AArchitecture 13 by AA School

Issue 13 News from the Architectural Association

AARCHITECTURE

Beyond Entropy in Venice PG 20

Architectural Association Foster + Partners Prize PG 25

Other Babel PG 23

AA Visting Schools PG 12

The publishing activities of the AA offer a timeline of the provocative and irreverent, often satirical and imaginative, and occasionally bewildering and ridiculous. Publish on Demand or Demand to be Published PG 28

VERSO

AARCHITECTURE

CONTRIBUTORS

News from the Architectural Association Issue 12 / Spring 2010 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Pedro Ignacio Alonso alonso_pe@aaschool.ac.uk

ÂŠ2010 All rights reserved Published by the Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES Contact: contribute@aaschool.ac.uk Nicola Quinn +44 (0)20 7887 4033 Please send your news items for the next issue to news@aaschool.ac.uk

Valentin Bontjes van Beek valentinbvb@yahoo.co.uk Mollie Claypool mollie.claypool@gmail.com Elif Erdine elif.erdine@aaschool.ac.uk Peter Ferretto peter.ferretto@gmail.com Yan Gao gao_ya@aaschool.ac.uk

Anne Save de Beaurecueil subdv@subdv.com Jack Self www.millenniumpeople.co.uk Emanuel Sousa sousa_em@aaschool.ac.uk Yvonne Tan yvonnetan18@gmail.com Tom Verebes tverebes@arch.hku.hk Brendan Woods brendan@bw-architect.co.uk DENNIS SHARP TRIBUTE

EDITORIAL BOARD

Evan Greenberg evan.greenberg@aaschool.ac.uk

Guest edited by Mollie Claypool mollie.claypool@gmail.com

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

Samantha Hardingham mclean@mailbox.co.uk

Contributors: Ed Bottoms edward@aaschool.ac.uk

EDITORIAL TEAM

Nicola Quinn, Managing Editor Wayne Daly and Claire McManus, Graphic Designers Scrap Marshall and Manijeh Verghese, Student Editors ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Valerie Bennett Aimee Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Carroll Alex de Rijke Satoshi Isono Jan Nauta Charlotte Newman Christopher Pierce Sandra Sanna Charles Tashima Thomas Weaver Printed by Cassochrome, Belgium

Roz Jackson roz.jackson@aaschool.ac.uk

Paul Oliver

Omid Kamvari o.kamvari@kamvariandpartners.com

Yasmin Shariff yshariff@sharparchitects.co.uk

Olaf Kneer info@mullerkneer.com

Simon Whittle simon335@hotmail.com

Franklin Lee subdv@subdv.com Arthur Mamou-Mani www.arthurmani.com Marianne Mueller marianne@muellerkneer.com Luke Olsen lukeolsen@tiscali.co.uk Lisa Pasquale lisa.pasquale@architype.co.uk Stefano Rabolli Pansera srp9880@hotmail.com

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

AARCHITECTURE

Issue 13

2 Post Occupancy Research 4 Klein’s Ecclesiastic Chrome 6 Modern Art Oxford ‘The Yard’ 7 Honourary Life Members’ Tea 8 A Review of a [Projects] Review: Animals, Predators and Vultures 10 Educating Architects, Reinventing Architecture 12 AA Visiting Schools 19 Venic Venic: Cedric Price at the Venice Biennale 2010 20 Beyond Entropy in Venice 22 Architecture on Display Book Launch 23 Other Babel 24 AA Bookshop and Bedford Press 25 The Architectural Association Foster + Partners Prize 26 New from AA Publications 27 New from Bedford Press 28 Publish on Demand or Demand to be Published 29 News 1

Projects

Post Occupancy Research By Lisa Pasquale Cutting Edge Research into ‘Buildings in Use’ In the field of sustainable building design, topical research is focused around qualitative and quantitative ‘buildings in use’ research. Commonly called postoccupancy evaluation, the thread of enquiry is to determine how well the built environment suits the needs of the end users and to verify design assumptions during the post-construction phase. Architype, an architectural practice managed by Bob Hayes (AADipl 1974) and Jonathan Hines, has been advancing this agenda of in-use research by conducting extensive post-occupancy evaluations of their buildings as part of a TSB-funded project with myself working out of Oxford Brookes University’s Low Carbon Building Unit. The goal of the research is to develop guidance and design methods to aid Architype in delivering buildings that are reliably more usable, comfortable, healthy and energy efficient. St Luke’s Primary School: A Case Study St Luke’s C of E Aided Primary School in Wolverhampton, recent winner of the RIBA Sorrell Foundation Schools Award, is one of the primary case studies for the research project. By observing how the building is performing and being used, and combining this with the handover and post-occupancy evaluation techniques, the research has aided the occupants to settle into the building and has brought feedback to the design team. Energy The building’s energy use is monitored using a website that helps users track their meter readings, giving immediate, graphical feedback on energy performance. The website utilises algorithms which predict annual usage from just a few weeks data, amending the analysis of the data to compensate for local weather conditions (called heating degree day analysis) thereby ensuring that colder weeks, when the building would naturally demand more heat, aren’t reported as having poorer performance than warmer periods. This has been integrated into the pupils’ routine by training the student council to input the meter readings as part of their other green school initiatives, and allows designers to remotely monitor the buildings performance.

Environment The quality of the internal environment is being measured using several methods. Air quality, for example, is monitored during the winter season to determine the as-operational ventilation rates in the classrooms. This aids in verifying if the designed rates are achievable and also informs whether typical rates are creating the environment standards set out in design guidance. Where shortfalls are found, this helps the designers improve the handover of this and future buildings, and to better train users as to when and how often natural ventilation devices should be in operation. This also helps verify and adapt design assumptions to take into account observed variations in behaviour, along with events not otherwise accounted for during design. Feedback to the Design Team The results from these studies are informing Architype’s discourse with their consultants, aiding in understanding appropriate levels of design robustness, identifying knowledge gaps in standard practice and in being able to offer performance-verified solutions to clients’ requirements. The research findings are currently being collated and we hope to report them in a future issue of AArchitecture. With its practical approach to understanding the built environment, post occupancy research is one of the most fundamental research practices offering clear paths to higher quality, lower energy buildings. Lisa Pasquale is an alumnus of the AA Graduate School’s MSc in Sustainable Environmental Design

Exterior: west elevation with horizontal timber cladding

View down to the Key Stage 1 multi-purpose activity space. Photos George Mikurcik

Projects

Klein’s Ecclesiastic Chrome By Jack Self

Detail of church’s chrome façade

Tobias Klein had several models in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Show. One of the rules for the entry is that no work shall be exhibited twice. Although these particular 3D prints have never been accepted, the same 3D model was previously exhibited. This raises the question: is Tobias Klein responsible for the virtual model, or the actual print? In an era of digital duplication, what (and where) are we designing? ‘Tell me about the chrome model’ I said. Tobias Klein, AA pedagogue and co-founder of the experimental architectural studio Horhizon, sat back in the large wooden chair and gazed thoughtfully up at his East London office building. ‘That model is an anomaly — a highly fetishised oddity.’ Several months before I had followed Klein to where a small group of technicians and students were examining a new product of the Bartlett’s digital prototyping lab. They all turned, somewhat guiltily I thought, and made space so Klein could see the focus of their attention. Glowing beneath the white neon was a shard of glistening silver about two feet long. A crystalline lattice of bone-like spikes hatched the surface, fracturing and exploding into complex geometries. There was something vaguely sinister about the dark sheen emanating from the delicate lace star shells and crucified skeletons. I peered into the depths of the thing… was that a plated Mother Mary, a frozen Baby Jesus in her argent arms? The base model, now covered by a molecular coat of chrome, was Klein’s diploma project –a church facade in Cuba. ‘Good God’ I heard him say. ‘The driving narrative for the project’, he told me later, ‘stems hugely from my fascination with the qualities of marble... In the Cuban necropolis of Christobal Colon you are confronted directly with the materiality of this marmo di Carrara – which is pre-revolutionary and shipped over the ocean to be laid under the equatorial sun. Its location in Cuba provides some of the most magnificent lighting conditions for the material. The light gets sucked deep into the material, radiating from the inside out – ultimately animating the material’. During design development what became apparent was the inability of existing rendering software to satisfactorily capture the more subtle – and essential – qualities of space and atmosphere. ‘This is something we all know from whitewash milky renders, which are actually quite good at explaining the complexity of geometries, but which don’t necessarily tell you anything further about the character and qualities of the architecture.’ The materiality of the project therefore rests in the materiality of the print itself. The powder used to layer up the model, has very similar material

properties, light filtering and scattering effects as the Italian marble. ‘The original print was stimulated by the idea that digital manufacturing processes might actually bring something to the project, express certain qualities that could not be expressed in any other way.’ ‘When I first saw the chrome, I was really considering whether to smash it against the next wall.’ The significance of the plating, and its relationship to the original intents of the project, becomes clear: although chrome has certain qualities in itself, this material has nothing to do with the meaning of the project – it transforms the model and strips out the history of the design process. What remains is a fetishised version of what was once an architectural model. ‘It asks the question, “if I have to look at it as an object, what has it become?” – a scale jump that architects find quite scary and uncomfortable. It is no longer a model, but an object.’ Whereas previous versions of the model were unquestionably representational, the chrome model represents only itself. The electrolytic process has transformed it from a recognisable architectural facade into a metallic statue. Earlier versions oscillated between the virtual and the real, between digital design methodologies and ideas about the future of manufacturing. This exchange is completely quashed by this material metamorphosis, which renders the model a digital palimpsest whose inherent attributes have been so far distorted from the original as to be barely recognisable. ‘The chrome destroys the architectural project… and yet as an entity it does have other valuable properties reflecting on cultural connotations embedded within a fetishised object.’ When it returned from the show the touch of many hands had softened the severe appearance of the model. The fading chrome now reflected an oil-slick rainbow of cadmium light. It was only with the authority of its newly acquired patina that I could see the ‘fetishised object’ once more as a model, representative of something else, something wonderful and yet unplanned by its architect – in my mind’s eye I saw a brilliant marble church, its façade silver-leafed by the hands of 10,000 pilgrims, winking under a flawless Cuban sky. Jack Self is a Third Year student

Projects

Modern Art Oxford ‘The Yard’

Reception view. Photo Alex de Rijke

Modern Art Oxford’s brief to ameliorate use and access to their gallery was met by architecture firm, dRMM, with the transformation of an existing delivery yard into a new type of gallery space for the UK – a ‘storefront gallery’. Completed in May 2010, the ramped lobby served as an installation; not permanent, plastered or white, but carefully constructed from massive engineered timber and polycarbonate panels. The ramp becomes a provocative site – encouraging artists to react in the hope that they will transform this entry space with an ongoing programme of exhibits. The deliberate omission of a facade connects the gallery directly with the Oxford streetscape by day. At night, a specially painted and perforated roller shutter invites the passer to view interior and exterior as a simultaneous artwork. The Yard provides not only a new entrance but a rebranded overall image for the centrally-located museum with a more active street frontage and direct level access. Drawing in people from the street, the yard is intended to address both the pedestrian and the cyclist; shoppers and tourists are as welcome as students and regular gallery-goers. The scheme,

envisioned as an urban catalyst, will have much wider repercussions if the planned surrounding streetscape improvements are also implemented. dRMM, led by Alex de Rijke, Satoshi Isono and Junko Yanagisawa used a palette of largely timber, polycarbonate and paint to design the Yard based on Modern Art Oxford Director, Michael Stanley’s idea to redefine the existing gallery facilities through an addition of a symbiotic gallery space that would allow for more flexibility in the programme. By coordinating the design input of structural engineers, a catering consultant and a specialist LED lighting manufacturer alongside Richard Woods’ contribution of artwork for the bar, furniture and shutter, Modern Art Oxford and dRMM have reinterpreted gallery architecture as ‘useful art’. Architect: dRMM Artist: Richard Woods Structure/M&E Engineer: Ridge and Partners Cost Consultant: David Flower Specialist Timber Contractor: KLH UK Catering Consultant: John Conroy Main Contractor: Knowles and Son

Events

Honourary Life Members’ Tea

AA President Alex Lifschutz and AA School Director Brett Steele raise their glasses to AA Life and Honorary Members gathered to celebrate the award of three new Honorary Memberships; Brian Henderson, Doris Lockhart and Dennis Sharp (see AArchitecture 12)

