AArchitecture 16 by AA School

AARCHITECTURE

LIFE AFTER THE AA

THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE REDESIGNED AARCHITECTURE FOCUSES ON THE THEME OF LIFE AFTER THE AA WITH INSPIRING ACCOUNTS AND INTERVIEWS WITH RECENT GRADUATES WHO ARE INVENTING NEW WAYS IN WHICH TO PRACTISE ARCHITECTURE. THEY EACH SPEAK ABOUT HOW INTERESTS CONCEIVED WHILE AT THE AA FORMED THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PRACTICE THEY ARE ENGAGED IN TODAY. FROM SIMULATING FOG TO THE IDEA OF AGENCY – THE RANGE OF PROJECTS THAT HAVE BEEN UNDERTAKEN BY THESE INDIVIDUALS IS DIVERSE. WE ALSO UNCOVERED SOME INTERESTING COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN OUR CONTRIBUTORS: THE FIRST YEAR STUDIO CREATED SEVERAL INSTALLATIONS FOR THE BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL THIS YEAR, WHICH THEY DISCUSS IN THEIR ARTICLE, BLOOMSBURY ROOMS. ONE OF THESE INSTALLATIONS WAS A STREET-FOOD STALL FOR GRAB, THE RESTAURANT DESIGNED BY AA GRADUATES JOY SRIYUKSIRI AND TANELI MANSIKKAMAKI, WHO ARE ALSO FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE. HELENA WESTERLIND, ANOTHER RECENT GRADUATE WHO HAS EXTRAPOLATED THE AGE-OLD ART OF KNOT-TYING TO A MORE SPATIAL SCALE, MENTIONS AT THE END OF HER ARTICLE THAT SHE WILL BE CREATING CHAIRS FOR THE NEW SOFT ROOM – AN ENIGMATIC SPACE THAT APPEARED

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The AA’s Hooke Park is a 350-acre working forest in Dorset, southwest England which acts as a space for students to learn rural architectures, the crafts of construction and sustainable timber technologies. On 28 April 2012 members are invited to a tour of the estate that will incorporate existing buildings designed by collaborations between ABK, Frei Otto, Buro Happold and Edward Cullinan, as well as the recently completed Big Shed designed by Diploma 19 and students of the graduate Design & Make programme. After a lunch catered by Georgie Corry-Wright, the group will be led on a ramble (weather permitting) through

the surrounding woodland, adorned with bluebells. For more information and ticket prices see the Membership Events page on the AA website. www.aaschool.ac.uk/membership/events

In addition to this trip, two ‘Open Saturdays’ for those living locally will take place at Hooke Park during bluebell season (dates tbc – dependent on the bluebells’ appearance). For updates, see Bluebell Watch at www.aaschool.ac.uk/hookepark

NEWS FROM THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

SCHOOL ANNOUNCEMENT

NEWS FROM THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

AARCHITECTURE

WITHIN THE AA EARLIER THIS ACADEMIC YEAR AND IS FINALLY EXPLAINED IN ANOTHER ARTICLE AUTHORED BY ITS DESIGNERS, LUKE CURRALL AND LEE REGAN FROM AA EXHIBITIONS. THIS ISSUE GIVES US A SNEAK PEEK INTO THE EVER-EXPANDING VISITING SCHOOL AS WELL AS RECOUNTING THE FUN-FILLED MEMBERSHIP TRIP TO COPENHAGEN IN SEPTEMBER LAST YEAR. ALSO, IN EVERY ISSUE, OUR NEW GLOSSY MIDDLE SECTION WILL NOW FEATURE A STAND-OUT PHOTOGRAPH OF A PARTICULAR AA SPACE THAT IS BEING REDESIGNED OR CONSTRUCTED ANEW TO SHARE IT WITH THE LARGER AA COMMUNITY. THIS ISSUE SHOWCASES THE RECENTLY COMPLETED BIG SHED THAT WAS DESIGNED BY DIPLOMA 19 AND THE DESIGN & MAKE MARCH PROGRAMME AT HOOKE PARK, THE AA’S CAMPUS IN DORSET. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WHAT’S NEW IN THIS ISSUE AND THE SHIFT TO THE NEWSLETTER BECOMING ENTIRELY STUDENT-EDITED, PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE ON PAGE 44. WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE NEW AND IMPROVED AARCHITECTURE !

EDITORS MANIJEH VERGHESE

EMMA LETIZIA JONES

PATRICIA MATO-MORA

AArchitecture 16 / Winter 2012 www.aaschool.ac.uk ÂŠ2012 All rights reserved Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES Please send your news items for the next issue to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk Editorial Board Alex Lorente, Membership Brett Steele, AA School Director Zak Kyes, AA Art Director Editorial Team Manijeh Verghese Emma Letizia Jones Patricia Mato-Mora Graphic Design Claire McManus AA Photography Valerie Bennett and Sue Barr Printed by Blackmore, England Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

CONTENTS 2 4 6 9 10 12 14 17 20 22

A SPACE FROM MYTHS AND LEGENDS URBAN FOG A PRACTICE THAT SERVES OTHER PRACTICES ARCHITECTURE AS DISCOURSE KNOTTED GRAB ‘N’ GO (UN)COMMON PEOPLE BLOOMSBURY ROOMS INEVITABLE LYRICAL IMPROBABILITY VISITING THE VISITING SCHOOL: FROM BEDFORD SQUARE TO BEYOND ENTROPY THE BIG SHED

25 28 30

34 36 39 40 41 42 44

THE GRAND TOUR OF COPENHAGEN MEMBERS’ EVENTS: A SNAPSHOT MAKE THEM BEAUTIFULLY WITHOUT MAKING THEM COMPLICATED THRILLING WONDER STORIES: A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING THESE STRANGE TIMES THE GONG SHOW FORTHCOMING FROM AA PUBLICATIONS FORTHCOMING FROM BEDFORD PRESS BEVERLY BERNSTEIN NEW AWARDS PARTING STATEMENT THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF AARCHITECTURE

AA NEWS

NEXT ISSUE’S THEME SCHOOL ANNOUNCEMENT STUDENT ANNOUNCEMENT

A SPACE FROM MYTHS AND LEGENDS A revisit from AA Exhibitions’ Luke Currall and Lee Regan, who designed the New Soft Room

In April last year we were tasked with editing ‘Beyond Entropy’ – an exhibition previously shown at expansive spaces in Venice and Milan – to fit the AA Gallery. In addition an events space was required to host the ongoing cluster’s public programme. Our solution was to refer to bleacher style seating, named for the way timber used to make outdoor sports seating is bleached by exposure to the sun. It was important to us that the seating allowed light to penetrate and that there was an economy of material. Using a timber scaffold structure of latitudinal ribs, the structure gained rigidity and form by 1"x1" longitudinal slats. The result was a lightweight structure which accommodated up to 30 people at a time. The structure had an extended life during Projects Review as AACP’s audience seating for magic shows and talks. It was as a result of the gallery’s success that we were asked to design and install a semi-permanent space at the back of the school. The space had defined boundaries and there was a limited budget. Flexibility was the key and we began to design a reconfigurable, modular space that could accommodate music, lectures, teaching and anything else the school should care to imagine. Our first challenge was to achieve a flat floor, an ongoing pursuit at the AA. The modular units that had been agreed were interlocking cubes with removable lids. The cubes were a development from the gallery installation, referencing the timber scaffold construction. The CNC fabricators we opted to work with made us aware of the technique of overcutting material to

‘It was important to us that the seating alowed light to penetrate and that there was an economy of material.’ Photo Valerie Bennett

allow for the tight joining of internal corners without manual labour – we were reassured of the precision of this process by the official terminology of ‘Mickey Mouse ears’. Once drawn and tested the Wisa Twin (a new sustainable and economical spruce core and birch face ply) CNC modular units arrived and were quickly pinned, glued and varnished. We then began assembling the

On 3/4/5 May, The Library is on Fire occupies the New Soft Room in three-parts: Creature / Constellation / Tracking Shot. We know books that contain libraries. What if a library was to function like a book or a film ? Programmed by Charles Arsène-Henry and Shumon Basar.

The CNC modular units were quickly arranged in their pre- planned formation. Photo Sue Barr

In the formation below the New Soft Room offers seating for 60 people; it has hosted lectures by Momus and Owen Hatherley among others (see page 14). Photo Sue Barr

units in a pre planned formation allowing the audience to enter in an elevated position to give an impression of theatre whilst also maximising capacity for 60 people. The glass façade and door through which you enter provides onlookers with a viewing platform and creates a calm, isolated, light-filled space inside. We used an ‘off the shelf’ industrial scaffold system to provide handrailing throughout the space. From start to finish the design and installation process was completed within two months. The room is currently in an L- shaped formation and is due for a reorganisation. On its completion the room needed to be named and the suggestion of the Hard Room was considered but deemed too risqué. The space became the New Soft Room, a resurrection of a space within the AA that now largely exists in myth and legend and derives its name from a brief spell in the 1970s when bean bags and cushions were substituted for chairs. We hope the room can continue to live up to its predecessor’s reputation as an active forum for debate, discourse and recreation. Visit the New Soft Room to see Helena Westerlind’s recently installed ‘Spill’ chairs (see page 10).

URBAN FOG Life after the AA for recent graduate Zoe Chan (AADipl 2010) becomes an urban installation, described here by editor Patricia Mato-Mora (AA 3rd Year)

How AA projects can – and whether they should – engage more with the architectural fabric of London, rather than with remote and exotic-sounding sites throughout the globe, seems to have been a debate at the school in the past couple of years. A discussion formalised in a particular brief or unit agenda? A reaction to the Boyarsky-initiated global schools? Perhaps a mere flow of ideas that everyone seemed to be concerned about, as present in everyone’s conversation as the word ‘literally’, which was a very fashionable word until not so long ago. The present issue of AArchitecture is looking out at London and discovering that, in fact, some AA Alumni have taken those concerns out of Bedford Square, into what I just called ‘the architectural fabric of London’, whatever that phrase might shelter under its umbrella. Urban Fog is an example of a crossover between art and architecture that builds on the discourse of architectural engagement with London. Designed by AA alumna Zoe Chan (AADipl ‘10), in collaboration with designers Sarah Khan, Mickey Kloihofer (AADipl ‘10) and Mariana Pestana, Urban Fog is an urban installation that responds to a derelict, walled and hidden pocket of space in Dalston. For some obscure reason, most of the ‘interventions within London’s architectural tissue seem to be happening in EC1 and beyond. The site where the team decided to intervene was a bare trapezial space in St Jude Street, close to where it crosses Henry’s Walk, in East London. The response to such a space was one that could create a backdrop for events by articulating the volume in an unexpected way. Urban Fog utilised the depth of the long enclosed site to create a series of

thresholds of occupation, a series of translucent screens that the team conceived and built last spring. However, its scope of interaction with the space did not end there, as it also aimed at creating a momentary community event, by operating as a tea house Thursdays to Sundays. To do so, Urban Fog teamed up with TinaWeSaluteYou, a local café just around the corner that would provide the cakes to go with the tea. The space was also used as a stage for a selection of performances that took place throughout the event.

Learn more about Zoe Chan’s practice: Atelier ChanChan by visitng their website: www.atelierchanchan.com

View through transluscent fabric fog Photo Zoe Yee Chan

The visitor to the installation had the opportunity to enjoy his or her afternoon tea and cake in what could be described as an urban cloud which had temporarily come to rest in this forgotten urban void of Dalston. Your regular afternoon conversation over Earl Grey and Victoria sponge became the experience of figures appearing and disappearing within the depth of the space, being distorted through light and shadow. Of course, fog itself is not an unknown London phenomenon – the ‘pea-soup’ of the city’s murky atmosphere

(a result largely of coal-burning) having defined an image of the city since the nineteenth century. Urban Fog orchestrates that inherent condition of London within the boundary of a space found in the city, and by doing so, it makes me wonder, what further architectural discussions can the AA and its alumni stir up in and about London.

