscape scales, taking account of the local cultures and Chile’s spectacular landscape.

Super-Blend Tsinghua University 19 – 27 February 2010 This AA visiting school takes Beijing not only as its physical venue but also as the basis for its design agenda, which sets out to identify new kinds of spatial prototypes by parametrically super-blending existing typologies of Beijing with digital computational tools and approaches. The essential parametric design technique will be taught alongside the team-based design studio exercise. The intensive nine-day international workshop will also give students a chance to explore Beijing right after the Chinese New Year.

Hyper Threads B M Sreenivasaiah College April 2010 With its ancient history, growing economy, disproportionately youthful population and innate technological skill base, India represents a fascinating architectural test case. This workshop will operate at the confluence of multiple disciplinary and cultural strands and offers young Indian and international architects a chance to imagine scenarios for this global stage. Emphasis in its teaching will be placed on emergent computational design tools and the architectural appropriation of India’s growing manufacturing capacities.

Over ten intense days, the workshop’s objective is to analyse contemporary design and fabrication methods and through them learn from Bangalore’s labour and ancient building cultures.

AA CSI 2010 David Azrieli School of Architecture July 2010 AA CSI 2010 is the second of three annual summer workshops focused on developing innovative methods for synthesising drawing and 3D printing.

Working with Object Geometries, participants will be involved in an intensive 10-day programme of making and testing 2D, ‘thick 2D’ and 3D digital printing techniques. The workshop programme is inspired by British pioneers of art and architectural representation – Joseph Gandy, James Stirling, David Hockney and John Outram – and influenced by Israel’s unique cultural heritage of textiles and ceramics. The workshop’s objective is to deliver an atlas of objects from each participant that they will incorporate into future theoretical and built projects, giving the workshop a wide-ranging material and intellectual influence.

Director Pedro Alonso

Director Yan Gao

Director Shajay Bhooshan

Directors Christopher Pierce Chris Matthews

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Madrid

Singapore

Daejeon

Shanghai

Bleaching Green IE School of Architecture July 2010 In its second year, the AA/IE Madrid Summer School will explore the relation between architecture and energy use in the near future. Through Madrid as a research ground, case study and base, students will investigate specific urban sustainable challenges. Moving away from green clichés, the Bleaching Green workshop will venture into uncharted territories, blending design intuition and technological invention.

New materials, creative partnerships and prototype pieces will be part of this design and research led workshop. As part of the AA/IE Madrid Summer School evening lectures, site visits and architectural tours will offer insights into the subject and the city itself.

Designed Geographies Singapore Polytechnic July 2010 For the fifth year the AA will be migrating to southeast Asia to pursue a series of experiments, initiated last year, around the idea of designed geographies. Participants will propose alternative ways of reading the city, informed by an introduction to contemporary methods of physical and digital mapping and modelling. The ten-day workshop offers an opportunity to engage with the AA’s design agendas through a hands-on approach and is complemented by a series of seminars and lectures as well as discussions, debates and visits. This workshop is made possible through the support of the Design Singapore Council and the School of Design, Singapore Polytechnic.

Awakening the River Daejeon University August 2010 The third AA South Korean global school will continue to explore the topic of rivers, with investigations focusing on proposals that engage the river with its wider natural infrastructure. Specifically we will consider four rivers in the southwest of the country presently demarcated as redevelopment sites.

The workshop will last approximately two weeks and will contain six separate units (each led by an AA tutor) accommodating 15 students. The focus of the programme will centre on design exploration via a rich selection of different methodologies, including physical models, cinematic screenings and digital media. The venue will be Daejeon University and the workshop will be a joint AA and SAKIA (School of Architecture Korean Institute of Architects) collaboration.

Post-Expo 2010++ Shanghai Study Centre, Hong Kong August 2010 This fourth consecutive AA Shanghai Summer School will be hosted at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture Shanghai Study Centre.

