Projects Review Exhibition Guide 2013-14

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Projects Review 2014 Projects Review is a culmination of a year of investigation, exploration and production resulting in an incredibly rich variety of work with drawings, models, installations, films and photographs charting the course of the year.

The AA is a unique hub of architectural experimentation and Projects Review details the lectures, publications and events that form the cultural output of the school.

Crammed into the AA’s Georgian premises is a microcosm of ideas, thoughts and proposals from which new architectural ideas, visions and projects emerge.

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Foundation Course & First Year The AA Foundation teaches students to think conceptually and creatively via the disciplines of art, film, architecture and craft with group and individual projects. Ideas and designs are explored through the process of models, sketches, drawings, films and performance. Throughout the year students explore individual design sensibilities and approaches while engaging with the rich educational, cultural and social life of the AA and London.

First Year introduces students to architectural design, critical thinking and experimental ways of working. It comprises approximately 60 students who work individually and in groups in an open studio format under the guidance of six experienced and energetic design tutors. Here, students begin to form their own architectural identities and personalities through a range of design ideas, agendas and interests. In addition to the studio, students take courses in history, theory, media, technology and technical studies. Together these courses lead to a portfolio of the year’s work, the basis for entry into the Intermediate School.

Foundation Course & First Year

F Drawing on numerous pedagogical practices, tutors and expert practitioners, Foundation offers a cross-disciplinary art- and designbased education in the context of an architectural school. Foundation seeks to develop the intellectual and process-based abilities of students through experimentation with various media and creative disciplines while introducing each individual to themselves: their interests, aspirations and inspirations. Once confident and articulate about their particular approach, students can embark on an education in a variety of creative disciplines.

We are the subjects. We are finetuning our point of view. We fictionalised an edit of ourselves and bred it with our speculations on the lives of others. We explored formal properties of objects then documented, dissected, reproduced, reconstructed and dissolved them to reconfigure their functions and alter their uses. We caught fluff from dryer filters and reclothed ourselves in its fragile matted greyness. We described the suffocating grief over the fragility of life and recreated captured moments from AA Archives, fusing decades together. Initially we toured the streets of Paris in the footsteps of the Situationists, then reached further, walking from the suburbs to the centre in rain that teased in Poissy, mocked in La Défense and drenched us on our way into the Louvre. We documented a camera’s sweep while analysing a scene from Amélie, then recognised its curious curve in the descent of the stair

at Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. We took the rumble of Parisian tyres on cobbled streets to the south coast of England and left them to be consumed by the sea. We articulated our frustrations at cleaning being controlled by a length of vacuum flex, examined a sweep of sunshine across a rooftop interior, saw a notional grid tracking our movements on the first floor and transposed a river from Hooke Park to Bedford Square.

Location Second Floor Foundation Director Saskia Lewis Studio Masters Umberto Bellardi Ricci Takako Hasegawa Taneli Mansikkamaki

Students Anisah Ahmed Julian Bachle Alix Biehler Min Jung Cho Clarissa Chua Marion Delaporte Shou Jian Eng Simon Glemser Georgia Hablutzel Alma Hawker Zach Hong Chawki Karam Jae Whan Kim Chris Kokarev Tanya Lee-Monteiro Zineb Lemseffer Chak Hin Leung Caterina Miralles Tagliabue Oluwafadekemi Ogunsanya Natalia Pereverzina Ignatio Putra Tenggara Angelica Rimoldi Nestor Ruiz Medina Simonpietro Salini Shaeron Santosa Bisher Tabbaa Na-pat Tengtrirat Melisa Turkay Sheng-Chin Wu Zhikun Wu

Foundation Course & First Year

7Y First Year students are exposed to architecture by translating visual references, thoughts, intuitions and briefs produced through forms of design, writing and argument. Work from this year’s explorations is collected into the six words: Muses vs Nemeses, In and Out and Primitive Worlds.

Muses collected investigations that reacted to exemplary architecture projects, texts from poetry to lyrics, and images by artists and illustrators.

Students translated this material into new readings, which took the form of indexical models, projects for buildings and visual essays.

Nemeses, in contrast to Muses, collected work that embraced unexpected spaces and inhabitations.

Students undertook weekly explorations of the complexity of a design proposal by constantly reacting to a series of unknown, often opposing parameters, including change of scale, programme, tectonics and inhabitation.

Following on from this, In and Out were used to construct a design sequence. For this brief, the First Year studio was divided into two large groups, with one designing rooms and spaces from the inside out and the other half focusing on cities, gardens and envelopes. We met in the ‘middle’ to arrange rooms inside buildings and to merge gardens with cities.

Primitive gathered the discoveries that question, reconstruct and challenge basic architecture topics and elements.

Alternative misuses of basic notions and elements were uncovered through the relentless making of raw models

and drawings. Worlds used hands -on experiments to translate stuff and emotions into a wider culture of architectural positions and projects. These positions then became characters in visual stories constructed by the students, in which the actions and connections are all related to the figure of the architect, the audience and the world.

Location Second Floor Head of First Year Monia De Marchi Studio Staff Fabrizio Ballabio Shany Barath Maria Shéhérazade Giudici Max Kahlen John Ng Students Matteo Agnoletto Olukoyejo Olanrewaju Akinkugbe Sophia Alami Gouraftei Maryam Abdulla Salem Mohammed Almana Alfalasi So Jae An Thanas Apilikitsmai Arya Arabshahi Alexander Christian Foss Ball Madalina Barnisca Janos Sebastian Bergob-Sowicz Carolin Adele Bongartz Francesco Catemario Di Quadri Yee Thong Chai Lara Chamandi Jiehui Chen Janice Yan Ji Chow Sze Chai Marco Chui Jeanne Sophie Charlotte Clerc Adolfo Del Valle Dominika Demlova Gian Andrea Diana Elisavet Dimitriou Ali Hussein Mohammed El-Hashimi Caroline Esclapez Raphael Zwi Fogel Giovanni Roberto Franzan Vidhi Goel Omer Hadar Antonin Hautefort Chiyan Ho

Michael Ho Juana Horcajo Rubi Veronika Janovcova Oskar Frederick Johanson Kyung Kuk Kang Mikolaj Robert Karczewski Mizue Katayama Jinah Kim Adi Krainer Chi Tou Lam Ronghua Lei Kevin See-Yat Leung Yixuan Li Mingyi Lim Cho Ying Lydia Liu Li Zhi Loh Yuen Yi Elizabeth Low Ioana Man Julie Mikkelsen Ali Mirzaei Jaeseung Nam Katayoun Nekourouymotlagh Ananya Nevatia Thao Phuong Nguyen Timothy James O’Hare Sahir Jayshil Patel Jonas Phillip Simon Popp Natacha Pradere Olimpia Presutti Celine Elia Lea Lavinia Przedborski Sadia Rahman Nabil Randeree Russell Royer Milivoje Sestovic Raya Shaban Hana Shokr Esha Sikander Irene Squilloni Susanna Steuerman- Kinston Elias Michael Tamer Ao Tan Ines Tazi Tuan Anh Tran Umberto Varricchio Yat Ching Marcus Yau Zhou Yu Jiahui Yuan

I

Intermediate School The Intermediate School gives Second and Third Year students the basis for development through experimentation within the structure of the unit system.

Each year the Intermediate School offers a balance of units covering a diversity of questions and innovative approaches to material, craft and techniques of fabrication. Explorations of cultural and social issues are often set in inspiring places around the world. In parallel to the unit work, skills are developed through courses in history and theory, technical and media studies as well as professional practice.

Intermediate School

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The Borscht Belt in upstate New York is a particularly forlorn paradise. Beautiful, empty, desolate, bereft of purpose; foreclosed. From the 1920s to the late 1970s hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers left the city each summer to seek respite in the Arcadian promise, budget accommodation, kosher food and the raucous black humour of the Catskills. By the early 1960s, however, resorts were in a terminal decline triggered by the end of the postwar economic boom and hastened by the competition of budget air travel. Now long-vacant, the undoubted romanticism of these environments is underscored by the crass realism of failure.

Intermediate 1 explored this paradox – the conjunction of beauty and uselessness – by travelling upstate, from New York City to the abandoned vacation resorts of the Borscht Belt, nestled into the Catskill Mountains. These investigations drove the unit’s ongoing fascination with the passing temporality of architecture and the residues of such failed utopias. We began with Stanley Kubrick’s epic account of misspent vacations – The Shining (1980) – as a premise for questioning the architectural potential, ‘fake histories’ and cultural resonances of the Borscht Belt. Acting as archaeologists of the immediate future’ (to paraphrase Reyner Banham), our design considerations then sought to uncover misplaced artefacts, failed architectural precedents and images of past declines and future ambitions.

Projects included shrink-wrapping a community of preserved bungalows; relocating a resort to the west side of

Manhattan; reinventing Grossinger’s Catskills Resort as a Grand (rather than merely large) hotel; a chess camp for the exiled (and reviled) American grandmaster, Bobby Fischer; an archived junkyard of abandoned architectures; a cultivated wilderness; a descaled, not-so-luxury (but viable) resort; relocating the town of Liberty inside the shell of the resort that bankrupted it; a yoga retreat; a demolition festival; and a reimagined Kosher town and bungalow community.

Location First Floor Unit Staff Mark Campbell Stewart Dodd

Students Tyler Bollier Iris Gramegna Lorenzo Lo Schiavo Jiwon Lee Wei Qi Lim Anna Maltsenko Efstratios Mortakis Jong-Won Na Jacek Rewinski Sebastian Tiew Pei Tsen Yeoh

2 ‘Our eye need only became a bit sharper, our ear a bit more receptive.

We need to take in the taste of a piece of fruit more fully. We should be able to tolerate more odours and become more conscious and less forgetful when touching and being touched, in order to draw consolation from our immediate experiences, which would be more convincing, more paramount, and truer than all the suffering that could ever torment us.’ • Rainer Maria Rilke This year the unit focused on spatial experiences that enhance awareness

Intermediate School of our senses and emotions. Our main source of inspiration was the enigmatic Villa Palagonia in Sicily: reflective domes, sinuous staircases, coiled passages and elliptical rooms figured amongst the architectural elements we examined, reproduced, redesigned.

Faithful to the Intermediate 2 tradition, we worked predominantly with our hands; this year we specifically focused on the techniques of plaster casting, gilding, acetone print, charcoal and pencil drawing.

We had a series of stimulating seminars exploring historical precedents for the architectural fragments we were designing, including Palladio, Boffrand and Soane. The discussions ranged from straightforward spatial analysis to deep philosophical reflection, with a rigorous focus on our aim of bringing poetry back into a practice that runs the risk of becoming increasingly standardised and soulless.

Our site of intervention was Bloomsbury, in London, and we developed programmes related to the themes of the hotel, the bathhouse and the retirement home. The images that follow reflect, we believe, the depth, the intensity, and at the same time the playfulness of our work. The architecture we make is born out of intuition, sensorial and emotional awareness, which we contend are the most powerful tools we have to transform the world into a more productive, enjoyable and meaningful environment.

Location Second Floor Unit Staff Ana Araujo Takero Shimazaki

Students Palma Bucarelli Oliver Chiu Anton Gorlenko Josh Harskamp Joy Matashi Nabla Yahya Andrea Nuccetelli Josh Penk Buster Ronngren Sasha Savtchenko- Belskaia Wenjun Zheng

3 ‘When it comes, the culture of the Now will not oppose the present world as an invading army opposes its enemy, but rather as a new day overtakes the old – in the natural course of things, when the old world is tired and asleep and dreaming of this dawn.’ • Lebbeus Woods Even among the most sceptical minds it is normal to find some extra scepticism and anti-fairy dust when the agenda is imaginative architecture – as if such practice immediately annuls the reality of the ‘real’ world. But as the Dead Kennedys once sang, one only needs to spend a ‘holiday in Cambodia’ to experience a less jazzy dose of reality’s elasticity where one finds killing fields, a lake that is also a river changing current once a year, ‘smoky mountains’ (the capital’s open garbage dump), DIY bamboo trains and the slums made up of New Khmer Architecture buildings.

Cambodia is made of the real and the painfully real, but it also holds a strangely real charm.

Departing from the study of the four elements – fire, water, earth and air – this year’s work incorporated the context of Cambodia and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of the Four Cities, asking students to develop their own imaginary ‘what-if-worlds’. From making interactive prototypes that considered how new networks of living and working could be organised, to writing fictions based on social practices and local rituals, the final project included experiments on more physical prototypes and drawings as renderings.