A PRACTICE THAT SERVES OTHER PRACTICES Recent graduate Jan Nauta (AADipl 2011) talks about life after the AA and the idea of agency with editor Manijeh Verghese (AA Fifth Year)

Jan Nauta graduated from the AA in 2011 as part of Diploma 10, a unit focusing on Direct Urbanism. In 2009, while a student at the AA, Jan along with fellow student, Scrap Marshall, set up the Public Occasion Agency (POA), a framework for a self-determining public programme at the AA. On 3 November last year, POA organised a salon at the Barbican Art Gallery as part of the OMA/Progress exhibition. Inviting a range of former employees and friends of world-renowned architecture firm, Office of Metropolitan Architecture, each speaker brought with them an artefact to speak about how the firm played an influential role as an educator in their lives. Interested to learn more about POA, why it was set-up, how it has influenced his life after the AA and what it meant to collaborate with the Barbican, we caught up with Jan one weekend to ask him some questions:

Manijeh Verghese: What made you and Scrap set up the POA while studying at the AA? Jan Nauta: Firstly, I think it was true disappointment with the way in which many architects choose to present themselves and their work in public. A multitude of client-oriented PowerPoint presentations created an urge to engage with the formation of public discourse and architecture. At first we set out to develop a sort of system that would allow the student community to decide who to invite, it was called ‘Students Invite.’ This was terribly naïve… In this ‘nightmare of participation’ we received over 100 requests for yet another lecture by Zaha Hadid… It was clear that things were not going to change through democracy. We scrapped the idea of ‘Students Invite’ and decided that we needed to take editorial control for the project to have any chance of becoming relevant. We then developed the idea of the ‘Public Occasion Agency.’ Was this something you saw yourself continuing to be involved with after graduating? Well, this is tricky. Many people ask us this question. I don’t think we are very interested in literally transforming it into a profession… But we are fascinated by the idea of agency, i.e. a practice that serves other practices. I would like to see the POA continue as a sort of modus operandi. Do you feel that the agenda you have set out for POA relates to your own agenda while at the AA and now, while in practice? Though we have always focused on things that we believe to be of relevance to the larger community, POA is of course partly informed by our own personal interests. Some of the events have indeed been influential for our projects, both inside and outside the school.

7 How did you get in touch with the Barbican and get involved with the public programme for the OMA/Progress exhibition? Actually they got in touch with us. We were of course thrilled… How did you choose the theme of OMA as Educator and select the speakers? We were very much interested in learning more about the pedagogical role of the institution of OMA… beyond just studying the work. There is no office that I can think of whose traces you can find within so many different places and people... Natasha Sandmeier (AA DRL 1999) leading the conversation at the POA event at the Barbican in November 2012. Photo Valerie Bennett

Were you pleased with how the event went? The attendance was overwhelming. It was also great to see so many of our regular audience in a completely different setting… I was very happy with the combination of the guests and overwhelmed by their generosity… We hoped to explore a variety of experiences and ‘lessons.’ I think this is what we got, so yes, I was pleased. What did it mean to extend POA beyond the AA into another institution as established as the Barbican? In the past we have done events at the ICA and at the Venice Biennale, so we were very happy to continue our excursion into the established world. It is a great experience to work with such dedicated organisations, you learn a lot!

8 What’s next for POA? We are currently finishing the POA 1–22 book with the Bedford Press. This book brings together the preview and the commissioned review material of the first 22 events. I don’t want to say too much about this yet, but it is very exciting… We aim to launch the book in March/April. Then… we’ll see! How has your involvement with POA impacted your life since graduating? As I mentioned earlier, I am taking along the idea of agency. My ambition of pursuing a widely oriented practice is definitely something that has been enforced by the diversity of the POA. And yes, there are currently various collaborations…

What else have you been working on since graduation? A number of things… With Tom Fox (formerly in Diploma 4), I have recently started ‘Operative Agency,’ a design practice in which we have been working on projects that investigate the relationship between institutions, policy and the transformation of physical space. We are currently working on a project for a temporary public space in London, a building on top of an existing art studio in Rotterdam and a consultancy job for an institution. Over the last few months I have also been coordinating the European Activities of Stefano Rabolli’s Beyond Entropy. Aside from this I am assisting Samantha Hardingham with research work for the Complete Works of Cedric Price.

To learn more about POA visit their website: www.publicoccasionagency.com. The POA 1–22 book, published by Bedford Press, is scheduled to launch later in 2012

The collection of POA leaflets 01–22

ARCHITECTURE AS DISCOURSE

Visit ASAP’s website to stay up to date on their curatorial events around the world: www..a--s--a--p.com

Life after the AA has taken Danielle Rago (AA HCT 2011) to New York for the launch of the Archive of Spatial Aesthetics and Praxis in New York

ASAP officially launched on 12 December 2011 at the top of The Standard in New York, overlooking the High Line. Founded in 2010 by Tina di Carlo, former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and led in partnership with Danielle Rago, former graduate student of the AA, ASAP collects, exhibits and circulates spatial practices via objects, texts, ephemera and virtual media. The event featured three protagonists from the archive’s collection – Jerszy Seymour, Alex Schweder La and Bjarke Ingels. Each artist staged a work within the room while conveying the mission of the archive: to advocate ‘the value of architecture as part of a broader, social, political, technological and aesthetic discourse’. Seymour’s ‘Some Notes to Myself…A General Theory of Design’ was specifically produced for the launch. The piece – notes that Seymour continually and periodically sends to himself via email – forms a design manifesto that begins to be emblematic of that of ASAP. The manifesto will circulate with the archive, and write its future history as Seymour continues to send notes to himself. Schweder La presented his ‘Evaporating Building’, originally created at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. A projection onto water mist, he describes it as performative architecture. Here, installed atop The Standard and at a 1:1 scale, the pieces became part of the cityscape. Ingels concluded the evening, presenting a series of strategies for building contemporary architecture through ‘public participation’ and the re-appropriation of traditional language to inform his practice.

Inspired by di Carlo’s first 2002 project at MoMA, The Changing of the Avant Garde, the archive is conceived as a rapid distillation of work in which architecture is produced through the accumulation and relation of things in space. The collection to date includes work by Andrea Zittel, Andreas Angelidakis, An Te Liu, Caitlin Berrigan, Didier Faustino, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Emanuel Licha, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Luca Pozzi, Markus Miessen, Alison Moffett, Patricia Reed, Philippe Rahm, Ralf Pflugfelder, Raumlabor, Salottobuono, Sissel Toolas, Teddy Cruz and Zak Kyes, among others. More information about the project, participants, and collection can be viewed online at www.a--s--a--p.com until future programming is announced. The archive will not only be virtual; there are also plans to open a physical space in New York City in 2012. The assembling of such a collection as part of a larger aesthetic is critical to raise the value of architecture. Yet ASAP repositions the archive as a productive entity that no longer merely stores and collects but instead, and like the work it collects, produces and is produced, by the spatial environment. ASAP claims it is nomadic. It travels. It is here where its future success lies. For it is the ways in which the archive transmits and circulates itself and information via the media (social media and traditional presses alike) in addition to the ways in which it mediates between mediums and publics – ie, positions that are polemical and open for debate – that will ultimately help expand the understanding, agency and value of architecture.

KNOTTED Alumna Helena Westerlind (AADipl 2011) describes the new form of practice that is taking shape in her life after the AA

After graduation I felt the need to get as far away from my computer as I possibly could, so I decided to travel from Moscow to Beijing by train. This took more than 140 hours and gave me time to think. In the end I knew I wanted to find an alternative way to practise as an architect but I did not have a clear idea what this was. Since working during my year out in India, where I was introduced to a much simpler and more hands-on approach to building design, I had come to really value that kind of directness and responsiveness in architecture. I chose to pursue this further in Diploma 7 where I had the chance to develop projects for socially critical contexts and work closely with material processes. In my Fourth Year I worked in a Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut using concrete – a material that since the establishment of the settlement had been extremely politically charged because it implied a permanence that did not tally with the official political standpoint of not recognising the camp’s existence. As there was no obvious way for me to turn my main interest in architecture into a professional practice, I felt a strange mix of confusion and growing creative energy. So while I was trying to formulate a new direction for myself, I started making knots, lots of knots, and this therapeutic interest developed into an ongoing project that took on a life of its own. Rope is a material that I had wanted to work with for a long time. It could be thought of as just a commonplace material but its origins from tiny fragile threads twined together to become something so strong and physical belie this. Its uses vary from prosaic maritime knot-making to Japanese bondage and its special appeal comes from being so easily transformed from something as simple as a line into

Helena’s ‘Spill’ chairs in the New Soft Room at the AA Photos Helena Westerlind

organised complexity. The beauty of the knot is that it can turn the continuous nature of the material, with no form of its own, into a structure through repeated movements that become captured in the surface and are forever visible. The knot is the building block that through its variation makes the shape. While spending time exploring this new world and talking to skilled knotmakers it became clear that these amazing techniques were usually applied in a very restricted way, i.e. for ships or as decoration, but I became increasingly interested in the potential for these methods to be used in a new context and transformed into a larger

11 scale. Creating knotted fabrics seemed to be a way to build larger complicated shapes and surfaces so I set out to adapt existing knitting techniques to the scale of the rope which for me was the key to unlocking a new spatial language. The project I have developed over the past few months explores these spatial manifestations of the rope in relation to the body, object and space. I’m interested

To see the full range of Knotted pieces visit Helena’s website: www.knotted.me. Also check out the ‘Spill’ knotted chairs, in the New Soft Room.

This knotted body piece shows off the intricacy of the rope work as it highlights the design of the human spine as a spatial entity.

in the various forms the material can take by responding to the different characteristics and needs at these different scales. Initially I made a series of neck pieces that were exclusively about expressing the aesthetic qualities of the material. These were part of the Dezeen pop-up shop in Covent Garden in December. At present I’m occupied by the potential of knotted surfaces to convert old broken furniture for new uses and I’m currently working on a series of chairs that will be installed in

the AA’s New Soft Room later this spring. My aim is to keep developing the skills and techniques necessary to advance onto larger and more complex installations relating to the architectural scale. Alongside this project I have started work at Factum Arte, a Madrid-based art workshop specialising in contemporary art development and conservation. Shared between these two disciplines is an obsession with developing and refining material technologies and manufacturing techniques. The work is often based on a material mediation from the physical to the digital and back to the material again

with the emphasis on understanding the physical reality of objects and their making. This makes for a great interdisciplinary environment where I find myself surrounded by artists, craftsmen and technologists and am constantly challenged by new ways of working and thinking. In short, it is a place of wonderful creative chaos in which I have found my ideal alternative form of practice. Helena Westerlind is working for Factum Arte in London and has just joined the International Guild of Knot Tyers.