As an intensive nine-day studio-based course, we will investigate new computational design approaches in architecture and urbanism, within the context of Shanghai, one of the world’s most rapidly growing, emblematic twentyfirst-century cities of commerce and industry. The subject of this year’s summer school is the 5.3 km2 site for the Shanghai Expo 2010, focusing on proposals for developing the area after the expo. Parametric design systems will serve as the vehicles for prototyping new kinds of adaptive cultural facilities, driven by scenarios of future incremental growth and change.

Director Ricardo de Ostos

Directors Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel Da Costa Goncalves

Director Peter Ferretto

Director Tom Verebes

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Tokyo

Berlin

The City After-Image F-2 Site/Spiral Arts Centre 14 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 23 August 2010 TBC The F-2 project is an ongoing urban redevelopment scheme in Fujimi 2-Chome 10 Ban Area in the Iidabashi district of central Tokyo. The workshop will coincide with the demolition phase of the F-2 project. By working directly within the periphery of this city under de-construction, we will create an ephemeral architecture that explores creative forms of reverse construction.

How can we make architecture in the city by making its building disappear beautifully? The workshop will be located in the F-2 project construction site, liaised by the Spiral Arts Centre in Omotesando, Aoyama Tokyo. The Maeda Corporation of Tokyo makes this workshop possible.

AA Berlin Laboratory Aedes Network Campus 3 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 12 September 2010 Berlin has emerged as a major player for contemporary cultural production within Europe, if not the world. Postwall Berlin, a laboratory of lifestyles and modes of production, gathers an influential community of highly creative people from around the globe. AA Berlin Laboratory harvests this exceptional moment in time by pairing AA- and Berlin-based skills. The Laboratory is an intense nine-day workshop that explores the role of experimentation in creative processes. Located at the Aedes Network Campus in the midst of East Berlin, the workshop is accompanied by a public programme with participants from architecture, science and art. This year we will focus on tools and systems of experimentation.

Director Shin Egashira

Directors Olaf Kneer Marianne Mueller

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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 3,200 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 develop­ ment 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 2008/09 is as follows: President Alex Lifschutz, BSc Vice Presidents Julia Barfield, MBE RIBA Henrik Lønberg, AADipl Honorary Secretary Christopher Libby, AADipl RIBA Honorary Treasurer Sadie Morgan, BA(IntDes) MA(RCA)

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Jim Eyre, OBE BA(Hons) AADipl RIBA Ordinary Members John Andrews, AADipl Daniel Aram, MA MBA Mike 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 Dennis Sharp, AADipl MA RIBA Christina Smith Rebecca Spencer Brendan Woods, AADipl RIBA 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.

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 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 41,000 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 CD-ROMs/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 just 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.

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 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 and Reyner Banham. 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).

AA students and staff can download low-res images from a fully searchable website featuring 8,000 images from the collection together with comprehensive information about each building.

Although the collection is primarily for use within the school, we operate as a commercial photo library, providing images for publication in books and journals worldwide. We also publish cards and postcards from the collection which are available from the AA Bookshop and hold regular

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The photo library also holds archive recordings of over 1,000 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 at: aaschool.ac.uk/lectures.

There is also a collection of over 800 films and documentaries which can be viewed in the library or borrowed overnight.

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

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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 aaschool.ac.uk/aalife/av.htm 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 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 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 2.00pm and 5.00pm and that most equipment is lent for a period of two days.

AAIR listen: aaschool.ac.uk/radio contact: 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.

Wood and Metal Workshop 10am–6pm Monday to Friday 10am–2.30pm Saturday (term time) aaschool.ac.uk/workshop.shtm The workshop is well equipped with machine and hand tools for working in 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 members of staff; 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. Workshop staff have a broad range of experience in design, materials and processes. Their aim is to support individual projects as well as units whose programmes depend upon the use of the workshop.

Model Workshop 10am–6pm Monday to Friday Saturday by appointment aaschool.ac.uk/modelshop.shtm 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.

Digital Prototyping Lab 10am–6pm Monday to Friday aaschool.ac.uk/digitalprototyping Set up in the summer of 2007, the digital prototyping lab is a new facility containing various rapid prototyping machines and a teaching space. The lab currently has two laser-cutting machines, two CNC-milling machines and an STL printer, and is designed to evolve in future years to keep pace with the latest developments in hardware and software technologies.