Intermediate School Flying cities, supernatural shrines, post-human temples, floating villages, underground fishing reservoirs, and we kid you not, New Jerusalem virtual nervous towers – within these fictive worlds, students searched for their own narratives and the possibility of turning them into a reality – an imaginative, hopeful and above all tangible one – at least as any good punk-fairy would.

Location First Floor Unit Staff Nannette Jackowski Ricardo de Ostos

Students Jocelyn Arnold Patricia De Osma Liam Denhamer Berkin Islam Raz Keltsh Maya Laitinen Cheryl Lim Natasha Rieffel Leonard Schrage Kira Sciberras Ke (Fay) Wang

4 Putting forward the idea of selforganisation, the unit collectively chose the urban situation as a study site for questioning the end of the city as an outdoor condition. The vertically layered and interlinked fabric of Hong Kong emerged from an iterative fourcity study of varied forms of tendencies towards the ‘introverted city’.

The unit’s successive scalar inversion and specific notation of cities, buildings and spaces illustrated the unobstructed growth of policed and controlled architectural interiorities, expanding beyond a perceivable form as a network of enlarged characterless entities. Challenging traditional street and societal models, student groups argued their findings over

several study workshops, alternative networks of interiorised public spaces in Bangkok, Toronto and Istanbul. This was complemented by a parallel study of iconic London and Paris spaces defined by their ceiling – the typology of reference for this year’s investigation of the urban interior. The unit’s systematic approaches and representative tools iteratively constituted the grammars of form and experience of individual students. Beginning with the parametric potential of classical models as associative designs to include the layered abstraction of urban precedents, the ceiling as a nominal architectural form exposed its transformational character. From the understanding of interiority of simple and monumental ceilings to urban precedents, hybrid conditions were revealed through a vocabulary of distinct experiences.

Individual interventions challenged the engineered efficiency that engulfs Hong Kong’s urban form, work and leisure activities. In lieu of the common and expected top-down approach to the rhizome city, proposals focused on experiential growth. The augmented ceilings, as transformed and transformative types of architectural artefacts, suggest the civic through plays on materiality and architectonics.

Offering new forms of qualitative densities, the inhabited ceiling defines novel urban situations.

Location First Floor Unit Staff Nathalie Rozencwajg Michel da Costa Gonçalves

Students Shahaf Blumer Elisia Brask Maria Broytman Carolina Gismondi Melissa Justine Gourley Seung Woo Han Chung Kim Hye Rim Lee Yibin Shen Gleb Sheykin Federica Sofia Zambeletti

Intermediate School

5 Perec | Price 01. What we must do – EXHAUST Living, won’t halt our progression. We reinvent and reclaim systems Using architecture as our tool. This project will restructure – GENTRIFICATION. Henderson | Safdie 02. STREET life is very inactive. It should be vibrantly used. Its reinvention shall create living. Through a changing topographical architecture, People can shape their EVERYDAY. Calle | Soleri 03. SYSTEMS of living pushed below.

A reuse of subterranean infrastructures.

Tunnel beneath for architectural space. Quotidian possessions on demand = Home. Static metropolis above – transient UNDERGROUND. Bon | Boutwell 04. TRANSPORT via intercontinental maglev train. Mobility warps distance–time relationship.

Reuse recycled archaic architectural typologies. Circular paternoster platforms = perpetual movement. A Free-Port occupation through SPEED. Bartlebooth | Tschumi 05. MACHINES traverse ever-present architectural boundaries: penetrating territories of rigid ownership – they disruptively appropriate impenetrable territories.

Reinventing spaces for everyday living, through a reinterpretation of hegemonic CONSTRAINTS. Cage | Fuller 06.

FOLDING architectures adapt and aggregate. Creating self-sufficient living spaces. For a transient urban demographic. Reinventing the static living model. Within the city’s wasted SCENARIOS. Atget | van Eyck 07.

SOCIAL opacity in the city Of London, everyday institutions challenged.

Reusing lost rivers, questions living.

Stagnant space and traditional patterns, Or architecture exposed by FLOW. Littlewood | Rudolph 08. VIADUCTS are arteries for mobility. Don’t destroy, reuse when defunct. And house a construction farm. Hybridised with a make(r) space.

Corn + Potatoes = Architecture / community / TECHNOLOGY. Lefebvre | Archigram 09. VISIONARY transport in London is Nonexistent but can reinvent commuting. Stationary architecture is wasting time. Living while travelling improves efficiency. Can home be a VEHICLE? Eisenstein | Olmsted 10.

PARKS are permeable for mobility.

Challenge privatisation of open spaces.

Reuse of abandoned iconic architecture.

Alters people’s preconception of nature. Vertically shapes the landscape PROTOTYPE. Calvino | Debord 11.

CONVERGENCE in a mobile city. It pays to buy good tea. architecture Awaits her menu’s – order. Highstreet:exchange – lowroad:delirium [Consume / Produce] reinvented, strategy, in.ACTION Location First Floor Unit Master Ryan Dillon Staff Jorge X Méndez Cáceres Ralph Andrew Merkle

Students 01. Tané Kinch 02. Raphael Iruzun Martins 03. William CJW Pelham 04. Zipu Zhu 05. Jane Wong 06. Georgia Trower 07. Jonathan George Cheng 08. Edward Rawle 09. Michael Cheung 10. Andrew Yuen 11. James Anicich

^ Intermediate 6 applies technology, scientific method and philosophical interrogation to the planning, design

Intermediate School and construction of novel urban proposals in rapidly developing environments. Projects are conceived through research, invention, testing and calibration against the complexities of urban ecological space. They propose creative solutions with the potential to initiate progressive tectonic shifts in the underlying structures of society itself.

This year we focused on developing operative insights and tools informed by studies of how social, cultural and economic relationships give form to and catalyse urbanity. We scrutinised the reciprocal effects of space, voids and networks of behaviour and activity in existing city neighbourhoods and important civic places, focusing on in-between spaces as catalysts for socio-economic exchange. Recognising that suitable and intelligent complexities emerge over time, we questioned to what degree the city and its buildings can be successfully ‘designed’.

After field research into important societal spaces in London, we travelled to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Following long periods of colonialism and communism, Vietnam is now experiencing rapid economic growth and cultural renewal. As such, it offers a unique perspective on contemporary urban centres in a state of transformation. We questioned the way in which foreign typologies and planning models are imposed on Vietnamese conditions, and considered whether local climate, materials and culture could instead inform an updated, unique and context-specific architecture.

Focusing on societal space, our design strategies aimed at the development of variable prototypes that could be grafted seamlessly onto our high-resolution, tactile mapping of the existing city ecology. We investigated how to incorporate and connect hybrid mixtures of programmes through three-dimensional in-between spaces.

We explored ways of constructing

a ‘framework for future urbanity’, producing unique architectural systems and dense urban proposals intended to provoke the emergence of vibrant new urban ecologies.

Location First Floor Unit Masters Jeroen van Ameijde Brendon Carlin

Students Laurenz Berger Lena Emanuelsen Sungbum Hong Ji Soo Hwang Ioannis Kanakas Charalambos Karakannas Time Kitilimtrakul Alessandro Magliani Jamie Neill Dominik Queisser

7 Intermediate 7 pursued a ‘project on the city’, relating cultural shifts to urban transitions. We engineered new architectural machines that affect cultural production, distribution and preservation. With the oversaturated yet frozen city of St Petersburg and canonical precedents as our contexts, we tackled three sets of design problems: First, we layered the formal city of glamorous facades and renowned collections with the ‘shadow city’ of obscured histories, spaces and artefacts.

Students juxtaposed museums and ‘antimuseums’, then challenged the resulting boundaries, overlaps and transfers.

Non-conformist galleries threaded through museum-islands while recycling ‘art-dumps’ undermined curatorial practices. Transit loops between the commercialised centre and peripheral artwork mills produced vast dark spaces – entropic fields of displaced fragments.

In cinematic space–time, the present

Intermediate School city’s monuments, streets and blocks extended into vast ‘strata-nets’ – dense archives of memories and records.

Next, we explored the junction between slow and fast cities by experimenting with fixed and liquid programmes. Proposals included shared platforms and crash-decks to spur new cultural centres, clusters and networks.

Illusionistic interior corridors restored live rhythms in ghostly palaces. Further parasitic elements combined into potent incubators, accelerating cycles of contamination and reprogramming.

Moving up in scale, ‘bridges of speeds’ fed on opposing urban sectors and recombined flows, functions and contents beyond familiar typologies.

Finally, we positioned our condensers at the nexus of artistic, economic and social inputs. Our surreal machines exaggerated the mechanisms of production/consumption – from conveyors of fashion to travelators of buildings. Merging the factory and the palace, new social hubs offered menus of actors, stages, costumes and props for ultimate parties. By joining contexts, experts and publics, new architectural exchanges became battlefields for imported and local models in the city of copies.

Through graphic provocations and theoretical propositions, urban strategies and architectural fragments, our cultural processors linked conceptual models and the city.

Location First Floor Unit Master Maria Fedorchenko

Students Isotta Biasion HyunJun Kim Assaf Kimmel Vicky Lai Maxime Monin Lorenzo Perri Rebecca Ploj Shira Rotem Jackson Ryan Olympia Simopoulou Guy Sinclair

8 Intermediate 8 focused on exploring the potential of the big block to create new centralities that could redefine the fragmented metropolis of São Paulo. Rather than attempt yet another description of urban reality under the sway of neoliberalism, the unit worked with the hypothesis of an emerging postneoliberal city – a city that is already in the sights of some Latin American city governments. This hypothesis does not fully erase the dynamics of the neoliberal city, but rather rearranges some of its most salient features to generate public space in a city divided between fenced private property and large urban infrastructure. Following these investigations, the unit work interrogated the civic role of the large building and its relation to private use by exploring programmatic mixtures and the mutability of public and private domains, reassessing the tension between the stability sought after by governments and the need to change economic processes.

Using the example of a particular freestanding block in an urban fragment of São Paulo, the unit investigated how the city is generated through contained formal entities. A series of formal exercises developed an understanding of the implications of designed architectural forms and the ways they articulate spatial and programmatic relations.

This research was supported through an analysis of how the public sphere was reintroduced into the capitalist city in the work of the Paulista School, a Brazilian architectural group that

Intermediate School included Vilanova Artigas, Lina Bo Bardi and Mendes da Rocha. In our exploration of the architectural form’s articulation of limits and relationships one particular focus of interest was the block’s capacity to establish its own spatial territory within the urban landscape – and in the process to become an element of negotiation within the city, asserting its political relevance.

Location First Floor Unit Masters Francisco González de Canales Nuria Alvarez Lombardero

Students Nurul Atira Binti Che Arriffin Alvaro Calle Moreno Shereen Maria Doummar Soso Eliava Alexander George Fergusson Alexandre-Karl Khachwajian Jae Seung David Koo Laurens Peter Paulmann Tommaso Sordon

9 Intermediate 9 ventured north into the great unknown – literally. It was early last summer, after a year of grappling with Aalto’s well-worn southern Finnish work, that we came across a fleeting reference to a Sant’Elia-inspired project just south of the Arctic Circle (in Oulu) that looked well worth our time. The Toppila-Vaara pulp mill has been the perfect foil for our work ever since we ventured out on our unreliable hotel hire bicycles early in September and discovered (but almost didn’t) its remains. We soon learned – but not from either Karl Fleig or the Aalto Foundation – that what we’d chanced upon was not only an entirely unpreserved (defiled would be more fitting) work by the youthful Finn, but

probably the only one with direct links to the UK (Oughtibridge in Sheffield, to be precise).

We learn by travelling (others would say by the incessant use of a laser-cutter and eyesight-challenging vermicelli-thin line drawings). So we went there twice, not only to see this endangered Aalto but with the highly touted ulterior motive of seeing a few of Finland’s natural wonders. Who, then, could have foreseen that the aurora borealis would be more visible in Leicester this year than in Nellim, or that it would be easier to spot a reindeer in Chessington than in Rovaniemi? Similarly, who (except maybe Al Gore) would have thought that in early February, the timing of our second trip, it would be colder in Bedford Square than in Oulu?