GRAB ‘N’ GO Recent graduates Joy Sriyuksiri and Taneli Mansikkamaki (both AADipl 2011) discuss their alternative experience of life after the AA with Shaelena Morley (AA Fifth Year)

The AA takes pride in being a unique architecture school and institution. The traits which make the AA unique, however, aren’t limited to what happens within the walls of the school, but also what happens after graduation. In a school that can be described as a ‘beat your own path’ kind of environment, many graduates from the AA have done the same with their budding careers. Joy Natapa Sriyuksiri and Taneli Mansikkamaki, graduates of the class of 2011, started their trail blazing while finishing fifth year. The two are the designers and co-founders of GRAB Thai Street Kitchen near Old Street in London, which they describe as a casual grab ‘n’ go restaurant. With four other partners in the company, Joy explains the inspiration for the team came from their own experiences of working in the area and the need for informal and quick restaurants, ‘The idea is that the menu is Thai street food so it’s already more casual. It’s hard to find a place that you can go to every day for good food that isn’t a sit-down Thai restaurant.’ Each of the partners of GRAB handles a different role based on their own varied backgrounds. Joy and Taneli, aside from designing the interior, act as creative directors for the company handling the visual identity and branding as well as helping to create the overall concept for the company. Joy speaks of the learning process of both designing the company itself as well as the space, ‘It’s a continual process. Now we’re working with the other partners who are there all the time: one deals with the finances, another does the marketing, and so forth; we’re working with them to find to out what else we need, what works and what doesn’t, what needs to change.’ Part of this process is also thinking about future growth, which the

team has considered in opening more branches around London, but always developing the company itself first as Taneli explains, ‘...we’re trying to develop the identity of the company as a whole through the main branch, trying to make it better, in a way make it more of a brand’. Starting up a company is challenging enough, but to do so in the midst of fifth year unit work and technical studies tutorials is almost mind-boggling. For these two, though, designing GRAB and bringing it to fruition served as a helpful outlet independent of school. Taneli speaks of the added responsibility as a stabiliser rather than a hindrance: ‘It helped keep us sane. Outside of school, you’re not often in a situation where you’re completely focused on just one thing – it’s easy to become consumed with unit work.’ When asked how the project compared to other experiences, Joy adds ‘For me it felt completely new, it was much more real than other stuff I’ve worked on. In school you don’t have to think about the reality of having to sell this product or think about customers. Even when working in an office as a Part 1, you don’t get to dabble in that part.’ With academic life behind them, the nature of a day-to-day routine shifts both in relation to GRAB and their architectural work. Joy confirms this point: ‘In reality it’s so different to what we do in school and what we do in an office. GRAB helped me to understand how to work with other people who don’t know as much about architecture...’ Joy is now working at Caruso St John, restricting her work at GRAB mostly to Saturdays while Taneli juggles his contribution to GRAB with freelancing work. With previous experience in media and graphic design, Taneli found his experience helpful in developing the business, in

GRAB Thai Street Kitchen is located near Old Street Station at 5 Leonard Street; you can also visit their website at www.grabfood.co.uk

For the interior of Grab, the use of appropriated wooden pallets coupled with bright red plastic stools generates the ambience of a street food stall in Thailand. Photo Valerie Bennett

‘understanding quickly what the project needed and how to create the identity of the company.’ As a Fifth Year who will (hopefully) be graduating soon, I asked about what they found most useful in how the AA prepared them for the professional world. Joy laughed, ‘Well, we’ve only been in the professional world for about six months!’ with Taneli chiming in, ‘It’s really hard to be scared of feedback after becoming accustomed to AA juries.’ Even so, both spoke about how they’ve learned to be both

convincing and self-critical. Joy says, ‘The AA helps to be self-evaluating and when people do give comments about what you’ve done, you become more open to change, balancing where you can improve and where to stand your ground.’ Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I quizzed the two on their favourite dishes at GRAB, to which Joy immediately answered Green Curry with Rice, and Taneli, thinking it over for a moment, decided on Congee (a kind of Thai porridge). Now, who’s hungry?

(UN)COMMON PEOPLE A conversation between Shumon Basar (AACP) and Owen Hatherley transcribed by Emma Letizia Jones (AA HCT 2011)

In Uncommon (Zero Books 2011), author and super-fan Owen Hatherley argues that the Sheffield pop group Pulp ‘should be taken very seriously indeed.’ The eminent publishing house, Faber and Faber share this hunch, evidenced by their release, in late 2011, of a lyric collection by Jarvis Cocker: Mother, Brother, Lover. Shumon Basar asked Owen Hatherley about the torrid and tender relationships between sex, class and the city of Sheffield in the 90s that lurk like amateur stalkers in Pulp’s back catalogue. Hatherley replied with the aid of Pulp’s most iconic music videos as well as his own tentative teenage encounters with the opposite sex. Corduroy, chipboard and seething sexuality seeping from the sidewalks: Sing along with the common people. What else can you do? – Shumon Basar

Shumon Basar: If it’s alright with you I’d like to go back to where you began (and also to where Jarvis Cocker says the band began), which is discovering girls – and that fine line between discovering them and not being able to quite access them, as it were. [To the audience] I’m also going to play this song in the background – it’s the song that Owen began his talk with [Pulp’s Sheffield Sex City]. Owen, in your book you said that an articulation of sexual obsession, sexual anticipation, sex as an instrument in the class war and finally sexual disgust is absolutely unique in Pulp. In fact I think it’s this very song that builds up to this incredible crescendo of collective orgasms in Sheffield tower blocks. And he [the narrator in the song] is even I think at some point ‘making love to the pavement’? It seems to me that there are a number of themes running through this book – class, sex and the city. So perhaps you could say something about the Pulp songs of this era in particular, which are just dripping with, as you say, all of these modalities of sex. And particularly this line, where you say that what’s running through the book is this relationship between sexuality and space. Owen Hatherley: Well, that’s absolutely the thing I have avoided talking about – there’s a bit about it in the book and there’s a reason why it’s written (and not spoken). There’s a part in the book where I was explaining that I had most of my formative sexual experiences in Sheffield, so for me Sheffield was sexy, and in a way it was that straightforward: if you’re engaged in an assignation then the space you are moving through is necessarily suffused by that assignation. But at the same time I don’t know if it is that simple. Lots of it has to do with… decay. And seediness. There is that link that Graham Greene makes between seediness and nostalgia and longing for the past, which seems really counterintuitive, but actually I think it’s very astute. You can’t explain why they’re connected but they are. For example, somewhere like Castle Market in Sheffield is a very, very sexy place, despite the fact that it’s a decaying 60s market hall

15 with bits falling off it and weird stalls selling god knows what. It has that sense of somewhere that’s been kind of left to go a bit strange and a bit odd, and so it becomes quite a sexual space. But it’s very difficult to explain why. In many ways in the book I don’t really try to explain why. It’s very hard to do that. Owen Hatherley and Shuman Basar discusses the pop band Pulp in the New Soft Room. Photos Sue Barr

The other major character in the book is that of Sheffield itself. You say it’s the city where the steel-making process was initiated, more or less. It’s one of the great steel cities in the world, in fact. You say it’s a provincial city that perhaps more than any other in the UK attempted to create a viable modernist landscape between the 1950s and the 70s, before the money ran out. Its wildly overambitious brutalist buildings provide a landscape where there’s space to dream on ‘what could have been’. In Jarvis’s lyrics and in your book it’s a formidable character right from the beginning. As well as that, there’s a whole chapter in your book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain that’s dedicated to Sheffield, so perhaps you could say something about the city? Sure, yeah, why Sheffield? Well, I know many people who went to university in Sheffield because of Pulp. They partly found the place they were looking for and they partly didn’t, but either way they certainly found it to be an extraordinarily seedy place. In The New Ruins there’s a section

16 about Attercliffe, an area of disused steelworks which is now largely made up of weekend warehouse parties and sex shops, in this decaying industrial landscape that’s been quite forgotten. That conjunction of uses is quite interesting.

university buildings. But then again these factors could be applied to many places. I think maybe the thing that it really boils down to is topography, in that Sheffield has some incredibly strange topography. It’s basically an industrial town built in the midst of the Peak District, so Sheffield is all about the hills. And the building sites on those hills were usually made up of council estates, over half of which have now been demolished. And that runs all the way though the lyrics of this song [Sheffield Sex City]. In Sheffield you get a strong sense of urbanism because you’re surrounded by the Peak District and you can see it most of the time, so you’re much more conscious of your city as ‘city’. You can see what is not part of the city just outside of it, because the city provides views. Wherever you are in Sheffield you get a view of a modernist city on one hand, and of rolling hills on the other.

Hatherley also blogs on architecture, urbanism, politics, design, music and critical theory at Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, see www.nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com

Could you say something to give us some background on why exactly Sheffield was this incredible locus of late modernism? That’s another question that is very difficult to answer. Sheffield had a very militant Labour movement and it was largely homogenously working class. Lots of it comes from the fact that the steel industry in Sheffield died later than in other places, as Sheffield was a boomtown in the 50s, 60s and 70s. The steelworks were nationalised at that time and running full pelt, and it was one of those coincidences of having a good planning department and a good city architects’ department. Also, I think to be fair it was the fact of having a very enlightened university: Sheffield University held one of the first postwar architecture competitions – for three new

BLOOMSBURY ROOMS Guy Sinclair and Radu Remus Macovei (both AA First Year) explain the First-Year brief and installation for the Bloomsbury Festival 2011

The temporary café served coffee and cookies for the Bloomsbury Festival in Bedford Square. Photos Sue Barr

To familiarise ourselves with processes of architectural inquiry, proposal and implementation, we began a tripartite investigation with the goal of defining the essence of a room and expressing these essences through an interactive installation:

To learn more about the Bloomsbury Festival and to see more photos of the event please visit: www.bloomsburyfestival.org.uk

Stage 1: What is a Room? In conjunction with exploring the theoretical aspects of what constitutes a room, we undertook quantitative research of notable rooms in the vicinity. Measuring, drawing, model-making, diagramming and comparing were the tools we used to make sense of the innate attributes of a room: boundary, skeleton, light, function, infrastructure and props. Each group manipulated these elements to play against each other, formulating the conceptual basis for a design proposal.

Bloomsbury has at various times been an epicentre for architects, philosophers, authors and artists: a nexus that has long facilitated interdisciplinary conversations. As new students to the AA and London we were initiated into both the spatial qualities and the historical context of the Bloomsbury area through our First Year brief. In order to develop an installation for the Bloomsbury Festival in October we identified rooms in the city and reacted to them by questioning their architectural components: light, circulation, content, use, redundancy, illusions, infrastructure, sound and materiality. By interpreting ‘rooms’ in the Bloomsbury area through the lens of these qualities we designed and constructed a number of installations that engaged with the public at the Bloomsbury Festival and articulated many of the narratives that occur in the AA’s locality.

Stage 2: Iterations We began a procedure of design proposals based on the foundations developed in the first stage and adapted them to group functions. While one group transformed the infrastructural aspect of a room into a suspended bar where electrical wires, bulbs and structural chains are kept highly visible while serving the function of a noodle-bar, another group reduced the room to its ground floor and deformed it to modify the experience of playing badminton in it. We explored the correlation between function and form through a series of reductive models while continuing to ground our design decisions in the initially identified rooms. Stage 3: Implementation Through developing a series of exploratory drawings and models we identified the construction materials and planned the

A colourful badminton court encouraged play and entertained visitors in the usually tranquil Bedford Square garden

19 crafting of the joints. The setting of Bedford Square played host to our architectural fair: a café-stand, a noodle-stall, a badminton court, a labyrinth of optical illusions, a meditation space, a quotidian diorama, a spatial wandering and a welcoming area. These installations were animated by music, dancing, sports, food and drinks. During the weekend, the fair attracted the public to participate in both its visual and its experiential curiosities. From the spectacle of Swedish dancers to Gothic tiles cast in jelly, the folly of the fair entertained visitors of all ages. This first project of the academic year introduced First Year to the multifaceted nature of architecture: analysis, design, construction, business and entertainment. Installations such as the following two, entertained and intrigued many visitors, whilst opening up the usually private space of Bedford Square Gardens to the public: Group Light To question the definition of a room as space limited by some kind of material boundary, we reduced the PhD common room at the AA to its essential elements: its structural frame. Several dimensions were created: as the sun moves around the frame, a shifting shadow defines the planar limit and the vaulted material elements shape a vertical limit while framing the sky – the firmament becomes the overhead in the room. To enhance the contour of the last standing beams of the room, we adjoined elements of detail that we captured on hexagonal tiles. Each tile displayed Gothic motifs carefully crafted by masons as well as marks spontaneously and accidentally made due to daily living. Collectively, the textures reveal the story of a room over centuries and are a testament to the beauty of decay. The effect is sudden – a room stripped of its walls, where the dichotomies of light and shadow and void and solid play against each other to form a bizarre space with changing boundaries. To functionalise and to familiarise visitors with this unusual space, a café served coffee and cookies over the course of the weekend.

The Badminton Court A less typical institution in Bloomsbury is the YMCA. Nonetheless, it is an important centre of activity, a space that emanates a certain dynamism. Stemming from this reading we began an iterative process examining, designing and finally implementing an installation that encouraged play through a subtle manipulation of tectonic values. Through a progression from abstract to more detailed model making and research the decision to subvert the form of the badminton court to create an event for the festival occurred. To transcend the strictures and rules, such as the dividing lines of a badminton court, which define movement in sports we deconstructed and altered their layout. The angular shifts created may be seen to orient or disorient players on the court, shifting advantage and disadvantage through architectural intervention.