The lab is available to all parts of the school, to the units that incorporate digital fabrication technologies into their briefs as well as the graduate programmes.

Registered students are able to reserve machine-time through an online booking system. All those interested in using the lab facilities are first required to attend an induction course.

The digital prototyping lab staff have experience with digital design processes and knowledge of 3D and parametric modelling applications. To support the work of the units and programmes, the lab will offer tutorials and short courses on how to design and prepare models for digital production. Integrated at an early stage, the introductions are intended to raise awareness of the potential of digital fabrication technologies and capitalise on their possibilities in the contemporary design process.

Hooke Park 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 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,

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resources/information 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.

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 long-term development of Hooke Park as a vital part of the school.

pastries, sandwiches, snacks and drinks are served in the bar on the first floor from 9.30am until 9.00pm. Lunch is served from 12.30pm to 2.00pm in the dining room in the basement, opposite the AA Bookshop.

Drawing Materials Shop 10am–5.45pm Monday to Friday aaschool.info/drawingmaterials The drawing materials shop is located on the ground floor of 34 Bedford Square. 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.

AA Bookshop 10am–6pm Monday to Friday T+ 44(0)20 7436 7863 aabookshop.net Situated in the front basement of 36 Bedford Square 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.

Bar & Restaurant 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,

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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 (2009/10 onwards) from the UK and EU are eligible for a Tuition Fee Loan (non-income assessed). For further up-to-date information students should go to the student finance section of the website 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. 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 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 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 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.

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: 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 non-art/design subject. Maths and a Science subject, together with English Language, are compulsory at least at GCSE level. The AA Open Studio foundation course is recognised by the RIBA as the equivalent of an Art A level.

Therefore the minimum entry requirements for students entering the Open Studio 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 25 June prior to entry to the school.

Portfolio Guidelines Suggestions on preparing your portfolio can be found online at: aaschool.ac.uk/admissions/ portfolioguidelines.shtm 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 architectural or design 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.

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 31 August 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 the Open Studio Foundation 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 self-generated projects can all be included. Offers of admission are based on evidence of motivation as well as intellectual and practical creative ability.

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information 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 Open Studio/First Year – Monday 9 November 2009 Fourth Year – Monday 26 October 2009, Thursday 14 January 2010 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 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 15 January 2010 (application fee £30); late applications will be accepted up to 12 March 2010 (fee £60).

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

Graduate Admissions Application Procedure: Mandatory Requirements All applicants are required to complete an application form, accompanied by the appropriate

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information 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.

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 1 May 2010 prior to entry in the Autumn Term.

recipients, are listed below.

See also: aaschool.ac.uk/admissions

Fees Fees are reviewed annually. For the academic year 2009/10 they are as follows: Undergraduate School Open Studio Foundation: £13,578 Five-year undergraduate programme: £15,273 Graduate School 12-month MA and MSc: £17,571 16-month MArch: £23,453 PhD: £15,747 Graduate Building Conservation Diploma (day-release course): £5,139 AAIS £13,578 full time, £5,850 part time (2 days per week) Visiting School Spring Semester Programme: £7,500 1-year Abroad Programme: £15,273 dLab: £1,750 Summer School: £1,450 Global programmes: see AA website for individual programme fee updates There is an additional £50 member­ship 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.

Scholarships and Bursaries 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.

What is the Difference Between a Scholarship and a Bursary?

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 Undergraduate applicants must complete the main application form no later than 15 January 2010, 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 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 2009/10

How to Apply for a Bursary for Graduate School Students Bursary application forms are available from the Registrar’s 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 mid-April to distribute the awards, bases its decisions on academic performance, tutor recommendations and financial need. (Bursary awards range from half a term 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 Elliott Krause, Imogen Long, John Ng, Emily Thurlow, Claudia White 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 Jiehwoo Seung 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. Appli­cations are particularly welcome from members of ethnic minorities entering the First Year. Applicants must demon-strate 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 Conrad Koslowsky 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.

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information 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 memory of Anne Gregory, who died while in her first year of studies.