Dennis Sharp’s widow Yasmin Shariff and son Deen joined the event to accept Honorary Membership on Dennis’s behalf. Photos Valerie Bennett

Events

A Review of a [Projects] Review: Animals, Predators and Vultures By Mollie Claypool While writing a review of a review, one feels slightly like a vulture, picking at a carcass of a dead animal after it has already been killed by a predator. The review presumably has been completed, through the meticulous act of breaking down content and structure and evaluating minute judgements against the comprehensive greater body of work. A review of a review then cannot look at the animal as a living, whole creature. It can only look at the spoiled remnants of what is left after the predator has killed the animal. Only through reviewing the review can one then truly evaluate the judgments made in the type and the location of the kill, picking up where the review left off. A review of a review deals only with analysing the modes and methods of critique utilised in the review. Reviews of the end-of-year exhibition at the AA have been few and far between in recent years. This is in part due to its academic year being traditionally scheduled to end a week or two later than other London schools of architecture, as well as the AA being the only private independent architecture school in the UK amongst multiple public universities with architecture programmes. These factors have contributed to a neglect of the AA Projects Review by a wider critical audience. However, previous years’ reviews have included vulture-like commentary calling the beast of the exhibition’s layout a ‘Babel-ic confusion’ and notational devices ‘excuses for exhibition navigation.’ (O’Carroll, Gerrard. ‘Best in Show – 2008’. Building Design Online. http:// students.bdonline.co.uk/2008/07/11/best-inshow-2008) This year’s show proved to be an exercise in adapting to the needs of an ever-changing animal, in pursuit of an end-of-year exhibition worthy of the vultures of an ample public critique. I will admit that the above criticism of previous exhibitions is not entirely incorrect. The AA did not have a school-wide policy regarding issues beyond the assigning of spaces to units and health and safety measures. The ‘Babel-ic confusion’ comment is not far off the mark. However, this year’s show proved to be an attempt at silencing such critiques. Projects Review has traditionally been housed in the AA’s main building, representing the work of over 500 students in Foundation, First Year, Intermediate School, Diploma School and Graduate School. It has to survey an immense body of work in

a building which is not designed as an exhibition space. This year the AA increased its exhibition space through the timely addition of new buildings to its Bedford Square campus in the prior weeks. The additional buildings enabled the 2010 exhibition to address critical issues of consistency, legibility, navigation and space. Raw plywood was used throughout the exhibition – floors, walls and tabletops – in order to pull the four buildings and several dozen programmes and units into a single, legible body of an exhibition. Only a few predators ignored this directive – one could think that the metaphor of the male elephant leaving its herd is applicable here – some choosing instead to coat the entirety of their exhibition space in black paint. For an exhibition of such a short length and with quite a lot of foot traffic, the plywood was a suitable choice. Although it did get rather dingy quite early on, the use of a consistent material throughout the show necessitated a minimisation of effort on the part of the units and programmes in differentiating from their neighbour. To counteract any feeling of monotony and add another level of legibility, each space was prepared with large graphics dictating the necessary information about the work in that section of the exhibition. A determined path was provided on the exhibition tour guide in order to lead visitors through the winding spaces, instead of letting them wander about freely as in previous years. The only questionable choice, and a battle wrought between Facilities, Exhibitions, Unit Masters and Programme Directors alike, was the inclusion of a royal blue sign – matching the colour of the exhibition catalogue – outside each new gallery. The vulture preys on what is left behind. The parallel role played out in this review of the AA School’s Projects Review 2010 end-of-year exhibition is one of both tutor and critic; vulture and predator. The animal is the AA School. When an animal changes its patterns, whether migratory or otherwise, the predator adapts. This review of a review could have been concerned with specific projects of exemplary AA students, but instead aimed to address the body of the animal as a whole and its attempts at managing the expectations and desires of predators and vultures. Mollie Claypool is an HTS tutor

Projects Review Opening, with banners showing the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent acquisitions

Gathering on the Terrace. Photos Valerie Bennett

Events

Educating Architects, Reinventing Architecture

View into the A4 Gallery space from the lobby of the Takenaka Corporation building

Exhibition In July 2010 the AA installed an exhibition of recent AA student work at the Takenaka Corporation’s A4 Gallery in Tokyo. The exhibition itself was designed around a recreation of the AA’s Bedford Square library, and so large 1:1-scale photographs of the library’s windows and bookcases provided a backlit internal facade to the gallery space. Student work in the form of portfolios, books and models were positioned on tables, custom-made to mimic the exact profile of those in the AA library. The result – surreal in both the exactitude of the library copy and its juxtaposition with the corporate surroundings of the enclosing Takenaka building – enchanted and amused its audience in equal measure.

Workshop On a weekend in September in the break-out spaces of the Takenaka building the AA ran a two-day design workshop. AA tutors Shin Egashira, Yusuke Obuchi, Natasha Sandmeier, Valentin Bontjes van Beek and Christopher Pierce led 35 students and professionals through a variety of assignments all based around the production of postcards. The resulting 300 cards have all been individually mailed back to the AA and will be exhibited later in the year. Symposium On the back of the AA exhibition and workshop at the Takenaka Corporation the school organised a one-day symposium, hosted by AA School Director Brett Steele. Other speakers at the event included four generations of Japanese architects and designers and featured, among others; Toyo Ito, Hideyuki Nakayama, Florian Busch, Akira Suzuki, Tom Heneghan and Hiroshi Kikuchi.

Shin Egashira and AA tutors Natasha Sandmeier, Christopher Pierce, Yusuke Obuchi and Valentin Bontjes van Beek during a two-day design workshop

The AA library installed 1:1 inside the A4 Gallery. Copies of the library tables display 50 student portfolios 2005â&#x20AC;&#x201C;10. All images ÂŠ Takenaka Corporation

Courses

AA Visiting Schools Santiago de Chile: Game (On) Santiago 6–15 January 2010 The construction of a new sports infrastructure to house the 2014 South American Olympics – ODESUR – was treated as an unparalleled opportunity to take a critical look at the ambitious plans currently under development. By staging two interrelated design units, Ground Strategies and Material Explorations, the workshop ranged from material properties and digital fabrication to the urban and landscape scales. We looked at the redesign of the National Stadium Sport Complex in Santiago. Inaugurated in 1938 following Berlin’s Olympiastadion, it is the largest arena in the country and holds a complex comprising tennis court, swimming pool, velodrome, and indoor training arena, but the overall site is largely the result of the gradual, unplanned aggregation of scattered programmes over time. No better chance to stage a masterplan in ‘retrospect’. Tutors Eva Castro, Alejandra Bosch, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce and myself looked at ground strategies while Monia De Marchi, Holger Kehne, Arturo Lyon and J Parrish (Arup Sport) concentrated in material explorations. Participants were ruthlessly challenged by simultaneous briefs coming from these units through a number of colour cards containing the formulation of key categories: programme (yellow); urban context (blue); structure (red); and environment and sustainability (green). Each team selected eight cards to which the project had to respond. And respond they did. By Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Director, Santiago Visiting School and former HTS tutor Beijing: Super-Blend 30 January – 7 February 2010 This studio-based course held at the Digital College of Crystal CG and Tsinghua Architectural Design & Research Institute was open to anyone interested in the experimental design of architecture. It investigated emerging computational approaches in the context of Beijing, one of the world’s most architecturally eclectic cities. As the capital of the world’s fastest growing country, Beijing has become an experimental platform for many architects making grand statements encouraged by the obsession for so-called ‘iconic’ buildings. Does Beijing need any more of these and do they respond to the city’s history and culture or create an entirely new context? The objective was to evolve some coherent architectural prototypes by ‘Super-

Blending’ seemingly conflicting elements co-existing in Beijing. Most significant was the awareness of a new way of thinking and doing based upon systematic design process, and the cutting edge digital techniques which could facilitate the development of the concept in a more rigorous way. Students learned how to work in an international team environment; communicating and discussing design ideas with people they had never met before was a big challenge. An extensive understanding of the practical application was provided by the evening lecture which opened up a broad horizon of ongoing digital technologies. The workshop tested a different way of teaching and learning under an intensive programme. How to teach efficiently while envisaging a rapid updating of knowledge based upon the development of technology is a big question. The workshop not only engaged with experimental design approaches, but also was an experiment itself.

By Yan Gao, alumnus of the AA DRL MArch programme and Director of the AA Beijing Visiting School

Dorset: Summer Make 5–16 July 2010 Once Upon a Time, deep in the enchanting Forrest of Hooke, in the fair county of Dorset, beyond Knights Bottom and below Shady Lady Glade gathered a motivated band of makers. They included three merry mentors, 12 deft disciples, several passing professionals, a nimble forester and a genius workshop miller and his delightful family. The aim was to contrive symbiotes to enhance and improve upon the existing infrastructure. Time expanded before them in this remote idyll where over one hundred models were manifest, before two new avant-garde parasites, contrived to proudly embrace the Edward Cullinan designed residential building. The parasites live on to this day, long after the rejoicing, blood, sweat and tears with guests from across the land who reveled in this summer make. By Luke Olsen, Co-director of Summer Make San Francisco: Biodynamic Structures 12–21 July 2010 At the CCA, ten days of weird science began with Rhinos, Grasshoppers, Kangaroos, and a Firefly. Then, suddenly, an odd critter – Arduino – joined the

Santiago. Daniel Mahony, Daniel Portilla,

Beijing. Photo Bejing Visiting School

Gonzalo Carrasco, Robert Krumhansl

San Francisco. Photo Jacqlyn-Pia Malinis

Daejon. Photo Peter Ferretto

Summer DLab. Photo Valerie Bennett

Tel Aviv. Photo Arthur Mamou-Mani

S達o Paulo. Photo S達o Paulo Design Workshop

SummerMake. Photo Valerie Bennett

laboratory, transforming these curious animals into robotic monsters, capable of responding to humans, altering environments, and ultimately creating a ‘Little Shop of Horrors’: Audrey II: You think this is all coincidence, baby? The sudden success around here? The press coverage? Seymour: Look, you’re a plant. An inanimate object. Audrey II: Does this look inanimate to you, punk? If I can talk and I can move, who’s to say I can’t do anything I want? – Little Shop of Horrors, written by Charles B. Griffith, 1960 By Evan Greenberg, EmTech Course Tutor and San Francisco Visiting School Staff São Paulo: Micro Revolutions 16–24 July 2010 Out of our ivory towers and Victorian mansions and onto the street. Or rather, underneath the street! The joint AA and NAI Design Workshop in São Paulo found itself under the viaducts in a formerly dusty and drug-ridden residual urban landscape, which has now been converted into an informal free boxing academy by homeless ex-champion boxer Nilson Garrido. Here he has created an urban oasis of dilapidated old gym equipment and punch bags made of suspended fridges and gas tanks. 65 students and 12 tutors from Brazil, Equador, Bolivia, Germany, Spain, England and Holland were inspired by Garrido’s resourcefulness and employed a ‘high-low’ strategy, combining ‘high-tech’ digital design with the ‘lowtech’ of recycled tyres, bottles, plastic seats, pallets, metal reinforcement bars and even old CDs, to intervene within the sports complex and create much-needed seating, storage and environmental mediation. Design proposals and 1:1 prototypes were presented in a dramatic final review, where students’ voices competed with the sound of passing cars and trucks, in the filtering light and echoes under the viaducts, followed by an action-packed boxing match! By Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee, Unit Masters, Diploma Unit 2 and Directors of the São Paulo Visiting School Singapore: Designed Geographies 21–30 July 2010 The AA Singapore Workshop is like a boot camp for architects, and all those interested in architecture. Volunteers signed up from all over the region to get a feel of the AI of the AA. Not the Artificial Intelligence of computer technology but our Architectural Intelligence imbedded in the AA approach. This year,

we ‘marched’ along a one kilometre territorial line imposed upon the urban fabric, charting the intricacies of the city. From the gathered information, strategies were crafted to conquer the coastline of the ever-expanding country; it was territorial expansion of a peaceful nature. The AA Singapore Army’s aim was to design geography.

