AArchitecture08OCR

Issue 8 News from the Architectural Association

aarchitecture

There comes a time as an architectural student when you just want to say fuck the conceptual crap, the drawings, the smart talk, I just want to build something.

I think we all felt that.

New Releases from AA Publications PG 18

Bridge of Styx PG 16

Perhaps this best characterises our generation as one that is nonchalant, resourceful and adapts to the problem at hand.

On the Terrace PG 14

Revolutions of Choice PG 4

Verso

aarchitecture aarchitecture

Contributors

NOTE ABOUT THE DESIGN

News from the Architectural Association Issue 8 / Spring 2009 aaschool.ac.uk

Frank Barkow barkow@barkowleibinger.com

The first six issues of AArchitecture, established in 2006 looked to establish a new title in the AA’s ever-evolving series of magazines and journals and in doing so revisited the legacy of numerous short-lived AA publications.

Since the publication of the seventh issue, the magazine has looked to shift direction even further, in its structure, now including a student editor, and in its form, as a newsletter with a more standardised and repeating format.

At the same time alternative modes of publication continue to be explored though Bedford Press established at the AA in 2008. In this and future issues it is hoped that AArchitecture will respond to the changing context of the AA and its public programme to communicate student projects and writing.

©2009 All rights reserved Published by the Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

Henderson Downing henderson@aaschool.ac.ul Helen Evans ab3hle@hotmail.co.uk Gonçalo M. Furtado gmfcl@hotmail.com

Contact: contribute@aaschool.ac.uk Nicola Quinn +44 (0)20 7887 4033

Edouard le Maistre ealm@aaschool.ac.uk

To send news briefs: news@aaschool.ac.uk

Catherine Annie Pease catherineanniepease@gmail.com

Editorial Board

Rebecca Spencer flaine_31@hotmail.com

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

Nicola Quinn, Managing Editor Wayne Daly and Claire McManus, Graphic Designers Scrap Marshall, Student Editor Acknowledgements

Valerie Bennett Mary Bowman Bonnie Chu Gabriel Djilali Kathleen Formosa Luisa Miller Printed by Cassochrome, Belgium

Camille Steyaert cramoche@hotmail.com

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

Issue 8

2 Stefano Boeri 4 Revolutions of Choice 7 AA Council and Student Representation 8 Cinema Lalibela: Off-Road Architecture 10 The Encounters Around Architecture and Systems Research: (An Introductory Excerpt) 12 Jan Kaplicky: Future Systems 14 On The Terrace 16 Bridge of Styx 17 AA Design + Make Programme 18 New Releases from AA Publications 20 Nicholas Pozner Memorial Fund and Dinner 21 Members’ Trips 22 News 24 News Briefs 28 Forms of Inquiry Annex

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AA Lecture, 12 February 2009

Stefano Boeri

By Marianne Mueller AA lectures are a luxury. Where else can one find such a density of potent, diverse and thought-provoking talks than in the AA Lecture Hall on almost any day of the week? However, the sheer array of interesting speakers, combined with the ambitious and timeconsuming work being undertaken by the students, means that even some of the most inspiring speakers can sometimes find themselves in a room with quite an intimate audience. This was the case when architect and editor Stefano Boeri presented his work.

Stefano Boeri has many professions: he is a practicing architect based in Milan, educator (he teaches in Milan and Harvard), editor of the international magazine Abitare (and, previously, Domus) and founder of the research agency ‘Mulitplicity’. One of the remarkable things about his practice is how he has found multiple yet coherent ways of persistently shaping architectural culture through using these diverse personas, each with its own set of tools and devices, limits and potentials.

Although constantly moving between curating, promoting, criticising, teaching and producing architecture, Stefano’s underlying position and view of architecture as a discipline remains astonishingly focused.

His work always seems to be about shaping the perception of space. Through his ‘Multiplicity’ work, which he presented at the AA in 2003, he argued for a radical shift in perspective, away from the zenithal gaze – this totalising view from above which produces a critical distance to the field, and is so dominant in the architectural profession – towards a type of gaze that could capture and engage with the ‘local sphere’.

Often it is inhabited or ‘impure’ space which Stefano brings into public focus and has a personal passion for, continuously searching for a correspondence between space and society – in other words, how space can shape society. With his work for Abitare Stefano maps this specific perspective onto built space and refines it into what he calls ‘lateral gaze’.

Using this ‘lateral gaze’, a type of sidelong glance that somehow wanders around the periphery of the object in question rather than focusing directly upon it, Stefano has brought a number of changes to the glossy world of the architectural magazine.

These are as subtle as they are radical, reforming the representation and therefore the reception of architecture. Here are some examples: the introduction of literature to the magazine and the commissioning of pieces of fiction set in contemporary

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architectural projects; the introduction of the use and the life of buildings after their completion; the deconstruction of architectural imagery within the magazine. This complexity of images introduces daily life and the social dimension of architecture and design, establishing the magazine as a device for criticism and teaching as well for creating social and political processes within and beyond its pages.

I particularly enjoyed his presentation of a number of reviews in Abitare that revisited buildings after their completion. This is a truly daring and potentially unpopular idea. It reflects the moment when the architect is no longer in control of the spaces he conceived. Conventional architectural imagery reflects this unease: as most computer renderings feature brilliant sunshine or amazing sunsets, most architectural photography is taken at the precarious moment when the building is still lifeless and without any traces of inhabitation. Stefano showed a refreshing review from Abitare of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from the point of view of the façade cleaning team. How wonderful!

Exploring the presence of buildings through his ‘lateral gaze’, he has reworked the focus of architectural imagery throughout the magazine, to embrace daily life and other ‘impurities’ or processes often erased from the portrayal of buildings and urban spaces. But he would argue that it is precisely these processes that allow us to grasp the coexistence of many different lateral presences that may exist in relation to a piece of architecture, and that the magazine is able to reveal their social dimension.

After the lecture I asked Stefano if he had doubts about the architectural object per se or thought it to be peripheral. In his reply he stated that he was not against the object as such but, on the contrary, he was so intensely interested in the physical or ‘mineral’ presence of built space that he trusted it had the capacity to produce processes beyond the object.

And it is of precisely these processes that we need to take note.

Marianne Mueller is a Unit Master of Intermediate Unit 1

Stefano Boeri discusses his projects during his lecture at the AA. Photos Valerie Bennett

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AA Exhibition, 27 February—27 March 2009

Revolutions of Choice

By Barkow Leibinger The ‘Atlas of Fabrication’ exhibition offered a glimpse of our practice’s dedication to experimental fabrication as an autonomous work in progress, focusing on the digital (and analogue) workshop techniques that have become one of the best methods for enabling the conception and production of architecture. We separate this work from our everyday building projects and the design competitions in which we participate.

This autonomy facilitates a form of research that is open-ended and speculative, able to succeed or fail, free from deadlines, client briefs or budget constraints at the time of its inception. Equally this research establishes an archive of materials, shaped by an array of tooling procedures, to which we continue to add, and our archive in turn records tectonic possibilities that can be applied to ongoing building projects or sponsored projects (hardware, furniture, etc.) as required. The architectural exhibition is a perfect format for the development of this work. Rather than representing or referring to architecture outside the gallery, the architectural or prototypical installation constitutes architecture’s actual effects and experiences as a de facto site in itself.

This research began with our teaching at the AA in the mid-90s, with our unit brief calling ‘for an idea of an architectural prototype which emerges from the control of a technical system’. Students surveyed machines in order to understand their capacity to transform material. This method positions the digital as a guide in the tooling of material, rather than as an image-producing system. Our ambition here is to dissolve, as much as possible, the boundary between representation (the things we draw and model) and truth (the things we build). We favour the mock-up, the prototype or the 1:1 scale model, the real over the rendered, as the best way to understand the potential of an idea. Ultimately we inform our buildings by these processes. It is a progressive procedure, one in which we have worked from initial projects where fabrication merely ‘accessorises’ a building to the point where it now encompasses essential components such as cladding and structural systems. While digital technology is at the forefront, our approach to architecture is inclusive: analogue, digital and handmade techniques can all be found in our current buildings. We exploit opportunities or embrace limitations depending on the building culture we find ourselves working in, and use the technologies site-specifically to drive the work. Perhaps this best characterises our generation as one that is nonchalant,

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resourceful and adapts to the problem at hand.