It’s these and other idiosyncrasies that we’ve tackled in projects addressing, among other things, ruination, canonicity, climatology and context. All this was further underpinned by ventures to the Maison Louis Carré, Niall Hobhouse’s stash in Somerset and some pre-Spring sun in Spain at Ceràmica Cumella, operating now as the feted extension to our Morwell Street studio. To get a better sense of what we’re talking about, take a look at: http://youtu.be/KaSD1YSaU8M Location First Floor Unit Staff Christopher Pierce Christopher Matthews

Students Ema Hana Kačar Katy Anne Long Vasilisa Lučić Radu Remus Macovei Nabila Mahdi Yonathan Kevin Moore Natalie Eugenia Ow Zsuzsa Péter Rory James Sherlock Andreea Vasilcin

Intermediate School

!0 This year the unit looked to explore design as an additive (but not necessarily limitless) process of placement, extension and modification by focusing on the idea of aggregation as a tool to generate a new part of the existing urban fabric. Underpinning this exploration was the understanding that the European city consists of a context and building stock so historically rich that to deny or ignore it would be to dilute its fundamental appeal.

Architecture here subscribes not to the cliché of removal – of knocking down buildings to always open up spaces – but of addition, and of the aggregation of things and ideas as much as shapes and forms.

To help support and inspire the students in their investigations we conducted a series of trips to Switzerland and Germany, visiting a range of buildings, which all in their particular ways demonstrated models for aggregation. These included the multiple brick pavilions of the Insel Hombroich near Cologne, the Mies van der Rohe houses and factory in Krefeld, as well as the temporary 1:1 Model of the Golf Club Project (MIK), and in Switzerland a series of works by Märkli, Snozzi, Galfetti, Vaccini, Olgiati, Zumthor and Gigon / Guyer.

The result of these explorations and studies was a collection of yearlong projects and a series of sites, programmes, contexts, formats and aesthetics individually set by each student. As much as their formal and material qualities, all of these projects hopefully also demonstrate

a playfulness and willingness to express and communicate a set of compelling ideas, if only because the year’s constant mantra was that the expression of ideas makes us human; the expression of ideas about the city makes us citizens; and the expression of additions to a city puts us in the realm of architecture.

Location First Floor Unit Master Valentin Bontjes van Beek

Students Noel Drangu Daria Gavrilova Xuanzhi Huang Jin Seo Lee Adrian Ma Carlos Peters Patricia Roig Ke Bo Tsai

!1 Trance Holistic Platforms is an architectural programme that offers a radical cultivation of the self. It is a human body empowerment project in an age of digitalism, massive urban growth and self-referential architecture.

Goa, India’s smallest state, was the ideal destination for creating our specific laboratory. The trance music scene and the expansion of traditional holistic practices (yoga, meditation, breathing, ayurvedic treatments, earthing) embody a set of techniques aimed at intensifying the body-environment in a mutually enriching symbiosis.

Projects varied from an individual and communal massage centre, to a building made by shedding skins containing a lifetime of memories, to a plant–human hybrid ecosystem for healing, to a temple for the empowerment of India’s transgendered community, to an aural rehabilitation rave party. Each project

Intermediate School is a unique type of retreat with its own form of therapy. These new age versions of western hospitals promote the healing process through the creation of radical temporal communities with new identities – beyond questions of gender, religion, class and race – and new forms of transpersonal rituals. As a result, these projects question the conventional boundaries between body and building.

The architectural definition goes from body modifications, with tattoos as main tool, to the design of buildings, as an amplified version of them.

Along the way, we built inner astral temples with LA musician Diva Dompé, marvelled at the wearable sculptures designed by Ana Rajcevic, visited the studio of celebrated tattoo artist Liam Sparkes and practised yoga in a session led by Nacho Frutos. On our trip to Goa, we visited temples, churches, hippie markets and alternative raves along the beach. We learned about the stranger side to ayurvedic medicine, were educated in zoning laws (and how to subvert them) and travelled by minivan from one end of the state to the other.

Namaste.

Location Second Floor Unit Staff Manuel Collado Nacho Martin Manijeh Verghese

Students María José García Concha Philippe-Raphael Hadji Mona Haidar India Jacobs Patricia de Sousa Leao Muller Roman Lovegrove Ashirai Musikavanhu Ana Maria Nicolaescu Joshua Potter Pietro de Rothschild Alexandra Shatalova

!2 The year’s work aimed to expand our understanding of an event as a physical manifestation capable of producing new modes of occupation and interaction.

Students aimed to produce a series of provocative building proposals that could inform change in the city of Istanbul.

We investigated happenings at various scales (from performance to festivals/ exhibitions and expositions) and asked how audiences and users can inform the production of spaces within cities.

What we did 1 Scavenger Hunt: defining actions in the city through the score 2 Event Taxonomy and Event Anatomy: research, analysis 3 Travelogue: documenting stories/ sites/spaces in Istanbul 4 Architectural Score: exploring time, community, context, structure, legacy 5 Representation: image-making to describe intent and event 6 Proposal: create an architecture that supports an event 7 Real-time Event: test the proposed event at 1:1 in the AA 8 Impressions: drawing to describe what it feels like 9 Vignettes: drawings to describe a user’s view 10 Mementos and Souvenirs: what survives the event?

How we did it 1 Workshops and talks 2 Arup Foresight: the future 3 Istanbul Technical University: collaboration and local knowledge

Intermediate School 4 Portfolio: how do you describe the event and create a conversation?

5 Tutorial trips

Themes 1 Time: using time as a key generator for architecture 2 Community: the project family tree of users, participants, audience and architects 3 Context: how context informs design 4 Structure: materiality and construction 5 Legacy: our impact Location Second Floor Unit Staff Tyen Masten Inigo Minns

Students Beatrice Melli Bozar Ben-Zeev Brandon Whitwell-Mak Lorenzo Luzzi Nicholas Zembashi Palita Rompotiyoke Sandra Karolina Kolacz Sebastian Serzysko Stefan Jovanovic Xin He Yasmin Keats

!3 1851: The Great Exhibition, at the height of the British empire, produced both the ambition and profits for what was mockingly called Albertopolis – Prince Albert’s enclave of cultural institutions in South Kensington. Planned to reinforce Britain’s industrial power by providing education in art and science to the working classes, it embodied the scientific and philosophical ideas of the time: notions of accumulation, rationality and empiricism.

1911: Alfred Jarry set out the many definitions of the alternative science of

pataphysics in his book The Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll: Pataphysician.

Jarry’s anti-rational methodology – a philosophy of imaginary solutions – was a reaction to nineteenth-century positivism and an attempt to subvert lofty and worthy ambitions.

2014: Unit projects take a pataphysical stance towards the contemporary institutions of Albertopolis by championing the exception and the useless. Dalia revives the mystical practice of alchemy through petri-dish laboratory cultures, while Yasmina suspends anti-gravity living capsules within a tensegrity structure over Imperial College. Tim creates a nonarchitecture of air within the backstreets of the university. Anthony and Lara toy with evolutionary science within the Natural History Museum with an elevated world housing an un-natural history institute and a museum of hoaxes.

The memory of the Royal Horticultural Gardens is evoked with Shaan’s surreal sunken garden that explores the emotional life of plants. The subjectivity of visual reality is explored by Lee’s observatory in the park while Sophia’s imperfect rehearsal soundscape occupies the space between the Albert Hall and Royal College of Music.

Museums are critiqued by Ahmad with his ‘phynancial towers’ that are built for institutional fund-raising and Bodo’s antimuseum in the park – a folly that has no purpose. James addresses notions of curation and voyeurism with his elevated mega-vitrine that contains and exhibits Albertopolis.

Location Second Floor Unit Staff Miraj Ahmed Martin Jameson

Students Ahmad Ismail Altahhan Sophia Shu Wei Chang Lara Michaela Daoud Dalia Matsuura Frontini Yasmina Abou Jaoude Anthony Shung Yiu Ko Hwa Jeong Lee James Mak Bodo Neuss Shaan Bimal Patel Tim Chee Hong Tan

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Diploma School The Diploma School offers opportunities for architectural experimentation and consolidation. With a broad range of interests and teaching methods, the aim is to marry drawing and technical proficiency to form complex intellectual agendas in an atmosphere of lively and informed debate. Students work in an environment that fosters the development of creative independence and intelligence. They learn to refine their research skills and develop proposals into high-level design portfolios at the end of the year. They begin to define their voices as designers and to articulate individual academic agendas that will carry them into their future professional careers.

Diploma School

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Over the past three years Diploma 1 has worked on defining a contemporary architectural response to today’s environment dominated by the nonphysical, the ephemeral data streams and the virtual super-saturation of augmented reality. Our studio takes the form of experimentation, critique and design, surrounding the polemical ideas of prototypes of the Informational Revolution. Here, we speculate and draw out questions about architecture’s relevance as a catalysing force on our evolved digital culture. In this simulacra we inhabit, we design spatial interfaces between the virtual and actual – exuberant augmentations.

Each year, the unit has explored the emergence of today’s changed status from a different angle – beginning in the first year with the definition of prototypes from a cultural and social point of view, following in the second year with explorations into the construct of synchronicity and the loss of genuis loci, and finally this year arriving within a larger historical context encompassing the emergence of augmentation in the baroque up to today’s collision and hybridisation of realities and media. As researchers and designers, we ventured into Europe’s past of the counterreformation, adopting, extending and mutating strategies of architectural propaganda – from anamorphic painted and built articulations in Rome to today’s collapse of realities in addictive MMORPG-driven Occulus rift worlds. The result of such precisely choreographed spaces – our journey through the Kunstlandschaft of Europe – sees

projects that can be read not solely as architecture of the built form, but also as the social and cultural embedded thinking and articulated design of interfaces applied to the complex realities of today. We believe that today’s shift in technological perception entices a shift in the architectural profession. If ignored, this re-articulation will render us bystanders into the most important evolution in spatial design since the development of the central perspective in renaissance times.

Location Ground Floor Unit Master Tobias Klein

Students Xinyue Zhang Lara Behmaoram de Toledo Leander Adrian Sergej Maier Yonatan Buchhandler Yoo Jin Lee Ioseb Andrazashvili Alvaro Fernandez Pulpeiro Phung Hieu Minh Van Wesley Kum Ho Soo Sarvenaz Yassari Christopher Yah

2 Diploma 2 has continued to explore the paradox of spatial and incorporeal autonomy in a global context of networking and convergence. This year’s testing ground for enquiring into conditions of self-containment has been Hong Kong, one of the few cities that remains administratively distinct – at least for the moment, pending its complete takeover by China a few decades from now. Within this context, we have been questioning the nature of autonomy in the contemporary city – its role, characteristics and function

Diploma School as a catalyst for development or as a hermetically isolated condition. Rachel’s project addressed the demographic problem of the city by proposing a new high-rise typology that internalised the urban-waste collection networks informally operated by elderly people.

Costas questioned the effectiveness of Disneyland’s spatial autonomy by reconfiguring it vertically and embedding it within a series of hotel towers in Hong Kong Central. Li’s project dealt with the growing pressures of urban migration in mainland China by proposing an open framework architecture that could informally house immigrants over fixed time periods. For Marietta, financial autonomy was a condition that could provide a protective incubating mechanism for a threatened species – the family-run business – while the lack of burial grounds in the city prompted Qishan to design a vertical cemetery in which natural phenomena are intrinsically linked to the burial process. Teeba’s project was concerned with how education in the contemporary metropolis is deconstructed by branding and technology and embedded within an environment of learning and consumption. Lastly, Brian’s polemic, set against the mechanisms of civic governance that are increasingly affected by power centres outside Hong Kong, proposed the reuse of urban infrastructure as places where locals and officials could debate in public.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Didier Faustino Kostas Grigoriadis

Students Teeba Arain Paul Challis Grace Chan Brian Fung Qishan Huang Marietta Kakkoura Rachel Khalil Costas Lemos Anna Muzychak Dakis Panagiotou Simon Rowe Li Zhang

3 With an understanding that architecture is a problem of organisation, Diploma 3 explored material, geometric and structural systems by means of computational protocols. Networks, recursive patterns and fractal formations were investigated, and explicit or emergent forms of order were sought – from the articulation of a single component to its growth strategy, all the way to the agglomeration of larger assembly.

Digital and physical form-finding processes were employed throughout in order to develop working prototypes.