By Yvonne S Z Tan, Alumnus and Singapore Visiting School Tutor

Daejeon: Public River Interfaces 25 July – 1 August 2010 The third Korean visiting school was a blast, everything an AA summer workshop should be; disorganised, unexpected, creative and relentless, there is no other way to describe it. Everything seemed doomed, our Korean partners SAKIA had been hit by the global recession and wanted to cut costs. All the units had to work with was a huge sports hall open 24 hours a day, which was fortunately air conditioned to cope with the torrid Korean summer heat. After our field trip to see vast open landscapes the students returned to base and started to ask questions. Does an interactive river necessarily mean controlling the river? An artificial electrical monitoring river fish seemed to trigger the students into a drastic response, the workshop was underway! Six units with six independent agendas, all looking at the same theme, was enough to completely baffle our Korean assistant professors. The students were unbothered, and they set the pace working until 3am on the first day and then drinking at the mosquito bar until dawn. The evening lectures were a real highlight of this programme; rather than opt for the standard predictable option, all AA tutors threw caution to the wind. Kate and Matthias combined forces in a 20 minute real-time design project for an architectural icon where both virtual and physical models were produced and projected live onto multiple screens. Valentin brilliantly improvised by bravely letting students freely select from his hard disk material, and letting the lecture spontaneously develop. Cristina and Efron showed a sensual pixilated animation of their working method, while Shin and I talked about our joint practice PRAXIS. The outcome, never the most important part of these events, was extraordinary in its diversity and creativity. Video shows, physical mappings, hydraulic machines, timber structures, fighting dragons, musical performances as well as political soap boxes; it will be difficult to top this one!

By Peter W Ferretto, Director of the Korean Visiting School and Former Intermediate Unit Master

London: Summer DLab 26 July – 6 August 2010 Summer DLab experiments thoroughly with the possibilities of digital design tools and rapid prototyping techniques as highly integrated systems of design development. It was organised into two units, tackling architectural thinking and production within the recent advances in the digital domain. Unit 1 /Computational Organisation raised the question: Is it possible to reduce all of architecture to a series of objects? The first aim of the studio was to focus on code implementation of Python/IronPython with Rhino, concentrating initially on basic scripting operations, followed by more complex topics such as Object-Oriented Programming. These initial exercises were used to propose projects responding to complexity through intelligent organisation and reductive geometry. Unit 2 /Do the Evolution! focused on the generation of a smart component system producing a variety of 1:1 objects such as display units, furniture, and partition systems. The studio worked with a combination of bottom-up and top-down design approaches, where components were expected to have embedded information about their structural behaviour and their ability to connect with their neighbours. The toolset for the studio was Rhino, Grasshopper, and Grasshopper scripting using VB.net. The workshop concluded with final presentations by each team to an invited jury, which included Michael Weinstock, Monia De Marchi, Chris Yoo and the teaching staff.

By Elif Erdine, alumnus of the DRL MArch programme and Summer DLab staff

Tel Aviv: Bad Mesh & Naked Edges 25 July – 4 August 2010 Architecture is similar to wine in that it requires patience and knowledge. The AA (the one where no one is anonymous) Visiting Schools are more like shots of vodka: In Tel Aviv, for ten days, everyday from 10 am to 10 pm students participated in lectures, software and fabrication courses, tutorials and site visits, and all this while working on their project. Additionally, I was required to wake up at 7 am as Chris Pierce and Chris Matthews had this ‘great’ idea to alternate one morning of Jogging with one of playing Madkot (Tel Aviv’s Beach Racket). I attended the AA’s Visiting Student Programme in 2005, and it is this same intensity, passion and fun that made me leave France to join the School full-time. Another aspect of the AA that convinced me five years ago is captured in a symbolic coincidence: the day after the

Visiting School started in Tel Aviv, the one in Tehran also began. Architecture can break boundaries! The specificity of our programme lay in its diversity: even though we started from the same brief, Adam Furman and Marco Ginex’ unit produced wonderful and colourful imaginary worlds, Chris and Chris’s students took delight in the unknown of new technology while my unit which I ran with Ruth Kedar somehow managed to make full-scale prototypes from low/high-tech components. We all have different interests, which shows that the AA is far from being a monolithic school. Now that I am back to sipping wine, I look forward to next year’s shots.

By Arthur Mamou-Mani, alumnus of the AA and Tel Aviv School Staff

Tehran: Manufacturing Simplexities 26 July – 6 August 2010 The Tehran Visiting School was one of the most unusual locations within the AA’s 2010 line-up. With a great deal of recent exposure Iran has very quickly become a big talking point in economic and geopolitical conversations. Less discussed is its amazing history of architecture. The workshop began on a hot Tehran summer’s day where the tutors, up at the crack of dawn, met with an unusual breakfast and a short walk from their accommodation to the university through the busy streets of Tehran city centre. The first day very quickly turned into a working session when we realised that the next day would be a public holiday. This pretty much set the tone for the intensity of the workshop; the students, fully expecting comfortable lectures by tutors, were met with tasks and homework from day one, which came as a bit of a shock to the system. This intensity carried on for the two weeks, with the Visiting School managing to keep the university open for 24 hours for the very first time on two different occasions, which unsurprisingly led to a number of different injuries relating to fatigue. In one particular case the injury carried with it a trip to the hospital and a number of stitches. Throughout the highs and lows everyone enjoyed the challenge of getting to know and work with each other; for the students a working culture shock, for the tutors the challenge of teaching students in a completely alien environment. As always the highs outweighed the lows and the workshop concluded with a fantastic unprecedented exhibition, which remained open to the public for three months, a true testament to the quality of the work produced. By Omid Kamvari, Alumnus of the AA, Alumnus of AA Emtech MSc and Tehran Visiting School Unit Staff

Tehran. Photo Omid Kamvari

Shanghai. He Yuxing, He Zhuojun, Liu Tuo, Jesica Bello, Jiang Wenyu

Summer School. Photo Valerie Bennett

Shanghai: Post Expo 2010++ 13–21August 2010 2010 marked the AA’s fourth consecutive Shanghai Summer School, hosted by the University of Hong Kong Shanghai Study Centre HKU SSC. The programme was taught jointly by AA and the University of Hong Kong staff and included 69 students, from 18 countries. This intensive nine-day studio-based course connected the realms of contemporary urban theory and cutting-edge computational design approaches in the context of one of the fastest-growing, most densely occupied cities in the world. The course was enhanced by taking as its topic the city in which it was located; Shanghai – serving as a live model of a pre-eminent twenty-first century city. Through studio-based speculative design work, we confronted the limitations of the Shanghai 2010 Expo’s short term legacy through engagement with the complexities of a dynamic, evolutionary approach to urbanism, focusing on proposals for the site after the Expo event. In the first stage of a two-phase programme, parametric design systems were introduced in a series of intensive design exercises and seminar sessions as the basis for investigating associative design concepts and methodologies, which led to a second phase of the workshop, in which students developed speculative design proposals focusing on developing new models of urban growth for the Expo 2010 site.

By Tom Verebes, Director, Shanghai Summer School and former DRL Course Master

Venice: Beyond Visiting 26–31 August 2010 The Venice Visiting School took place during the three days of Vernissage at the 12th Architecture Biennale. It was part of a larger ‘Venetian Experience’ that included the exhibition of Beyond Entropy prototypes and the international symposium. The visiting school focused on ‘visiting’ as a main vehicle for architectural research: as in the ‘Grand Tour’ tradition, the action of visiting exposes students both to the cultural legacy of classical architecture and to the contemporary experimentation of the international pavilions. Visiting is an active form of architectural engagement: rather than producing images, drawings, models or maps, the students were asked to observe; to look at the pavilions, to talk to curators, artists and architects as well as to move with the crowds populating the Giardini and Arsenale. Far from being a contemporary form of tourism or cultural pilgrimage, Beyond Visiting exposed the students and tutors to the extraordinary variety of research, experimentation and suggestions that

the Biennale offers. In addition, the Visiting School provided an opportunity to view specific works of art, to converse with curators, artists and architects including several generations of AA tutors (such as Pascal Shöning, Katrin Lahusen, Brian Hatton, Liam Young, Ricardo de Ostos and Tobias Klein) and possibly the only chance to hear conversations between architects, scientists and artists on the theme of Energy and Form. Finally, it is hoped that Beyond Visiting marks the first episode of a regular collaboration between the AA, the Venice Biennale and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

By Stefano Rabolli Pansera, Unit Master Intermediate Unit 5 and Curator of the Beyond Entropy Research Cluster

Berlin: AA Berlin Laboratory 3–12 September 2010 AA Berlin Laboratory investigated experimental modes of dwelling in the context of Berlin. From mass housing to highly individualistic visions of living and extreme communal regimes, Berlin has long pushed the boundaries of what it means to live together. New organisational forms of dwelling, combined with alternative implementation methods, are currently challenging the roles of both architect and local authority in the process of delivering dwellings for the city. During this year’s workshop students from 12 different countries studied 12 live case studies situated in Berlin before developing their own visions. Working within categories such as Living Machines, Organic Living, Urban Living, Communal Regimes, Urban Villas and Self-organised Living provided a framework in which to launch into individual projects. On-site experiences involved learning about selforganised housing and meeting many of its protagonists, sneaking into numerous households, reflecting on Eisenman’s grids, meeting John Hejduk’s daughter Renata, playing crazy golf on the rooftop of the local commune and many all-nighters in Berlin’s bars and in front of the computer. By Marianne Mueller and Olaf Kneer, Unit Masters, Diploma Unit 1 and Berlin Laboratory Programme Directors Visiting Schools also took place in Madrid, Bangalore and Tokyo, and in London the AA hosted its Summer School and Visiting Teachers’ Programme

DENNIS SHARP 30 October 1933 – 5 May 2010

Dennis Sharp By Mollie Claypool

Dennis typing in front of an open window on Bedford Square (c. late 1970s) Photo: AA Archives

As an educator, historian and practitioner within a field with a multitude of modes of production, from drawing to building, Dennis Sharp found his most poignant voice through the art of words. As editor and writer, he produced an astounding body of texts both externally and within the Architectural Association. Produced in tandem with the development of his architectural practice, writing enabled Dennis to explicitly address the broad spectrum of his interests in architecture and planning. Throughout my studies and now in the beginnings of an academic career, I have until recently only had a casual acquaintance to Dennisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, studying his writing on the English house in Mackintosh and Muthesius and assigning The Anti-Rationalists and the Rationalists

as reading for a course on modernism. I became directly familiar with Dennisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in the final months of his life, when I began the project of compiling and editing a comprehensive survey of his most seminal pieces of writing for a forthcoming AA publication. This process began in a very clear way, as Dennis, with the aid of his wife Yasmin, outlined what he believed to be his most important works in a categorised list. Divided into sections showing the specificity of his various strands of research, the list encompassed

50 years of investigation into architectural history, practice and theory. The strength and brevity of the writings he chose to commemorate his own career range from personal accounts of the careers and life of close friends and family, which Paul Oliver and Dennisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife, Yasmin Shariff, have emulated in this newsletter supplement, to editorials for the Architectural Association Quarterly which Edward Bottoms discusses in his lecture transcript, to letters from readers as to the importance of his contribution to architectural pedagogy, as Simon Whittle addresses in his piece on the Sharp Prize. Any editorial process is difficult, especially when confronted with the work of a master. It is one of addition and subtraction; active and passive interpretation. In the process of discovering the intricacies of the great coherency and comprehensible nature of the work of Dennis Sharp, he has left me with an invaluable lesson in how to provoke and juxtapose while maintaining editorial clarity and consistency. His writing undoubtedly was and is an invaluable contribution to the ever-evolving landscape of architectural discourse.

Dennis Sharp Memorial, 1 July 2010 Talk originally given by Edward Bottoms, AA Archivist I want to talk briefly about Dennis and the AA Quarterly. I became personally acquainted with Dennis recently, when we were setting up the AA Archives in 2007. He was extremely generous in taking the time to visit our collections, sit down with us and talk through our plans. Enthusing over student drawings of the 1920s and 30s and lending strong, sympathetic but nevertheless firm advice, he instantly assessed where we needed help and gently urged us to be more forceful and vocal in pressing our case. It felt like being provided with a benign, but firm, guiding push to get us travelling in the right direction.