This informs the work and establishes difference.

The physical outcome of our fabrication work embodies both formal/aesthetic attributes and performative/functional ones, oscillating between these two poles. The terms ornamental, decorative or pattern-like describe the appearance and critical alignment of much of our recent work. Nonetheless these are systems where structural components, or systems that control surface, light, air or temperature, are made apparent, enabling one to see how they work and change. Digital machining enables ornamental complexity: no crime here – it’s just another choice.

We use software such as Rhino or Visual Basic scripting. Initially a way to set up rule-based strategies to produce pattern (repetition and variation), it is now used to resolve complex geometric construction problems. In these ways the architect is empowered and freed from the standard building catalogue, freed from ‘experts’ and in a position to have much more control over the construction of his or her buildings.

In our work these technologies are trickling down and being applied to everyday buildings: factories, offices, houses, canteens.

The exhibition, like the fabrication archive in our practice, is organised around groups of actions.

The action of a particular material and the resulting transformations drive the formal characteristics of our work, not the other way around. This favours surfacemaking or form-making that evolves from the logic of material accumulation, rather than producing forms which must then be materially rendered post facto.

A testing of the capabilities of those machines in order to exploit the full range of possibilities follows the inventory process.

We work differently from how we did 10 or 15 years ago. We keep looking for new tools and instruments. We speak to the people who make the machines and the people that operate them in order to learn their capabilities. In this search we find ourselves looking outside our discipline for knowledge and techniques that we can then bring back into architecture. This is what drives our work and makes it evolve; these are the things that allow design to move forward. Authenticity is a result of discovery as much as of invention.

Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger are former Intermediate Unit Masters

Before and After. The installation process and the end result of the ‘An Atlas of Fabrication’ Exhibiton by Barkow Leibinger. Photos Valerie Bennett

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AA Council

AA Council and Student Representation

Spreads from Barkow Leibinger: An Atlas of Fabrication, AA Publications 2009

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The responsibilities of the AA Council include ensuring the AA’s financial health, compliance with applicable (and ever-changing) statutory requirements, and reviewing the school’s academic programmes and initiatives. During the last two years, important initiatives have included re-energising membership activities, strengthening the AA’s governance, and expanding the AA’s property holdings.

During the 2008/09 governance year, Council felt particularly that student involvement had been missing for too long. Luckily, members of Student Forum were drawing the same conclusions, and at the Annual General Meeting held in December 2008, several students presented a petition asking that members of Student Forum be co-opted onto Council.

Council took the unanimous decision at its January 2009 meeting that two members of Student Forum – the maximum allowed by the by-laws – should be co-opted as a way of improving understanding and the flow of information between the AA School and the AA’s governing body. The co-opted students are Camille Steyaert and Rebecca Spencer, both in second year. According to Rebecca, ‘The aim of having Student Forum representatives on the AA Council is about being able to participate in the discussion, and to have the student perspective considered when decisions relating to the school are made. The prospect is an exciting one that relies on the students and members being vocal about what they want.’

Although they joined mid-session, Camille and Rebecca were given the same trustee induction that all members of Council receive upon joining – an induction which includes an introduction to the regulatory and legal frameworks in which charities and UK companies must operate, a detailed look at the AA’s governing documents, and a review of key business decisions taken by the Council over the past two years. Both have participated actively in discussions regarding the setting of student fees and the acquisition and disposal of properties owned and/or leased by the Architectural Association for the benefit of the AA School.

The Architectural Association, Inc. is governed constitutionally as a charitable company, the primary object of which is the running of a school of architecture. Members of Council act as directors and trustees of the charitable company, including the AA School. It is also the parent company of AA Publications, Ltd., which runs the AA Book Shop and distributes books and other published materials

produced by the AA School. Council members receive no compensation for their work.

Any member of the Architectural Association (including students) is eligible to stand for election to a seat on Council, with the exception of those who are in paid employment at the AA, such as tutors and administrative staff. Nominations to the Council ballot for the 2009/10 year closed on 3 April 2009.

Ballots for the 2009/10 Council elections will be circulated in early May. In order for students and all other members of the Architectural Association to ensure their interests are represented on Council, members must remember to vote during the elections in May. All members will receive a ballot in the post, which will include full information on all candidates running for Council as well as clear notification of instructions for voting and the voting deadline. Votes may be submitted online or by freepost.

Student Representation Recently the question has arisen as to whether the Student Forum could or should do more than organise the end-of-term parties for which it had become renowned. It was felt above all that the communication between specific departments and SF needed to be improved. Our position on the AA Council is a great development in terms of ensuring this. Questions had been raised as to how important popular opinion is within the school regarding the continuation of traditional events. Therefore, representatives on the council will in future be able to ensure that such considerations are not overlooked, and with the acquisitions of the new buildings on Bedford Square, the consideration of the student perspective could not be more important.

The co-option onto Council is indeed an achievement and for that we must thank the Council members for welcoming us. Thanks also must be passed on to the many students and staff members who encouraged the suggestion and instilled the confidence to pursue student representation.

We should like to highlight that in order for student representation to remain on the Council in the year to come, members must make the use of their vote in the forthcoming Council elections in May.

By Camille Steyaert and Rebecca Spencer, Second Year Students and Student Representatives

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AA Diploma Unit Trip

Cinema Lalibela: Off-Road Architecture

By Helen Evans

The second night – crowds of hundreds gathered to watch the film festival. Photo George Woodrow

In December 2008 Diploma Unit 7 brought a portable cinema to Lalibela, a remote village in Ethiopia, as far ‘off the beaten track’ as it comes. Under the moonlight and framed by rugged mountains, a unique interaction took place with a community far removed, in every sense, from that of Bedford Square.

Diploma 7 has a tradition of travelling to developing countries to carry out research for architectural proposals that promote sustainable growth. This year, a different approach to the unit trip was taken; the idea was to use a cinema to engage with the local population of Lalibela and hence gain greater insight into their culture and the challenges faced by the community. Moreover, our film festival aimed to provide a meaningful contribution to the village during our stay. Lalibela is a village of 20,000 people in Northern Ethiopia, best known for its ancient rock-hewn churches. The village can be reached by a two-hour flight or a two-day drive from the capital, Addis Ababa. After three weeks of intense preparation, we flew out to Addis with our equipment and then hired a minibus for an epic drive to Lalibela, often over unforgiving terrain.

The cinema is essentially a cylindrical enclosure housing the projection equipment. Images are back-projected onto the end of the cylinder, allowing the audience to sit wherever they please without obstructing the picture. This arrangement gives a useful ‘backstage’ area for the projectionists. During the day the interior space can be used for consultations or exhibitions. Almost a building in a suitcase, the structure is lightweight (for portability), cheap and

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quick to assemble. The design consists of a 12mm GRP framework wrapped in polyester net fabric under tension. When erected the structure stands 3m high and stretches to over 15m in length. When packed up it fills just two boxes and one small bag.

Deploying the cinema was a performance in itself that caused much commotion with the locals.

The structure dramatically took three-dimensional form from a thin disc to a tube 15m long within a matter of seconds. The translucent skin beautifully caught the flickering film projections, becoming a glowing alien object in the landscape at night.

Children compared its appearance to that of the moon. An unexpected, but gratifying, display of local interest was the enthusiasm with which the villagers helped with the deployment of the structure. The fact that people wanted to become part of the effort and were so visibly excited by it felt like a real measure of success.

There is a very real future for Cinema Lalibela.