The unit travelled to New York to study the redevelopment of Hudson Yards, where we focused in particular on the organisation of the public realm. We looked for place-making opportunities in the context of a masterplan that is driven by top-down commercial objectives and lacks any real public dimension. As an alternative solution we deployed strategies of intervention consistent with our own logic. Through assembling, sheltering, dismantling and screening our set of systems we developed a performative strategy for occupying the public realm. Our aim: to design a resilient built environment.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Daniel Bosia Marco Vanucci Adiam Sertzu

Students Alexander Streatfeild Anand Naiknavare Andrew Bardziu Dimitar Dobrev Dionysis Tzokis Yiran Guo Huida Xia Kitae Kang Tom Hatzor Xiao Von Chua Yong Peng Liu

Diploma School

4 The EU project is transforming the European peninsula at an unprecedented rate, sweeping across existing relations, moulding new industrial and financial supply chains, cutting through longestablished connections and shaping new modes of cohabitation. In Diploma 4, architecture sets out to measure, sense, reimagine and interact with these unfolding processes. It engages, consolidates, amplifies, diffuses and challenges their often disruptive and dislocating outputs.

Graham designed forms of delimiting jurisdictions in the transcontinental grid intensified by Canada, US and EU trade agreements. Stavros deployed the pervasive architectural forms of the compound to address negotiations and territorial structures in the Eurasian steppe. Roland investigated how measuring nature through remote sensing redefines the forms of contemporary work and landscapes in post-colonial Portugal. Maria traced the unexpected links connecting the civic enthusiasms of the Non-Aligned Movement to the contemporary unfolding of new media spaces in the Balkan peninsula. Eleni outlined a new Greek archipelago resulting from the complex establishment of post-crisis simplification processes. Luis connected his work to the excluding processes engendered by logistics systems and reimagined the distribution of postnational citizenship in the Costa Azzurra.

Alexander designed modes to intensify value production and food in the Aral Eurasian territories. Yeon’s project linked forms of scientific modelling to the

procedural and parading formations of independence movements in Flanders.

Tao reinvented free-trade and low carbon emission zones as entangled landscapes between European and Chinese cultures.

Manuele established operative centres to realign the Italian polytechnic state to post-Maastricht industrial organisations.

Jonas envisioned post-Soviet Baltic architecture as a complex geological process. Elaine reinvented the assembly of scientists, politicians, businessmen and the city as forms for negotiating mitigation of climate change.

Location Ground Floor Unit Masters John Palmesino Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

Students Manuele Gaioni Tao Huang Yeon Sung Lee Luis Ortega Govela Stavros Papavassiliou Maria Radjenovic Roland Shaw Graham Smith Elaine Tsui Eleni Tzavellou Gavalla Alexander Zhukov Jonas Žukauskas

5 Have you ever thought about your own perfect paradise? Almost every single culture in the world has elaborated and depicted through oral descriptions – in some cases, images – its own version of this place and the ideal conditions from which supposedly everybody comes and to which only a few go back.

This year, by replacing the notion of building with pairi-daêza, the Diploma 5 engineers of artificial paradises made a deep and precise survey of concrete and culturally based paradises that centre on specific groups of people. From the public and open house in Jeddah,

Diploma School run exclusively by women, where male oppression and domination of public space is discussed, to the infiltration of a former work camp in Shanghai with floating fabric mobiles, to the recreation of rituals related to scent and flowers in Forcalquier, and to all kinds of other paradises composed of fragments and pieces taken from different origins, such as exotic species and materials of all kind that apparently do not match each other because what it is valued most is their abundance and exuberance. Their strange and compulsive nature converts them in bizarre amalgamations of wonders and rarities that form small, rich and inclusive universes as alternatives to the everyday, sad and ordinary environments.

As culturally produced texts, these projects endow meaning upon spaces, because they are fully charged with specific connotations that reflect collective aspirations and longing.

They are spaces of perfect conditions that are universally understood, of physical pleasures and eternal good weather. Because the space itself provides everything needed, they therefore form a counter-representation of everyday reality, misery and privation.

They reveal obsessions and desires, concerns, collective anxieties and wishes, making explicit the shared ethos of the communities that dream them.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Cristina Díaz Moreno Efrén García Grinda Nerea Calvillo

Students Fourth Year Fatemeh Ghasemi Laura Lim Sam Shi Qi Ng Fortune Penniman Leni Popovici Fifth Year Katie Albertucci Gabriel Bollag Magnus Casselbrant Song Jie Lim Basmah Kaki Ling Leng

6 Diploma 6 – the ‘Unknown Fields Division’ – is a nomadic design studio that embarks on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth, exploring peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness.

These landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine – are embedded in global systems that connect them to our everyday lives.

This year we travelled east, onboard a mega-container ship to the manufacturing heart of southern China, tracing the shadows of the world’s desires along supply chains and cargo routes as a way to explore the dispersed choreographies and atomised geographies that global sea trade brings into being. These are the contours of our distributed city, stretched around the earth from the hole in the ground to the high-street shelf. Our design speculations operate within this dislocated city where intense pockets of activity in unexpected places fulfil the every need and desire of faraway cultures.

Drifting out on the high seas, Christina, of our Nautical Mythologies Division, has founded an autonomous ocean territory inhabited by nomadic radar spoofs and sonar anomalies that disrupt the efficiencies of highfrequency shipping lanes; Ardi of our Rational Obsolescence Group has imagined Tide, an all-consuming city of products lasting only 24 hours, and Quiddale has hidden within a world of mass-produced plastic objects the lost languages of cultures that their type of global manufacture has dissolved.

Diploma School With our Department of Biomechanical Efficiency, Golshid has choreographed a symphony, hidden in the production line of a microwave factory. In our Bureau of Rare Earthworks Nataly has curated an exhibition of post-natural tailing pond landscapes only visible from Google Earth. Richard has manufactured a million mysterious circuit boards, loaded with precious minerals whose sole function is to orchestrate new supply-chain relationships on the other side of the planet. www.unknownfieldsdivision.com Location Ground Floor Unit Masters Liam Young Kate Davies

Students Chapman Kan Harry Kay Alexey Marfin Nicholas Masterton Nataly Matathias Quiddale O’Sullivan Ardi Rexhepi Rich Seymour Golshid Varasteh Kia Christina Varvia Zhan Wang

7 12 students plus four tutors with a combined age of 586 years and 20 guests spent 12 weeks searching the potential of using film-as-sketchbook and another 21 weeks developing moving drawings to explore Speed, Time and Interval as a relevant definition of architecture for the twenty-first century, and with an invitation to design a response to the following provocation: The architecture of the New Nature evolves from a culture whose dominant raw materials exist outside the visible spectrum: digital anthropology meets

the sublime anthropocene. What might this mean in the context of two airstrip locations less than one hour from the AA: a) a 700-home development proposed for the currently operational Panshanger Flying School on the edge of Welwyn Garden City b) a VIP departure lounge at RAF Northholt in Middlesex?

Particular attention was paid to points of arrival and departure: house as port – port as house – port as park – park as port – park as house. Repton, Howard, Olmsted, Price, McLean, Tschumi, Broadbent, Macfadyen, Sobek have all worked or continue to work in the field. They are the antennae of our enlightenment. One design question elicits another, and another and another.

Only one thing remains certain, and that is the importance of keeping a record of unknowns. The list below shows the most recent unknowns offered by each student at the time of going to press.

What if flux means architecture?

What is the architecture of absence?

What does it mean to exist weightlessly?

What if the city comes to you?

What is an ecotone?

What is a crowd settlement?

What is suburban mining – is it a wonderland or a treacherous image?

What is a field of departures and arrivals?

What is an aerovecus landscape?

What is a nomadic suburban stretch?

What is a year of water without the Cocteau twins?

What can a quantum house be?

Location Ground Floor Eduardo Andreu Gonzalez Lingxiu Chong Wai Tat Chow Raha Farazmand Sanket Ghatalia

David Greene Nara Ha Fazil Selim Halulu Samantha Hardingham Yijun Huang Yin Lee Pou Wai Lei Lucy Mary Moroney Patrick Morris

Diploma School

8 ‘Any literary succession is first of all a struggle, a destruction of old values and a reconstruction of old elements.’

• Yury Tynyanov This year Diploma 8 embarked on an exploration of architectural form.

Taking our cue from early to midtwentieth-century literary movements, we approached an interrogation of reading and writing as an active process of architectural speculation.

Like the Russian formalists attempting to roughen textual surfaces, our agenda utilised devices that stripped away the familiarity of the built environment.

Students developed critical readings of their chosen site and context, uncovering latent architectural sediments otherwise obscured by layers of cultural, social and economic history.

In the same way that the formalist preoccupation with ‘literariness’ was used as a means to argue for a disciplinary autonomy through a deconstruction of language, we used analogous devices for making distinctions between architecture and building. However, rather than distinguishing elements of architecture by ascribing functional roles, students were asked to identify and argue for dominant forms that rendered cities legible. By scrutinising the perpetual emergence and evanescence of forms that give scale, tactility and meter to a city, students were then able to exploit their findings, challenging architecture through its formal bases.

The year has yielded a range of architectural proposals that exist in

presentia as much as in potentia, taking what is common in architecture and attempting to make it difficult. Instead of challenging our understanding of architectural form through mere additive processes, the agenda put forward an approach that placed emphasis on providing oppositions within extant structures of the environment and its histories. It is with such an agenda that the unit seeks to evolve earlier literary influences, enabling a conversation of language to still find relevance in a discussion of architectural form today.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Eugene Han

Students Fifth Year Ni Ding Evangelos Gerogiannis Charikleia Karamali-Zeri Arabella Maza Liza Rudyk Suzan Ucmaklioglu Joshua Pak Yue Wong Pei Yee Yong Fourth Year Jenny Hill Erez Levinberg Emmanuelle Siedes

( All of us have unbuilt projects in our portfolios, but some of them live a life beyond the sheets on which they were drawn and printed. Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Tatlin’s Tower, and Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino all transcend the ‘reality’ that steel and stone help assemble. The architects of these visionary projects suggested forms of the future, of inhabitation and experience via the most prosaic medium: paper. They launched careers with paper. It’s a staggering and

Diploma School inspiring truth that unbuilt architectures imprint as sturdy a memory as ones we see in ‘real’ space.

We navigated our way through this paper world, not only printing on it but also exploiting it as the very medium through which the architect defines and argues for each individual designed world. Anny drew so deeply she cut through her paper and into the table, appropriating it as the foundation and new ground for her project. Eleanor eliminated lines from her own drawings of a housing estate to flatten the divide between the inhabitant and the viewer, while Ananth argued that the architect is the factory through which mind and matter converge into building.

The practice of architecture is at its best when developed as a collective project, as the result of conversation, battles, debate and exchange. We fought to cultivate this atmosphere – one in which the architect, typically an isolated figure, was the very project we worked on. Students put the architect under scrutiny in order to examine everything from personality to process, thus shaping their own narratives in real-time. Through this unravelling and unbuilding of architectural myths they launched new ones that repositioned the architect as a critical figure. In a unit vested in the manufacture of context, more than its architecture, we have come to realise that we are the context.

Location Ground Floor Unit Master Natasha Sandmeier

Students Merve Anil Ariadna Barthe Catarina Sampaio Cruz Svetlana Demchenko Eleanor Dodman Ioana Iliesiu Oliver Pershav Vidhya Pushpanathan Ananth Ramaswamy Andreani Maria Stephanou Elizaveta Tatarintseva

!0 Diploma 10 has worked with and challenged the current transformation of London’s Nine Elms. We started by scanning the area three times: firstly, a digital construct brought together key contextual variables; secondly, constructed situations isolated the live realm; and lastly, a physical model articulated the interrelationships that exist between physical structures and social situations. Informed by the scans, a workshop in Belfast and a collaboration with SOM, we have proposed composite interventions that integrate combinations of spaces, situations and strategies.

• Nick captures ‘Episodes’ encapsulating the live realm and reconfigures three infrastructural projects, then imposes both on the masterplan.

• Vere designs a diplomatic line, a nonembassy: the new Dutch Embassy.

• Nichola, strongly influenced by Belfast, delineates a number of division lines: a key one relates to the US Embassy and another to a frontline housing estate.

• Nuria creates a new floating river frontage that houses communities and amenities.

• Lelia creates two disruptive structures: the first one spans across the dividing line on Nine Elms Lane, linking the territory of the invisible Malaysian investors with those of the existing communities; the second one bisects the internal public space of Battersea Power Station.

• Fragkiskos uses the existing railway viaduct as a backbone for reinstating

Diploma School industrial production on the site.

• Ben looks at the economic and political forces governing the transformation of Nine Elms.

• Ami substitutes the anodyne green corridor proposed by the GLA with a user’s territory based on the experiences of Hannah (a local resident) and her dog Eddie.

• Angelina proposes four territories of mediation that combine the concepts of urban ‘prestige’ and ‘insecurity’.