R D Hammett Bursary Denis Hegie This bursary is funded by the generous bequest of graduate R D Hammett.

Mercers’ Bursary Simon Whittle This one-term bursary has been made available since 2002 thanks to the generous support of the Mercers’ Company, the City of London’s premier livery company.

It is awarded annually to a British student.

Nicholas Boas Travel Award Uliana Apatina, Alma Wang, Harri Williams-Jones 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 one-month 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.

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information 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 Stephen Marshall, Sarah Huelin This bursary fund, established in 2008 in support of British or UK-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.

Doris Lockhart Bursary Kory Kromm A new bursary has been set up this year by AA supporter and former AA council member Doris Lockhart, in support of UK and international students in need of financial assistance. The bursary looks to reward, at an undergraduate level, a student’s ability to represent architectural ideas in writing.

Fletcher Priest Foundation Bursary Taneli Mansikkamaki The Fletcher Priest Foundation, established by AA alumni Keith Priest and Michael Fletcher, has initiated this year a generous commitment to the AA Foundation, to support over the coming years a number of bursaries for deserving undergraduate AA students in need of financial assistance.

AA Graduate Diploma in AA Interproffesional Studies 12 months full time 12 months part time (2 days per week). Applications assessed individually upon receipt. CV, a short statement and original evidence of qualification.

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).

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).

AA Gradute 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 15 January 2010 (application fee £30). Late applications will be accepted up until 12 March 2010 (late fee £60). 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 22 January 2010 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 Graduate and Undergraduate Assessment Full information will be given in the Student Handbook 2009/10.

Equality 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.

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 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.

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.

Plagiarism 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 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.

Contacts 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/ One Year Abroad ssp@aaschool.ac.uk Professional Studies (Year Out & Part 3) psco@aaschool.ac.uk Interprofessional Studio aais@aaschool.ac.uk

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STAFF LIST

information Director’s Office Director Brett Steele Personal Assistant Philip Hartstein Academic Head Charles Tashima AACP Shumon Basar Staff Francisco Gonzalez de Canales Oliver Domeisen Registrar’s Office Registrar Marilyn Dyer Assistant Registrar Belinda Flaherty Registrar’s Office/ External Students Administrative Coordinator Sabrina Blakstad Admissions (Undergraduate)/ Visiting Students Programme Coordinators Ruth Lie/Meneesha Kellay Admissions (Graduate) Coordinator Claire Perry Admissions Imogen Evans Undergraduate School Administrative Coordinator Victoria Bahia Visiting School Coordinator Chris Pierce Visiting/Global Schools/Visiting Teachers’ Programme Administrative Coordinator Sandra Sanna Foundation Studio Masters Saskia Lewis William Martyr Takako Hasegawa Matthew Butcher

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First Year Studio Masters Valentin Bontjes van Beek David Greene Samantha Hardingham Tobias Klein Martina Schäfer Robert StuartSmith Intermediate School Unit 1 Deane Simpson Mark Campbell Unit 2 Martin Self Charles Walker Unit 3 Nanette Jackowski Ricardo de Ostos Unit 4 Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel da Costa Gonçalves Unit 5 Stefano Rabolli Pansera Goswin Schewendinger Unit 6 Jonathan Dawes Fumiko Kato Dagobert Bergmans Unit 7 Liam Young Kate Davies Unit 8 Francisco Gonzalez de Canales Nuria Alvarez Lombardero Unit 9 Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews Unit 10 Claudia Pasquero Marco Poletto Unit 11 Theodore Sarantoglou Lalis Dora Sweijd Unit 12 Sam Jacob Tomas Klassnik Unit 13 Miraj Ahmed Martin Jameson