AA Quarterly What marked the AA Quarterly out from its predecessor journals at the AA, and indeed placed it at the forefront of contemporary architectural journals, was its international scope, intellectual range and the sheer quality of the writing. Contributors included Charles Jencks, Bruno Zevi, William Curtis, Colin Rowe, Amos Rapoport, Lucien Kroll, Tim Benton, Colin Rowe, Adrian Forty – the list goes on. It reads as a roll call, a Who’s Who of architectural luminaries. The conception of the AAQ took place in 1968. Dennis had been hired the previous year to replace Frank Duffy as the editor of the AA’s journal Arena, whilst also teaching two days a week as Senior Lecturer in History. At this stage Arena was haemorrhaging money and was merged with Inter-

build, the trade journal produced by Prefabrication Publications Limited. As an attempt to share costs, advertisements and, ultimately, readership, this merge failed dismally, with the publisher pulling out in 1968. This failure provided Dennis with the golden opportunity to put forward proposals for a new, invigorated and more broadly-based academic journal. In his own words: ‘We had to invent a new magazine and I was determined that we would invent [one] that had a literary content, that was something like a combination of Encounter, Horizon, Time Magazine, and so on, with short, sharp articles but written to the length that was required for someone to make a point.’ Its principal aim was to create an international magazine that could be academic, critical, topical and theoretical, and which [crucially] would be unfettered by discussions of built work.’ Indeed, key to the AAQ’s editorial approach was Dennis’s international awareness and range of contacts. A few years into his editorship he was able to boast that ‘contributors so far have come from... the USA, France, Germany, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, Spain, Latin America, Malta, Poland, Holland, etc.’ Central to this international scope was the network of friends and contributors that Dennis had

built up, mixing work with socialising and pleasure; an extended family of contributors who could be drawn upon for reviews, comments and topical articles. Indeed, Dennis’s editorial role has been described to me as something of an impresario, combining talent spotting with superb editorial judgement. For example, Dennis published Charles Jencks’s ‘Pop Non-Pop’ article in two issues of AAQ in 1968, while Jencks was still a PhD student at UCL. Michael Sorkin was also given the opportunity to publish important early work while he was still studying at Harvard, including the 1975 article ‘The Architect: A New American Movie Hero’, which looked at films such as Death Wish and Towering Inferno. Likewise, promising AA students were promoted and brought into Dennis’s circle, such as Ken Yeang, who had his fifth year portfolio drawings published as a pictorial essay in the ‘First Real Ersazt Architecture’ of 1972. Two years after his AA graduation, Robin Evans had his study of Bentham’s Panoptican published in 1971, pre-dating Foucault’s Discipline & Punish by some four years. In terms of breadth of themes, AAQ ran the gamut, from professionalism to social and building needs, architecture and politics to historical analysis. There was a prescient con-

cern with energy questions, with one particularly important issue, The Human Setting, in 1970, which was jointly edited with Amos Rapoport. As Dennis himself said, ‘we had everyone writing for us, from Wedgewood Benn to Paolo Soleri’. Which other major journal would have published a nine-page spread entitled ‘Motoralama: Introducing Gerald the Herald’ – a comic strip following the adventures of a Triumph Herald and conceived by Piers Gough, Philip Wagner and Diana Jowsey in the same issue as a rigorous examination of preColumbian Mexican architecture by John Adams, an article investigating ocean systems by Farooq Hussain and include discussions of Paulo Soleri’s arcology? Dennis’s work with the AAQ was only part of his concerns with architectural journalism and writing within the AA. In conjunction with his more general editorial duties on such publications as the monthly, AA Notes, the series AA Papers and a host of other AA publications and texts, Dennis also operated an architectural journalism and criticism workshop for students. He seemed to be particularly proud of this course which aimed to ‘get an instant magazine out of students – the sessions covering journalism one week, criticism the

following, [and] elaborating a whole system of analysis and so on, and then, at the end of the two term programme, students were left to themselves to actually produce their magazine’. Students graduated and were brought on board the AAQ as editorial staff. Amongst those students nurtured by Dennis through the course were the architectural journalist Neil Steedman as well as Martin Spring, who worked for AD before going on to become the architectural editor at Building magazine. Indeed, in many ways the course seems to have been an extension of Dennis’s approach at the AA Quarterly – guiding and nurturing talent – which in turn fed into the AAQ network – and encouraging experimentation combined with rigorous, open-minded exploration of the broadest range of issues.

With grateful thanks to Yasmin Shariff and Peter Wylde

Covers of AA Quarterly, edited by Dennis from 1968â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1982 AA Archives

A Tribute to Dennis Sharp By Yasmin Shariff Dennis Sharp loved the AA and all it had to offer. Its influence guided everything he did from the time he joined as a student until his death on 5 May, 2010. He started his career at the practice of Sir Albert Richardson whose close association with the Bartlett at UCL meant that Dennis went against the advice of his mentor in joining the AA in 1954. His experience in Richardson’s office, in addition to the fact that his father and grandfather were both builders, gave Dennis a solid grounding in architectural history and the practicalities of construction. Although Richardson’s practice was committed to the modernist attitude, it lacked the intellectual stimulus that Dennis needed as a young architect. Library books from the Bedford County Library boosted his knowledge, and he even became interested in the distinct landscape shape of the architecture shelves, from which he borrowed texts by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the library, there were also a few volumes of Skira’s History of Art

series. These books led Dennis towards to the history of art course he attended at the Luton College of Art. Despite his experience he still had to join the third year before he could enter the Diploma School at the AA. Dennis was a hardworking student; many of his projects received distinctions and were archived. He won a Travel Scholarship in 1955, which enabled him to visit continental Europe, where he discovered the architectural delights of Alvar Aalto in Finland, Sigurd Lewerentz in Sweden and Walter Gropius in Germany. Whenever Dennis spoke of his time as a student at the AA, the enigmatic tutor Arthur Korn would inevitably be mentioned. Korn’s commitment, passionate optimism and belief in man, architecture and planning as the most powerful instruments in making the world a better place was shared by his enthusiastic student. Dennis played an active part in AA life, setting up the Architecture and Christianity group, and when he became a member of staff he set up the AA Friday Night Jazz Club. The latter group

enjoyed the presence of high-calibre (1991), as well as surveys of the musicians such as Don Rendell, Barwork of Santiago Calatrava, Manfredi bara Thompson and Stan Tracey, who Nicoletti, Richard England and Kisho would sit in before retreating to more Kurokawa. The RIBA Library now has lucrative venues down the road such over 300 titles under his name. More as Ronnie Scott’s. These sessions recent publications include the new were advertised and reported in the translation of the three-volume set of AA Notes and the Events List. books by Hermann Muthesius called He moved to Liverpool University The English House (2007). Just before to study for a Masters Degree after his death he saw the completion of a graduating from the AA in 1957 with comprehensive survey on the Modernthe Ralph Knott Memorial Scholarship. ist architects Connell Ward and Lucas. His thesis at Liverpool, ‘ExpressionThe AA is currently in the process ism in Modern of compiling Architecture’, some of his provided Denmost impornis with a rich tant writsource of maings, due for terial for sevpublication in eral books. In 2011. 1968, Gradu Dennis’s ate School writings were Director Paul complimented Oliver appointby exhibitions ed Dennis that he curatas the Head of Council Lunch. Photo Valerie Bennett ed. Early in his History Studies. time at the AA Dennis’s remarkable knowledge of he set up an exhibition programme, architecture enabled him to be an infilling the Front Members’ Room spiring lecturer. Yet, as was evident in with exhibitions on German Housing, the journals and books that he edited, Hermann Finsterlin and the Picture he was sensitive to the perception Palace. Dennis went on to launch The of others. Works include The Bauhaus Architecture Centre at the RIBA with a (1993); Twentieth Century Architecmajor exhibition on Santiago Calatrava ture: A Visual History (4th edition: in 1992. 2002), and The Illustrated Encyclo He was involved in other orpaedia of Architects and Architecture ganisations outside the AA. He was a

co-founder of the 30s Society (now the Twentieth-Century Society), CICA – the Committee of International Architectural Critics and DoCoMoMo (Documenting and Conservation of Modern Movement buildings). He played an active part on RIBA Council (1991–95), the Worshipful Company of Architects and the AA Council (1994–2010). His practice, Dennis Sharp Architects, was founded in Manchester in 1964, and ran throughout his working career, undertaking a vast range of projects. He was master of architectural detailing due to his construction knowledge and a designer of great skill and vision. However, Dennis had few opportunities in his design career, and his scholarly work overshadowed his work in his practice. He was seen by the profession as a prolific architectural writer and critic, making an important contribution to our understanding and knowledge of architecture and architects. He helped further the career of many and will continue to do so through the Sharp Prize for Architectural Writing that has been set up by the AA.

Obituary: Dennis Sharp 30 October 1933 – 5 May 2010 By Paul Oliver Dennis Sharp Architects, the architectural practice developed in partnership with Yasmin Shariff, was based in St Albans during the 1970s, and later in London. At each location the premises functioned as an architectural bookshop, enhanced with an art gallery where selective exhibitions were held for public view. The work of the practice was largely devoted to the conservation, restoration and renovation of listed buildings, such as those of the Royal Ascot Racecourse and the Baseri House in Grosvenor Square. Other commissions included the renovation of the Renault Centre in Swindon, which was originally designed by Norman Foster, and that of the Flat Roofed House by architect Colin Lucas. The nature of their professional practice helped prepare Dennis Sharp for the work for which he has become best known: his prolific writing and lecturing on various architect’s designs and buildings.

I knew Dennis personally for over 40 years, having first met him while teaching and lecturing at the AA. In 1962, I was invited to reorganise the History of Architecture course. As it was given in a single sequence of weekly lectures, students had to wait two years before more recent architecture was discussed. In order to avoid their missing an important stage in their studies I proposed a parallel Modern Architecture History course. At the time, I was also Editor of the AA Journal and had published a feature entitled ‘Rudolf Steiner and the Way to a New Style in Architecture’ (AAJ vol 79, June 1963) and, in December that year, an unprecedented supplement The Modern Movement in Architecture: a Biographical Bibliography. Both were by former AA student, Dennis Sharp, who explored new ground with his book Modern Architecture and Expressionism (Longman, 1966). Dennis

was then teaching at the University of Manchester but when we met in London, I knew that he was essential for the course I had defined. We planned it together, and when I became director of the new AA Graduate School in 1967, he was appointed head of History Studies. Dennisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vast architectural knowledge and sensitivity to colleagues and peers was evident in the journals and books that he edited, such as Planning and Architecture; Essays Presented to Arthur Korn by the Architectural Association (1967). When Dennis was made general editor for the AA in 1968 he initiated the AA Quarterly and produced the series AA Papers. He wrote hundreds of articles, features and reviews in such publications as Building, Concrete Quarterly, Building Design, Architects Journal and many more, for both European and North American publishers. Throughout his working life Dennis was writing books, which were often innovatory, such as The Picture Palace and Other Buildings for the Movies (Evelyn, 1969). He wrote with great skill, basing his data on intensive research. His texts are highly readable, often witty and always accurate. His biographical writings were extended multinationally with his editing of The Rationalists: The Illustrated Encyclo-

paedia of Architects and Architecture (Quarto, 1991). Apart from travelling and photographing extensively in order to experience the architecture himself, Dennis Sharp also had one of the largest personally collected libraries on the subject, which is evident in his book Sources of Modern Architecture: A Critical Bibliography (1981). He was an avid collector of books on all aspects of architecture as I well know from our shared trips to the bookshops of St Albans and elsewhere. Our other mutual interests were in the arts, including studies in painting and sculpture, and in the music of blues and jazz, which sadly, we can no longer share. Dennis Sharp will be greatly missed, not only by his family, but also by all who knew his lectures and his engaging personality and those throughout the world who have benefited from his prolific published writings. Dennis is survived by his daughter Melanie; wife, Yasmin Shariff and their son Deen. Paul Oliver MBE is former AA academic staff and a Graduate School examiner

Sharp Words: Selected Writings of Dennis Sharp AA Publications, 2011 To commemorate the life and work of Dennis Sharp, and his contribution to the academic and publishing culture of the Architectural Association, in 2011 AA Publications will be producing a volume of his selected essays. With so much written material to process, making the selection was no easy task, but with Mollie Claypool as assistant editor we have put together a variety of essays that tries to touch upon each of Dennisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s particular architectural fascinations â&#x20AC;&#x201C; among them, glass architecture, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, theatres and picture palaces, masters of concrete, the pioneering research he carried out on English modernism and the MARS group, together with a handful of interviews and obituaries on figures like Kisho Kurokawa, Bruno Zevi and Bruce

Goff. Punctuating these texts will also be a number of editorials from his days as editor of AAQ, which graphically as much as intellectually, offers emblems (still striking today) of his time at the AA. The book itself will be produced in the spring of 2011 and will be available at the AA Bookshop and website (www.aaschool.ac.uk/ publications) as well as through bookshops the world over.