• Hunter uses time-lapse observations to create time-based proposals for the two new Northern Line stations at either end of the Nine Elms development.

Location Ground Floor Unit Master Carlos Villanueva Brandt

Students Nichola Barrington-Leach Nicholas Green Vere Van Gool Hunter Devine Ben Jones Angelina Kochkinova Fragkiskos Konstantatos Wun Yee Ku Ami Matsumoto Nuria Romo Torres

!1 This year Diploma 11 chose toys as a way to infiltrate Central London.

We looked for cracks and interstices, disrupted the constant activity of the bustling streets, identified networks with which to interact and created new viewpoints to observe the city. Designing 1:1 toys for playing with the city enabled us to engage directly with the interiority of our immediate environment – a one-mile radius from Bedford Square.

We threw a layer of ambiguity onto

the surrounding built environment and distorted the existing to inject alternative scenarios and acquire a new vision of neighbourhoods dominated by big masterplans and developer-driven construction.

Our discovery and understanding of Medellin’s social urbanism revealed the potential for educational and community spaces to act as true agents of urban revitalisation.

Inspired by the consideration of the citizen as a potential motor of transformation, our projects back in London became counter-proposals, responses to the momentum of economic forces pushing for an urban gentrification that is erasing cultural differences and limiting social mobility.

We sampled the city and drew window sections, mapped textures, collected fragments, collaged at 1:20 and reconfigured the existing.

We broke down linearity and established vertical connections, we misplaced models, we added layers, we tested ideas of urban furniture at 1:5, we took over the city’s lowest depths and highest rooftops. By reading the city as playground, we opened up an environment of potential and an opportunity to reinterpret the urban landscape.

Seminar study took in Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, Aldo Van Eyck and Team 10, Colin Stansfield-Smith and Hampshire County Architects, Colin Ward, Walter Gropius’s Impington Village College and the notion of the Village College.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Shin Egashira

Students Madiha Ijaz Ahmad Alex Frunes John Hudspith Summer Saud Islam Tae Hyuk Kim Stefan Laxness Marko Milovanovic Charlotte Moe Manon Mollard Chloe Riviere Louise Underhill Yantian Zhou

Diploma School

!4 While the noun ‘house’ emphasises the symbolic dimension of the domestic realm, the term ‘housing’ focuses on its functioning – the process of containing subjects by subtly defining their way of life. In this sense, Le Corbusier gave the most precise definition of housing when he said that the house is a machine à habiter. This definition allows us to understand housing not only as the space of the ‘everyday’ but also as a multifarious apparatus that brings together social, economic, juridical and cultural domains.

This year Diploma 14 departed from this understanding of housing, working towards the invention of new forms of domestic space. Once believed to be a place of stability and recovery from the social world of production, housing has become the most uncertain domain: more than any other single thing, it reveals the highly subjective dimensions of the current economic crisis. As Maurizio Lazzarato has recently argued, the neoliberal economy is a subjective economy that is no longer based – as classical economics was – on the barterer and the producer.

A fundamental figure of the neoliberal economy is the ‘indebted man’ – that is, the indebted consumer, the indebted user of the welfare state and, in the case of nation-state debt, the indebted citizen. Housing in the form of property has played a fundamental role in the making of the indebted man. But since this system has failed to ‘take care’ of its subalterns, the time has come to propose alternatives to traditional forms of home ownership. The issue for this year’s

unit was to rethink forms of housing, going beyond home ownership towards more sharable and collective ways of inhabiting space.

A fundamental focus of the unit is the idea of domestic space and how its radical reform can be understood as an act of political and social imagination.

Each student worked individually on a specific project developed both as a political and economic framework and as a precise architectural proposal.

Within such research, the interior becomes the key place for design exploration; by changing spatial proportions, and thus conventions and habits, Diploma 14 ultimately seeks to redefine and challenge our relationship with the spaces in which we dwell.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Pier Vittorio Aureli Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

Students Chris C Bisset Eugenie Hanae Bliah Kate Finning Jesper Victor Henriksson Antonis Romao Papamichael Edward Pepper Marie-Louise Raue Rocio Romo Torres Jack Self Jonathan Skerritt Lara Yegenoglu Chen Zhan

Intermediate School

1. (previous page) First Year; 2. Inter 1; 3. Brandon Whitwell-Mak (Inter 12); 4. Inter 9

Intermediate School

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5. Laurens Peter Paulmann (Inter 8); 6. Shaan Patel (Inter 13) 7. Catarina Sampaio Cruz, Dip 9

Intermediate School

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8. Ignatio Putra Tenggara (Foundatoin); 9. Summer Islam (Dip 11); 10. Natasha Gill, Octavian Gheorghlu, Sergey Krupin, Nhan Vo (DRL); 11. First Year; 12. Georgia Hablutzel (Foundation); 13. Zhan Wang (Dip 6); 14. H&U; 15. Suzan Ucmaklioglu (Dip 8); 16. Sooseok Kim (SED); 17. Antonis R Papamichael (Dip 14); 18. Design & Make.

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Intermediate School

19. (previous page) Assaf Kimmel (Inter 7); 20. San Rocco: Book of Copies exhibition opening; 21. Night School Run Club warms up; 22. AA Members’ trip to Saw Swee Hock Student Centre 20

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23. inside the AA’s Trance Tribal Christmas Party hosted by Inter 11; 24. AA Visiting School, Alpine, Liechtenstein; 25.

Inside the LA Art Book Fair, (opposite) attended by Bedford Press

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Diploma School

1^ In pursuit of new design possibilities in environmentally specific ‘re-generative’1 architectural and urban production, Diploma 16 is continuing its investigation of emerging design paradigms through an interrogation of the environmental impact of material fabrication and production processes based on cybernetic relationships and designfeedback mechanisms.

Re-Generative Advances – the third research agenda in Cybernetic Insurgence – focuses on inner-city densification, expansion and selfsufficiency, particularly in East London, seeking a positive environmental impact that outweighs the adverse environmental effects of construction operations. Its central objective is to design and develop novel architecture and urban prototypes that enable a regenerative ecological footprint without compromising design quality or sensibility. Our source of inspiration is the impending paradigm shift from sustainability to what is commonly referred to as regenerative design, which will radically reshape how architecture and urbanism is conceived and produced through its emphasis on new ecologies, infrastructure, energy production, resource harvesting, waste management and material fabrication and production processes.

Student projects revolve around the critical relationship that the design must achieve between the formation of largescale infrastructure, urban communities and architecture and the promise of a positive environmental impact.

Location Ground Floor Unit Staff Andrew Yau Jonas Lundberg

Students Fifth Year Andrew Grant Tommy Hui Jan Kocjan Jin Uk Lee Natasha Tariq Royce Tsang Guan Xiong Wong Fourth Year Zeina Al Derry Nick Chen Jaewon Lee Jerry Lam Jin Kyu Moon

!7 We continued our study of new forms of the contemporary city, focusing on areas in China undergoing unprecedented territorial transformation.

We observed recurrent patterns of urbanisation, where new cities are still planned following functionalist strategies and infrastructure performs the partitioning of territory while exacerbating the private sphere.

As a unit we identified two dominant forces shaping the urban environment: on the one hand the political power, primarily through the deployment of authoritarian infrastructural monuments, and on the other hand, excessive private development. Within these disputed territories we investigated the sociopolitical role of circulation and proposed new modalities for public life as our primary design motive for architecture.

We started the year by approaching architectural form from performative and behavioural points of view and its ability to engage the individual and the collective. Through the development of tectonic models, we explored

Diploma School geometrical integration of multiple design objectives that seek to integrate structure, circulation and activity in one form, as a way to facilitate new modes of civic appropriation.

Through programmatic coupling, we experimented with new organisational and growth strategies, assigning areas of permanence and adaptability while producing economically viable synergies and greater resilience to change.

We concluded the year with the design of a mixed-use urban unit at the scale of a neighbourhood that integrated multiple activities of living, working, transport and leisure. We focused on defining the civic spine and the variety of socialisation levels contained within it, as well as its relationship to the city.

Students developed their design theses through speculative proposals for the near future.

Location Ground Floor Unit Masters Theo Sarantoglou Lalis Dora Sweijd Support Tutor Sebastian Andia

Students Win Assakul Nailu Chen Daniel Christiansen Philip Doumler Nikolaos Klimentidis Ilina Kroushovski Kirk Kwok Antonis Nikitaras Kahee Park Yu Zheng Taylor Zhou

!8 This year Diploma 18 dove into the territory of the Mediterranean, exploring the ‘Architecture of Particles’ and interpreting the environment on the molecular level to design strategies of intervention in both the tectonic/material and the climatic/incorporeal.

The expedition to the Medes Islands in Costa Brava was an occasion to analyse a coastal region that lives according to the rhythms of nature but remains thoroughly organised as an ecosystem in which man is irremediably implicated through political dynamics, tourism, cultural activities and environmental threats. Scientific research was developed together with Tecnalia Research Centre in a series of workshops that included a visit to the centre’s facilities in the Basque Country.

Projects proposed empathic solutions, from the infrastructural to the molecular scale, and attempted to raise green consciousness and activism: • Alternative Marine Reserves – An open source platform of events across the Mediterranean • Addicted to Pleasure – Island-hopping through sensational landscapes • (EN)dependence – Plug into the floating energy blanket • Winged Migration – An organised flight network for birds • Circus of 9 Intelligences – Embracing biosphere consciousness • SMFoF – Uncovering the Factory in Nature • Time-based Plastics – Initiate a new consumer with new habits • District Cyborg – Nano-architecture in a mutational environment • West-we-stayed – Enabling sustainable fishing across an implementationof fabrication workshops • Modern-ism_activ-ism – An active machining of migration and tourism Location Ground Floor Staff Enric Ruiz Geli Pablo Ros Felix Fassbinder

Students Krists Ernstsons Houssam Flayhan Ioana-Corina Giurgiu Dunya Thaer Hatem Yufei Li Jing Liang Donika Llakmani Rula Rita Sayegh Cliff Anlong Tan Aikaterini Laoura Tsitouridou

Complementary Studies The programmes in Media Studies and Technical Studies make up an essential part of every year of the Undergraduate School. In term-long courses students obtain knowledge and gain experience related to a range of architectural learning. These courses also provide opportunities for those approaching architecture from the different agendas of the units to come together in shared settings. Media Studies helps students develop skills in traditional forms of architectural representation as well as today’s most experimental forms of information and communication technology. Technical Studies offers surveys as well as in-depth instruction in material, structural, environmental and other architectural systems.

This leads to technical submissions, which build upon the ideas and ambitions of projects related to the work in the units.

Together, the various courses on offer in Complementary Studies allow students the opportunity to establish and develop their own interests and direction in the school.

Complementary Studies

MS Media Studies offers a range of courses that explore various methods involved in the process of making architecture. With a focus on subjects that include fabrication, visualisation and information techniques, the programme both complements and acts independently from undergraduate studio units. The opportunity to explore the possibilities of available media in an integrated curriculum allows students to materialise and reinvent their architectural design approaches.

This year’s media ranged from digital information processing, computeraided machining and prototyping, to video, photography, drawing and the curation of space. The department also administers digital skills-based lessons for major applications to help students effectively learn contemporary tools to develop their architectural ambitions.

While Media Studies courses form a compulsory part of the curriculum in the First Year and Intermediate School, the programme draws the participation of students from across the entire AA. This integration of students from a diverse set of backgrounds allows for participative discussions through production techniques. Beyond the studio courses, Media Studies also offers workshops that introduce students to contemporary applications and fabrication techniques.

The department is made up of staff who possess a breadth of expertise encompassing architecture, the arts and technology. This diversity allows for a comprehensive collection of courses that equip students with skills relevant to contemporary means of production in architecture.

Location Ground To First Floor Staircase Department Head Eugene Han Department Staff, Core Charles Arsène-Henry Shany Barath Sue Barr Valentin Bontjes van Beek Shin Egashira Anderson Inge Alex Kaiser Tobias Klein Immanuel Koh Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu Antoni Malinowski Marlie Mul Joel Newman Capucine Perrot Department Staff, Lab Ran Ankory Chris Dunn Andres Harris Joshua Newman Vincent Nowak

Complementary Studies

TS This year Technical Studies has seen the birth of a new way of experiencing TS. In response to a reduction of the hours of the formal teaching programme, the Environment Team opted for alternative forms of teaching and learning, neither less nor more formal – simply alternative.