Visitors to Bloomsbury Festival wander through a tunnel constructed by First Year students, punctuated by optical illusions framing the park beyond.

INEVITABLE LYRICAL IMPROBABILITY Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos (Intermediate 3 Tutors) celebrate the work of their student, Basmah Kaki (AA Year Out), winner of the RIBA Bronze Medal

In his new book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly establishes parallels between biological evolution principles and technological developments. In a brief passage he mentions a very telling connection between self-organising systems in biology and the ways in which open-ended ingenuity of natural forms become ‘highly probable’ among a chain of almost impossible factors. Looking back at Basmah Kaki’s tenacious Third Year project in Intermediate 3 2010/11, we realised that there was some of the inevitable, a lot of the improbable and a dash of an additional regulatory ingredient: the lyrical. Basmah Kaki’s project ‘An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism’ received a high pass in Technical Studies, a high pass from the External Examiners and was also awarded the RIBA Bronze Medal 2011 for the Best Design Project at Part 1, out of more than 100 entries from 56 schools in 15 countries. Prizes are a positive public reward for great achievements. The prizes mentioned above are indeed recognition of Basmah’s hard work and talent. However, what prizes can hardly encompass is the inner struggle of the work and its deep connections with the personal path of the author. Great work is so, not so much for the prizes it collects, but rather for the personal edge and its creative tension. ‘An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism’ presented a process of design with the right challenges for Basmah as a third year student in Inter 3. She reinvented the unit brief of ‘Energy’ and articulated a clear path to prototype artefacts that would generate energy from wind. These prototypes built up a series of small success stories. Based on her initial technical understanding (bear in

mind, we are still architects amid our curiosity for interdisciplinary technology), the improbability of her creatures to generate energy was high. After a series of attempts she turned the improbable into the possible. At some point the prototype did generate energy and produced sounds, something she had not expected beforehand. The final project is sited in a granite quarry at the edge of Bangalore city, a high-tech powerhouse in India. It deals with the migrant cast of workers – among them many women and children – ‘whose hearing is progressively damaged by the noise pollution endemic to their work condition’, as Basmah describes: ‘An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism creates a long-term strategy where sound and religious spaces offer relief, treatment and hope for the community of workers.’ The choice of a social programme placed the project under new demands and complexities beyond the mere generation of energy. The current architecture discourse regarding social design tends to equal ‘minimum architecture for survival’, that is to say, cheap, fast and mindless constructions. Playing with the infrastructural qualities of the site – rock noise, dynamite explosions, and wind force – as well as the fragile presence of an existing temple, the tension of the urgent social scenario blends with the cultural narrative of sacred symbols. The project was partly documentary – the necessity to tell a tale of human struggle – but not only that: it was an opportunity to speculate based on its peculiar cultural fragments of persisting religion. This mixture between the

See more drawings and a description of Basmah’s project on the RIBA President’s Medals website, www.presidentsmedals.com

Axonometric drawing of an Acoustical Lyrical Mechanism

inevitability of addressing the social issues present at the site and the awkwardness of doing so by telling the story through sound, enabled the project to be precise and expressive in equal measures. Lyrical mechanisms tested how the building could be played by the wind, like an Aeolian harp transforming the abrasive sounds of quarrying into sensorial stimulus inside the retreat spaces of the proposed building. The final design explores the potential of infrastructure-cum-building, placed within the left rock of the quarry. It utilises wind updraft to buffer the noise pollution, transforming the abrasive sound into acoustic ambience, offering educational programmes via lyrical mechanisms, tuning tools and sonic workshops. Nevertheless, in our view, the project succeeds when it challenges convention. The project achieves an unexpected yet absolutely mesmerising end product thanks to a narrative that merges the social and the

interactive aspects of the environment. In a design unit like Intermediate 3 the design synthesis of the highly unlikely has become a key feature. Basmah Kaki not only learned the inevitable intuitions of a designer but also developed her own repertoire of creativity, desire and discipline. In this sense her lyric mechanisms are a mirror of her own balanced personality and sensible attitude. With regards to the improbable, nothing better than remembering Jorge Luis Borges and his take on prizes: ‘Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me.’ Congratulations, Basmah!

VISITING THE VISITING SCHOOL: FROM BEDFORD SQUARE TO BEYOND ENTROPY Karina Monteith-Joseph, coordinator of the Visiting School, visits Venice and describes the diverse schools taking place around the world

I started my role as the Visiting School Coordinator last summer, and prior to my interview I had little idea of what it entailed. I quickly learnt that there was a diverse range of short architecture-based programmes on offer in various locations worldwide. I was impressed by the long list of cities in the prospectus including Berlin, Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore and Venice. June is the busiest time for the Visiting School, with up to six programmes taking place. The AA-based Summer School programme was about to begin, directed by Natasha Sandmeier and assisted by Manijeh Verghese, and it was fun to have them join the office during that period! I caught glimpses of some of the fantastic work being produced across the terrace, and witnessed their final champagne ceremony in Bedford Square on a glorious summer’s day. I also took a peek at the DLAB student presentations, a programme directed by Elif Erdine, in the AA Lecture Hall, impressed by how the groups had worked so productively on their projects during the ten days. In August 2011, I had the opportunity to join the Venice Beyond Entropy programme, directed by Stefano Rabolli Pansera, my first experience of attending a workshop. I was intrigued to discover the processes and outcomes of a Visiting School. I arrived late at night, onto the magical island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the location of the

prestigious Fondazione Giorgio Cini residence where the programme is held each year. The Palladian architecture was magnificent, and I felt privileged to have access to the facilities, including the historic library, usually accessible only to scholars of Italian architecture and history. The group consisted of international students, mostly around the ages of 20–25, with mature students too. The premise of the Venice workshop was to spend time ‘visiting’ in the Grand Tour sense of the word. The highlight for me was a private guided boat trip along the Brenta River to Stra, observing the changing water levels, agriculture and facades of the Palladian villas along the way. We stopped at the famous Villa Pisani and Villa Foscari or ‘Malcontenta’, where we were given in depth tours of the beautiful frescoed interiors. We walked around stunning landscaped gardens and a maze whilst taking notes and doing sketches, and were asked to consider how Palladian symmetry could be applied to solve the problem of the urban sprawl of recently built houses, shops and roads over the original Palladian Villas. We took a not so glamorous public bus home so that we could take pictures of our site and observe the chaos at close range. It became clear on the second day that there was so much on the agenda, with rarely a moment to stop. We convened at

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The premise of the Venice workshop was to spend time visiting in the Grand Tour sense of the word.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Photos Karina Monteith-Joseph

24 the Fondazione Giorgio Cini for presentations of student research, and to hear talks by leading guest speakers and critics on the topic of Beyond Entropy, which really opened up a new way of seeing and presented a strong research agenda. We attended a tour of the Venice Biennale where the highlight for most was Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’, which combines thousands of short film extracts that show the time, as a continuous 24-hour film in real time. Stefano pointed out its connection to our discussions on film and space in relation to Beyond Entropy, such as the music videos of Michel Gondry. At the end of my visit I felt enriched, enlivened and inspired. What makes the Visiting School so unique is that all the workshops are completely different in content, so for potential applicants there is plenty to choose from. Our office at 38 Bedford Square is small and quiet, consisting of

Chris Pierce, myself and Lucy Moroney our student assistant, yet from this base we liaise with AA tutors and staff in both the UK and abroad, and hundreds of applicants from around the world. AA Programme Directors also invite tutors and other practitioners to contribute to the workshops. A benefit of working at the Visiting School is being able to gain an insight into contemporary architectural and theoretical discourse, and seeing the results of the experimentation and work generated by each programme. Most of the content from past workshops including photos can be viewed on the programme sites on the AA website.

The AA Visiting School is a worldwide programme of short courses, design and research workshops. To learn more about the different global schools and download the prospectus visit the website: www.aaschool.ac.uk/visitingschool

‘The Palladian architecture was magnificent, and I felt priviledged to have access to the facilities, including the historic library.’

THE BIG SHED

Big Shed is the vehicle for a collaboration between AA Masters course, Design & Make and last year’s Diploma 19 (Director: Martin Self, Programme Staff: Piers Taylor and Kate Darby). By working collaboratively on a real project, the unit and the programme developed individual theses that are derived from a passionate integration of making within design. The ‘Big Shed’ is a 500m2 assembly workshop, the first of the new campus buildings at AA’s campus in Dorset – Hooke Park. While the exploratory mechanism for this building has been a series of constructed ‘primers’ or small inhabitable structures and prototypes: the students of Diploma 19 were responsible for extracting from the unit brief for the Big Shed a personal design agenda that would ultimately manifest itself in the building design. Students’ interests ranged from envelope performance or using wind to dictate the shape of the building to integrating the surrounding landscape into the materiality of the shed to researching ad-hoc construction processes as an argument for a non-deterministic approach to design and structure. The early experiments of one student, Elena Gaidar, explored articulated structures leading to a proposition that the Big Shed should be adaptable in its configuration, allowing the building to maximise its seasonal and functional flexibility. This principle – that the Shed adapts to environmental and programmatic requirements – was identified collectively as the driving concept for the project. The final shed was recently completed by the Design & Make programme. It has large moveable sections that future users will be able reconfigure to form walls (in winter, for wind and rain shelter), doors, or canopies (in summer, for shading, and to allow large components and equipment in and out of the Shed. The building has been constructed from larch, sourced from Hooke Park and local woodlands. For the primary structure, tree-trunks were used ‘in-the-round’, thereby retaining their full structural integrity. An ‘ad-hoc’ infill of smaller secondary members will carry the cladding.

For more information on the Big Shed please see http://summerbuild.aaschool.ac.uk

Photo Valerie Bennett

THE GRAND TOUR OF COPENHAGEN

Forthcoming Membership Trip Abroad: 3 Days in Madrid with AAIS 19–21/5/2012 For further information see www.aaschool.ac.uk or email events@aaschool.ac.uk

Two contrasting accounts of the Members’ trip to Copenhagen by First Year students Stratis Mortakis and Oliver Chiu

Stratis Mortakis: Oli and I were heading to Gatwick Airport to get the plane. Sitting on our luggage in the Tube, we were talking about our experience at the AA as First Year students. I had applied for the trip long before I got into the school, and that was the reason I was so excited about it. We both wanted to meet more people. After a while, we reached the airport, got the plane, and before we knew it we landed in Copenhagen. One thing that struck us and still makes us laugh is the pronunciation of the word Copenhagen, which seemed to be a completely different place when read Kopenhavn. This first experience is a small memory of the trip, and it was the best introduction to what would follow. Meneesha and Joanne (Membership) were at the hotel when we arrived, ready to welcome us. From that moment, we had Denmark ahead of us to explore. As a country that continuously evolves in the field of design and architecture, we visited plenty of impressive, modern buildings such as the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, we were starting to get to know each other: not only students, but also members and AA Alumni. Because most of them were older than us and had studied in the school for longer than us, listening to them gave us the chance to get to know the school better. The days started promptly with a home-cooked breakfast. We chatted about the previous day while planning the day ahead. Copenhagen was more than just ‘fascinating’. We saw hundreds, thousands of bikes, more than cars or even pedestrians. Each time we entered a café or a shop, we were amazed by the amount of

unlocked bikes left outside. Walking around, we got a sense of what it is to live in Copenhagen. Peaceful. In addition, we were learning about its culture day after day, through exhibitions, buildings and even dinners together. In the majority of areas that we visited, the architecture was free of commercial buildings. Copenhagen’s character and cultural identity were present almost everywhere, and that created an intriging edge that made us want to explore it. When we visited buildings by contemporary Danish practices, we were taking pictures of something we had only seen online, and that was quite refreshing. Now, back into the school routine, I remember the discussions on the train to the Museum of Modern Art, or walking back to the hotel talking about how nice the dinner was. It makes me jealous of my former self for having had such an amazing and interesting break! Oliver Chiu: The trip to Copenhagen for me as a new member of the Architectural Association was one of extreme excitement and a more than appropriate way to start my First Year. This trip conveyed to me the fresh and enthusiastic connection the school has with its students and its inseparable relationship with architecture. Rather than a community which keeps within their own years, the AA encourages collaboration between the groups and explores many different opinions from varied experiences. This gave me, in particular, a great foundation to see how much I could learn from my seniors within the AA. The three days spent in Copenhagen were exceptionally carefree, in the sense of