By Thomas Weaver, Managing Editor, AA Print Studio

Sharp Words Selected writings of Dennis Sharp

The Dennis Sharp Prize By Simon Whittle The importance of critical thinking within the design process is an unequivocal tenet of the AA School’s pedagogy. Of equal importance, however, is a critical approach to the theories and ideas – both contemporary and historical – that underpin architecture. By engaging with these ideas – by understanding, questioning and reformulating them – it is possible to create work that has a deeper relevance. The Dennis Sharp Prize has been established to encourage and support enquiries of this kind. It is awarded every year to the author of an outstanding essay written for History and Theory Studies. Dennis Sharp was intimately involved in the development of critical thought and historical understanding at the AA through his work as editor, writer, tutor and council member. The prize preserves his legacy and helps foster a new generation of architects who value writing as an equal part of architectural expression. Alongside their design work in the Diploma School, students

develop a written argument within a thesis. My thesis – which won last year’s Dennis Sharp Prize – was a re-reading of the spatial condition of the room as a critique of contemporary modes of production and social organisation, drawing on the historical precedents of Sebastiano Serlio and Louis Kahn and the theoretical viewpoints of Hannah Arendt and Paul Virilio. This year, the Dennis Sharp Prize will be accompanied by a ‘Sharp Talk’ bringing together students, tutors, critics and historians. This will be an opportunity for students to present emerging ideas to more established practitioners, and for everyone to find a moment of reflection in this everchanging world. A book of selected essays by Dennis Sharp will be published in the coming year by AA Publications.

Simon Whittle is an alumnus of the AA

Global

Venic Venic: Cedric Price at the Venice Biennale 2010 An unfeasibly tiny but no-less chock-full room in the Palazzo del Esposizioni pays homage to one of the giants of th twentieth-century in architecture, Cedric Price (1934–2003), AA Dipl 1958. The exhibition celebrates Price the communicator, the thinker, ‘the observer of human nature’*, and more importantly, an architect for the 21st century. The idea for the room grew from a series of recorded conversations between Obrist and Price between 1998–2003. Amongst the encyclopedic array of subject matter covered (typically Pricean) a specific reference to sketchbooks led Obrist to invite Samantha Hardingham (AA First Year Master) to make a selection of previously unseen drawings from Price’s personal notebooks, and to present earlier screen footage dating back to 1975. Samantha Hardingham is currently researching and writing a Complete Works of Cedric Price in Three Volumes. For Price, the notebook sketches ‘serve as a personal reminder’; some are the finest and funniest cartoons capturing an idea in a few lines, often peopled with characters from Price’s world. Others are diagrams or sectional sketches showing the workings out of issues of scale or logistics; describing an architecture of both mobile and fixed elements assembling and dispersing over time. The room also features an online project conceived at the department for Exhibition Design and Curatorial Practice at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG). The website (http://huoarchive.hfg-karlsruhe.de) comprises hundreds of individually edited video-clips taken from Obrists recorded conversations and tagged according to specific key words, which can be used to generate a live, albeit fictional, conversation between Cedric Price and the user. *From The Pickwick Papers or The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens (1836–37) – a CP favourite. Exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Samantha Hardingham Special thanks to Eleanor Bron, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, The Architectural Association Photo Library and The Institute of the 21st Century Play it...all the time (c.1971) – Image courtesy of the Cedric Price Estate, London

Global

Beyond Entropy in Venice By Roz Jackson ‘Beyond Entropy: When Energy Becomes Form’ is the ongoing collaborative project between artists, architects and scientists developing new thinking about energy. Curated by Stefano Rabolli Pansera and sponsored by Digital Technology Solutions, RePower and Bersi Serlini, ‘Beyond Entropy’ was prompted by the need to assess how energy is politically, economically and culturally impacting on our global future. The project’s first phase involved a symposium held at CERN in Geneva (see AArchitecture 12), where the artists, scientists and architects formed groups, each focusing on one particular form of energy. Using the titles of nuclear, electric, gravitational, mass, thermal, potential, chemical and mechanical, they steered their minds towards new thinking on energy. With this unique collaboration, the result was the designing and producing of prototypes demonstrating their thinking thus far in relating energy to space and form. On 26 August 2010 the Architectural Association launched the second phase of the project – the ‘Beyond Entropy: When Energy Becomes Form’ exhibition, held at the Fondazione Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. A group of AA staff and students also travelled to Venice to be part of this ambitious project; a Collateral Event, part of the twelfth Architectural Biennale, which housed these eight prototypes, encouraging public participation in the debate about energy. For example, architect Vittorio Pizzigoni, artist Alberto Garutti and scientist Giuseppe Celardo collaborated to work on a prototype for Electric energy. As energy cannot be stored and reserved, we rely on it to be produced when we require it; every second of every day. This energy is not delivered from one place, but rather it is brought to its users at the Fondazione Cini via a complicated network of sources. In this case, 100 people are responsible for this sophisticated system, and it is the ambition of ‘Beyond Entropy’ to bring them to the exhibition next year, for the final phase of the project. 100 empty chairs await their arrival. Under the heading Potential Energy, architect Julian Loeffler, artist Peter Liversidge and scientist Roberto Trotta joined forces to create their prototype resembling a pinball machine. Here energy is stored in a metal spring in the form of potential. We know that when that spring is stretched, energy is required to perform this action, and we have an ordered

understanding of how this spring will respond; thereby resisting entropy. What we cannot know is the realisation of this energy, so we rely on theoretical constructions to understand its existence. The prototype focuses on the rigidity of the individual machine, and the contrasting randomness of the events happening within it. Complimenting this exhibition was the marathon symposium event, held on 27 August from 1pm – 12am, where a broad range of international speakers spoke to some 800 guests about energy. The potential of energy can arise anywhere, as illustrated by the diversity of the speakers’ backgrounds and specialities, ranging from philosophy to geography. Angelo Merlino, a scientist working as a mechanical engineer for CERN, delivered his talk, entitled ‘Revealing the Origin of the Universe through High Energy Accelerators’. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has the potential to revolutionise our way of thinking about the universe, by studying the smallest particles of the world’s origins that act as building blocks for all matter. Angelo addressed some of the questions CERN hopes to answer through the experiments of the LHC, such as: ‘What is the origin of mass?’ and ‘In how many space-time dimensions do we live?’ Reinier de Graaf, a partner for the leading international architectural practice OMA, presented ‘Roadmap 2050’. On offer was his architectural response to today’s looming climate crisis. We must treat climate change as a trans-national issue that needs to be addressed accordingly. In support of this Roadmap 2050 he proposes a decarbonised power grid for Europe based entirely on renewable energy sources. Consequently we would welcome a future where European regions derive their identity from their main source of renewable energy, and not from their culture. Perhaps it is time for architects to save the world. Beyond Entropy will next feature in Milan where Stefano Rabboli Pansera, Stefano Boeri, Pier Alain Croset and other scientists and philosophers will gather for a one day round-table event to continue the discussion on energy, space and form. It is then the intention that the project will return to Venice for its concluding phase, as part of the 2011 Art Biennale, where the final installations from the collaborative groups will be exhibited. Roz Jackson is an AA Development Officer

Outside the Fondazione Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore

Mechanical Energy Prototype by Shin Egashira and Andrew Jaffe, with initial input from Attila Csorgo. Photos Valerie Bennett

Global

Architecture on Display Book Launch

The book, Architecture on Display, a research initiative by Aaron Levy and William Menking, was launched by AA Publications on 27 August 2010 at the Fondazione Cini at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. The publication consists of interviews with each of the living directors of the Venice Biennale for Architecture. The origins of the Architecture Biennale are generally traced back to the 1970s, when it emerged from under the umbrella of the larger Venice Biennale, which was itself established in 1895. Since then it has become one of the most prestigious forums for architectural discourse today, and has

served as a model for a range of international exhibitions. This book explores the Biennale through the directors who established its particular discourse, including Vittorio Gregotti, Paolo Portoghesi, Francesco Dal Co, Kurt W Forster, Massimiliano Fuksas, Hans Hollein, Richard Burdett, Deyan Sudjic, Aaron Betsky and this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s director, Kazuyo Sejima, as well as the current president of the Venice Biennale, Paolo Barrata. These conversations do not seek to recapitulate the exhibitions themselves but rather explore the questions that these raise, with the hope of offering a model for future curatorial endeavours.

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Other Babel by Emanuel de Sousa

Take Note: Bernard Tschumi. Joyce’s Garden. 1976. Photo courtesy of Bernard Tschumi

Founded in 1979, the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture) Study Center is an international research centre and museum devoted to interdisciplinary research on architectural thought and practice through its Visiting Scholars Programme. Linking advanced research with public engagement in architecture, the CCA encourages scholars, students, architects and other professionals to advance new lines of discourse and investigation in a connective inquiry that cuts across time, space, and media and to enable research into the changing character of thought and perception of the built environment. From Gordon Matta-Clark’s handwritten notes on anarchitecture to Aldo Rossi’s sketches for la cittá análoga, the odyssey within this contemporary Tower of Babel spans from the Renaissance to the present day. What began over 50 years ago, as a private collection by the architect Phyllis Lambert, now holds more than 100,000 prints and drawings, 60,000 photographs, 150 archives, 215,000 volumes and over 5,000 periodical titles. The ongoing exhibitions and public programmes, both local and international in scope, reveal the collection linking architectural thought and practice, the history of ideas, and changing social and cultural conditions. ‘Take Note’, curated by Sylvia Lavin with UCLA students – the fifth in a series of CCA exhibitions developed in collaboration with universities – presented snapshots of pivotal moments in the ongoing relationship between writing and architecture. Lavin explains: in the 60s, ‘the page became a site for design and texts became architectural works in their own right’.

On yet another adventurous journey, which started forty years ago after the 1969 moon landing, the exhibition ‘Other Space Odysseys’ – curated by Caatrina Borasi and Mirko Zardini – presented three responses to questions of space travel and inhabitation of extraterrestrial realities. From the simple tools of a farmer to digital animation tools, the exhibition traced the work of architects Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan and Alessandro Poli. Greg Lynn’s ‘New Outer Atmospheric Habitat’ (NOAH), showed four planets developed for the science fiction film Divide, exploring the notion of ‘ground’ in the absence of gravity. Michael Maltzan’s ‘Jet Propulsion Laboratory’ (JPL), a NASA laboratory in Pasadena, proposed a collaborative physical environment between the heroic sublimity of the received outer space image and the day-to-day technical and bureaucratic life of the ongoing Cassini mission. On the other hand, Alessandro Poli presented a changed vision of planet Earth – from Architettura Interplanetaria (1972), a film by Superstudio, of which Poli was a member, to their research for Cultura Materiale Extraurbana. From the highway to the moon to the fictional protagonist Zeno, the Tuscan peasant, Poli’s reflections are crystallised in the collage Zeno and Aldrin Meet in Riparbella (2008), highlighting the rediscovery of Earth – and the way we inhabit it – through the exploration of space. Emanuel de Sousa is a PhD Candidate and HTS teaching assistant, and recipient of the AA/CCA Research Collection Grant Scheme 2010 www.cca.qc.ca

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AA Bookshop and Bedford Press

AA Bookshop/Bedford Press Stand in the Off Press section, Art Basel 41, 16–20 June 2010. Photos Zak Kyes

The AA Bookshop and Bedford Press are collaborating in presenting publications at a number of key international events this year: Salon Light 7 Au Point Ephémère 200 Quai de Valmy – 75010 Paris 22–24 October 2010 AA Bookshop & Bedford Press stand at this annual curated book fair as part of the programming of FIAC NY Art Book Fair MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens 5–7 November 2010 AA Bookshop & Bedford Press will have a project room presenting a new work by artist Joseph Grigely alongside a temporary AA Bookshop AA Bookshop 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES Tel +44 (0)20 7887 4041 www.aabookshop.net