And so, in the First and Second Years, the students have engaged with the Environment content of TS in a more hands-on and experimental way.

Likewise, if design is the materialising of the idea, the Materials Team has brought materials much closer not just to the drawing board and keyboard but also to our bodies. In the Third and Fifth Years the students embark on their own project of research and experimentation intimately related to their unit design work. The TS design tutors aim to provide every student with the wherewithal to materialise the ambitions, ideas and concepts born in the intimacy of the unit.

The Projects Review can only show a small sample of what Technical Studies (TS) achieves in the year. Our ‘solo exhibition’ was the High Pass Exhibition, where we saw just what the dedication of the TS Staff and the enthusiastically committed response of the AA Students can produce.

Location Salon: Ground Floor Head of Technical Studies Javier Castañón Diploma Master Javier Castañón Intermediate Master Kenneth Fraser Administrative Coordinator Belinda Flaherty Design Tutors Giles Bruce Wolfgang Frese Clive Fussell Evan Greenberg Mehran Gharleghi Pablo Gugel Martin Hagemann David Illingworth Axel Körner Nacho Martí Federico Montella Paul Thomas Manja van de Worp

Course Lecturers Carolina Bartram Giles Bruce Phil Cooper Ian Duncombe Wolfgang Frese Evan Greenberg Ben Godber Martin Hagemann David Illingworth Anderson Inge Emanuele Marfisi Nacho Marti Thomas Prospert Nina Tabink Paul Thomas Manja van de Worp Simos Yannas Mohsen Zikri

G

Graduate School The AA Graduate School includes postgraduate programmes offering advanced studies in one of the world’s most dynamic learning environments. Full-time programmes include 12-month MA and MSc and 16-month MArch options. The Design Research Lab (AADRL), the AA’s innovative team-based course in experimental architecture and urbanism, offers an MArch. Emergent Technologies & Design (MArch/MSc) emphasises forms of architectural design that proceed from innovative technologies.

Sustainable Environmental Design (MArch/MSc) introduces new forms of architectural practice and design related to the environment and sustainability. Landscape Urbanism (MA) investigates the processes, techniques and knowledge related to contemporary urbanism. Housing & Urbanism (MA) rethinks urbanism as a spatial discipline through a combination of design projects and contemporary theory.

History & Critical Thinking (MA) encourages an understanding of contemporary architecture and urban culture grounded in a knowledge of histories and forms of practice. Design & Make allows students to pursue workshop-based design while imagining alternative rural architectures. Projective Cities is dedicated to researchand-design-based analysis of the emergent and contemporary city. AAIS researches and applies alternative forms of collaboration through spatial performance and design. The part-time Building Conservation course offers a two-year programme leading to an AA Graduate Diploma. The AA PhD programme fosters advanced scholarship and innovative research in the fields of architecture and urbanism through full-time doctoral studies. A PhD by Design programme provides a setting for advanced research and learning for architects, designers and other qualified professionals.

The AA is an Approved Institution and Affiliated Research Centre of The Open University (OU), UK. All taught graduate courses at the AA are validated by the OU.

Graduate School

DRL This year the DRL concluded the first year of its new design research agenda, titled Behavioural Complexity, which builds on the scenario- and material-based research outcomes of its predecessor, Proto-Design. The work investigates architecture as an instrument of interaction in which social scenarios are coupled with material behaviour and life cycles that aim to open up speculative questions about how we live and the role that architecture can actively play.

In order to achieve this, behavioural, parametric and generative methodologies of computational design are combined with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic and reflexive feedback systems. The result is the development of new forms of spatial organisation containing adaptive characteristics that are not type- or sitedependent but tested within scenarios of evolving ecologies and environments with the aim of developing novel design proposals concerned with the everyday.

The iterative methodologies of the studio focus on investigations of spatial, structural and material organisation, engaging in contemporary discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism.

Possibilities of Behavioural Complexity are explored in four parallel research studios. Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Behavioural Agency, explores mobility as a driver for a hybrid infrastructural scenario of autonomous spatial machines as urban prototypes.

Semiological Crowds, led by Patrik Schumacher, focuses on the design of parametric prototypes that intelligently

vary general topological schemata across a wide range of parametrically specifiable site conditions, such as a campus. Robert Stuart-Smith’s studio, Behavioural Production, explores ideas of autonomy and organisation through the architectural production of matter, energy and information via its eventdriven agency in relation to people, machines and the internet. Shajay Bhooshan’s studio, Synthetic Equilibria, explores two avenues of research and knowledge: empirical learning via prototyping of spaces and objects at a human scale and scientific learning through methods and technology from the computer graphics industry.

Location Ground Floor Director Theodore Spyropoulos Founder Patrik Schumacher Course Masters Shajay Bhoosan Robert Stuart-Smith Course Tutors Pierandrea Angius Doreen Bernath Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon Apostolos Despotidis Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu Mostafa El-Sayed Manuel Jiménez García Tyson Hosmer Technical Tutors Albert Taylor Edward Moseley Alessandro Margnelli Software Tutors Torsten Broeder Paul Jeffries Karoly Markos Jorge X Mendez- Caceres Ashwin Shah Programme Coordinator Ryan Dillon

Students Phase 2 Radwa Mostafa Abdelmon Ahmed Ashkan Ashki Michael Barraclough Mayank Ravikumar Chavda Tianyi Chen Devika Sanjay Chowgule Yang Chu Ron Savio Chua Maria Andrea Diaz Usme Irem Dokmeci Yang Du Marya Filatova Ralph Antoine Gebara Octavian Mihai Gheorghiu Natasha Gill Akshay Goyal Vandana Goyal Maryam Kalantari Sofoklis-Goulielmos Koutsourelis Sergey Krupin Annkit Kummar Matthew Le Grice Izabella Lima Julian Lin Henry David Louth Mohd Haris Mashkoor Sakshi Mathur Sajeena Moorkoth Guillermo Oliver Lopez Daniel Ovalle Costal José Pareja Gómez Ronak Parikh Dimitra Pavlakou Yue Pei Milica Pihler Balaji Rajasekaran José Manuel Roldan Caballero Dimitra Tampaki

Graduate School Angel Tenorio Castillo Vineeth Thappalli Kannoth Alexandros Paris Tsernos Nhan Vo Yue Wang Jie Xu Lei Yang Haocheng Yang Xiaoyu Zhang Students Phase 1 Soulaf Aburas Doguscan Aladag Dmytro Aranchii Karthikeyan Arunachalam Leyla Asrar Haghighi Agata Banaszek Mengxian Bao Paul Clemens Bart Sai Pratiek Bhasgi Nik Arief Bin Nik Ab Rahman Delfina Bocca Duo Chen Yiqiang Chen Cosku Cinkilic Victor Corell Camilla Maria Degli Esposti Faten El Meri Alexandra Katerina Garcia Lipezker Maria Luisa Garcia Mozota Flavia Ghirotto Santos

Maha Moustafa Habib Abdelraouf Yuqiu Jiang Dachuan Jing Sasila Krishnasreni Baiye Ma Evangelia Magnisali Karim Mohamed Anwar Abdel Salam Mohamed Juan Jose Montiel Giannis Nikas Georgios Pasisis Ilya Pereyaslavtsev Akshit Bharat Rawal JosĂŠ Antonio Rodriguez Gonzalez Maria Alejandra Rojas Jaramillo Carolina Saenz Marrufo Mattia Santi Melhem Sfeir Tahel Shaar Ahmed Moshen Shokir Daniel Simaan Franca Antonios Thodis Junfeng Tong Pavlina Vardoulaki Maria Paula Velasquez Garzon Yining Wang Wan-Shan Wu Liu Xiao Houzhe Xu Wei-Chen Yeh Yiwen Zhang Yuchen Zhu

ETD The Emergent Technologies & Design programme is focused on the concepts and convergent interdisciplinary effects of emergence on design and production technologies, and on developing these as creative inputs to new architectural and urban design processes.

The programme continues to evolve through the development of our research in studio, seminar coursework and dissertations. We aim to produce new research each year, building on our interests and expertise in material organisation and the design and

development of systems in a variety of scales. This continuation of work is focused on the interdisciplinary effects of emergence, biomimetics and evolutionary computation of design and production technologies.

The instruments of analysis and design in Emergent Technologies & Design are computational processes.

The seminar courses and core studio are designed to familiarise students with these instruments, their associated conceptual fields and with their application to architectural design research. The courses are extensively cross-linked, thematically and instrumentally, with each other and the core studio. In Core Studio 1 the focus is on the exploration of material systems and their development into differentiated surfaces and assemblies.

These assemblies demonstrate the potential for integrated structural and environmental performance, producing local microclimatic variations that define spatial arrangement. In Core Studio 2 we investigate a larger and more complex piece of the city, examining urban systems and generating new material, social and ecological organisations.

Location Ground Floor Directors Michael Weinstock George Jeronimidis Studio Master Evan Greenberg Studio Tutors Wolf Mangelsdorf Mehran Gharleghi Visiting Tutors Joseph Allberry Suryansh Chandra Axel Koerner Manja van de Worp

MSc Students 2012/13 Napak Arunanondchai Naphat Chongratanakul Marco Corazza Cagla Gurbay Shih-Hwa Hung Axel Koerner Anna Kulik Yemin Ma Vasiliki Mavrogianni Michela Musto Mikaella Papadopoulou Yasmina Rougab Tejas Sidnal Tessa Steenkamp Yuchen Wang Carlos Zulueta

Graduate School MArch Students 2012/14 Yan Bai Nicolas Cabargas Mori Abhinav Champaneri Viral Doshi Andrew Haas Ulises Juliao Georgios Maragkos Dragos Marian Rugina Miguel Rus Prajish Vinayak Subramanian Mehnaj Tabassum Ruben Taboada Jiangyue Xia Yunfu Yi Jinjing Yu

HCT The 12-month programme in History & Critical Thinking is a unique platform for enquiry into history, theoretical arguments and forms of architectural practice. The aim is three-fold: to connect contemporary debates and projects with a wider historical, cultural and political context; to produce knowledge that relates to design and public cultures in architecture; to explore writings of history as well as new forms of research, communication and practice. The course is organised around lectures, seminars, debates, writing sessions and workshops that offer students opportunities to expand disciplinary knowledge in a broad cultural arena across a variety of viewpoints.

Writing as a practice of thinking is central to the course. Different modes such as essays, reviews, short commentaries, publications and interviews allow students to engage a diverse line of questioning to articulate aspects of their study. Seminars with distinguished designers, critics, journalists, writers and curators lend a diversity of perspectives and skills.

In a Term 1 workshop on Books and Writing students explored the relationship between the text and the performative power of speech. In Term 2, the one-week workshop, Design by Words, helped students develop a critical view of the arguments put into design and the knowledge produced through its effects. The HCT-hosted February symposium ‘Translation in Architecture: Ernesto N Rogers’ brought together scholars to look into Rogers’ written and editorial work and discuss the more encompassing question of translation.

As part of the research seminar in Term 3, the unit ventured to Ljubljana and Trieste to develop the final thesis while participating in daily seminars and architectural visits.

Vertical connections in the school were reinforced through collaborations with AA units and participation in juries, joint seminars with PhD students and the HCT Term 2 Debates with visiting speakers, creating a point of interaction with the academic and architectural community.

Location Ground Floor Director Marina Lathouri Staff Mark Cousins John Palmesino Douglas Spencer Thomas Weaver Visiting Tutors Pedro Ignacio Alonso Mario Carpo Fabrizio Gallanti

Students Matilda Audisio Caitlin Elizabeth Daly Winston Hampel Maarten Lambrechts Marzia Marzorati Yanisa Niennattrakul María José Orihuela Alvaro Velasco Pérez Devanshi Paresh Shah Lindsey Stamps

Graduate School

Hu The Housing & Urbanism programme applies architecture to the challenges of contemporary urban strategies. Today’s metropolitan regions show tremendous diversity and complexity, with global shifts in the patterns of urban growth and decline. The programme investigates how architectural intelligence helps us understand and respond to the changing urban condition. Housing is explored as a critical aspect of urbanism and as a way to reflect on changing ideas of domesticity, identity, living and public space.

Offering a 12-month MA and a 16-month MArch, the programme engages with cross-disciplinary research and design application work.

It combines design workshops, lectures and seminars, and a final MA thesis or MArch project. The programme explores the interplay between graphic tools and writing to develop ideas and research about the urban condition and foster skills for intervening as urbanists through spatial design.