The NGO Link Ethiopia have a project already underway – to improve an existing football pitch and provide much needed sanitation facilities. Diploma 7 has been invited to design a permanent cinema as part of Link’s educational programme. The first phase of the project was supported by two donors who wish to remain anonymous, and the unit is currently looking for fund-raising partners for the next phase. An exhibition will take place in the AA Bar in May – watch this space!

Silhouettes of projectionists seen through the translucent skin of the cinema.

Photo George Woodrow

The cinema’s debut showing of ‘Blue Planet’ outside the elementary school.

Helen Evans is a Fourth Year AA student

Photo Johnny Gao

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AA Member’s Projects

The Encounters Around Architecture and Systems Research: (An Introductory Excerpt)

By Gonçalo M. Furtado The following text is an excerpt from Gonçalo Furtado’s ‘Envisioning an Evolving Environment: The Encounters of Gordon Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer’ [PhD Dissertation], London: University College of London, 2007. The thesis provides a history of exchanges between architecture and the fields of cybernetics, systems research and computation throughout the last five decades.

In particular, it focuses on the encounters between three pre-eminent British professionals – Gordon Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer – and provides a complete account of two outstanding architectural projects related to systems and computation, Generator and Japan Net. It also highlights the architectural relevance of these encounters and the importance of their contemporary legacy – the genesis of the systemic and computational paradigm in architectural design and the promotion of an evolving environment.

In the post-war era, cybernetics and the systems approach have shown new means of dealing with complexity and organisation, which possess broad application. This has been paralleled by developments in computation and Artificial Intelligence. In the UK distinguished work was developed by cyberneticians such as Ashby, Beer, Pask and George.

Cyberneticist and experimental psychologist, Gordon Pask, the crucial figure of second-ordercybernetics who was awarded the Wiener gold medal, is identified as a seminal promoter of cybernetics in the fields of art and architecture since the 1960s.

Pask also developed particular ideas on ‘general intelligence’ (as distinct from the more rigid understanding of Artificial Intelligence) and his own major second-order cybernetics achievement – Conversation Theory – which interestingly had one of its first expressions in architecture. Clearly, Pask understood computation as something interactive, and conversation as the basis of meaning exchange.

In relation to architecture, modernist thinking was affected by the breakthrough attitude of the 1960s

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and 1970s. At the time, there were many parallel avant-garde practices, including Archigram and Yona Friedman, and they presented their work jointly with Cedric Price in the 1966 IDEA. The two projects mentioned in this short text pertain, not coincidently, to Price. This maverick of British avant-garde architecture was a tireless promoter of flexible impermanent architecture open to users’ participation, a concept from which arose post-modern questions concerning the role of architecture in society and the architect’s status. Price’s early acknowledgement of the potential of the new informational and computational technology permitted the formation of influential bases for the later development of high-tech and digital architecture.

From 1976 onwards, Cedric Price worked on a project engaged with systems and computers – the Generator. This envisioned a flexible architectural complex on the Florida-Georgia border, consisting of a grid into which a crane would deliver cubical spatial modules and other components in various arrangements. My thesis reveals Price’s exhaustive pursuit of an impermanent architecture open to users.

Price’s aim of a ‘responsive architecture’ was furthered by John and Julia Frazer’s systems consultancy. The Frazers’ up-to-date research provided a system that enabled and stimulated the regeneration of the complex and, furthermore, they envisioned Generator as possessing its own life and mind – a proactive rather than a reactive structure. Price and the Frazers’ encounters reflected, at the time, the availability of computation opened by the microprocessor, and such encounters led to its recognition as the first intelligent building.

John Frazer continued to develop outstanding computational research on the seed technique, intelligent modelling systems and evolutionary architecture. He became a crucial name associated with evolutionary design computation, and his insights continue to exert their influence today.

In 1982, Pask’s Microman offered a seminal envisioning of man-machine symbiosis in a more holistic Information Environment, and his involvement with ‘Andragology’ led to Conversation

John Frazer, Cedric Price, Gordan Pask & Robert Mull. Photo Valerie Bennett

Theory’s extension into the Interaction of Actors theory. Pask also reencountered Price in 1986 for Japan Net. Here, Pask gave a unique expression to Price’s premises of change and permanent information exchange, envisioning Kawasaki as an ample evolving system, and expressing his own second-ordercybernetics’ interests. Frazer and his unit, in turn, developed outstanding research that would lead to the ‘Universal Constructor’ and subsequent electronic models and exhibitions at the AA. His research coincided with a revisiting of the Generator project (1989–90) for which a model containing interactive adaptation and evolutive capacities was envisioned.

When one of Frazer’s electronic models was exhibited at the AA, Pask identified it as an expression of the Information Environment.

Also at the AA, Pask manifested his interest in experimenting with the ‘Thoughtsticker’, and in promoting the ‘Information Environment’ and the ‘Architecture of Knowledge’ epistemology. He became involved in the organisation of events at the AA that dealt with time and emergence issues [e.g. with Bunschoten], and even intended to conceive an evolving computation animation called ‘A of K’ to be exhibited together with Frazer’s electronic model.

In 1995 Frazer published a major account about An Evolutionary Architecture (AA Publications), a new paradigm that equated architecture with an ‘artificial life form’. This new paradigm resembled Price’s own search for a ‘responsive architecture’ and computer aided design methods that would benefit users. Pask authored the foreword, and he also revealed his interest in writing a work entitled ‘Architecture of Civilization, Culture and the Information Environment’, in line with his later concerns with a civilisation encompassing the temporal evolution of culture, architecture and thought.

Throughout that time the new techno-cultural order of the Information Society was established, influencing architecture at the level of urban, building and design. The current interest in thoughts of complexity and emergence and in a more evolving environment has its roots in systems research and computation. Gordon Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer have had long-lasting influences and retain contemporary relevance to work developed by a range of architects and artists.

Gonçalo Furtado is a Member of the AA paskpricefrazer.blogspot.com

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Jan Kaplicky: Future Systems

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He ran a Diploma Unit at the AA with Ron Herron between 1982 and 1988, and was External Examiner between 1995 and 1998.

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13

AA Live Spaces

On The Terrace

By Henderson Downing My first job at the AA lasted less than thirty minutes.

It was during Projects Review, July 2001. I was drumming in an experimental indie band booked to provide part of the day’s musical entertainment.

Playing on the terrace above the Materials Shop, we watched as storm clouds gathered overhead. Before the late afternoon lightning electrocuted any of our guitarists, the plug was pulled. Up to that point, we had breezed through a set list fervently polished while touring the UK with legendary Japanese psychedelic rockers Acid Mothers Temple. Back then I knew almost nothing of the AA’s counter-cultural legacy.

But there were whispers that we were intersecting in a musical continuum that included a group of architecture drop-outs who had galvanized the 1966 AA Christmas Carnival under the name Pink Floyd.

And that Throbbing Gristle had almost incited a riot in 1978 when they embarked on a performance billed as ‘High Noise Torture’ from inside a cage in Ching’s Yard.1 Aside from the life-threatening thunderstorm and the lavish drinks rider, the most memorable aspect of Projects Review involved watching the ways the audience circumnavigated the school. I was intrigued by the complex interaction between the building and the sociability of the event. We were surrounded by a constant flow of people surging through a multilayered network of stairs, corridors and terraces while partying through the contents of their champagne glasses. Closest to the bar, the first floor terrace proved the most crowded of these outdoor spaces ‘inside’ the school.

Working in the AA Photo Library a couple of years later, I was introduced to an incredibly rich archive of images detailing the life of the building.

Like the Bedford Square pavement that hosts the annual pavilions, the first-floor terrace and its adjacent spaces have proved significant sites for installations and exhibitions. The majority of these projects have been the work of AA students. Most recently, as an important part of the ongoing series of full-scale structural experiments by the EmTech programme, a team of graduate students used an innovative component-based design approach to construct a Membrane Canopy that provided the terrace with adjustable sun shading and rain protection without obstructing the views across the key interstitial spaces of the AA and the neighbouring roofscape.