Documents

The Architectural Association Foster + Partners Prize

The annual AA/ Foster + Partners Prize is given to the AA Fifth Year Diploma student whose portfolio best addresses the themes of sustainability and infrastructure. The essential aims of this new prize are to forge stronger links between Foster + Partners and the AA and to encourage students to address themes that are of increasing relevance to architecture. The winner is presented with the award at the AA’s graduation awards ceremony and invited to exhibit the work at Foster + Partners. The jury was held on 21 June, with presentations from six students, nominated by the Academic Head in consultation with the Diploma Tutors following the Diploma Committee. Project Description My proposal aims to bridge the infrastructural and development gaps of the local area. Through the introduction of a new medical and transport hub, focussed on the sorting and distribution of medical components and blood donation, my project aims to help network the Royal London Hospital development across Whitechapel and beyond. The project makes use of the former East District Post office on Whitechapel Road, adjacent to the Royal London Hospital and Whitechapel tube station. The site itself sits at an interesting infrastructural junction of the newly reopened East London Line and the historical infrastructure of the Mail Rail, deep underneath the

existing building. I aim to salvage a portion of the existing building in order to utilise this largely empty building, prior, during and after its assumed future development as the Royal London continues to grow. By reactivating the mothballed mail rail as the ‘medi-rail’ I can help to network the Royal London through to the major central London hospitals, alleviating the pressures on the heavily used medical couriers at ground level, and providing a safe and rapid distribution route for medical material and samples to and from the UK’s largest hospital. In doing so I also have the opportunity to reveal this historical and currently hidden infrastructure of the mail rail, to the public, whilst simultaneously creating a new platform connection to the East London line and Whitechapel station and at basement level, entrances to the hospital. Above ground the structural skeleton of the existing building is utilised to house a blood donation distribution and disassembly station for the Royal London hospital, connecting to the hospital and distributing via the mail rail. This new organ for Whitechapel and the local area will act as a core for the future medical development of the rest of the site as the remainder of the building is demolished and redeveloped in the future. By Aimee O’Carroll, an alumnus of the AA and winner of the inaugural Foster + Partners’ Prize

Documents

New from AA Publications: Autumn 2010

Space as Membrane Siegfried Ebeling With essays by Walter Scheiffele and Spyros Papapetros 68 pp, col. & b/w ills 270 x 220 mm, paperback October 2010 978-1-902902-92-0 £15 What if architecture was no longer 3D or 2D, mass or surface, object or space? What if the architectural environment was envisioned not as an abstract continuum but as a material envelope that grows organically from the human body, uniting its skin with the periphery of a city, a region or a continent, even the entire earthly atmosphere? This hypothesis informs the 1926 essay ‘Space as Membrane’, by former Bauhaus student, architect and cosmological theorist Siegfried Ebeling. The first English translation of Ebeling’s original treatise.

Marseille Mix William Firebrace 248 pp 225 x 140 mm paperback October 2010 978-1-902902-95-1 £18 Marseille Mix describes the city of Marseille, its culture, buildings, gastronomy, cinematic images, history, planning, language, music, detective stories, criminology. These aspects create a complex ever shifting image. Once one of the busiest ports in the world, its harbour is now largely empty. Marseille has lost its traditional purpose. The book uses various forms of writing – essay, narrative, description, list, recipe, glossary, conversation – to examine the city and investigate its defining mix. William Firebrace teaches in various London schools of architecture including the AA. The AA includes within its charter the promotion of architecture through publications. Today, thanks to the AA’s unique position at the centre of the international architectural scene, AA Publications has become a major architectural publishing house, with a reputation for innovative and finely produced publications. www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications

Documents

New from Bedford Press: Autumn 2010

Civic City Cahier 2 Design and Democracy Gui Bonsiepe 68 pp, 2 col. 115 x 190 mm, paperback with dust jacket November 2010 978-1-907414-11-4 £8 Rejecting the economically narrowed neoliberal definition of democracy, Gui Bonsiepe claims for the potential of design to promote democracy. Design and Democracy introduces a concept of design activities which aim to interpret the needs of social groups and to develop viable emancipative proposals in the form of material and semiotic artifacts. This short text is accompanied by an interview with the author and a reprint of early 1970s material from Chile.

Maelfa Sean Edwards & Sam Jacob 64 pp, 2 col. 136 x 185 mm, paperback November 2010 978-1-907414-09-1 £12 Maelfa is the focus of artist Sean Edwards’s portrait of the near derelict Maelfa Shopping Centre in Llanedeyrn. The book is composed of images shot as research for his film Maelfa (2010) which touches upon the poignancy of disappearing communities and failed utopian aspirations. Included is a text by Sam Jacob on the architectural history of the centre. Bedford Press was initiated by the Architectural Association (AA), London in 2008 as a publishing imprint of AA Publications Ltd that seeks to develop contemporary models of publication practice. It aims to establish a more responsive model of small-scale publishing, nimble enough to encompass the entire chain of production in a single fluid activity, from initial commission to the final printing. Its output includes publications, pamphlets, posters and limited edition prints. www.bedfordpress.org

Legacy

Publish on Demand or Demand to be Published by Scrap Marshall

White Rabbit cover, 1970, AA Archive

Printing in the form of producing ‘books’ now seems emblematic of an architectural student’s education. Vast tomes are compiled each year to illustrate what was ‘learnt’ or how hard someone has worked during the year: backbreaking tomes of varying size, bursting with drawings, diagrams, photographs and images that explain technical and intellectual gymnastics For over 120 years, however, another form of printing has been active within the AA’s walls. News-sheets, newspapers, magazines, journals, pamphlets and manifestos have been continually produced by students to provoke thought (and people), announce intentions (wild and tame) and engage with and demand change in both their own education and the wider, often ambivalent, architectural establishment. (See ‘The Purple Patch to Sexymachinery: 100 Years of AA Student Journals’ by Edward Bottoms, AArchitecture 1) From the recently unearthed Architecting News of the 1880s to Sexymachinery in the twenty-first century, this form of publishing has encompassed the demands of Focus in the 1930s, the provocations of ARse in the 70s and the urban experiments of NATO in the 1980s. Printing in this form, whether it comprises single newssheets with miniscule print runs, handed out in staircases, or finely printed sponsored journals sold in the thousands, has been a vital part of the independence and health of both students and tutors in Bedford Square for many years. The Course ‘Publish on Demand’ was initiated by AA Art Director Zak Kyes in 2009 within the framework of AA Media Studies (in collaboration with

Bedford Press and the AA Archive). As part of the course, student researchers and editors are currently in the process of investigating the content of these publications to form a timeline of the provocative and irreverent, often satirical and imaginative, and occasionally bewildering and ridiculous publishing activities within in the AA. This new student publication will compile extracts and facsimiles from the original publications in the AA Archive with analysis and opinions, interviews with protagonists, writers and editors and newly commissioned written texts. Rather than being a pragmatic or nostalgic history, the publication aims to question both the past and future role, if there is indeed one, of student publishing in the AA, and in turn, the wider architectural community. Further research and workshops are planned for this academic year with a publication date in 2011. Interested students must sign up for all second term Media Studies courses including ‘Publish on Demand’ during week 11 of the Autumn Term. Scrap Marshall is a fourth year student and a student editor of AArchitecture If there are any students, tutors or alumni who were involved in the production of any selfinitiated or alternative publications and would like to share materials or thoughts, then please contact Scrap Marshall (scrapmarshall@hotmail.com) or Jan Nauta (jannauta@gmail.com).

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Snow from Mount Fuji: Shin and Carolina’s Wedding Ceremony in Koshirakura by Valentin Bontjes van Beek

Group picture taken the night of the wedding

The morning after, remains from the party scattered

ceremony. Photo Miki Takafumi

around the moving house. Photo Hiroe Shigemitsu

You take the train from Tokyo station north to Nigata for about 90 minutes and get off at Echigoyuzawa station, which during the winter months, I was told, serves as the portal to the ‘Snow Mountain’. You exit the station through an indoor farmers’ market, where the sound of women’s voices shouting ‘Irasshaimase!’ (‘Welcome!’) reverberates around the hall. Two hours later we arrive in Koshirakura the location of the wedding and the place where the couple met one year before. We enter the village from the top, driving down a small serpentine road. We could be in Switzerland, only for the fact that we know we are in Japan. A humming sound is in the air: dragonflies, cicadas and abundant heat. It is the day after the wedding. We drive by the oh-so-familiar looking bus stop; the viewing platform, and the little station built around the mountain spring’s well. This side of the road is now in shade. Just around the bend lies the village centre, where people are getting ready for another celebration. Students have been travelling here for the past 15 years to spend around two weeks at a time building structures for the village, seeing and living something quite magically ‘Japanese’ and becoming a part of this remote village and its community. This year many have come back as guests to a wedding celebration,

a manifestation of their (and the village’s) serious commitment and bond to Shin and his work. The wedding celebration was held on a large plateau above the school where ‘the moving house’ is located, slightly further up the hill from the swimming pool, into which everyone gets thrown during the ‘Momigi Hiki Matsuri’ (the Maple Festival). For the wedding party the students built a forest of halfway split bamboo structures, elegantly bending arches holding candles in their centre. A Brazilian and an American chef slowly cooked a 50kg pig. The DJ started out by playing soft reggae music while the villagers prepared a large fresh fish for sashimi. A small car had arrived delivering snow from Mount Fuji – a bed for the fish. 200 people were expected. This is what I was told. As we drive down the road the next celebration is about to begin. An annual festival, a workshop and a wedding are all part of the village’s story. I regret not being here the night before to congratulate Carolina and Shin, but by now the music and the soju of the next celebration is already engulfing me, preventing me from continuing this line of thought. Valentin Bontjes van Beek is a First Year Master

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Summer Office Moves

32 Bedford Square, First Floor Back. Photo Valerie Bennett

The AA has recently completed a long process of acquiring several new properties along the west side of Bedford Square and on Morwell Street. It now occupies a continuous set of properties from 32 to 39 Bedford Square, and 16–18 Morwell Street. This large acquisition of new properties has allowed the AA School to consolidate its activities on Bedford Square and was largely funded by the sale of the AA’s property on John Street, which until now had been the home of the DRL and other graduate programmes. During the period of negotiations with the Bedford Estate on the property acquisition, a consultant team led by Fiona Duggan of FiD Ltd was appointed to help the AA assess its space utilisation patterns and identify areas of need (See AArchitecture 10). With objective observations and hard data at hand, Fiona and team led a year-long consultation with students and staff, and worked closely with the AA Council to develop a plan for rationalising space usage across the full range of properties. Over the summer, the AA began to implement the space rationalisation plan, convening an Operational Advisory Group (OAG) comprised of senior departmental staff. This group assessed the first draft of a space reallocation plan for administrative offices and studio space, and through an intense two-month consultation period examined and assessed the operational impact of the proposed moves. The result of this consultation was the OAG’s submission to the Director of School a substantially revised plan that ensured departmental adjacencies were thoroughly rationalised, and that office moves were timed to minimise impact on departmental working patterns. Please check the AA’s website for up-to-date information on office relocations throughout the academic year. www.aaschool.ac.uk

The following administrative offices are now in new locations: The Office of the Company Secretary has moved to the second floor of 32 Bedford Square. The Membership Office has relocated to the ground floor of 33 Bedford Square. The Development Office and HR staff have moved to the second floor of 33 Bedford Square. The Exhibitions team have moved their offices to the ground floor of 38 Bedford Square. Please note, however, that the exhibitions galleries at the ground floor of 34–36 Bedford Square and in the Front Members’ Room have not relocated. The Visiting School and Professional Practice (Part III) offices have moved to the second floor of 38 Bedford Square. The computing and AV departments are currently relocating to the ground floor of 16–18 Morwell Street, with IT administration and support staff located in the adjacent space at the ground floor of 39 Bedford Square. Administrative offices will continue to be relocated during the academic year. The following moves are planned to take place before the end of January 2011: The AA Book Shop plans to relocate to the ground floor of 32 Bedford Square. The Facilities team plans to move their offices and workshop space to the lower ground floor of 33 Bedford Square.