26 Installation by Arne Quinze, ‘My Home My House My Stilt House’, at Louisiana Moma LIVING Frontiers of Architecture III–IV Photo Stratis Mortakis

scope and freedom for visiting the nation’s architecture, just like school life, the trip was independent. The grand tour of Copenhagen was wonderful as students who lived in Copenhagen gave us their personal view on what they considered worth seeing and introduced to me the fundamentals of architecture within the social context of the city. Mike Taylor, a Canadian AA Member interning at a Danish architectural practice, and local student of architecture, Oskar Jönsson, both provided invaluable insights and were a welcome addition to the group. A day trip to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art was a significant focus of the weekend. We were taken on a guided tour of LIVING Frontiers of Architecture III–IV which exhibited recent architectural projects, art installations and case studies, including a great many 1:1 scale models. Notable works included: My Home My House My Stilt House by Arne Quinze; Final

Wooden House by Sou Fujimoto Architects and Le Cabanon by Le Corbusier. After visiting Louisiana MOMA we were given time to freely explore Copenhagen which again emphasised the independence within the life of the AA. After looking at various cultural exhibitions we were treated to the more architectural aspects of the trip, visiting urban landmarks such as Örestad projects: (ranging from apartments to the Masterplan) Tietgan Dormitory by Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects and BIG’s VM Housing and 8 House. We also looked at other forms of architectural delight such as Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint’s expressionist Grundtvig’s Church, with its meticulous and wonderful use of material, true to Copenhagen’s architectural nature. Its already monolithic appearance was accentuated by clever masterplanning whereby houses along the road leading to the church tapered to exaggerate the viewer’s perspective.

The lifestyle of Copenhagen was conveyed strongly to me as the trip not only broadened my relationship and understanding towards the city’s architecture but gave me a greater appreciation towards its way of life, from the ubiquitous bicycles to pleasant night life. What I registered was the enthusiasm everyone contributed to the experience and atmosphere of the trip. I was also astonished by the level of diversity within the group, there were people who were not from the AA but were associated with different architectural backgrounds. The careful planning of the trip was astounding on many levels. We even managed to fit in a visit to the famous Room 606 in the SAS Royal Copenhagen

AA Membership Events are open to all members including students and staff and range from AA-based curatorial talks, external gallery talks, lectures, brunches, site visits and international trips. Please check www.aaschool.ac.uk for information and updates or feel free to visit us at 33 Bedford Square Ground Floor Front.

The group outside the 8 House by Bjarke Ingels Group in Ørestad Photo Joanne McCluskey

hotel, the only hotel room with the original Arne Jacobsen décor from July 1960 preserved in its entirety. The trip was concluded with a three-course meal at Restaurant Cofoco, a fantastic and a wonderful way to round off an extremely worthwhile trip which was balanced with enough passion and charisma for me to sign up for the next trip without a moment’s hesitation.

MEMBERS’ EVENTS: A SNAPSHOT A selection of the varied Membership events that have taken place since November 2011

Building visit to One New Change led by Sidell Gibson Architects’ Sanya Tomic in November 2011 Photo Joanne McCluskey

The AA’s Thomas Weaver listens to François Dallegret describe his 1967 Palais Metro project during a gallery talk in tandem with Dallegret’s recent AA show, ‘GOD & CO: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble’, November 2011 Photo Meneesha Kellay

See our new photo album of recent Members’ events at www.aaschool.ac.uk/ membership/events

H·O·R·T·U·S exhibition talk by ecoLogicStudio, January 2012 Photo Joanne McCluskey

Membersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Trip: Haroon Mirza light installation, Venice Art Biennale, November 2011 Photo Joanne McCluskey

MAKE THEM BEAUTIFULLY WITHOUT MAKING THEM COMPLICATED

John Winter is one of the most important British architects you have never heard of. Naturally, this statement is not completely true. As evidenced by the remarkably distinguished audience that turned out for the recent Docomomo lecture, ‘John Winter in conversation with Adrian Forty’, many have heard of him, and indeed value him highly. However, his relative obscurity, sandwiched among a list of big name architects such as the Smithsons (who came directly before) and Richard Rogers and Norman Foster (who come directly after), can be put down to his humble design approach and practice. His career was characterised mostly by the building of housing on a modest scale and within a tight budget. The lecture was timed to coincide with the latest issue of AA Files, in which Forty, along wiht Files editor Thomas Weaver, interview Winter about his formative years. Here, we learn that after an apprenticeship based in the Arts and Crafts tradition, Winter embarked on a remarkable architectural quest, working for historically important architects and travelling across the United States. This adventure, we heard, was the 1950s version of the grand tour. Rather than the traditional visit to the Continent, ambitious yu architects flocked to the United States, then a postwar world of maximum possibility. However, Winter felt something was lacking in his experience of the US. He was searching for an architecture of place, a dialogue with the past, and

America – the land of empty potentiality – simply could not deliver. Winter returned to England, taking with him an enhanced knowledge of advanced construction systems and practical design solutions. His statement ‘keep it simple’, a phrase often repeated, serves well to define the practical methodology he gained regarding materials and construction techniques. ‘One of the things you learn in America is that building is not some sort of esoteric science… anyone can do it’ – this statement resonates throughout the conversation, merging nicely with Winter’s motto of simplicity. Prefiguring the popularity of movements like Rural Studio, Winter utilised this hands-on approach, combined with a Miesian attention to the detail of steel construction, to create elegant and economical structures which employ site- and climate-specific logic. Though exposed steel beams and factory-made materials tend to elicit obvious comparisons to High-Tech architecture, Winter brushes aside the resemblance, declaring High-Tech a movement which ‘makes simple things very complicated… then solves them beautifully.’ He qualifies that his aim is rather ‘to make them beautifully without making them complicated’. Watching this conversation, it was easy to lose track of the Docomomo connection (Docomomo is an organisation whose aim is to preserve and restore Modern Movement buildings). Remembering that it was precisely the desire for a historical

John Winter was elected Honorary Member of the AA in 2011. Future nominations for Honorary Membership can be made to the AA Secretary by downloading the form: www.aaschool.ac.uk/downloads/hmnom.pdf

Alison Moffett (AA HCT 2011) profiles architec, John Winter MBE (AADipl 1953, former AA tutor and Trustee of the AA Foundation since 1991) through the recent Docomomo lecture, ‘John Winter in conversation with Adrian Forty’

31 richness and layering that returned Winter to his homeland, his active collaboration with a preservation society makes sense. This importance was beautifully outlined in a set of slides, chosen from Winter’s own collection, showing examples of the additive

If you missed the DOCOMOMO lecture at the AA, watch it online here: www.aaschool.ac.uk/video/johnwinter

Amongst the crowd at John Winter’s lecture were several AA graduates who helped build his first house. Photo Alexander Furunes

process that is possible only in the Old World, where one age builds directly onto the fabric of the previous age, constructing a patchwork of architectural interventions. ‘The whole history of architecture’, declared Winter when contemplating the walled fortress of Carcassonne, ‘in one tower!’ Through Docomomo, this additive historical process is not too far from Winter’s current restoration quest. Here, just as Violletle-Duc ‘restored’ the roof of Carcassonne, he is often forced to use an informed creative licence to return dilapidated Modernist buildings to life, adding his own details where they ‘should be’. In the current climate of cutbacks and austerity, bringing with it a growing distaste for lavish iconic buildings and a new interest in modest, well-made solutions, it now seems even more important to look to examples of Winter’s work for beautifully

practical, economical design solutions as well as a sense that buildings should last and be cared for along the way: a commitment to reuse and restoration. Though heartwarming to see so many longstanding colleagues of Winter’s return to the AA in support, it would also have been encouraging to see a larger percentage of young faces in the audience. Rare, indeed, is the opportunity to hear someone speak who has worked for and with Erno Goldfinger,

Louis Kahn, SOM, and Charles and Ray Eames, and who, from an explorer’s experience, learned to value the not necessarily opposing practices of quality precision construction and self-build economy – and, choosing to remain true to home, brought these ideas back to the UK in order to improve a country in dire need of rebuilding. Remarkably, this utilisation of foreign discovery is precisely what the British Council is asking of the current generation for the next British pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale, with the concept of ‘Venice Takeaway’. Winter’s is a story of the past shown to be remarkably applicable to the present. But, perhaps the most enduring sentiment expressed by Winter looking back on a life’s work, is one of a passionate enthusiasm: As he puts it, succinctly, ‘you won’t get very good buildings if you don’t give a damn.’

THRILLING WONDER STORIES: A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING THESE STRANGE TIMES Diploma 6 student, Hannah Durham (AA Fifth Year) encapsulates the third installation of Thrilling Wonder Stories into an acronym

The third annual instalment of Thrilling Wonder Stories landed as scheduled at the AA in October. Now in its third session this event was twinned to an equally thrilling event occurring five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, in New York. Morphed into two simultaneous events, they were connected via Skype screens for a spectacle described as a ‘two-day transatlantic story-telling jam session’ by Liam Young, Diploma 6 Unit Master and director of the futurist think-tank, Tomorrow’s Thought’s Today. Hosting the event in London were Liam Young and Matt Jones from BERG London. They were our ‘ushers’ for the day, weaving us through the fantastical worlds of the futurist experts that were invited as guests to this ‘weird wedding of machines and architects’, as Matt Jones described. Thrilling Wonder Stories was organised, as in previous years, by Liam and Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG. Geoff and his partner Nicola Twilley were the hosts of the New York Thrilling Wonder Stories event. For the first time this year Popular Science and Studio X NYC helped coordinate the event, along with the AA. Robustly, the day began with an introduction by Brett Steele, who remarked ‘story-telling is a technology’; in fact it may be ‘humanity’s greatest, deepest form of technology for its ability not just to communicate ideas which it has been doing for

millennia, but to actually conjure all other activities which we think of as technology’. Steele also noted the ‘capacity of storytelling to try and imagine this thing called the future’. While listening to the tales spun by the fantastic array of experts gathered in London and New York, it became easy to understand the power of ‘story-telling’. It is a tool for escape but equally, as Liam Young says, a tool which highlights ‘the flaws and frailties of the everyday’ and offers ‘a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios’. This is, Liam Young suggests, due to ‘fiction’s ability to simultaneously reflects the current condition while suggesting the possibility of what’s to come’. In London the speakers noted story-telling’s ability to ‘slip between the real and the imagined’. The day followed a trajectory from science fiction to science fact, under three main themes: ‘Worlds of Wonder; Far from Home’, ‘Blood, Guts & Hydraulic Fluid’ and ‘Strange but True; When Robots Rule the World’. The brilliant guest list stretched (to name just three) from the written worlds communicated with strings of wondrous words from sciencefiction author Bruce Sterling, to the creator of the robotic squirrel, frog and human head seated proudly centre stage in the AA lecture hall by animatronics engineer Gustav Hoegen, and fantastically to the

Visit the Thrilling Wonder Stories website to see videos of the past three events as well as written and visual commentary, www.thrillingwonderstories.co.uk

A very ‘real’ demonstration by taxidermy artist and sculptor Charlie Tuesday Gates Photo Valerie Bennett

very ‘real’ demonstration by taxidermy artist and sculptor Charlie Tuesday Gates. Leading the day the first guest to take to the screen in the ‘Worlds of Wonder; Far from Home’ chapter was Christian Lorenz Scheurer, a concept artist and illustrator for video games and films. He told us of the ‘catalogue of questions’ he asks himself whenever he starts a new concept image, such as: who lives here? what is the temperature? are they poor or rich? With every digital brush stroke he paints into the texture of his digital paintings, his questions are answered and the stories of the image are unlocked. This moved through to a motion graphics artist from SPOV, who showed trailers of a world where bombs were filled with tree saplings, transferring to Gavin Rothery, a concept artist from the film Moon (2009). These discussions led to the idea that what makes a brilliant science-fiction film is when a set of rules for the imaginary world is fixed and strictly followed.