Three research themes make up H&U work: • the role of urbanism in enhancing ‘innovation environments’ and ‘knowledge-based’ clusters • the idea of living space and housing, and issues of mix, density and urban intensification in which architecture is viewed dynamically in relation to a process of urbanisation • the exploration of an appropriate urbanism to address urban irregularity and informality and to engage with the interaction of spatial strategies and urban social policies.

This year’s design workshops have been in several of London’s major redevelopment areas and in Recife, Brazil, in collaboration with the Federal University of Pernambuco. These workshops addressed processes of urban development related to knowledgebased economies and the potential for synergies between existing and new urban cultures. The programme’s work was complemented by a study visit to Vienna, Austria.

Location First Floor Staff Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley Lawrence Barth Abigail Batchelor Nicholas Bullock Florian Dirschedl Elad Eisenstein Dominic Papa Elena Pascolo Alex Warnock-Smith MA & MArch Students, Phase 1 Asli Arda Mariana Cenovicz Moro Natalie Clemens Ivo Barros Hugo Do Nascimento Serra Vaishali Enos Yolanda Nayeli Galindo Cano Sushant Jain Magnus Thiemer Jensen Shaleen Jethi Gayathri Kalyanasundaram Sharmila Kamalakkannan Sneha Kathi Keval Kaushik Livia Rita Klemencsics Sabrina Kösters Piyush Naresh Makwana Ioana Ochoa Alvarado Pegah Rahimian-Parvar Solachi Ramanathan Margarita Shcherbakova Zheyu Shi Vitor Silva Delpizzo Marisela Soto Salas Wei Sun Sasiwimol Utaisup Sonad Uygur Nikita Uday Vora Christina Voutsa Meruert Zharekesheva

MArch Students, Phase 2 Zohreh Malihe Ahmad Teerapat Amnueypornsakul Nithesh Khatod Ashok Kumar Karan Bakre Shikha Bhardwaj Alexandra Chechetkina Diego Grinberg Jose Manuel Otero Garcia Sigen Margarita Palis Castellanos Nitisha Popat Diana Sanroman Baeta Medina Sankalp Shishirkumar Sinha Reshma Srinivas Poom Supakijjanusan Huong Helen Tran Chao Wang Yanran Zhang Mingyu Zhu

Graduate School

lU Landscape Urbanism is a 12-month design course that explores how the techniques, dynamics and discourses of landscape-based disciplines can be reappropriated to raise fundamental questions about the contemporary city.

The programme explores the ways in which the intersection of physical and social processes and the dynamics of territorial formation generate new forms of urban typologies, governance and knowledge.

In October 2000 the European Landscape Convention in Florence became the first pan-European project that aimed to define the entire European territory from a cultural perspective.

It promised a collective sense of territorial specificity, supported by comprehensive studies of charters and tailor-made recommendations. However, the decidedly encyclopaedic spirit of the Florence Convention highlighted a stubborn reality in which practices of property developers, as well as a set of labyrinthine policies, were never translated into meaningful systems of space production.

It was in this rift between utilitarian and cultural practices of European policies that Landscape Urbanism aimed to locate a space of research.

The course sought to explore how productive and natural formations can generate the basis of a pan-European project of territories that are neither generic nor iconic, neither conventional nor touristic. As such, the course was concerned with the geomorphological formations of relevant landforms as well as with the actual cultural, political and economic forces that drive and

choreograph the social formations of these landforms. The outcome was a set of cartographies – a radical atlas conceived to produce new ways of documenting the future of European environments. These cartographies were seen as projective machines capable of unveiling the glitches between conflicting systems – tectonic landscapes, political governance, land administration – and of putting forward projects and design intentions at territorial scales as future alternatives.

Location First Floor Co-Directors Alfredo Ramírez Eduardo Rico Studio Master Clara Oloriz Seminar Tutors Tom Smith Douglas Spencer

Students Valeria Garcia Yunya Tang Niki Kakali Anastasia Kotenko Fernando Blanco Shruthi Padmanabhan Anji Han Yi-Chun Kuo Eugenio Da Rin Josine Lambert Simranjit Kaur Ariadna Weisshaar

Technical Tutors Ignacio López Busón Giancarlo Torpiano Vincenzo Reale

SED The conditions for a symbiotic relationship between buildings and the urban environments they form and occupy are the key concerns of the MSc and MArch in Sustainable Environmental Design (SED).

The dynamic energy exchanges characterising this relationship foster distinct changes in the climates of cities, the environmental performance of buildings and the resulting comfort and energy consumption of their inhabitants.

Knowledge and understanding of the physical principles underlying these

Graduate School exchanges, along with the conceptual and computational tools to translate them into an ecological architecture and urbanism, form the core of the taught programme. Design research within the programme engages with real-life problems aiming to provide alternatives to the global architecture and brute force engineering that are still the norm around the world. The generative process is driven by strict performance criteria following a process of adaptive architecturing that proceeds from inside to outside, attuning the built form and its constituents to natural rhythms and inhabitant activities. Key objectives of all SED projects are to improve environmental conditions and quality of life in cities, achieve independence from non-renewable energy sources and develop an environmentally sustainable architecture that is able to adapt and respond to diverse and variable urban environments.

Term 1 focused on case studies of recent urban schemes in London. These involved field measurements to assess environmental performance, followed by computer modelling and parametric analysis to investigate potential for improvements. The findings of these case studies provided starting points for Term 2 design briefs that explored responses to climate change, technical developments and lifestyle trends for London. Terms 3 and 4 were devoted to design research projects set in many different cities and climates around the world.

Location First Floor Teaching Staff Simos Yannas Paula Cadima Jorge Rodriguez Klaus Bode Gustavo Brunelli Byron Mardas Mariam Kapsali Herman Calleja

MArch & MSc Phase 1 Georgina Alice Campbell Larissa Carreira De Rosso Han Chen Adriana Comi Pretelin Camilla Diane El-Dash Francisco Javier Godoy Guevara Edith Anahí González San Martín Madhulika Kumar Ayelet Lanel

Patrícia Laudares Nogueira Rhiannon Taylor Laurie María Lumbreras Arcos Mahmoud Ezzeldin José Antonio Millán Tauste Neusa Raquel Monteiro Fernandes Gabriela Sofia Nuñez-Melgar Molinari Artem Polomannyy Ganesh Pulavarnattham Sivakumar Hyosik Pyo Jorge Ramirez Cuevas Andrea Rossi Pavitra Sanath Kumar Praew Sirichanchuen Leonidas Tsichritzis Pierluigi Turco Mariyam Zakiah

MArch Phase 2 Adriana Briseño Campos Camila Inés Della Bitta Alessandra Ghione Shanuli Gupta Javier Guzmán Domínguez Sooseok Kim Juan José Montoliu Hernández Mileni Pamfili Sanyukta Pande Shravan Pradeep Kartikeya Rajput Chandhana Ramesh Harshini Sampathkumar Amedeo Scofone Danielle Severino Polina Vorobyeva Yiping Zhu

CHB The Conservation of Historic Buildings course awards a Graduate Diploma on completion of its two-year programme of studies. The course is designed for Built Heritage professionals to develop their awareness and skills in the core subjects of historic knowledge and cultural appreciation; research and report writing; philosophies of conservation; traditional building materials; structures of historic buildings; fabric deterioration and repair; building investigations and assessments; regeneration and conservation; design in modern urban contexts, and international projects. In addition to developing an understanding of that knowledge, the programme investigates twentieth-century buildings and environs alongside current political and social changes such as regeneration and urban redevelopment. The course also follows international ICOMOS training guidelines, currently under review.

Emphasis is placed on a complete understanding of materials, with visits

Graduate School to a stone quarry, a lime workshop and timberworks. Our expert lecturers and visits organisers are hugely thanked by all course participants and the staff.

Andrew Shepherd was involved with building repairs workshops for young professionals and students on behalf of the Swedish NGO, Cultural Heritage without Borders, at restoration camps in Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and BosniaHerzogovina. Other training initiatives were undertaken by programme staff including David Hills and Martin Cook, who (as might be expected of a past graduate of the course) took to his role as Thesis Tutor as a duck to water – allowing a seamless transition from his predecessor. The three part-time staff members take this opportunity to express our thanks to our coordinator Danielle Hewitt for all that she does, and most importantly, to the students who keep the show rambling on down the road into our fortieth year!

Location First Floor Director Andrew Shepherd Staff David Hills (Year Tutor) David Heath (Thesis Tutor)

Second Year Susan Barreto Camilla Gersh Thomas Hardin Waleed Hassan David Morgan Angus Morrison Rachel Williams Matthew Woollven First Year Timothy Brooks Faye Davies Sarah Khan James Moore Michael Garber

DM Students of the MArch Design & Make programme design and construct buildings at Hooke Park, the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset. The 16-month course is structured around a series of design–build projects that develop and test architectural responses to material, site and processes of construction. These projects lead to the design and construction of permanent buildings as part of the growing Hooke Park campus and the production of an individual thesis by each student.

The 2012–13 cohort completed two projects: a timber-seasoning shelter and a student accommodation lodge. The seasoning shelter is a 150m2 canopy intended to store and air-dry timber for use in future projects at Hooke Park. The project was used as a vehicle to test the potential of beech trees as a structural material and to develop a technique for steam-bending bespoke elements that form a woven reciprocal grid.

Designed in parallel, the student lodge accommodates two resident students and is the outcome of a series of design and making strategies, including reactive design process that incorporate full-scale mock-ups, material reuse and up-cycling. Each student wrote a thesis drawing on aspects of these projects, with topics including material imperatives, design methodologies and the roles of making in architecture.

Currently the 2013–14 cohort are designing a boiler house which will form part of a new district heating system for the campus, fuelled by woodchip from the surrounding forest. The scheme incorporates a sinuous timber wall constructed from layered bent trees that

Graduate School grow with a natural curve. A process of 3D-scanning each standing tree is currently underway. This will allow specific trees to be felled and matched to the geometry derived from the scanned data.

Location First Floor Programme Director Martin Self Studio Masters Charley Brentnall Kate Darby Stewart Dodd Visiting Tutors Mark Campbell Alice Foxley Kostas Grigoriadis Jos Smith

Phase 1 Students Sattaveesa Sahu Yingzi Wang Phase 2 Students Carlos Chen Stephanie Cramer Iosif Dakoronias-Marina Meghan Dorrian Sarina Adella Da Costa Gomez Paint Kavit Ko-udomvit Elizabeth Lawrence Omri Menashe Glen Stellmacher

AaIS The Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) brings together professionals from diverse creative disciplines to collaborate on the design of a series of interrelated projects. Creating and challenging links between architecture and performance, AAIS uncovers a hidden set of ‘worknets’ that link multiple professions and products. Its aim is to shape concrete projects and events using creative languages that reflect various fields of research.

In May 2014 the studio’s cohort of international talent – hailing from Israel, Poland and Lebanon – launched the project with a performative installation at the Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf, London. In The Conversation, a Film-Set without a Film, AAIS worked with the dance group New Movement Collective and the music ensemble Distractfold to

merge architecture, dance, music, art and fashion. The event will be followed by performances in Barcelona (June 2014) and Berlin (August 2014), which will explore and further develop the ideas emerging from this collaboration.

The Conversation is a performative playground of characters placed in the cityscape. The characters fulfil repetitive roles defined as hybrid creatures, partly taking the shape of film-set elements, partly regenerating the urban pattern of the surroundings. In this way, elements of the set come alive. The stage becomes the staging. The narrative becomes the film-set. The film-set becomes the actor. Awareness is raised of the reciprocal relations that bind urban elements with presentation and performance. The connections between the characters generate the synergy of urban and natural patterns, creating the performance itself.

The performance is designed to take place within the circular perimeter of the set – a highly composed performative structure that each spectator will perceive differently. Audience members will create their own story, which will unfold into a conversation and a net of relations between planned and unplanned entities.

Location Ground Floor Studio Director Theo Lorenz Studio Master Tanja Siems Studio Tutors and Consultants Andy Dean Jonathan Goddard Heiko Kalmbach Immanuel Koh David McAlmont Joel Newman Mauricio Pauly Ilona Sagar Allard Van Hoorn Steve Webb Renaud Wiser

Students Lubna Fakhry Hadar Menkes Sylwia Niegodzisz Motti Rauchwerger

Graduate School

pC Projective Cities (MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design) uses systematic analysis, design experimentation and theoretical speculation to explore the conception and formation of the city within diverse political, economic, social and cultural contexts. At the core of its research agenda are questions arising from the synthesis of architecture, urban design and planning.