32 Bedford Square, Ground Floor Back. Photo Valerie Bennett

The new spaces were on show for the first time during Projects Review. Photo Sue Barr

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Fence Support. Photo Brendan Woods

Peter Klein 1951 – 2010

Peter Klein, who studied at the AA over a long period of time, sadly died in late July after a long battle with cancer. Peter started at the AA in 1969 but shortly thereafter took himself to Paris where he immersed himself in the aftermath of ‘Les Evénements’ and became particularly interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze. He was awarded RIBA Part 1 in 1978 around about which time we first met and subsequently entered competitions together, including the Brixton Community Centre. Our entry was awarded a Special Mention (we broke a few rules) and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1985. Peter eventually gained his AA Diploma and Part 2 in 1993 when David Gray discovered a way to help him bring his investigations to a conclusion, not an easy task as Peter would be sidetracked, or seduced, by some aspect of a project and go off on exhaustive research at the expense of the programme for the year, hence his 24 year period of study at the AA – which may well be some kind of record. By this time Peter had moved to Saffron Walden with Joanna whom he had met in 1980 and married in 1986. Peter worked for local practices before eventually setting up his own in 2003. He had compiled an impressive portfolio of completed projects over the seven years and a recent project of his had been awarded Best Individual House in East Anglia. As his friend Andrew Ballantyne has said, ‘the important things were Peter’s openness to ideas, his

appreciation when something interested or amused him, and his precise perfectionism in fitting things together – whether the ‘things’ in question were ideas, parts or buildings, the front fork of a bicycle and a wooden stool, or a photocopy, turned into a booklet. He developed a sensitive and sophisticated sensibility, that was always his basis for judgement and action, but perhaps because of his grounding in psychoanalysis, he was equally capable of responding to earthy humour or finely nuanced philosophy.’ He was a delightful friend, always eager to delineate aspects of an experience that connected it to the world of ideas, sometimes bewilderingly esoteric but always with an intense and vital passion. He will be terribly missed by Joanna, his daughter Penelope, his family and all his friends. Brendan Woods is an alumnus of the AA, Former Unit Master and former AA Councillor

The Nicholas Pozner Prize

The fourth year project of Fredrik Hellberg (Fifth Year Student) which won the Nicholas Pozner Prize, was published on the cover of the September 2010 issue of Blueprint magazine.

X-Architects, with principal, Farid Esmaeil (AA Member), and Al Qadra Real Estate have won the Cityscape Abu Dhabi MEMA Award for the Best Mixed Use Future Development project of the year for their project Al Nasseem. The ceremony held on 18 April 2010 recognises projects that demonstrate the most sensitive approach to climate and sustainability in architectural design and planning. Taking cues from both the natural oases of Al Ain and the dense urban fabric of traditional Islamic cities, Al Nasseem develops an environmental synergy between landscape and urbanity that is both modern and unique. The practice has also won the 2010 Middle East Architect Award for Boutique Architecture firm of the year and Farid and co-founder Ahmed Al Ali have won the award for Principal of the Year. x-architects.com The AA Concrete Geometries Research Cluster, organised by Marianne Mueller and Olaf Kneer (Unit Masters Diploma Unit 1), received an overwhelming 415 submissions from all over the world. 36 were selected to appear in a preliminary exhibition in May and June 2010. A symposium followed in October and a short list will be devised from the entries for a forthcoming exhibition and book. In addition Mueller Kneer’s hm55 furniture range designed for Hitch Mylius was on show at the Clerkenwell Design Week at the Farmiloe Building from 25–27 May 2010. Marianne and Olaf have also teamed up with Jens Casper (AA Visiting School tutor) to realise a major new gallery project in London. www.caspermuellerkneer.com Asif Khan (AADipl 2007) participated in the group show Subject: Matter by the Cass Sculpture Foundation, November 2009 to March 2010 where he exhibited a 2x2m mirror polished stainless steel mobile called Swivel, originally designed for / shown at London Fashion Week as part of fashion designer, Osman

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Yousefzada’s a/w 2009 catwalk. In addition he had a three-page article in Domus in April 2010 about his project, Harvest. In June his practice was nominated as one of the top 25 emerging practices in the UK in the AJ and in July he appeared in the Independent newspaper’s list of the 100 most influential creative people in the UK. He also designed the new Pavilion Café in Victoria Park and a restaurant in Borough Market called Elliots due to open this autumn in collaboration with graphic designers Rinzen and Fashion designer Paul Smith. He is working on a range of tableware with Belgian company When Objects Work, a range of furniture for schools in developing countries with Italian manufacturer Magis and Julia King (AADipl 2007 and AA Councillor) and on a lighting project with Italian manufacturer Danese. www.asif-khan.com/Domus April 2010 a4_s.pdf Helena Marconell (AA Member) had an exhibition of prints entitled ‘An Instant in Time’ at The Arts Gallery, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital from 23 May to 5 June 2010. The Arts is an internationally known gallery sited in the ground floor of the hospital. http://p3-prints-paintingsphotographs.com Zubin M Khabazi (AA EmTech MSc 2009) has recently had published an on-line book about computational and algorithmic geometry in Grasshopper entitled Generative Algorithms by Robert McNeel and Associates (Developer of Rhino and Grasshopper) on their Grasshopper website www.grasshopper3d.com/page/ tutorials-1 Alfredo Ramirez (AA LU MA 2005 and AA LU Consultant) lectured at the International congress ‘Designing Ecotown’ in Pescara Facoltá di Architettura, Italy, on 13 May 2010.

In ‘From the Academia to the Praxis’ Alfredo presented the research of the AA LU MA and its application in the large scale urban projects that Groundlab has been developing recently. www.unich.it/dart/ecotown.htm Architectural Record’s May 2010 issue ran a feature about Enrique Limon (GradDiplDes (MA) 1997) as an emerging architect. Selections were made from a pool of international firms. In addition Enrique has received a Pratt Faculty Grant to research parametric software and its relevance on an urban scale. This research will be conducted with two case studies– one in the area of Harlem where the Metro North Railway bisects the neighbourhood, and the other in the area surrounding the Los Angeles River, with Downtown on the West side and East Los Angeles on the other. limonLAB has also been commissioned to do a low-income housing project in Mexico City www.limonLAB.com http://archrecord.construction.com/ archrecord2/design/2010/May/ limonLAB.asp Superfusionlab’s Nate Kolbe (AA DRL MArch 2000 and former Intermediate Unit Master) and Lida Charsouli (AA DRL MArch 2000) were shortlisted for the Queen’s Park Arena Competition in Glasgow. Their entry was exhibited in the Glasshouse, Queen’s Park as part of the Southside Festival during 22–23 May 2010. The project aims to create a multi-purpose performance space on the former bandstand site in Queen’s Park, Langside, Glasgow. In addition Superfusionlab was selected to exhibit two models in the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2010. They also took part in three more exhibitions as part of the London Festival of Architecture: the Bexhill Kiosk and Shelter project exhibited at the Aram Gallery 1 July to 28 August 2010, the Green & Blue hat for London exhibited

at the ‘Hat-itecture’ exhibition at Gabriela Ligenza Hats from 19 June to 18 July 2010 and the Spontaneous Schooling Exhibition where London Metropolitan University work tutored by Nate and Lida was exhibited at Nous Gallery 18 June to 4 July 2010. www.superfusionlab.com www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/ summer-exhibition/ www.queensparkarenadesign competition.co.uk/ Material Formations, a workshop run by Sevil Yazici (AA DRL MArch 2006), founder of ParaMaterial, had a roundtable event on 18 June entitled Spontaneous Schooling. Her work was exhibited as part of the London Festival of Architecture from 18 June to 4 July 2010. An exhibition also took place at ITU from 14 May to 30 June 2010. In addition her article ‘Creating Space with Material Intelligence’, was published in Mimarlikta Malzeme (Vol. 05 No.15) by the Turkish Chamber of Architects Press, Istanbul, (ISSN 13066501) Steffen Lehmann (AADipl 1991) has been appointed as Director of a new Research Centre for Sustainable Design in Adelaide which will have a particular focus on material flow, resilient cities, design for disassembly and prefabricated lightweight construction systems. Julika Gittner (AADipl 2005) and Jon Purnell have curated a one day art and architecture event entitled ‘The Stones of Menace’. The event took place in the main space of St Paul’s, Bow Common, a New Brutalist church from the late 1950s, and showcased work by architects, artists and members of the local community. The show explored a range of perspectives on the architecture of New Brutalism and the role of art in relation to housing and regeneration in order to open up a debate on culture as a source of conflict and criticism.

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www.re-title.com/artists/julikagittner2.asp www.scareinthecommunity.com Sounds and Arts in City Spaces (SACS) Symposium Emotion and the City invited Emanuel de Sousa (AA HTS teaching assistant and AA PhD Candidate) to be one of the speakers at Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espectáculo UP in Porto in May 2010 where he presented a paper entitled ‘Heterotopia: E-Motion Spatiality’ that discussed the valorisation of the relational and the performative in the reassessment of spatial practices in the city. In addition he was one of the invited speakers in June at Centre Canadien d’Architecture (CCA), in Montreal, Canada, as part of his residence at the institution, presenting the paper entitled ‘Heterotopia: Other Histories, 1960– Present’ where he discussed the appropriation of the notion of Heterotopia in distinct branches of knowledge. Emanuel is the recipient of AA/CCA Research Collection Grant 2010 (see page 23). He was also one of the invited speakers at the International Ultzama Campus 2010 on mobility, Fundácion Arquitectura y Sociedad, on 29 July, in Pamplona (Spain), where he presented the paper ‘On Displacement: Mobility within Heterotopia(s)’. http://sacsverona.altervista.org/site/ www.cca.qc.ca/en www.arquitecturaysociedad.com/ 6a architects, of which Tom Emerson (former Diploma Tutor and former AA Councillor) is a director, were awarded £5,000 for the best first-time exhibitor in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition awards for their Mines Park Model while Florian Beigel and Philip Christou (both former Academic Staff ) received a commendation for their A Box of Ideas.

Ahmad Sukkar (AADRL MArch 2006 and London Consortium PhD candidate) gave a performance based on his fictional tale about the walls at the faculty of architecture in Damascus University and the department of architecture at the International University for Science and Technology, in Damascus at the end of 2009. The story is entitled ‘Ḍijrit minnī al–Ḥīṭān: Ilā Judrān Fairūz wa Zaha wa Ummī wa Scheherazade’ (Walls are Fed up with Me: To the Walls of Fairuz, Zaha, my Mother, and Scheherazade). The story is about a student of architecture turning into a wall and questioning his identity in relation to topics such as art, politics, gender and spirituality. It is also in the process of being published in Arabic and English architecture and literature magazines. Eleftherios Ambatzis (AADipl 2009) recently completed an altar-sculpture presenting a set of wooden angels from the fifteenth-century. The work was on display until mid-July at the Sao Bento Metro Station in Porto. The exhibition was commissioned by Paulo Teixeira de Carvalho, General Manager of the Hotel Infante de Sagres for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the city. The sculpture was inspired by the painting Island of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin as an attempt to stretch the dead and hermetic nature of the exhibits. Colour, texture and scale were juxtaposed and create a surreal environment in the centre of the central station of the city and it was constructed in black glossy resin by the sculptor Paulo Moura. http://eleftherios-ambatzis.com/#/ altarpage1/4541690087 Santiago Calva Maisterrena (AA H&U MA 2002) has founded multiple café-galleries in London and is now working as an independent architect/ designer for a variety of corporate and private clients in Amsterdam’s red light district.

London South Bank University appointed Federico Rossi (AADipl 2007) to run the new digital design media platform as Senior Lecturer in Digital Media. Nuria Alvarez Lombardero (Unit Master Intermediate Unit 8) has recently published an article entitled ‘Reflecting on the Shop Window’ in Metalocus magazine n.026. This paper was presented at the 2009 AA Phd Symposium ‘Ideology in Transparency’. Nuria and Francisco Gonzalez de Canales (Unit Master Intermediate Unit 8, MA H&T Course Tutor and AACP) lectured in Mexico for three weeks this summer. They have recently published the article ‘The Right to Form in Arquitectos’ ( Journal of the Spanish Council of Architect Associations). Francisco has also published the essay ‘The Conflicting Vernacular’ in the Journal of Architectural Education. The Canapé House in the Flemish countryside by the practice of Martine De Maeseneer (Former Diploma Unit Master) has been nominated for the Belgian Steel Award 2010 in the Residential Buildings category. In addition their Bronks Theatre in Brussels (see AArchitecture issue 9) has been published in the yearbook of Architecture in Flanders 2008–2009: the Specific and the Singular. www.infosteel.be/nl/ staalbouwwedstrijd10.php www.infosteel.be/fr/cca10.php www.box.net/shared/t1kph5f2hp Leon van Shaik (AADipl 1971 and Former Academic Staff ) and Geoffrey London (History & Theory GradDipl(AA)) 1987) have recently published a book entitled Procuring Innovative Architecture with Routledge. The book includes De Bronks Children’s Theatre (see above).