In 1997, as part of the AA’s 150th anniversary celebrations, the eminent New York-based artist

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Dan Graham constructed a pergola on the terrace – an intervention that asked people to reconsider their spatial negotiation of the building.2 Twice in the last month I have heard people cite Georges Perec’s potentially gnomic remark that we ‘should learn to live more on staircases’.3 By occupying the admittedly grand yet recognisably domestic setting of a Georgian terrace in Bedford Square, the AA has become a laboratory for the kind of transformative exercises in recalibrating our habitual responses to everyday space that preoccupied Perec. Not only have the inhabitants of the AA learned to live more on staircases, but in corridors and on terraces too.

In the essay ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’ Robin Evans cites the innovation of the corridor as a critical element in a shift towards a more private and segregated occupation of space in Western culture. As an AA alumnus and tutor, Evans had firsthand experience of the reprogrammed domestic space of the school that both supplemented and problematised his analysis. His essay concludes with a quiet entreaty to reconsider ‘an architecture arising out of the deep fascination that draws people towards others; an architecture that recognises passion, carnality and sociality’.4 Like the AA bar (a room that has recognised its own share of ‘passion, carnality and sociality’ over the years), the first-floor terrace is situated within a series of interconnected spaces.

Although severely limited in size, it still functions as a hub – weather permitting – for random encounters between different parts of the school. With the consolidation and planned expansion of the AA into a single campus based around what is often revealingly described as its ‘home’ in Bedford Square, there is a need to register the continuing relevance of an architecture that sustains the kind of convivial communities investigated by Evans in the 1970s. At its most gregarious, as captured in numerous archival photographs of crowds gathered to watch firework displays, the terrace provides a homegrown model for such future spaces (with or without musical accompaniment).

Henderson Downing works in the AA Photo Library

Installation by Intermediate 3, Projects Review 1996. Photo Valerie Bennett

Dan Graham, ‘Pergola, Architecture2’.

Photo VB

Projects Review 1998. Photo VB 1. On 3 March 2003, as a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the gig, Pete Gomes and Allon Kaye organised ‘TG03/03/03’: an event in the AA dining room that coupled an audio recording of Throbbing Gristle’s original 1978 performance with projected footage shot by Gomes from the audience’s point of view around Ching’s Yard 25 years later. For more on TG at the AA, see Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (London: Black Dog, 1999), pp. 8.12–8.14.

2. Through a series of glass pavilions and other hybrid projects that rupture the definitional seam between sculpture and architecture, Graham has spent decades repositioning the spectator into a more active role as a subject within his work – often encouraging that subject to reflect (literally) on the relationship between perception and participation.

3. Georges Perec, ‘Species of Spaces/Espèces d’espaces’ in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. by John Sturrock (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1997), pp. 1–91 (p. 38). Espèces d’espaces was initially published in 1974 as a small book commissioned by Paul Virilio.

4. Robin Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’ in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), pp. 55–91 (p. 90). The essay was first published in Architectural Design, vol. 48, no. 4 (April 1978), pp. 267–78.

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AA Live Spaces

New AA Programmes

Bridge of Styx

Bridge of Styx, July 1988. Photo John McMinn

The Bride of Styx was a workshop project undertaken

by AA students for the Projects Review Exhibition in 1988.

The Blasters, AA Students Mark Wallace Jeff Molder Robert Mentho Mary Bowman John McMinn

Workshop Staff Gille Djilali Peter Billing Chris Evans Don Bates Jamie Campbell David Petters Jeff Molder Mark Wallace

From Projects Review 1987–88 There comes a time as an architectural student when you just want to say fuck the conceptual crap, the drawings, the smart talk … I just want to build something. I think we all felt that. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we were all North Americans … A feeling that anything is possible and if it doesn’t work out you can’t say we didn’t try.

Don’t want to think too much. What does it mean?

Structural rationale? Is it right? Is it beautiful? No! At some point energy, enthusiasm (and the lure of lolly) take over. The thing just grows … organically.

Welding, sparks flying, grinding, shouts, profanity, spit, beer and dirt. Knees, back, fingers ache. Feels good. Watch it growing, sprouting legs, looks like a bird’s nest … eating Chicken Al Capone and knowing it’s going to be great. Extra hands help hoist it into place, stretching and arching over 10 metres, the last welds … running out of time. The bridge, a shack, a couple of coal-burning barrels and lots of garbage lit up by blue lights shining through swiftly moving fog … a few too many drinks and you forget about…

The Urban Blues.

Mary Bowman

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AA Design + Make Programme AA Graduate Diploma (Design + Make) In 2009 the AA School will launch a new full-time studio/workshop-based graduate design programme in rural, alternative architectures. The programme, entitled AA Design + Make (AA D+M), will be based at the AA’s Hooke Park campus, a working forest in Dorset, three hours’ west of the AA School in London.

The new AA Design + Make programme pursues the teaching and learning of architecture through the design and construction of small-scale, sustainable and ecologically sensitive prototype buildings located in rural settings and communities.

The course is distinct from the rest of the AA School in that it is the only full-time course of study located at Hooke Park. Its focus is on rural settings and alternative, renewable construction methods, with hands-on, building and environmental projects pursued by students living in a small, local community. This innovative academic programme directly engages with the contemporary ethical and professional challenges faced by architects working in rural communities, protected landscapes and delicate ecological settings. Participants learn through open experimentation with renewable and alternative building materials, and develop sustainable building construction systems through collaborative design, workshop and building activities.

The 16-month, four-term course will bring together students, teachers, consultants and craftspeople from rural England, Europe and around the world. Students and staff will live off-site in a village community near Hooke Park. During its early years the programme will design and construct buildings located at Hooke Park, creating a new rural AA campus that will benefit the AA School and local communities. In the longer term the programme will work directly in local Dorset communities, creating experimental prototype buildings appropriate to their settings.

Coursework includes a combination of design, ecology and materials seminars and workshops.

Design studios, planning submissions and on-site construction coursework feature prominently in the

AA D+M’s project-driven pedagogy. Throughout the world architects today are confronting unprecedented challenges which are altering the relationship between cities and rural communities. Contemporary architectural practice is accordingly being transformed by a recognition that the issues associated with rural settings present both opportunities and problems that lie beyond conventional educational and professional approaches. The AA D+M programme has been created as a means to fully explore and address these challenges.

As in many other parts of the AA School, a core belief in the course is that students and architects can learn through the imagination, development and realisation of large-scale prototype structures. These become the means by which ideas for the future are conceived, tested, documented and communicated to others interested in experimental thinking and learning abour architecture.

The AA D+M programme responds to the need for inventive, sustainable and new alternative architectures that are able to address the challenges of rural, local and environmentally sensitive natural and community settings. Architecture, like other design cultures, must reconsider the relationship between urban and rural environments and their ways of living, working and inhabiting natural and manmade environments. Hooke Park takes as central to its existing and future mission a carefully calibrated engagement with rural and local community life as the setting for an innovative and unique learning environment in architecture today.

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AA Publications

New Releases from AA Publications 1 New AA Words 3 The Poetics of a Wall Projection Jan Turnovský Translated by Kent Kleinman 128 pp, b/w ills 180 x 110 mm, paperback March 2009 ISBN 978-1-902902-68-5 £12 Originally published in German in 1985 as Die Poetik eines Mauervorsprung, Jan Turnovský’s The Poetics of a Wall Projection is ostensibly a description of a corner within the breakfast room of the Villa Stonborough in Vienna, designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann. But it is also much more. Working from within an established Viennese tradition (practised most famously by Krauss, Freud, Loos and Wittgenstein himself), Turnovsky’s study elucidates a complex set of ideas from something seemingly trivial – in this case, an analysis of the villa’s corner detail expands into a wider exploration of the logics of architectural syntax and his belief that good and poetic architecture is always also practical.

Jan Turnovský (1941–1995) at various times worked as a carpenter, graphic designer, tenor saxophonist, poet and architectural researcher at the Architectural Association and the Technical University in Vienna.