Diploma School Unit 1 Marianne Mueller Olaf Kneer Unit 2 Anne Save de Beaurecueil Franklin Lee Unit 3 Alison Brooks Max Kahlen Dip 4 John Palmesino Ann-Sofi Rönnskog Dip 5 Cristina Díaz Moreno Efrén García Grinda Unit 6 On Sabbatical Unit 7 Simon Beames Kenneth Fraser Unit 8 Eugene Han Chris Yoo Unit 9 Natasha Sandmeier Monia De Marchi Unit 10 Carlos Villanueva Brandt Unit 11 Shin Egashira Unit 12 Holger Kehne Jeffrey Turko Unit 13 Oliver Domeisen Tristan Simmonds Unit 14 Pier Vittorio Aureli Unit 15 Francesca Hughes Noam Andrews Unit 16 Jonas Lundberg Andrew Yau

Graduate School Administrative Coordinator Clement Chung Graduate Design DRL Directors Yusuke Obuchi Theodore Spyropoulos Founding Director Patrik Schumacher

Course Master Alisa Andrasek Marta Malé-Alemany Course Tutors Jeroen van Ameijde Shajay Bhooshan Christos Passas Robert Stuart-Smith Technical Tutors Lawrence Friesen Hanif Kara Riccardo Merello Emtech Director Michael Weinstock Codirector (Cohort 08/09) Michael Hensel Studio Master Christina Doumpioti Studio Tutors Evan Greenberg George Jeronimides Kostis Karatzas Landscape Urbanism Director Eva Castro Programme Staff Eduardo Rico Alfredo Ramirez Douglas Spencer Tom Smith Workshop Tutors Enriqueta Llabres Bridget Mackean Jorge Ayala Teruyuki Nomura Clara Oloriz Histories & Theories Director Marina Lathouri Programme Staff Pedro Ignacio Alonso Francisco Gonzalez de Canales Mark Cousins Housing & Urbanism Directors Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley Programme Staff Lawrence Barth

STAFF LIST Hugo Hinsley Nicholas Bullock Kathryn Firth Dominic Papa Elena Pascolo Alex WarnockSmith Sustainable Environmental Design Director Simos Yannas Programme Staff Klaus Bode Joana Soares Gonçalves Raul Moura Jorge Rodriguez Alvarez Gustavo Brunelli Alberto Moletto Barak Pelman Conservation of Historic Buildings Director Andrew Shepherd Programme Staff Judith Roebuck David Heath PhD Programme Academic Coordinator Simos Yannas Programme Staff Lawrence Barth Mark Cousins Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley Marina Lathouri Professional Practice Professional Studies Coordinator Rob Sparrow Professional Studies Advisor Alastair Robertson Part 1 Javier Castañón Future Practice/ Part 2 Hugo Hinsley Interprofessional Studio Studio Director Theo Lorenz Studio Master Tanja Siems

Studio Tutor Jan Brüggemeier

History & Theory Studies Administrative Coordinator Belinda Flaherty Director Mark Cousins Course Lecturers Brett Steele Mark Cousins Maria Fedorchenko Chris Pierce Consultants Judith Clark Sam Jacoby Christopher M Lee Patrick Wright John Palmesino Ines Weizman Pier Vittorio Aureli Mark Campbell Paul Davies Oliver Domeisen Brian Hatton Martin Self Brett Steele Simos Yannas Programme Staff William Firebrace Teaching Assistants Eva Eylers Emanuel de Sousa

Administrative Coordinator Belinda Flaherty Intermediate Master Wolfgang Frese Diploma Master Javier Castañon Programme Staff Phil Cooper Kostis Karatzas Martin Hagemann Anderson Inge Toni Kotnik Wolf Mangelsdorf John Noel Manja Van de Worp Simos Yannas Consultants Carolina Bartram Ian Duncombe Marissa Kretsch Randall Thomas Mohsen Zikri Emmanuele Marfisi

Media Studies Director Eugene Han Programme Staff Sue Barr Shajay Bhooshan Valentin Bontjes van Beek Monia De Marchi Shin Egashira Trevor Flynn Matej Hosek Toni Kotnik Zak Kyes Antoni Malinowski Joel Newman Anne Save de Beaurecueil Goswin Schwendinger Tobias Klein

Media Services Audiovisual Manager Joel Newman Audiovisual Assistant Nick Wayne Head of Computing Julia Frazer Assistant Head of Computing Mathew Bielecki Computer Engineers David Hopkins Timothy Ling Deron Marrett Kevin Seddon Syed Qadri Digital Platforms Network & Database Michael Papapavlou Computing Course Coordinator Eugene Han