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Christina Doumpioti (AA EmTech MArch 2008 and EmTech Studio Master), Evan Greenberg (AA EmTech MSc 2008 and EmTech Tutor) and Konstantinos Karatzas (AA Emtech MSc(Dist) 2009) have been invited to present their current research titled ‘Embedded Intelligence: Material Responsiveness in Facade Systems’ at ACADIA 2010 at Cooper Union, New York. Jonathan Dawes (AADipl 1999 and former Intermediate Unit Master) appeared in the 30 July 2010 issue of Building Design. His project at Cottrell & Vermeulen Architecture was on the BD website and was featured in a special envelope supplement accompanying the magazine. www.bdonline.co.uk/buildings/ technical/cladding-and-facades/ cottrell-and-vermeulen%E2%80%99sbrentwood-school/5003392.article Land Lease HQ, a retrofit by Fletcher Priest Architects, the practice of Michael Fletcher (AADipl ) and Keith Priest (AADipl 1975 and Chairman of the AA Foundation) was featured as a case study in AJ Specification August 2010 which focused on green products. Ioanna Symeonidou (AAEmTech MSc 2009) presented design research on Surface Nets at the 5th EAAE/ ENHSA Architectural Theory Subgroup Workshop ‘SUR-FACE/ ΕΠΙ-ΦΑΝΕΙΑ: Digital Materiality and the New Relation between Depth and Surface’ as a Challenge for architectural education. The Conference and Workshop were hosted by the Technical University of Crete. www.arch.tuc.gr/surface.html David Dobereiner (AADipl 1954) and Paul Jones of Northumbria University School of Architecture were the runners up for the Integrated Habitat Design Competition. The Scheme,

MATRIPOLIS, is designed to house 500 people in a compact-sustainable development on a terraced slope, such that every one can step directly from their front door into a rich realm of biodiversity. http://ihdc.org.uk/#/ runner-up/4543948924

Jan Nauta (Fifth Year Student) interviewed Markus Miessen (AADipl (Hons) 2004 and former unit master) in his article, ‘Architecture as a Tactic’ that was recently published in the French magazine, l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui’s issue 378 which was guest-edited by Winy Maas.

Kirk Wooller (AA PhD 2010 and AA H&T MA 2006) is the editor of a new book, 20/20: Editorial Takes on Architectural Discourse (AA Publications) that brings together editors from twenty leading contemporary architectural magazines to collectively discuss the role that editors play in shaping architectural discourse. The critical positions and observations are as diverse as the magazines from which they originate, which range from the oldest student-edited journal (Perspecta) to a research collective that at the time of writing was on the cusp of being launched ([bracket]). Also included are contributions from the editors of 306090, AA Files, Actar, An Architektur, Footprint, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, Hunch, Interstices, Log, Manifold, Mark, New Geographies, OASE, Praxis, Scapes, UME and Volume.

Maria Fedorchenko (Unit Master Intermediate Unit 7) will present a research paper Shape Follows Decorated Diagram: Modes of Aligning Formal and Programmatic Expression in Recent Practice at the Constructed Environment Conference, in conjunction with the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in November 2010.

Mark Chan (AA Dipl 2010) won the railLA international Call for Ideas 2010, an international ideas competition held by a non-profit organisation to support the development of high-speed rail in Los Angeles. His winning entry was his Diploma 12 thesis project, ‘Re-Envisioning Los Angeles’. The project is exhibited in the LA Beyond Cars exhibition. (29 July–28 August 2010, The Jewel Box, Los Angeles) www.mark-chan.com Tom Fox (Fifth Year student) participated in ‘Chto Delat What Struggles Do We Have In Common?’, a 48 hour Seminar at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Jeroen van Ameijde (Digital Prototyping Lab and Unit Master Intermediate Unit 6) taught a workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, organised in collaboration with Kristof Crolla in August 2010. Invited by the PG Group and Glass South Africa, the workshop focused on advanced digital design and fabrication technologies and was accompanied by a number of local publications and public lectures in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Ermis Chalvatzis and Natassa Lianou (AA DRL Students) wrote a text for the Catalogue of the Greek entry for the Venice Architectural Biennale 2010. The catalogue is entitled The Ark, Old Seeds for New Cultures and their text within is called ‘ProSeeding – The process of seeding as a machine for architecture’. Winyu Ardrugsa (AA PhD Candidate) presented a paper entitled ‘Mount Sumeru’ and the New Thai Parliament House: The ‘State of Exception’ as a Paradigm of Architectural Practices at the conference Theoretical Currents: Architecture, Design and the Nation’ at Nottingham Trent University. The

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event was organised on 14–15 September 2010 by the East Midlands History and Philosophy of Architecture Research Network. The paper discusses the recent winning design of the Thai parliament complex arguing that the proposal’s return to a religious cosmological order for its spatial and formal organisations discursively deforms the constitutional nationcitizen framework. As part of the London Design Festival 2010, works of Tobias Klein (AA First Year and Media studies tutor) are exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tobias is a part of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research) whose work is framed within the show. Tobias was also invited to exhibit at the 12th international Architectural Biennale in Venice. His work, entitled Synthetic Syncretism, was displayed at the Austrian Pavilion, curated by Eric O Moss. Tobias had an article entitled ‘Theater der Organe’ published in the Swiss magazine archithese in issue 4 on ‘Szenographie’. Tobias also exhibited his research from the past five years regarding magnetic resonance in spaces at the ARAM Gallery in the exhibition ‘Experiments and Prototypes V’. Stephanie Edwards (AADipl 2010) has collaborated on ‘Connecting Stockholm’, a live exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Stockholm, designing a long term strategy that turns the segregated capital of Sweden into a networked city. In October, Immanuel Koh (AADRL MArch 2010 & AA Shanghai Visiting School 2010 Unit Master) joined the Faculty of he Dessau Institute of Architecture (DIA/Bauhaus) Graduate School in Germany, teaching both computational design studio and scripting modules. He will also be

running a workshop at the Ecole Spéciale d´Architecture, Paris, as part of the GreenLab design studio which will investigate the issue of sustainable design via computational means. Immanuel was also invited to teach and lecture at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture & Design for their 2010 summer programme in Moscow. In June, Immanuel was invited to speak at an Architectural Research Think Tank Forum at the National University of Singapore (NUS) on his DRL thesis project (Proto-Design Agenda). During his time at NUS, Immanuel served as a Visiting Researcher at the Ambient Intelligence Lab at the National University of Singapore’s Interactive and Digital Media Institute. This on-going research investigates the relationship between virtual space and real space via social media and is funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore. Part of the research will be featured at Singapore’s ArchiFest 2010 in October. www.immanuelkoh.net www.dia-architecture.de/ www.esa-paris.fr/ www.strelkainstitute.com/ www.arch.nus.edu.sg/ www.idmi.nus.edu.sg/ Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco (AA PhD candidate) was selected to present the paper, ‘On Aesthetic Diversity: The Omnipresence of the Neoliberal State’ at the 7th Annual AHRA Research Symposium. The symposium was held at the University of Sheffield on 22 October 2010. Calvin Chua and Kai Ong (Fifth Year students) recently won an Honorable Mention in the International Professional Competition ‘SEASIDE 2010’ hosted by Arquitectum. Their project challenged the typology of seaside houses by dispersing spaces and programmes within the house through follies. In addition Calvin, Sarah Ho

(Fourth Year student), Johnny Gao (AA Dipl 2010) together with Creative [SIN] ergy, recently curated an exhibition and forum entitled ‘Uniquely Singapore, Distinctively London? A GeneriCity Project’ at the Crypt Gallery and Great Western Studios during the London Festival of Architecture and the London Design Festival. Using photography as a medium of exchange, the project has hosted a series of conversations on generic spaces between six pairs of architects, students and writers in London and Singapore over the past year. Rosa Ainley (AA Web Editor), with muf architecture/art, was awarded an art and public health commendation by the Royal Society of Public Health for work on the Leysdown Rose-tinted regeneration project, undertaken in 2009 for Swale Borough Council with Kent County Council, funded through the CABE Sea Change initiative. Their work is now being implemented. Klingmann Architects, the practice of Anna Klingmann (GradDipl (AA) and Summer School Tutor 2004) and Brand Consultants (KABC) has been shortlisted for six awards in the architecture competition at Cityscape Dubai. KABC is attending the convention to discuss its latest development in Salalah, Oman, a mixed-use eco-resort and sustainable residential neighbourhood attached to the wetlands preserves in the Dhofar region of Oman. The project was nominated in the Community Future, Leisure Future, Tourism Travel and Transport Future categories, and for three special awards in the Environmental category, Islamic Architecture category and Master Planning category. ‘Cityscape Global 2010’ is the largest and most influential Real Estate Investment and Development Event for emerging markets globally.

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The design proposal by Ludovico Lombardi (AADRL MArch 2008) for ‘A New Landmark for Aldgate’ competition, organised by The Architecture Foundation, was displayed as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2010. Ludovico also won first prize at the Pelle+ Design Competition for designing the best project using vegetable-tanned leather. www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/ programme/2010/london-festival-ofarchitecture-2010/high-street-2012/anew-landmark-for-aldgate-exhibition www.vogue.it/en/talents/contests-andmore/2010/09/ pelleplusselectedthewinners Dominic Papa and Alex Warnock-Smith (both AA H&U Programme Tutors) gave a presentation at the Nangang Vision 2050 International Forum in Taipei and lectured at NCTU Graduate Institute of Architecture on 2–4 October 2010. Paolo Cascone (AA LU MA 2003) has had his fourth ecology design project in Mali published in the Domus review (October 2010). The fourth ecology design project for the Sevaré Cultural Center (Mali) is the result of the collaboration between Paolo Cascone and Fabrizio Carola. It is a case study of the post-vernacular architecture research project directed by Paolo Cascone towards a high-tech design process and low-tech construction. Paolo and Andrea Di Stefano (AA Dipl 2005) presented the Urban Ecologies research project at the 5th International Congress on Urban Ecology, which took place at the Humboldt-Universitat of Berlin from 22–24 October 2010 www.co-design-lab.net www.domusweb.it/edicola/index.cfm www.stadtoekologie-berlin.de/en/ upload/_aktuelles/flyer.pdf

Douglas Spencer (AA LU Course Tutor) was an invited speaker at the symposium Infrastructures and Landscapes at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, on October 14. His lecture was entitled ‘Groundworks’. www.terraincritical.wordpress.com Alfredo Ramirez (AALU MA 2005 and Director of the Mexico City Visiting School) organised a symposium which was held at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City on 11 October 2010. The symposium was a one-day event of lectures and presentations given by staff and alumni of the Architectural Association as a prelude to the AA Visiting School in Mexico City in January 2011. www.arquitectura.uia.mx/boletines/10/ octubre/01/Anexo4.pdf With regret we announce that William Deane Dockeray (AADipl 1954 and Life Member) passed away on 6 July 2010. William Deane Dockeray was born in 1928 and in 1955 was admitted to the RIBA, in the same year whereupon he worked at Lyons Israel Ellis. In 1956 he joined John Laing Construction where he remained until retirement in 1990. Hapkido (traditional Korean Martial Art) classes have resumed at the AA on Wednesdays (see AArchitecture 7) in the Ground Floor Back Lecture Space at 36 Bedford Square. The class is suitable for all grades and beginners. For further information please contact Philip Hartstein on philip@aaschool.ac.uk or come to the Public Programme office behind reception. Philip Hartstein is a licensed coach/ third dan in Korean Hapkido and has been instructing for over 30 years, certificated by the Korean Kido. He is assisted by visiting instructor, Anna Milan, third dan Spanish Olympic Taekwondo champion.

Back cover: AA Bookshop Reading List bookmarks, Summer and Autumn 2010