The Poetics of a Wall Projection is translated, and introduced, by Kent Kleinman, Dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University.

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2 Forthcoming AA Words 4 Having Words Denise Scott Brown 160 pp 180 x 110 mm, paperback May 2009 ISBN 978-1-902902-70-8 £12 Having Words collects together for the first time ten essays by the pioneering architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown.

Educated in the 1940s and 1950s at Witwatersrand University, the AA and the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Brown has, since the 1960s, taught and led her Philadelphia firm, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, in collaboration with Robert Venturi.

The essays in this collection extend from her 1967 text, ‘Planning the Powder Room’ (written five years before the publication of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s seminal book Learning From Las Vegas) to ‘Towards an Active Socioplastics’ from 2007, which offers an overview of Scott Brown’s education and the gestation of her key architectural and urban ideas.

In between, nine other essays from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, offer insights not only into Scott Brown’s evolving architectural imagination but touch upon the changing collective ideas and aspirations of design education and practice.

The launch of this title will take place on Thursday 30 April at approximately 7.30pm, following Denise Scott Brown’s lecture at the Architectural Association.

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3 New An Atlas of Fabrication Barkow Leibinger 96 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills 297 x 210 mm, paperback March 2009 ISBN 978-1-902902-75-3 £12.50 An Atlas of Fabrication celebrates the commitment to material research that informs the buildings and teaching of Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger, who were AA unit masters in the late 1990s.

The practice’s fascination with machine-tool fabrication began academically but now resonates in all ongoing building projects within the practice.

This publication accompanied an exhibition at the Architectural Association from 27 February to 27 March 2009.

The exhibition showed how the work favours a material architecture, guided by a conviction that architectural ideas and materials are inextricably intertwined. Put another way, architecture is a physical substance, and the point of conceptualisation is to figure out how to treat that material. It is a practice that embraces the factory, where an ongoing dialogue is established with the industries that make the machines and people who operate them. This knowledge informs the work and frees it from the standard building catalogue.

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AA Membership and Development

AA Membership and Development

Nicholas Pozner Memorial Fund and Dinner

Members’ Trips

By Catherine Annie Pease When Nicholas Pozner died tragically in a car accident in Spain in November 2006, only a few months after graduating from the AA, those of us who knew him wanted to find a way to celebrate and commemorate his short but incredibly fruitful life.

Nick had many wonderful qualities which included generosity, kindness, humour and enthusiasm. He showed a great passion not only for the people that he knew, but also for the things that he did. In his eyes something was not complete unless it had reached a state of perfection. Therefore it was only right to hold an event that brought across his many qualities and that he would have been proud to have organised himself. After months of preparations this finally took place on 28 February 2009, when over 130 people gathered at the AA to celebrate Nick’s life and launch ‘The Nicholas Pozner Memorial Fund Prize for Best Single Drawing’ aimed to inspire and encourage future AA generations.

The evening – the largest formal sit-down dinner held at the AA in the past ten years – was a unique opportunity to commemorate an exceptional life. It was attended by family, friends and colleagues who’d known Nick in different contexts and at different periods of his life, but all of whom had been touched by his warmth. Not only did having so many people who knew Nick in one place make his presence felt all the more, but also the evening was structured in such a way that each part brought back something different. To begin, everyone gathered in the bar where an exhibition of Nick’s work was held. As Charles Tashima mentioned in his speech, the bar was where many of us spent time with Nick and therefore it was apt to bring him back into that space.

This was followed by a screening of his film ‘Cookie’, to which he had dedicated many hours of his holidays and free time, showing the same attention and care which he applied to his architecture. Dinner followed in the Lecture Hall, where all the guests were seated for an elaborate four-course meal whilst photographs of Nick were projected onto a screen. The evening culminated in an auction and raffle as part of the fundraising for the Memorial Prize.

‘The Nicholas Pozner Memorial Fund Prize for Best Single Drawing’ was an idea conceived by Nick’s parents Liz and Anthony Pozner and Brett Steele. It is an annual prize awarded to an AA student or group of

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students for the best single drawing of that year.

From a personal point of view I can not think of a more appropriate prize to commemorate Nick. He had an incredibly strong sensibility towards line, depth of plane and layout. I particularly admired him for his natural transition from hand drawings at Cambridge to computer drawings at the AA. The exhibition in the bar displayed these different works and serve to illustrate how talented he was, whatever the medium.

Having followed a year later, I was lucky enough to have him as my mentor and was able to learn many techniques from him. What really stood out was the precision and detail that went into a drawing. Every line was considered. The result was that the most technical of drawings became an artwork in itself. To date the Memorial Fund has raised £43,000 with over 200 donors. On the evening itself £8,000 was raised in the auction with lots that included limited edition Zaha Crevasse vases, Glyndebourne tickets and a flight over the Thames Valley in a 1952 De Havilland Chipmunk aircraft.

Everyone felt that Nick in his modest way would have been amazed had he seen the school transformed in his honour. The family, the committee (Ben Brafman, Rob Gluckman, Mellis Haward, Anya Matthews, Tom Smith, Charles Tashima and Tom Whitecross) and many others did a wonderful job in creating an evening of which Nick would have been proud. He would have been touched to see so many friends and family gathered together to celebrate his life. However, Nick would have deserved no less, and the Memorial Fund will be a constant tribute to him in future years.

Westminster Lodge, Hooke Park in the recent snow. Photo Jesse Randizo

Catherine Annie Pease is an alumnus of the AA On 25 April there will be a Members’ day trip to Hooke Park offering an opportunity to enjoy the woodland when the bluebells are in bloom, and to see the Dorset site’s pioneering examples of sustainable architecture; the refectory and workshop

by Richard Burton and Frei Otto, the Westminster Lodge by Edward Cullinan with Buro Happold and the Crossings bridge by AA students in collaboration with Jürg Conzett.

Richard Burton will deliver a talk to the visitors on the history of Hooke Park, and there will be an opportunity to learn about the AA’s future plans

whilst enjoying a barbeque. The cost is £40 including the barbeque and travel to and from London, or £15 if you are making your own way to Hooke Park.

Other upcoming Membership Events in May include a walking tour of Corbusian architecture in London led by Alan Powers of the Twentieth Century Society, the price of which is £12, and a trip to Paris to see the architecture of Le Corbusier there, costing £200.

To book a place on any of these events please contact Luisa Miller on 020 7887 4034 or events@aaschool.ac.uk

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NEWS

NEWS

A Personal Tribute from

Paul Barnett

Edouard Le Maistre

What to say about a friend you knew …. and yet didn’t know? By that I mean that Gille came in many guises – he could be different things to different people. To my mind, there was a sense of mystery about the man; for instance one time he was ‘Djilali’ and another time, no doubt for very good personal reasons, his name would change to ‘Larbi’. I guess I only got to know the ‘good old Gille’ that he wanted me to know, and I was only too aware that there was a richness about his multi-faceted life of which, alas, I only managed to catch a glimpse. For all that, I valued Gille as a friend. He could be both a ‘challenge’ and also incredibly hospitable and generous to a fault. I recall his love of cookery and the tales he told about the Moroccan roast lamb he cooked for workshop parties, and his knowledge of wine and surprising sophistication in such matters.

In typical AA tradition Gille was a one-off. Such a character! He came from Tangiers via Paris, sort of multi-lingual with some experience of stone masonry and building construction, and fortuitously at a time when the AA industrial workshop was ripe for expansion. Gille developed technical skills in parallel with the increasing demands on the workshop, with – over the years – countless unit masters and students wanting to push the boundaries of structural experimentation using all

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kinds of materials and techniques.

At any celebration otf Gille’s life there will no doubt be many anecdotes about staff and students’ ‘adventures’ with Gille in the AA workshop, outside in Ching’s Yard and beyond. Gille intuitively and enthusiastically lent his support to the physical realisation of projects of which other schools of architecture could only dream. Much of this work was achieved way outside normal daytime working hours and often with Gille’s beloved jazz music playing in the background.