Technical Studies Director of Research & Dev Michael Weinstock

Research Clusters Alan Dempsey Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Olaf Kneer Marina Lathouri Stefano Rabolli Ponsera Marianne Mueller

Digital Photo Studio Sue Barr Digital Platforms Head of Digital Platorms/ Web Designer Frank Owen Content Editor Rosa Ainley Images & Videos Joel Newman Workshops Model Making Trystrem Smith Wood and Metal Workshop Technicians Robert Busher Will Fausset Head of Digital Prototyping Jeroen van Ameijde Prototyping Lab Technician Kar Leung Wai Hooke Park Bruce Hunter-Inglis Charles Corry Wright Chris Sadd Association Secretary Kathleen Formosa Secretary’s Office Personal Assistant Cristian Sanchez Gonzalez Head of Membership Alex Lorente Membership Coordinator Jenny Keiff Membership Events Coordinator Luisa Miller Development Office Head of Development Esther McLaughlin Special Projects Officer Jan Brüggemeier

information AA Foundation Secretary Marilyn Dyer Administrator Alex Lorente Exhibitions Head of Exhibitions Vanessa Norwood Exhibitions Project Manager Lee Regan Exhibitions Coordinator Luke Currall Library Librarian Hinda Sklar Deputy Librarian Aileen Smith Archivist Edward Bottoms Cataloguer Beatriz Flora 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 Graphic Designers Wayne Daly Claire McManus AA Publications Marketing & Distribution Kirsten Morphet Marilyn Sparrow Photo Library Librarian Valerie Bennett Accounts Office Manager Steve Livett Assistants Fozia Munshi Lauren Harcourt Eve Livett Linda Keifff

Drawing Materials Shop Manager Liz Griffiths Facilities Manager Anita Pfauntsch Assistant Manager Peter Keiff Maintenance & Security Lea Ketsawang Colin Prendergast Leszak Skrzypiec Bogdan Swidzinski Matthew Hanrahan Adam Okuniewski Patrick Ridge Sebastian Wyatt Front of House Reception & Switchboard/ Outside Events Booking/ Managing Editor AArchitecture Nicola Quinn Reception & Switchboard Sandra Sanna Catering/Bar Manager/Chef Pascal Babeau Deputy Manager/ Barman Darko Calina Catering Assistants Brigitte Ayoro Daniel Swidzinski Miodrag Ristic Human Resources Head of Human Resources Tehmina Mahmood AA Bookshop Bookshop Manager Charlotte Newman Bookshop Assistant Luz Hincapie

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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 Prospectus is produced through the AA Print Studio

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.

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 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 Nicola Quinn (reception@aaschool.ac.uk/ 020 7887 4000), or by accessing the AA website at aaschool.ac.uk.

For an audio recording of AA Events List, please call 020 7887 4111.

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Editors: Pamela Johnston, Thomas Weaver Editorial Assistant: Clare Barrett Art Director: Zak Kyes Design: Claire McManus, Wayne Daly Printed in England by Beacon Press

academic year 2009/10 key dates Autumn Term (12 weeks) 28 September – 18 December 2009 Introduction week: Monday 21 – Friday 25 September Open week: Monday 2 – Friday 6 November Spring Term (10 weeks) 11 January – 19 March 2010 Summer Term (10 weeks) 19 April – 25 June 2010

Autumn Term 2009

Spring Term 2010

Intro Week: 25 September Picnic – all new students Week 1: 28 September 10am Diploma Unit Intros 29 September 10am Intermediate Unit Intros 30 September Graduate School Intros 2 October Complementary Studies Intros Week 2 All Complementary Studies courses commence Week 4: 19 October 1pm Foundation/First Year student meeting 20 October 1pm 2nd/3rd Year student meeting Week 5: 26 October 1pm 4th/5th Year student meeting 27 October 1pm Grad School student meeting Week 6: Open Week All undergrad classes suspended for the week for S.H.O.W 6 November External examiners MA/MSc: H+T, HU, LU, EmTech and SED Week 8: 16 November Part III oral exam Week 11: 11 December Christmas Party Week 12: 18 December End of Autumn Term