Leading onto the ‘Blood, Guts & Hydraulic Fluid’ chapter, animatronics engineer Gustav Hoegen ran the audience through the process of designing an animatronics shot in a film. He powered up the frog on display, designed from studying a real frog’s skeleton and movements. Mid-way through the day, the artist and sculptor Charlie Tuesday Gates took to the stage and, let’s face it, did slightly shock the AA audience with a live taxidermy demonstration, complete with the smell of the decomposing ‘fox in a box’. But the audience remained keen and transfixed by the ‘realness’ of this reality compared to the science fiction paintings our eyes had grown accustomed to in the morning’s presentations. From seeing the insides of a hare, we then side-stepped into the film Splice (2009), about modifying human DNA, with a Skype-linked presentation from the film director Vincenzo Natali. In ‘Strange but True: When Robots Rule the World’, we were treated to the spectacle of an army of small circular robots which spun and shuffled themselves in a dance to get into a programmed position, thanks to the ‘Natural Robotics Lab’ at Sheffield University. Then we were transported into the magical landscape of a synthetic forest by Philip Beesley. This forest seemed plausible somehow, after seeing what robots are apparently capable of. New experts continued to take to the screen as it became increasingly clear, with the constant flipping from science fiction to science fact, that we are already living in a world where this distinction is blurred. Saturated by Thrilling Wonder Stories, with the fantastical and brilliantly bizarre stories of other imaginary worlds that nevertheless each contain an element of everyday reality, our minds were opened to imagining what the alternative roles of the ‘architect’ might be. It seems story-telling is a technology and a tool used to reframe and renew our perception of the present as well as the prospective future. So... Go forth with Thrilling Wonder Stories as your tool for understanding these Strange Times.

THE GONG SHOW

There is a general rule to prize-winning that seems to suggest that the more competitions you enter the more prizes you will win. Norman Foster’s office has long adopted this strategy, developing it more recently into a fine art, with one full-time position in his office dedicated only to entering Foster and Partners’ projects for prizes. As a result his practice regularly picks up gongs for prizes that no one else had the perseverance to realise existed – things like Kazakhstan’s Best Mechanical Ventilation prize, and other such vital awards. You can see these all listed at the end of his books. There are literally thousands of them, even for buildings as magnificent as London’s City Hall. My own relationship to prizes and awards follows the Woody Allen model – in Annie Hall his character Alvy Singer offers his opinion on Hollywood’s award-centric society: ‘More awards? What’s with all these awards? All they do is give out awards here. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.’ I have long used this line when anyone close to me announces some recent honour. But then, out of the blue, someone actually gives you an award, and you immediately feel deliriously happy. Or rather it is an award given to the AA’s terrific Print Studio and publications team. Over the last few months we have won three of these awards, and in each instance I have been overjoyed. This is largely down to the fact that the books and publications that these awards are celebrating are all, actually, great. The first of these was for Jason Griffiths’ recent book, Manifest Destiny, and was awarded by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (or DAM). I heard the news through a rather earnest email from a German publisher: ‘Congratulations Herr Weaver, you have won the DAM award.’

I immediately called Jason and relayed the news. ‘What god damn award?’, he replied. The prize itself was for one of the ten best books on architecture published in 2011. The organisers told me that for the other nine award winners they had long disagreements and battles; but all of them agreed that Manifest Destiny had to win (again, once you start winning awards, even the sycophantic, clearly embellished stories surrounding their winning start to become something you cherish). The next prize came a few weeks later, and was for a British Design and Production Award for Double or Nothing, a catalogue of a recent AA exhibition by the young Belgian firm 51N4E. The prize came with a large laser-cut Perspex trophy and was handed out at an awards dinner in a west London hotel. The third and most recent award is for something close to my own heart – a nomination for John Morgan, the amazing graphic designer of AA Files, for one of the Design Museum’s 2012 Designs of the Year (‘the Oscars of the design world’, as the Design Museum’s own gushing PR tells me). All of the nominations, in lots of different design categories, are currently on display at the Design Museum, before a final winner is announced at the end of April. AA Files is up against Alexander McQueen’s wedding dress for Kate Middleton, a wind-powered device for clearing land mines in war zones and Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House. If it wins I will be amazed.

All of the AA’s books and journals are available via www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications; and more information on the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year can be found at www.designmuseum.org

Thomas Weaver (managing editor of the AA’s books and journals) responds to the troika of prizes recently awarded to a number of AA titles

Three recent award-winning AA publications Photo Sue Barr

FORTHCOMING FROM AA PUBLICATIONS

Architecture Words 9 Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt Mark Rakatansky 288 pp, 180 x 110 mm, paperback May 2012 978-1-907896-15-6 £15 This latest instalment in the Architecture Words series collects together for the first time a number of key essays by the New York-based architect and critic Mark Rakatansky. Following its title, the book is broken down into three sections: Tectonic, Acts, Desires and Doubts. In each, Rakatansky covers a series of subjects, from Louis Kahn’s relationship to the brick to a more general polemic involving identity and politics in contemporary architecture, and in a writerly voice that varies from the third-person narrative of the scholarly essay to the transcript of an email exchange with fellow academic Sarah Whiting, discussing two recent books by architect Greg Lynn.

Architecture Words 10 Utopia Anthony Vidler c 160 pp, 180 x 110 mm, paperback Autumn 2012 978-1-907896-16-3 £15 This book is based on five MA presentations at the AA School all on the subject of utopia by Anthony Vidler, dean and professor at the School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, New York City. In these five resulting essays, Vidler presents not a descriptive history of utopias, but a series of questions and problematics that have emerged throughout history when utopian thought, as derived from literary and philosophical genres, has been spatialised by architects and urbanists.

Architecture Words 11 Maps & Territories Alessandra Ponte c 160 pp, 180 x 110 mm, paperback Autumn 2012 978-1-907896-17-0 £15 Written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, this collection of essays begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, ‘The Map and the Territory’, written specifically for this volume.

Architecture Words 12 Stones against Diamonds Lina Bo Bardi With an introduction by Silvana Rubino c 160 pp, 180 x 110 mm, paperback June 2012 978-1-907896-17-0 £15 Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) was a prolific architect, designer and thinker, whose work, absorbing her native Italy and then after 1946 her adopted homeland, Brazil, spans across architecture, furniture, stage and costume design, urban planning, curatorial work, teaching and writing. This collection of essays is the first-ever English anthology of her writings. It includes texts written when she was still living in Italy as well as later contributions to a number of Brazilian newspapers, journals and magazines. An acute critic and a creative thinker, Bo Bardi proposes a series of new parameters for design thinking and practice, such as the notions of ‘historical present’, ‘roughness’ and ‘tolerance of imperfection’. Presented collectively, her texts present a wealth of inspirational thoughts articulated in a refreshingly simple, straightforward fashion.

Sharp Words: Selected Essays of Dennis Sharp With an introduction by Paul Finch 160 pp, 310 x 240 mm paperback April 2012 978-1-907896-07-1 c £25 To commemorate the life and work of Dennis Sharp (1933–2010), Sharp Words brings together a variety of essays that touch upon each of his architectural fascinations – among them, glass architecture, picture palaces, masters of concrete and English modernism. Punctuating these texts are a number of editorials from his days as editor of AAQ , which graphically as much as intellectually offer emblems of his time at the AA.

For further information on AA Publications visit www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications

FORTHCOMING FROM BEDFORD PRESS

Bedford Press is an imprint of AA Publications www.bedfordpress.org

Civic City Cahier 4: Afterlives of Neoliberalism Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore c 120 pp, 190 x 115 mm, paperback Summer 2012 978-1-907414-18-3 £8 The global financial collapse of 2008 was widely interpreted as discrediting the neoliberal project and its false utopia of market rule, though it remains to be seen whether the death of neoliberalism has in fact been greatly exaggerated. Brenner, Peck and Theodore raise the question: will late-neo-liberal regulatory reforms and modes of crisis management usher in a truly post-neoliberal political settlement, or will the neoliberal project continue to stagger on in the form of a leaner and meaner politics of austerity, a politics that fails to fundamentally disrupt prevailing neoliberalised regulatory settlements and sociospatial relations? And finally, how can a rejuvenated ‘civic city’ emerge from within the interstices of the fractured, polarised urban spaces of late neoliberalism?

BEVERLY BERNSTEIN Reforming Registrar at the AA, co-founder of Circle 33 Housing Trust and ‘Queen of the Islands’ development planner, who died 22 December 2011; profile by Bob Garratt (AADipl 1974, former AA tutor)

Beverly Bernstein came to London from New York with her husband, David, in 1964 intending to spend a year or so here. Instead they stayed and made significant contributions to architectural education, social housing and development planning in both the UK and overseas. Her appointment in her early twenties to the role of Senior Registrar at the Architectural Association School coincided with the end of a turbulent period in the AA’s history which stabilised during the interim Principalship of Professor Otto Koenigsberger of the AA’s Tropical School. She became part of the selection process for the new principal, John Lloyd, and a lifelong friend of Otto. John Lloyd joined the AA from Ghana and the radical and massive rehousing project recreating communities displaced by the Volta dam, which he oversaw as the Dean of the Architecture and Engineering

Faculty of the University of Kumasi. He was determined to develop at the AA the effective multi-disciplinary educational processes they had pioneered. These were eagerly accepted by the AA students and faculty but less so by the architectural educational establishment elsewhere. The reforms of the AA’s organisation were tested both when negotiations continued for two years on the merger of the AA School with Imperial College, and when they failed and the AA continued its independent path. In 1970 Beverly left the AA to follow her development planning interests working with both Colin Buchanan and Partners and Land Use Consultants. By chance rather than design, she specialised in the development planning of islands and had success in the Seychelles, Malta and the Channel Islands and, curiously, Saudi Arabia. She edited Habitat International , Housing Review and The Works of Charles Abrams. Together with David Bernstein and David Levitt, she had a significant effect on social housing, helping to create the modern housing association movement and, in 1968, the Circle 33 Housing Trust, which has become the very successful Circle Anglia Housing Association.

NEW AWARDS New scholarships, bursaries and prizes for AA students

A full list of student prizes awarded in 2011 is available at www.aaschool.ac.uk/portfolio/awards. For more information on student scholarships and bursaries please visit www.aaschool.ac.uk/financial_aid

Student prizes and distinctions awarded in 2011 were showcased in an exhibition spanning the Front Membersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Room and AA Bar, October 2011 Photo Sue Barr

The Beverly Bernstein Prize is an annual award in support of student work in housing and/or urbanism in the developing world. It has been set up through the generous support of Beverlyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friends and family to commemorate her involvement with the AA as Senior Registrar in the 1960s, as well as in recognition of her life-long interest and specialisation in housing and development planning. The prize will be run by the AA through its postgraduate programme in Housing and Urbanism, who will promote it within the School and manage the selection process. The first award is expected this academic year.

The Jane Chu Travel Scholarship has been set up by a donation from Margaret Chow (AADipl 1984). The award is in the name of her mother, and will facilitate travel for students working in the field of sustainability. This will be an annual award. Well-known author Marian Keyes (former AA Accounts Office staff) has made a donation to set up the Charlotte Coudrille Bursary. The bursary is to be awarded annually to a student who is in financial need. Charlotte Coudrille, who died in 2001, worked at the AA for many years, most notably as manager of the Accounts Office. Andrew Szmidla (former AA tutor), who sadly died last year, has left a substantial bequest to the AA. The money from the bequest is to be used to establish scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduate students from Eastern Europe. Professor Szmidla taught at the AA in the early 1970s and ran its Future Environment Research Unit in conjunction with the newly established Graduate School. The above awards are administered by the AA Foundation, Registered Charity No 328455 under the Charities Act 1960. Contributions of any amount are welcome to help the Foundation continue its important work in support of AA students. Cheques made out to the AA Foundation can be sent to Alex Lorente, Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES, or for more information please call Alex on +44(0)20 7887 4074. Students wishing to apply for AA Scholarships or Bursaries can find more information on the AA website, Financial Aid section. Submission deadlines and criteria for AA Prizes are advertised during the year in the weekly AA Events List.