In those flexible days before Health & Safety, Gille created in the workshop a truly ‘can-do’ environment where many students (and teaching staff too!) cut their teeth on some amazing fabrications. Gille refused to get in the way of a good idea; indeed he often seized on students’ concepts and gave them his full encouragement. That’s not to say that he was always easy to get on with – after all he was what some would call a bit of a maverick and could occasionally be quite volatile! The flip side was that, when time was short, Gille would lend all his energies and time to those who would appreciate it. He also had this uncanny and unerring ability to spot someone misusing a machine out of the corner of his eye – no doubt derived from his experience as a crane operator in Paris watching helplessly as an Acetylene bottle ignited way below him.

His acute awareness of the potential danger of tools dealt with any H&S situations by virtue of his eagle eye(s).

What is clear to me is that Gille was the right man in the right place at the right time. There are countless generations of AA staff and students who will acknowledge how much they have benefited from their experience in the AA workshop under Gille’s guidance. I remain profoundly grateful to have known Gille as a colleague and to have been able to observe that rare talent from a very singular contributor to AA life.

Gille Djilali was born in Morocco 18 October 1934; he worked at the AA School from 1972 to 2000 and retired to Morocco, where he died on 19 February 2009.

The AA extends sincere condolences to Gille’s family and will commemorate his life on Wednesday 3 June 2009 at an event for family and friends.

Edouard le Maistre is a former AA Secretary.

AATV

After many years off air AATV is making a comeback in digital form. Selected lectures will be available to view as live streaming video on the website over the coming terms. Our extensive video archive, which stretches back to the early 1970s, is being progressively digitised and made available for online viewing in the members’ section of the website. The full catalogue of videos currently in the archive will be coming online to allow members to request individual lectures.

See www.aaschool.ac.uk for details.

Building Ruins

Building Ruins is a collaborative forum between the MA Histories & Theories programme at the AA and the MA in Research Architecture programme at Goldsmiths College. Started in the late fall by members of both programmes, Building Ruins acts as a space in which the intents of both programmes can intertwine: theoretically (AA H&T) and practically (GC MARA). Using the multiple representations and understandings of contemporary history encouraged by each of the programmes, the collaborative attempts to create a history which did not exist previously – and to build from the ruins, or traces, of our discourses. If you are interested in participating, please contact Mollie Claypool on mollie.claypool@gmail.com (AA H&T) for more information.

Member’s Letter

AA CAMERA CLUB

Alex Laing

GILLE DJILALI:

The AA Photo Library has re-established the AA Camera Club.

Basically, it means that when you go out you take some good slides of interesting buildings or places and bring them (or send them) to the Photo Library for consideration. Your slides may then become part of the school’s image library and database. There are thousands of images already there, from decades of documentation both within and outside the school. There may even be an opportunity to make some money if your images are selected by outside organisations for use in their publications. It’s a great tradition of the AA, encouraging people to take photos and also giving them a kind of aim or end point to each small project. It’s not very often that one gets the chance to get images published if one is not a professional photographer. To be considered, the images need to be of high quality. They are not meant to be ‘arty’ photographs, but more like beautiful documentary photographs: no distortion of the image, the sky should preferably be bright and blue – although there are exceptions of course to context – and the image should be taken to give clear information about the particularities of its topic. We need transparencies that can be scanned or large 300 dpi tiffs with full information about the building.

My brief excursion into work in the Middle East was in 1968 as a job architect for the new passenger terminal for Dubai International Airport. Head of State Sheikh Rashid had approved a design by Kuwait architects Page, and Broughton and Costain, for whom I was working at the time, were engaged to do a design-and-build based on their concept. It was both imaginative and up-to-date, in that the Sheikh hoped to out-do his neighbour, the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, not only in architectural terms, but also providing stop-off facilities for the brand-new, about to be launched, Boeing jumbo jets.

Dubai was not much more than a fishing village in those days, but with fast growing entrepot trade in many commodities, most significantly gold bullion on its way to Pakistan. With most of the disciplines under one roof or nearby, in October 1968 we had completed layout drawings and were assembled in the Costain Board Room ready to explain the scheme to Sheikh Rashid and his entourage. But first coffee was served. The Sheikh sipped the coffee first and made a face – something was wrong! Indeed it was – someone had put salt into the sugar bowl ‘by mistake’. Luckily the tall figure of the Sheikh, a quiet man in his beautiful white robes straightened up and the ghost of a smile crossed his face. Thank God our £ 4 million contract was safe!

As it happened the jumbo jets found other stop-off points on their way East, until one day – boom! The rest is history.

John Douglas Turner (AADipl 1951)

Contact the Photo Library: valerie@aaschool.ac.uk

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NEWS briefs

ANTIFABRIC – Ivan Ballesteros, Elena García Pérez (AA DRL MArch 2006) and Aurora Santana (AA DRL MArch 2005) – has won first prize in the Connectivity Competetion organised by the Seccond Biennial of the Canaries, and their work was featured in the exhibition Territories of Landscape, 27 December 2008 – 15 February 2009 at the Espacio Cultural El Tanque in Tenerife. They have also been selected for the national ARQUIA PROXIMA competition 2008, a show of the 128 best realisations in Spain by young architects, for their research work on the SLC (Smart Linear Component) which they developed at the AA. DUNE – Anti-desertification architecture, last year’s project by Magnus Larsson (Fifth Year student) recently won first price in the international Holcim Awards. The work was carried out in Diploma 16 under the tutelage of Steve Hardy and Jonas Lundberg. The project is also being exhibited in the upcoming Out Of Water exhibition at the University of Toronto (which will then travel to a number of venues worldwide, including Ohio State University, Israel and Morocco), as well as being featured in the Material Fusion conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. holcimfoundation.org/T865/ A08AMng11.htm Sturgis Associates, the practice of Simon Sturgis (AADipl 1980) has had its overhaul of Fleetway House featured in the 29 January 2009 issue of the AJ. The sustainable project re-used nine floors of the original concrete frame and added four new floors.

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NEWS briefs

The same issue of AJ also had a large feature on Pringle Richards Sharratt’s extension to the Herbert Museum in Coventry. Penny Richards (AADipl 1975, and former Vice President of the AA) is one of the directors of the practice.

The 12 February 2009 issue of the AJ features a portrait of Kathryn Findlay (AADipl 1979), as well as a spread on her recently completed project, Poolhouse 2, The Chilterns, also featured on the cover of the magazine.

Victoria Goldstein (AA DRL MArch 2008) has recently completed the design for the facade-skin of the new Coventry University Engineering and Computing Building. She worked closely with environmental engineer Francesca Galeazzi to develop a shading device using computational techniques. The project director was Dipesh Patel. The facade around the main courtyard was designed to be self-shading yet provide optimum daylight conditions, through the parametric varying depth of the cladding pieces. Computational tools were used to analyse, size and orient the double layered hexagonal pattern that provides both the openings and shadings for the interior space. This ‘thick skin’ layer acts as a climatic buffer between environments, integrating analytical and generative software design tools.

Jan Pietje Witt (AA Dipl 1999) won a competition for his design for the IKN headquarters in Neustadt near Hannover, Germany, together with Jan Ahnsorge and landscape architects TGP. Two articles appeared in the January issue of Deutsches Architektenblatt about the project.

Juan Carlos Sanabria (AA E&E MA 2002) was included in the 40 under 40

list in the Costa Rican newspaper El Financiero on 14 December 2008. The list features people (from any profession) who are deemed most likely to influence the nation by their ideas and achievements. In addition he was recently elected as the Director of the School of Architecture at the Veritas University. www.uveritas.ac.cr Tom Heneghan (AADipl 1975 and former Unit Master) has been appointed full Professor in the architecture department of Tokyo Art University, and has resigned from the University of Sydney where he has been Chair of Architecture since 2002. Tom previously taught and practiced in Tokyo for 11 years and received the principal design award of the Architectural Institute of Japan and the Japan Government Award for Architecture. He will be among the first foreigners appointed full Professor at Japan’s National Universities, following the recent change in the regulations of the Japanese Ministry of Education to permit such appointments.