Week 1 HTS/TS/PP/FP hand-in week Progress reviews (all years) Week 2: 18 January All Complementary Studies courses commence 22 January Graduate School Open Day Week 3 Media Studies courses commence Week 4 Combined tutorials for Intermediate and Diploma units 5 February 1st Year Progress Reviews Week 6 Open Jury Week 7 Option 1: TS3/TS5 interim juries Week 8: 1 March External examiners MArch: SED, EmTech, DRL Week 9 Option 1: TS3/TS5 final submission week Week 10: 26 March End of Spring Term

Summer Term 2010

Week 1 HTS/TS submission hand-in week 19 April 1st Year Progress Reviews 20–21 April 4th Year Previews Week 2: 27–28 May Inter Previews for 3rd Year/Part 1 Week 3: 4–5 May Diploma Previews for 5th Year Week 4 Option 2: TS3/TS5 interim juries Week 5 Inter/Dip Final Jury Week Week 6 Option 2: TS3/TS5 final hand-in 24 March Part III Oral Exam Week 8: 7 June Foundation end of year reviews 2nd Year end of year reviews 8–9 June 4th Year end of year reviews 10 June TS3/TS5 High Pass Jury 10–11 June 1st Year end of year reviews Week 9: 14–15 June Intermediate (Part 1) final check 16–17 June Diploma Committee 18 June 2pm Dip Hons presentations Week 10: 22 June AA Intermediate examination (RIBA/ARB Part 1) 23 June AA Final examination (RIBA/ARB Part 2) 25 June 3pm graduation awards ceremony 6.30pm opening Projects Review End of Academic Year

PREFACE

notes UNIT

and

Unit Staff Valentin Bontjes van Beek, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, Nick Puckett Nathalie Rozencwajg, Martina Schäfer Students Eugenia Andersson, Faraz Anoushahpour, Uliana Apatina, Teeba Arain, Costantino Balbo Bertone di Sambuy, Frederik Bo Bojesen, Stefano Branca, Maria-Panagiota Brewster, Shu Susan Chai, Jin Chang, Hwui Zhi Cheng, Yeuh-Shen Chua, James Kwang-Ho Chung, Hussam Dakkak, Artemis Doupa, Gary Du

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Pont, Lap Heng Fung, Madoka Furuhashi, Max Hacke, Lyn Hayek, Yu Won Kang, Karl Karam, Ja Kyung Kim, Taeho Kim, Conrad Koslowsky, Saif Lassas, Stephen Marshall, Harpreet Marway, Eulalia Moran, Francisco de Borja Muguiro, Elisha Nathoo, Nora Nilsen, Aine O’Dwyer, Alex Osei-Bonsu, Jessica Pappalardo, Octave Perrault, Ryan Phanphensophon, Perrine Planché, Kristina Pokrovskaya, Costantino Rivetti, Elina Safarova, Kayvan Sarvi, Rebecca Spencer, William Stanley, Camille Steyaert, Anna

Ström, Luke Shixin Tan, Stefania Triantafyllou, Kassymkhan Ulykbanov Digital Workshop Jeroen van Ameijde, Monia De Marchi, Claude Ballini, Christopher Robeller, Adrian Tung, Michal Ciomek, Fredrik Hellberg, Kim Diego Azevedo

Video Workshop William Firebrace, Nic Clear, Dana Behrman, Joel Newman, Jesse Sabatier, Takanao Todo, Ina Kapitola, Colin Ashton, Rojia Abadeh, Jesse Randzio, Students of Oxford Brookes (Joel

aaschool.ac.uK

Chappell , Mike Halliwell, Simon Houlden, Marina Illum, Eva Seljan, Justus van der Hoven) Fashion Workshop Flora McLean, Janice Turner Thames Hotel Lectures Dr John Bold, Fergus Henderson, Holger Kehne, Brett Steele Thank you to all our visiting critics