PARTING STATEMENT Farewell from the former managing editor of AArchitecture, Nicola Quinn, who is Research and Proposal Development Manager in the AA’s Development Office

It only seems like yesterday when we had our Ideas Party launch, where people scrawled their ideas for the new newsletter on the Bar mirror, in pens that weren’t quite as impermanent as advertised. Suggestions that ranged from the commonplace, such as Horoscopes and a Gossip Column, to the plaintive ‘The Lonely Life of New Students’ and ‘What do I do after I leave the AA’, to the slightly misplaced ‘Some Stuff about Horses’ and ‘Can we have Artichoke on the Menu’, to the downright bizarre ‘Hair Club for Men’ and ‘Super Interesting Totally Bottom Up’. One suspects not all suggestions were meant to be taken seriously. Somehow we were still able to launch AArchitecture in the summer of 2006. Over the years we’ve seen regular features come, such as trips to the AA Archive aka Ed’s Basement, and go, such as the ill-fated Guess the Building Competition. We have taken a good look at the literary heritage of the AA. And we’ve taken in many an interesting story along the way, of AA life and beyond. AArchitecture has evolved from uncertain beginnings into the format of the last few issues. But nothing stands still (as evidenced by our recent article featuring contributions from Twitter), and now over five years and 15 issues later AArchitecture is to evolve again, as this issue features a new design by Claire McManus (AA Print Studio), and I bow out as Managing Editor and overseer. I have very much enjoyed my time working on the publication and would like to thank all our contributors over the years and urge them to keep writing, as I intend to myself. The student editors have taken over, led by long-time contributor and editor Manijeh Verghese, and they will no doubt stamp their own style and ideas on the publication with I am sure exciting results. I wish them well in their endeavours and look forward to reading AArchitecture for many years to come.

THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF AARCHITECTURE Diploma 9 student and editor Manijeh Verghese compares the publication’s earlier format to its new thematic redesign

This issue marks a new chapter in the history of AArchitecture, the AA’s triannual newsletter. The new AArchitecture picks up on threads present within the previous issues. Themes focusing on writing, research, curating and practising architecture have emerged through the variety of pieces contributed over the years. What we’ve aimed to do by rethinking the structure and design of AArchitecture is to articulate these themes more clearly and focus the publication to address topics specifically with each issue in order to make them more apparent to our readership both within the school and throughout the larger membership. Now entirely student-edited, the newsletter hopes to encourage an annually evolving editorship that would invite interested students and members to curate the content communicated to the AA community. Rather than summarising the events occurring in and around the school, the new format encourages speculation and criticism by providing a platform for the AA community to share their research, projects and ideas. Additionally the redesign introduces the use of colour and higher quality images, which we hope will invite more visual (in addition to written) contributions from students and members alike. The thematic format was chosen by keeping in mind the need for the publication to remain relevant from when we commission content to when it is mailed to the membership and student body. Each topic can now contribute to a broader discussion that relates to both the microcosm of the AA and the macrocosm of the AA’s global community, thereby engaging with a wider audience. The theme for each issue will be announced through the call for submissions which will now allow contributors to respond to the overarching topic with their ideas/projects. We hope you will find this change refreshing in the continuous evolution of AArchitecture and we look forward to receiving your ideas and contributions for future issues.

AA NEWS PUBLISHED Kirk Wooller (AA MA H&T 2006 and AA PhD 2010) published an article, ‘Media Matters’, in Architecture Today #219 (June 2011), after being invited by the editor to comment on the role of the journal in contemporary design culture. Kirk Wooller is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he will be teaching architectural history and theory. Eric Parry Architects, the practice of Eric Parry (AADipl 1979 and Former President of the AA) were featured in the 30 June issue of the AJ. The issue had an article on their spa on the roof of the Four Seasons hotel in London. The spa opened in March 2011.

Architectural Review published Drawing on the Soane Media Studies Project by Patricia Mato-Mora (AA Third Year). The July 2011 issue of the magazine published the project in the Delight section. Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the practice of Simon Allford (Former Vice President of the AA) and Paul Monaghan (GradDiplCons AA 1989) were featured in an article in the 15 September 2011 issue of the AJ in an article entitled White Collar Factory by Rory Olcayto. The article focused on buildings they have designed for Derwent London. Margot Krasojevic (AADipl 1996) has recently had a new book published. The book entitled Dynamics & De-Realisation published by Springer, edited by Professor Lebbeus Woods and Jonathan D.Solomon, explores technology’s influence on society, underlining the relationship between psychology, neurology, phobia, the experience of space and the built environment affecting our perceptions and, in the process, defining architectural design criteria. www.springerarchitektur.at/ en/margot-krasojevic-im-portrat The church of St Patrick’s in Soho Square was featured in the Technical and Practice section of the 20 October 2011 issue of the AJ. Castanon Associates, the practice of Javier Castañón (AA Technical Studies Course Master and AA Professional Practice, Part 1 Course Master) renovated the church.

Steffen Lehmann (AADipl 1991) and Robert Crocker have published a book on material efficiency, sustainable consumption and resource recovery; Designing for Zero Waste. Consumption, Technologies and the Built Environment . It presents international and local case studies and strategies for material efficiency, resource recovery and its relation to the built environment. Copies can be ordered at: www.routledge.com/sustainability Eleftherios Ambatzis (AADipl 2009) has designed the front cover for HOME magazine (December issue) based on his Fourth Year project at the AA, developed with Natasha Sandmeier and Monia de Marchi. ‘I transformed the drawing, in order to look like a gothic rose window and matched it with a limited edition table which I have designed.’ An interview with him on his work was also presented in the same issue. In that section, part of his Fifth Year project was also presented. www.athensvoice.gr/article/ design-home www.eleftherios-art.com

A Holistic Approach to Architecture – The Felicja Blumenthal Music Center and Library is a book recently written by Nili Portugali (AADipl 1973) and published by AM OVED Publishers Ltd, Tel-Aviv.

LECTURES & SYMPOSIA Christina Doumpioti (AA MArch EmTech 2008, AA EmTech Course Master and AA San Francisco Visiting School Coordinator) was an invited speaker at the ‘SURVIVAL 9. Art Review in Wrocław, Poland, which took place 20–26 June, 2001. The theme of the 9th edition of SURVIVAL was: ‘When a park becomes an arena.’ She also presented at the Acadia 2011 conference: integration through computation at Calgary/Banff, October 11–16, 2011. The paper presented was Responsive and Autonomous Material Interfaces. Finally, her paper ‘Variable-modulus and Acitve Material Systems’ was presented at the Ambience 2011 conference in Boras, Sweden. Alejandra Celedon (AA PhD Candidate) presented the paper ‘The Plan of Oikonomia’ in the ‘Economy Conference’

held the 6–8 July 2012 in the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. www.cardiff.ac.uk/archi/economy Ludovico Lombardi (AADRL March 2010) was invited to present a 2-day lecture at the Istituto Marangoni visiting school in London in August 2011. He also lectured at the AA Singapore Summer School in July 2011. www.ldvc.net Douglas Spencer (AA LU Course Tutor) has co-organised a symposium on Landscape and Critical Agency held at UCL, February 2012. landscapeandagency.wordpress.com Siamak G. Shahneshin (AA E&E MA 2000) was a keynote speaker at the ‘Knowledge City World Summit’, where five-hundred key academics from around the world met. Siamak also delivered two distinct lectures, in November 2011, at the two main Israeli schools of design, Technion the Israel Institute of Technology, and the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Aviv University. A Processing Workshop with Karsten Schmidt (creator of the Toxiclibs libraries) was organised by Arthur Mamou-Mani (AADipl 2008) and took place at London Metropolitan Works, 3 and 10 December 2011. Phillipe Rahm (Former AA Diploma Unit Master) has given a series of lectures during Autumn 2011 in Japan, the US, Spain, Austria, France and Belgium. In addition, he has held two exhibitions, ‘Imperfect Health’ at the Canadian Center for Architecture (Montreal, Canada), open until 1 April 2012, and New energy in design and art at the Museum Boijmans, in Rotterdam between November 2011 and February 2012. Politics of Fabrication (Nuria AlvarezLombardero & Francisco GonzalezCanales both Unit Masters, AA Intermediate Unit 8) exhibited their work from the 2 February to 3 March in the Miami Beach Urban Studio (420 Lincoln Rd, Suite 440, Miami Beach) of the School of Architecture of Florida International University, Miami, Florida, under the title ‘Politics of Fabrication: Challenging Political Expression in Little Havana’.

46 Sevil Yazici (AA DRL 2006), Founder & Principal at ParaMaterial, presented on 1 March 2012 in Digital Aptitudes Conference, ACSA 100th Annual Meeting which will be hosted by MIT/Boston

CAREERS & PRIZES Alex de Rijke (Former AA Unit Master and AA External Examiner) took up in January 2012 his new post as Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. David Adjaye (Former AA Diploma Unit Master and Former AA Council Member) was named Design Miami Designer of the Year. The 2011 focus was on Buckminster Fuller and David’s structure, which he was commissioned to build as a result of winning the award, featured a triangular plan, hollowed out to create a space pierced with ovoid holes reminiscent of Fuller’s dome. David and Design Miami, which ran alongside Art Basel Miami from 1–4 December 2011, were featured in the 26/27 November issue of the Financial Times. Jorge Ayala (AA LU MA 2008) was appointed to be part of the RIBA President’s Medal Award Jury in October 2011. Toby Burgess and Arthur MamouMani (both AADipl 2008) have been appointed the new unit masters of Diploma Studio 10 at the Westminster University School of Architecture and the Built environment. www.wewanttolearn.net Ioanna Symeonidou (AA EmTech MSc 2009) is recipient of the eCAADe grant for young researchers in 2011. Selection was based on a research proposal presented as part of her ongoing PhD at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in the thematic area of digital design and digital fabrication. This research line was initiated during her MSc thesis for Emergent Technologies and Design programme at the AA and is further investigated through her ongoing PhD research at the Aristotle University, supervised by professors Nikolaos Tsinikas, Vassilis Bourdakis and Dimitris Papalexopoulos. Ioanna and Anastasia Tzaka (AA Visiting Teachers 2009) won Honorable Mention in architectural competition in Thessaloniki, Greece. The design team included Ioanna Symeonidou, Anastasia Tzaka, Konstantinos Nastou, Eleni Georgiadi, and Andreas Goumas.