Markus Miessen (AADipl (Hons) 2004 and former Intermediate Unit Master) has just been announced as a Visiting Professor at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

AA PhD Dialogues, the second Architectural Association PhD Research Symposium, will take place on 8 May 2009. The event is organised by Doreen Bernath, Nerma Cridge, Eva Eylers, Kris Mun, Emanuel de Sousa, Tania Lopez Winkler and Kirk Wooller (all AA PhD programme). AA PhD Dialogues is the follow-up event to the 2008 AA PhD Symposium, ‘The Critique of the New’ (featured in AArchitecture 7). This year’s theme is ‘Ideology in Transparency’. aaphdsymposium.net

Giles Bruce (AA SED MArch(Dist) 2007) received the Best Paper Award at the 2008 PLEA (Passive Low Energy Architecture) hosted in University College Dublin, Ireland, 22–24 October 2008. The paper was entitled High Density, Low Energy, Achieving Useful Solar Access in Dublin’s Multi-storey Apartment Developments, and was based on his Master’s dissertation. architecture.ucd.ie/Paul/PLEA2008/ content/papers/oral/PLEA_FinalPaper_ ref_511.pdf The practice of Ada Karmi-Melamede (AADipl 1960) had its Visitor’s Pavilion in the Ramat Hanadiv Gardens near Haifa, Israel, shortlisted as ‘Project of the Year’ in an international competition chaired by Richard Meier.

The competition, which attracted 300 entries, was organised by Architecture of Israel Quarterly, and included architecture, interior design and landscape projects. The results were published in issue 76 of the magazine in February. adakarmimelamede.com Competition winner Fusionopolis phase 2B, Solaire by the Park, in Singapore by T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd is now under construction. T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd is the practice of Tengku Robert Hamzah (AADipl 1971) and Ken Yeang (AADipl 1972 and former AA Councillor). The project, a tender with Soilbuild Group Holdings Ltd and CPJ architects, is a multi tenanted facility for infocoms, media, science and engineering R&D and is part of new urban development. (One North by Zaha Hadid architects) The aim of the project is to create a building that is a fusion of its environment and a vibrant focal point for the One North community.

Jinho Park (AA Year out Student), has just had a book, written with her novelist mother, published in South Korea by Sigongsa. The book is entitled London Sky is Blue and describes how London has become one of the most eco-friendly cities in the world, having moved on from its bad reputation of The Great London Smog. A brief history of the city of London and its new laws and schemes related to sustainable architecture, the book is intended to encourage others to become more aware of the importance of green architecture, which can be learnt from London’s example. The book is available in the AA Bookshop, priced £ 8.90.

Junkai Jian and Jinqi Huang (both AADRL MArch 2008) received a special mention in the eVolo Sky Scraper 2009 competition in January 2009, and accordingly their project will be included in an exhibition in New York during the summer of 2009. evolo-arch.com/dskyg.html Vicco’s Tower by 51% Studios, the practice of Catherine du Toit (AADipl 1988 and former Diploma Unit Master) and Peter Thomas (AADipl(Hons) 1986 and former Diploma Unit Master) won an RIBA London Award and was short listed for the Georgian Group Architectural Award in 2008.

Conceptually the project frames nature in the city. It is a lightweight timber tower on an asymmetric steel stiletto which frames specific views and creates particular qualities of light in each space.

The Central Square of Thermi Municipali in Thessaloniki, Greece received an Honoural Mention in the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (EIA) at the Greek Architectural Awards for the period 2003–2008. The project was designed by Spiros I. Papadimitriou (AADRL MArch 2003), Dimitrios Kontaxakis and Maria-Eleni Kosmidou.

Chris Lee (AADipl(Hons) 1998 and Unit Master Diploma 6) and Sam Jacoby (AADipl 1999 and Unit Master Diploma 6) will jointly curate an exhibition of their unit’s work with Tarsha Finney (AA H&T MA(Dist) 2003) at the University of Technology Gallery, Sydney. Running from 21 April–22 May 2009 , Urban Futures: Ideas of the City is funded by the City of Sydney, the British Council, UTS Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Design Practices, UTS. Accompanying it will be a one-day symposium Urban Futures: Architectural Type and the Urban Plan, to be held in Sydney on 4 May 2009.

Winyu Ardrugsa (AAPhD Programme) presented a paper entitled ‘Khaek’: The Stranger Within, at the 2nd Samaggi Academic Conference Solutions for Thailand: How can we change Thailand in the next decade? at the University of Cambridge. The event was organised by Samaggi Samagom, the Thai Association in the UK in collaboration with Cambridge University Thai Society on 7–8 February 2009. The paper, part of Winyu’s developing research entitled ‘Stranger’ and ‘Home-Land’: The Spatial Negotiations of the Muslim Community in Contemporary Bangkok, Thailand, investigates the social conceptions of otherness registered through spatial conditions.

Arjan Scheer (AADipl 1999) has recently opened his private practice ASAS in Rotterdam. ASAS focuses on the design of spaces that make people interact in new ways, and carries out this mission in designs for buildings and urban spaces with a strong public intensity. Currently the practice is working on a church in Rotterdam as well as various public squares throughout The Netherlands. arjanscheer.nl

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NEWS briefs

Simos Yannas (AA SED Director) was a keynote speaker at the Green Design: from Theory to Practice Conference chaired by Ken Yeang and hosted by the Rothschild Foundation at the International Convention Centre in Jerusalem, where some 1,500 participants attended the three-day proceedings on 25–27 January 2009.

Maria Fedorchenko (AA H&U Tutor) has had an article entitled Beautiful Apparatus: Diagrammmatic Balance of Forms and Flows published in Architectural Theory Review, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2008.

Eve Livett (AA Accounts) has been selected from over 5,000 hopefuls to appear in a West End Production called ‘The Voice of Tomorrow’, which will be performed at the Bloomsbury Theatre from 28–30 May 2009. voiceoftomorrow.com Imelda Akmal (AA H&T MA programme) has launched a book Indonesian Architecture Now 2 on 3 December 2008. This book is a follow up to Indonesian Architecture Now (which was listed as a recommended title in Borders in Singapore). Indonesian Architecture Now 2 presents an entirely new selection of 29 projects ranging from private houses, commercials spaces, hotels and public buildings designed by prominent and progressive contemporary Indonesian architects in the past four years.

Guan Lee (AADipl 1999 and AA LU MA 2002), (with Olivier Ottevaere and Paul Starr) under the practice Multiply Studio took part in an exhibition at the Bartlett on 3 March as part of the event ‘Research Projects 2009’. Guan also participated in the accompanying conference, the proceedings of which will be available later in the year.

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NEWS briefs

Stefan Hajek (AA E&E MA 1996) has had an article entitled ‘You Dare! This Will Kill That’, published in CloudCuckoo-Land (Wolkenkuckucksheim), International Journal of Architectural Theory (ISSN 1434-0984), December 2008, a issue On the Interpretation of Architecture: Theory of Interpretation. www-1.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/ TheoArch/Wolke/wolke_neu/inhalt/en/ issue/aktuell.php The ongoing Cultural Center project for the Paraisopolis Favela Community Group, (UMCP) in São Paulo, Brazil, designed by Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee, (Unit Masters, Diploma Unit 2) was selected as a finalist for the London School of Economics Urban Age Award Conference in São Paulo.

In addition, the work of Diploma Unit 2 was featured in an interview of Anne Save de Beaurecueil in the French Architecture Magazine, CREE, as part of an issue featuring Innovative Envelopes and Skins – Digital Design.

Cecile Brisac (AADipl 1995 and Unit Master, Diploma Unit 1) and Amir Sanei (AADipl(Hons) 1994) were winners of the Europe 40 under 40 ; Europe’s emerging young Architects and Designers competition, run by the Chicago Athenaeum.