Andrea Di Stefano and Aleksandra Jaeschke (both AADipl 2005) from studio AION have been awarded the prestigious Europe 40 Under 40 for 2011, confered by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies & the Chicago Athenaeum. The prize ‘recognizes the best emerging European design talent in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and industrial design and their exceptional leadership contributions and achievements early in their professional careers.’ Martine de Maeseneer (former AA tutor)was one of the finalists for the Mies van der Rohe Award for her project The Bronks Youth Theatre (Brussels, Belgium). An exhibition about the 2011 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award was held in Paris at the ‘Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine, Palais de Chaillot / Institut français d’architecture’ from 8 February to 4 March 2012. The winning project, the Neues Museum (Berlin, Germany) by David Chipperfield Architects, and the five finalists were shown in model, drawings and images, together with another 39 selected projects for catalogue and exhibition. www.citechaillot.fr www.miesarch.com Andrew Bardzik (AA Third Year Student) entered the 13th Shelter International Design Competition based in Japan with this year’s theme being ‘A House in the Wilderness’. His design proposal (De-Generate House) received an honourable mention out of some 1100+ applicants. The head juror was Ryue Nishizawa (2011 Pritzker Laureate). Immanuel Koh (AADRL MArch 2010 & AA Shanghai Visiting School 2010 Unit Master) was featured and exhibited at the ‘DigitalFUTURE’ Exhibition at Tongji University (in collaboration with University of Southern California) in Shanghai, curated by Neil Leach & Philip Yuan. He has also been interviewed and featured by Zhulong (China’s largest architecture website) as part of the Tsinghua Parametric Design Workshop in Beijing where he taught as a Unit Master in July/August. Finally his Students at Dessau Institute of Architecture (DIA|Bauhaus) won the Lars Lerup Prize 2011 for best student project for the academic year 2010/11. http://news.zhulong.com http://arch.usc.edu http://lehre.afg.hs-anhalt.de/dia Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the practice of Simon Allford (former Vice President of the AA) and Paul Monaghan (GradDiplCons AA 1989),

have seen two of their projects win in the British Construction Industry Awards 2011. Anne Mews, King William Street Quarter, Barking has won the Regeneration Award while the Angel Building London was a joint winner of the Judges’ Special Award. The Hopkins Architects, the practice of Michael Hopkins (AADipl 1963 and former President of the AA) and Patty Hopkins (AADipl 1968) won the Prime Minister’s Better Public Building Award for the Velodrome, Olympic Park, London. Helena Marconnell (AA Member) had her solo exhibition ‘Painting to the sound of music’ at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, in Summer 2011. Second year in a row and this time she displayed her latest work inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Liszt’s Rhapsodies and Bolero by Ravel. Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton (both former Academic staff) Sauerbruch Hutton’s KfW-building in Frankfurt has been awarded ‘Best Tall Building in the World 2011’ by Chicagobased Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat, CTBUH. www.sauerbruchhutton.com Povilas Cepaitis, Lluis Enrique, Diego Ordonez and Carlos Piles (AA DRL MArch 2011)’s thesis project ‘Cast on Cast’ (2009–11, tutors Yusuke Obuchi & Rob Stuart-Smith) has recently won Holcim Awards ‘Next Generation’ first prize in Europe. The ceremony took place in Milan on 15 September 2011. www.holcimfoundation.org/t1335/ a11eung1uk.htm www.castoncast.com Superfusionlab – Nate Kolbe (AA DRL MArch 2000 and former Intermediate Unit Master) and Lida Charsouli (AA DRL MArch 2000) – was long-listed for the Young Architect of the Year Award and exhibited with the other long-listed practices at the Architecture Foundation, 4–26 November 2011 www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/ programme/2011/autodesk-youngarchitect-of-the-year-award-2011 Darrick Borowski, Jeroen Janssen (AA EmTech MArch students) and Nicoletta Poulimeni (AA EmTech MSc student) Place Second in International Competition, October 2011. Their Center for Urban Farming in Brooklyn, New York, proposes a systems-based approach to food production, distribution, and waste cycles within a new type of urban ecology. www.suckerpunchdaily.com/tag/ center-for-urban-farming http://edibleinfrastructures.net

47 Manijeh Verghese (AA Fifth Year) is the Online Editor of Disegno, a start-up magazine that aims to generate conversation between the disciplines of Fashion, Design and Architecture. The magazine is comprised of a weekly updated website as well as a biannual print magazine. The magazine is available in the AA Bookshop or can be accessed online at www.disegnomagazine.com Danielle Rago, (AA HCT MA 2011) is now the Co-Director and Curator of the Archive of Spatial Aesthetics and Praxis (ASAP). ASAP is an archive of practices. It advocates architecture and its value as part of a broader social, political, and aesthetic discourse through the collection, exhibition, writing and circulation of media. www.a--s--a--p.com

DESIGN Alex Haw (Former AA First Year and Diploma Unit Master), Friedrich Vitzthum (AA Member)and Pablo Milara of the practice atmos have designed the Floating Forest, a leisurely drift through the canals of East London on a unique floating landscape. Alison Brooks (Former AA Diploma Unit Master) won the competition to design a ‘third quad’ for Exeter College, University of Oxford. The project on the new Walton Street site will include 100 studybedrooms, fellows’ study rooms, theatres and public areas. It was featured in the 10 November 2011 issue of AJ. Paolo Cascone (AA MA E&E 2003) and COdesignLab presented the Grid(h)ome pavilion at ‘Casa dell’ Architettura’ in Rome in collaboration with Inarch. This project is part of th Eco_logic Habitat cycle of design workshops directed by Paolo on high-tech design low-tech construction. Paolo Cascone/ COdesignLab presents the ‘khaima’ urban installation in Salè (Morocco) in collaboration with the CISS and Quartiers du Monde. This project is part of the Eco_logic Habitat cycle of self-construction workshops directed by Paolo Cascone. http://codesignlab-ecologichabitat. blogspot.com http://codesignlab-khaima.blogspot.com Architects of Invention, the firm of Niko Japaridize (AA Member), has completed several new buildings recently including the Tbilisi Prosecutor’s Office in Georgia, which opened on 25 January 2012 and the National Olympic Committee House in Georgia, which was opened on 19 September 2011 by Prince Albert of

Monaco. A third project, the House of Justice Lazika, Georgia, will be completed in September 2012. For more information and images of these projects, please see their website: www.architectsofinvention.com Alejandro Villarreal (AA Member), principal of Hierve – a small multidisciplinary design firm based in Mexico City and London, has recently designed a new product entitled ‘Wardrobe System.’ This furniture system combines the traditional wardrobe and the glass cabinet to create a playful yet practical and flexible solution to how we store our clothes. The exhibition about the 2011 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architeture – Mies van der Rohe Award was held in the new Roca London Gallery designed by Zaha Hadid (AADipl 1977 and former Academic staff) Architects, from November 28 2011 till January 27, 2012. The winning project, the Neues Museum (Berlin, Germany) by David Chipperfield (AADipl 1980) Architects, and the 5 finalists: Bronks Youth Theatre (Brussels, Belgium) by MDMA – Martine De Maeseneer (former AA Diploma Unit Master) Architects, MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Arts (Rome, Italy) by Zaha Hadid Architects, Concert House Danish Radio (Copenhagen, Denmark) by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Acropolis Museum (Athens, Greece) by Bernard Tschumi (former AA Academic staff) Architects, Rehabilitation Centre Groot Klimmendaal (Arnhem, The Netherlands) Architectenbureau Koen van Velsen, and the Collage House (Girona, Spain) by Ramon Bosch and Bet Capdeferro (Emerging Architect Special Mention) will be shown in model, drawings and images. www.rocalondongallery.com Bolles+Wilson, the firm headed by Julia Bolles Wilson and Peter Wilson (AADipl 1974 and former AA tutor) have designed the new ‘Raakspoort – City Hall and Bioscoop’ in Haarlem (NL), which opened in November 2011. Additionally, a new series of Moleskine’s ‘legendary’ sketchbooks complete with marks, notes and sketches by Bolles+Wilson, Zaha Hadid, Giancarlo De Carlo and Alberto Kalach were released in December 2011. The Bolles+Wilson monograph documents evolutionary snapshots from projects such as the Suzuki House in Tokyo or the BEIC Library in Milan alongside characteristic insights into Peter Wilson’s sketchbooks – minute, highly detailed and atmospheric records of places, readings and architectural reference.

OBITUARIES Since the last issue of AArchitecture, the AA has lost a number of close friends, alumni and members. John Bancroft, AA member since 1981 passed away in August 2011. Obituaries were published in various national papers including the Guardian on 20 September 2011. At his funeral his daughter Sarah spoke of an obstinate man who fought passionately for what he believed in, championing a varied range of causes throughout his life including the failed campaign to save his own Pimlico School, a seminal project sadly demolished in 2010. Phil Gusack (AADipl 1974) passed away peacefully in November after a courageous battle with a brain tumour. He was described by friends as ‘a real maverick and quite elusive, but architecture (as well as attractive women and martinis) remained his passion and on his return to the UK in the last few years he reconnected with AA friends such as Doug Patterson, Peter Cook, Michael Sorkin and Sally Mackereth’. Beverly Bernstein, AA registrar from 1964 to 1970 died in December 2011 and a memorial event was held at the AA in her honour in February. A prize fund has been set up in her memory by friends and family, which will support student work in the AA’s Housing and Urbanism programme – see full article on page 40. The legendary Isi Metzstein, who taught at the AA in the 1970s and became one of Scotland’s most inventive and prestigious modern architects, died in January 2012. Obituaries can be found in numerous national papers and architectural journals. An event is being planned at the AA in the Spring, which will be featured in AArchitecture 17. Adrian Cave (AADipl 1967 and former AA honorary secretary) died of cancer aged 76. He was celebrated for his outstanding contribution to the field of accessibility, with work at sites such as the Tate Modern, Royal Festival Hall, Royal Hospital Chelsea and Oxford Circus. He was awarded an OBE in 2009. An obituary appeared in the Guardian on 26 January 2012. Roman Halter (AADipl 1959) passed away on 30 January 2012. A survivor of Auschwitz and Stutthof concentration camps and slave labourer in Dresden, Roman moved to the UK with dozens of orphaned children after the war. He studied at the AA and went on to run a successful practice. After retirement in 1974 he devoted time to writing and

48 painting about his Holocaust experiences, working in stained glass and making royal coats of arms. In 2007 he published Romanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Journey to critical acclaim. A review of the book can be read in the Guardian, 14 January 2007. A full obituary was published in The Times on 18 February 2012, available online to subscribers. Geoffrey Edward Bowles (AADipl 1950) died on 15 February 2012. He has been remembered as an architect and artist of great sensitivity and vision, an inspirational teacher and devoted family man. He lectured for 40 years at Brighton College of Art and Architecture, now Brighton University, and for the Open University. In his own practice he concentrated on domestic architecture, building strong and trusted relationships with clients and planners. A full obituary is available in the AA websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s News section. Graham Parsey, former associate director at DEGW who graduated from the AA in 1963, died in July 2011. Arthur Lewis MBE (AADipl 1949), Robert Watts (AADipl 1959) and John Williams (AADipl 1958) have also sadly passed away. Obituary notices now also appear in the News section of the AA website, with further links where possible.

NEXT ISSUE’S THEME

CURATING ARCHITECTURE

CONTRIBUTIONS TO AARCHITECTURE@AASCHOOL.AC.UK

SCHOOL ANNOUNCEMENT

!""#$%&'(#% )*+$)$**% ,'-.!% ''%/$/)$(0!1&%,1**%*$'2%'%0$(1$0% "3%0&(145%$6$4-0%'-%!""#$%&'(#% -!10%)*+$)$**%0$'0"4 0'-+(2'7%89%'&(1*%8:;8% The AA’s Hooke Park is a 350-acre working forest in Dorset, southwest England which acts as a space for students to learn rural architectures, the crafts of construction and sustainable timber technologies. On 28 April 2012 members are invited to a tour of the estate that will incorporate existing buildings designed by collaborations between ABK, Frei Otto, Buro Happold and Edward Cullinan, as well as the recently completed Big Shed designed by Diploma 19 and students of the graduate Design & Make programme. After a lunch catered by Georgie Corry-Wright, the group will be led on a ramble (weather permitting) through

the surrounding woodland, adorned with bluebells. For more information and ticket prices see the Membership Events page on the AA website. www.aaschool.ac.uk/membership/events In addition to this trip, two ‘Open Saturdays’ for those living locally will take place at Hooke Park during bluebell season (dates tbc – dependent on the bluebells’ appearance). For updates, see Bluebell Watch at www.aaschool.ac.uk/hookepark

STUDENT ANNOUNCEMENT

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The Canning Town Caravanserai is a playful response to a winning Meanwhile London scheme, made possible by Ash Sakula architects. The aim was to find â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;meanwhileâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; uses for three prominent brownfield sites (and the adjacent water) in the Royal Docks and Canning Town, as part of the regeneration of East London.

The Caravanserai team are working on creating an exciting community through a series of events, launching on the weekend of 31st March. They are looking for enthusiastic volunteers to help with the build between Monday 26th and Friday 30th March. For more information please get in touch with Harriet on: harriet@caravanserai.org.uk