Amir also won an AR award this year for his project MESH (Mobile Eco Second Home) the ‘Highly commended’ category. On a more personal note, since graduating he has produced five children (Zak, Hana, Nina, Zal and Ziba) and would be interested in sharing thoughts about juggling life and architectural practice with anyone who has the same number of children.

Nex, a new multidisciplinary design office established by Alan Dempsey (AADRL MArch 2007, Research Cluster Co-curator and former Intermediate tutor) has been invited to present recent work at the Rhino Symposium Shape to Fabrication 3 in London on the 15 April. Other participants include AKT, Zaha Hadid, and Buro Happold and Bob McNeel and David Rutten. simplyrhino.co.uk/about/ shapetofabrication3.html Flowspace Architecture comprising Jonathan Dawes (AA Dipl 1999 and Unit Master, Intermediate Unit 6) and partner Fumiko Kato have just won an invited competition in Kyoto, Japan.

The winning scheme, for Kyoto University Medical School is for a new 1,000 square metre student clubhouse facility. The project will now be developed in collaboration with LIV Architects in Japan and is due to go on site in summer 2009. flowspace.com Patricia Mato-Mora (AA Year Out Student) had an exhibition of her work in Valencia, from 27 January – 11 February 2009, thanks to the local city council. The title of the exhibition was Visions de l’Havana en Blanc i Negre (Visions of Havana in Black and White).

Hua Li (AA PhD 2008) and William Hailiang Chen (AA Dipl 2006) co-presented a lecture – The ‘Wall’: From traditional home to today’s Olympics – at the China Design Now Schools and College Event at the V&A Museum on 26 June 2008. In addition William cofounded CDR (Chinese Designers’ Region), a non-profit membership organisation which supports and promotes Chinese contemporary designers internationally.

With members from varied fields CDR dedicates its efforts to create an experimental and cross-disciplinary

platform through collaboration. cdregion.com www.vam.ac.uk/chinadesignnow www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/events/ friday_evenings/friday_late/events/ lfriday_late_june_08/index.html The Al Nasseem urban design project

by X-Architects, of which Farid Esmaeil (AA Member) is one of the principal architects, has been selected as the first pilot project by Estidama for the year 2008. Al Nasseem will be a live project to assess Estidama’s draft guidelines that have a point-based rating system to examine a wide range of sustainable design criteria like land use, water and energy use, environmental quality, social well being, transport, pollution, material and waste management, etc.

The project will be showcased by the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council at Cityscape Abu Dhabi 2009.

Studio E Architects, of which David Lloyd Jones (AADipl 1966) is a director, were nominated for a record four out of nine categories of the Annual London Corporation sponsored Sustainable City awards. The practice won outright the Environmental Improvement to Small to Medium Enterprises Award and was runner up in the Air Quality/Climate Change and Resource Conservation categories. Their Watford Leisure Centres were shortlisted.

Nikolaus Hirsch (Former Diploma Unit Master) gave a lecture entitled Building Kowledge at Garaj Istanbul on 28 February 2009. The lecture was part of the Transdisiplines series, organised by the Garanti Gallery in Istanbul.

Referring to Exquisite Corpse, his growing institutional model for the European Kunsthalle (recently exhibited at Showroom London, 2008), and the Cybermohalla Hub (Manifesta 7 and Delhi), Nikolaus questioned the relationship between stable and unstable spatial configurations.

Lucy Bullivant (AA Member), architecture curator, author and critic, has received a research grant from CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) for her next book, Masterplanning Futures, on the ideals and processes of contemporary masterplanning, to be published by Routledge in 2010.

Forms of Inquiry, which originated at the AA and was curated by Zak Kyes (AA Art Director) has been on display at Archizoom EPFL from 27 Feb – 9 April 2009. The Exhibition was at the AA in October 2007 and was featured together with the accompanying publication in issue 5 of AArchitecture. formsofinquiry.com The Book ‘Cinematic Architecture 1993-2008’ edited by Julian Löffler

(AADipl(Hons) 2004 and former Unit Tutor), Rubens Azevedo (AADipl 2002 and former Unit Tutor) and Pascal Schöning (Emeritus Unit Master) will be launched at the AA on 15 May 2009.

This is the second book of three, following ‘Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture’, written by Pascal in 2005.

It is an illustration of fifteen years of consistent, yet evolving architectural statements. The selected projects are single frames that represent certain critical moments or sequences in the ‘film’ of former Diploma Unit 3. A colloquium with ex-students, teachers and collaborators and external guests will then form the basis for the third volume of this cinematic trilogy. The colloquium is planned as a cinematic event with live broadcasting in different locations at the AA and will coincide with the launch of the book on the 15 May.

atmos, the practice run by Alex Haw (Former Diploma Unit Master) has been invited as one of four international designers to create an installation for smart light Sydney, from 26 May 2009 and Alex will be giving a keynote lecture at the symposium. atmos will also be part of the juried exhibition at ISEA, the international symposium on electronic art, in Belfast in August 2009 where Alex will be giving a lecture on digital optics. He now shares the spot of Aaron Betsky’s old column in Deutsche Bauzeitung and has recently lectured at the University of Wales, the Univeristy of Edinburgh, the Futurelab conference and the Kinetica Art Fair. Some of atmos’ recent work has just been published in XS Extreme, edited by Phyllis Richardson and Spacecraft 2: More Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, edited by Lukas Feireiss. gestalten.com/books/detail?id=ceaea7651e30 769 d 011eb 0968636002e&count=10 # moreinfo Teresa Stoppani (AA HTS Lecturer) continues to develop and present her research ‘Piranesi’s Space: A contemporary re-reading of the beginnings of modernity’ through a series of lectures and publications. She gave recent lectures at the University of Nottingham (November 2008), SARCHA / Byzantine Museum, Athens (December 2008), Carleton University Graduate Studies Abroad, Bern (March 2009) and Rhode Island Institute of Design (March 2009). Her forthcoming publications are ‘Piranesi in Ghent’ (review of the exhibition and symposium organised by Ghent University/MSK Museum of Fine Arts Ghent), in The Journal of Architecture and ‘Disabitato cum figuris. Five digressions on Piranesi’s terrain vague’, in Tracey Eve Winton (ed.), The Disabitato: Rome’s Terrain Vague (University of Waterloo).

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Announcement

Forms of Inquiry Annex, Bedford Press, 2009

Forms of Inquiry Annex (Eds. Zak Kyes & Capucine Perrot) published by Bedford Press, is a fragment of the fifth constellation of Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design, an exhibition staged in two parts at Archizoom, Lausanne and BolteLang, ZĂźrich after originating from the AA. This slim volume is intended to function not merely as documentation, but as an annex which highlights the local context of the exhibition and accumulates further commissions by Francesca Grassi, Hoon Kim, Jonathan Hares, Julien Tavelli & David Keshavjee, Laurenz Brunner, Lex Trueb & Urs Lehni, Liam Gillick, Martin Frostner & Jonas Williamsson, NORM, Ryan Gander and Xiao Mage & Cheng Zi, as well as additional contributions to the Reading Room and the ambitious public programme Four Evenings in the Form of an Inquiry curated by Nicole Udry.

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Forms of Inquiry Annex is available in the AA Bookshop.

Forms of Inquiry Annex 56 pp self cover, illustrations in three colours 148 x 210 mm March 2009 ÂŁ5

This page: Images from the Phyllis Lambert AA Evening Lecture, 11 March 2009. The evening consisted of a screening of the Teri Wehn-Damisch biopic Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture, a film which switches from biography to autobiography, from public to private, with nods to Orson Welles and Gilles Deleuze. This was followed by a roundtable discussion between Lambert, Wehn-Damisch and Brett Steele. The event was part of the Clients and Patrons lecture series, organised by Shumon Basar. DVDs of the event are available for loan from the AA Photo Library.

Back cover: Phyllis Lambert lecture poster, designed by AA Print Studio.