The main ambitions of the programme are twofold: to serve as a critical forum to examine how architectural ideas of the city provide alternatives to current design doctrines; and to define the ambivalent notion of research in architecture by proposing new methodologies for studying, analysing and speculating on the synthesis of theoretical and practical design research. This is framed by a number of methodological propositions – that the city can be read as a projection of the possibilities of architecture; that strategic and applied research make available alternative but complementary disciplinary frameworks to analyse and project the synthesis of the city and its architecture; and that design and research activities are thus inseparable, with knowledge production and formal production linked through empirical, theoretical, experiential, historical, sociopolitical and speculative enquiries.

Projective Cities prepares students for independent research through its taught programme and supports their individual enquiries by providing supervision. The programme is divided into two phases. Phase I represents the taught part, with design studios, seminar courses and workshops each

term. It introduces students to the programme’s pedagogy and provides the theoretical and practical foundations as well as the analytical research methods required to conceive, formulate and execute a research project. The research problems and questions of the dissertation project are fully developed in Phase II, ending with the submission of a comprehensive designed-andwritten dissertation.

Location First Floor Programme Director Sam Jacoby Staff Adrian Lahoud Maria Shéhérazade Giudici Mark Campbell Workshop Consultants Alvaro Arancibia Max von Werz Sakiko Goto Samaneh Moafi

Students Aainaa Suhardi Alex Xiaomao Cao Cyan Jingru Cheng Filipe Lourenco Guillem-Jaume Pons Naina Gupta Runze Zhang Simon Goddard Tianyi Shu Yana Petrova Yating Song Yu-Hsiang Hung

PhD The AA School’s PhD programme combines advanced research with a broader educational agenda, preparing graduates for practice in global academic and professional environments. Current doctoral research encompasses the topics of the AA’s postgraduate programmes in architectural theory and history, architectural urbanism, emergent technologies and design, sustainable environmental design, projective cities and city architecture. Under each of these strands, doctoral candidates may either follow the traditional route of a text-based thesis or the studio-based

Graduate School option of a PhD in architectural design.

A growing number of new PhD projects in the programme incorporate design research as an integral constituent of the method as well as argument of the doctoral thesis. Shared research issues across the PhD programme’s strands are explored in specialist research groups as well as more broadly in seminars and other events within and outside the AA. There were four new starts and four completions this academic year. Throughout the year all of the programme’s PhD candidates contributed to conferences, teaching and publications in the AA School as well as elsewhere in the UK and abroad.

These include presentations of current work at the University of Thessaly, Greece; Architectural Humanities Research Association AHRA Symposium, University College Dublin; Urban Lab UCL; ArchitectAs Symposium on Architecture and Gender, Seville; Pontificia Universidad Catolica and the University of Chile, Santiago; Architects Meet in Istanbul ARKIMEET 2013; eCAADe Education & Research in Computer Aided Design in Europe 2013 and 2014 conferences in Delft and Newcastle upon Tyne; Congress of Architectural History, Athens; European Architectural History Network’s EAHN 2014, Turin; University of San Jose, Costa Rica; University of Diego Portales, Chile; Hellenic Centre, London; UPenn Summer School, Herakleion; PLEA Passive and Low Energy Architecture 2013 and 2014 conferences in Munich and Ahmedabad.

Student papers this year appear in AArchitecture, Materia Arquitectura, Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism, ArchiDOCT e-journal of doctoral research in architecture and Scapegoat Journal among others. Special events include the PhD Conversations on the Building, organised with colleagues from the US, as well as Sachiyo Nishimura’s exhibition ‘Random Structures’, both at the AA.

Location Ground Floor Directors of Studies Pier Vittorio Aureli Lawrence Barth Mark Cousins Jorge Fiori Hugo Hinsley George Jeronimidis Marina Lathouri Brett Steele Michael Weinstock Simos Yannas Second Supervisors & Contributors Doreen Bernath Vida Norouz Borazjani Paula Cadima Mark Campbell David Cunningham Socratis Georgiadis Sam Jacoby Spyros Papapetros Patrik Schumacher Edward Soja Douglas Spencer Thomas Weaver

PhD Students Nihal Al Sabbagh Alvaro Arancibia Tagle Francisca Aroso Pinto de Oliveira Arthur Aw Merate Barakat Alejandra Celedon Elif Erdine Ali Farzaneh Gabriel Felmer Plominsky Gabriela García de Cortázar Adriana Granato Kensuke Hotta Serena Jarvis Niloofar Kakhi Konstantinos Kizis Patricia Martin del Guayo Arturo Revilla Perez Ricardo Ruivo Ivonne Santoyo Orozco Emanuel de Sousa Thiago de Soveral Emmanouil Stavrakakis Aldo Urbinati Alexandra Vougia Jingming Wu

AS F

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT The AA Archives documents and makes available the AA’s educational, administrative and cultural history.

The AA Salon brings together a series of disparate initiatives – some long entrenched within the culture of the school, others new to the AA this year – which sit outside the traditional pedagogical structures, units and programmes of the school. Despite this separation, each of their distinct agendas, from books and exhibitions through to evening classes, archives, AA Members’ events or parties, results in an equivalent proliferation of projects that continue to promote an informed and wide-ranging endorsement of architecture to audiences not just in London but the world over.

FORMAT is a live magazine that looks at the shapes that discourse takes.

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT AA Archives

Visiting School

The Architectural Association Archives documents the AA’s educational, cultural and organisational history. It holds over 10,000 drawings and 1015 cubic feet of textual records.

A major proportion of AA Archives’ collections consist of student projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. These include drawings, paintings, digital portfolios, models and ephemera. The Archives also collects records relating to the theory and practice of architectural education, such as lecture notes and teaching records, and thus preserves evidence of the teaching methodologies, systems and pedagogies that have evolved at the AA. Additionally, the AA Archives documents the social and cultural activities of the Association, together with records of the AA’s governance, including such material as minute books and committee reports dating back to the 1850s.

Other major collections held by the AA Archives include The Royal Architectural Museum Archive and The Otto Koenigsberger Archive.

Recent additions to the collections, displayed this year in the Projects Review exhibition, are drawings by Piers Gough (AA1966–71), Kenneth Frampton (AA1950–55), John Miller (AA1950–56), Alan Colquhoun (AA1947-49), David Gray (AA1950-55) and Dereka Boas, née Thompson (AA1963–69).

The AA Visiting School (AAVS) is a worldwide network of short courses, design workshops, research programmes and public forums held in the UK and across five continents each year.

As a vital and living extension of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, AAVS also embodies the cultural and learning ethos of our many partners with whom we share the belief that architecture, like other human, cultural and educational endeavours, benefits indelibly from the bridging of the chasms opened as a result of the accelerating realities of global knowledge economies and professional practices.

In 2013–14 more than 50 workshops, laboratories and nomadic studios, along with a couple of Semester Programmes, one Night School, Summer School, Summer DLab and Visiting Teachers Programme, and more than 1,000 students of all ages and backgrounds convened around the planet and at Bedford Square and Hooke Park to rapidly make, think, discuss, debate and actively shape the future of architecture.

Where cultural externalisation is so often about exporting an established and dogmatic model to far-flung places with expected results, AAVS inverts that practice.

It is learning, exploring, engaging, collaborating and experimenting with ‘local’ people, places and practices in order to reimagine the shape, form and expectations of architectural education, in the process constantly producing unimaginable outcomes.

In this sense, the AA Visiting School is a contemporary wunderkammer. No two of its programmes are alike, and while the scale, material, methods and issues are unique to each programme, what they ultimately share is the AA’s unquenchable thirst for the unknown.

Location Ground Floor AA Archives Edward Bottoms

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT Welcome to a world of continuous architectural investigation, proposalmaking and communication – a world where not only architecture, but also architectural learning, is everywhere.

Location Ground Floor: Salon Visiting School Andrea Ghaddar Christopher Pierce

Research Clusters AA Research Clusters are year-long special projects, activities and events that bring together diverse groups of AA staff, students and outside partners – audiences, specialists, researchers – to realise a body of focused research.

Originally conceived in 2005, Research Clusters are mechanisms for triggering new territories and modes of research.

The clusters are intended to promote and cultivate the culture of applied research in the school.

Each year the AA Research Cluster Group, in consultation with existing cluster curators, takes applications from across the school for a new cycle of research areas; there are usually four clusters operating at any one time. In addition to developing expertise and specific projects, Research Clusters seek to challenge existing forms of research and presentation – exploring alternative ways in which work can be produced.

These might include events, symposia, conferences, workshops, performances, publications, off- or on-site exhibitions, fabrications and interdisciplinary collaborative research and competitions.

Architectural Doppelgängers The research cluster Architectural Doppelgängers explores the relationship of architecture to the multivalent meanings and implications of copying.

Subject to law, the idea of the copy also brings profound moral disturbance to our idea of architecture. Though the profession increasingly relies on technologies of copy, duplication and replication, the idea of originality remains a disciplinary foundation. Does the myth of the doppelgänger haunt the discipline? Is architecture’s imminent death signalled by the encounter of its doppelgänger? Does its doubling create an evil twin? Or conversely, might architecture find a productive relationship with the culture of the copy? Originating with a sequence of public interviews, small symposia and talks examining a variety of intellectual products and properties, the cluster will explore two main questions: one concerns the nature of the copy, the other the problem of copyright.

In a comprehensive atlas of practices and forms, architectural doppelgängers – ie, obscure cases of architectural curiosity – are archived, categorised and investigated in myriad forms of duplication, doubling, faking, pirating and re-enactment. Interestingly, all research about a doppelgänger always requires an intense study of the original. The questions about the value and meaning of the authentic work of architecture as well as the technological possibilities for reproduction pose challenges for historians, architects, students and legal experts.

On the basis of such an extensive atlas of ‘architecture doppelgängers’ we will investigate scientific and legal methods of assessing the meaning of architectural doubles and potentially unsavoury dealings with them. This part of the research will also open up a more unconventional way of exploring architecture between legality

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT and illegality. It will address the rights to architecture – the meaning of the legal owner of the copyright as private property – while also thinking through a legal definition of ownership about architecture as a ‘public commons’.

Location Ground Floor: Salon Cluster Curators Sam Jacob Ines Weizman

Paradise Lost Laughter, Charles Baudelaire once noted, is not only what separates humanity from the animals (who lack a sense of humour); it also reminds us that we have been cast out of paradise – that we are only too human. (Naturally, the divine also lacks any sense of humour.)

Moreover, laughter also serves to reveal to us that all human enjoyments are essentially contradictory, ‘at once a token of an infinite grandeur and an infinite misery’, as Baudelaire offered, and thus proving a reminder of the fallibility of all human endeavours, including that most self-consciously serious of the arts: architecture.

The Paradise Lost research cluster is fascinated with those contradictory tokens, or architectural remnants, which speak of an infinite grandeur and at times infinite misery. For the past three years we have been exploring such lost paradises in the context of the United States. While the US was the world’s greatest economic, scientific and cultural force during the twentieth century, it now faces a kind of unplanned obsolescence in which the changing patterns of consumption and demand have resulted in a kind of architectural redundancy. In this context architecture often exists solely as a form of by-product or residue, leaving such casual asides as the abandoned swimming pools of the Catskills Resorts

of upstate New York or the unwanted mass suburbs of California’s Salton Sea. Our means of considering the architectural consequences of these paradises lost is simple. If the symbolic history of the US rests on the heroic potential of production, mythologised in the inventiveness of Henry Ford’s assembly line (amongst others), then we are examining the opposite: that which isn’t work. Or, more appropriately, that which constitutes non-work when there is no productivity left to define it. This is to say, when everything is redundant, what remains?

The work of the Paradise Lost research cluster concludes in spring 2015 with a final publication and accompanying exhibition.

Location Ground Floor: Salon Cluster Curator Mark Campbell

Saturated Space Since Plato’s opposition of image to reason, defining image as antithetical to logic, and the consequent antagonisms of rhetoric vs discourse, painting vs drawing and colour vs form, there has been a consistently strong iconoclastic, de-saturating tendency within western thought and architectural discipline. It is a line of reasoning that pits superficiality against depth: depth is idolised as pure, abstract, white, difficult to grasp and serious, while whatever is sensual, eloquent, colourful and essentially non-linguistic is ridiculed as superficial, vulgar, indecent and even pornographic.

That which operates directly on the senses is demonised and feared for the potency of its power, and ultimately excluded from ‘serious’ discourse.

Colour in architectural discipline and theory is necessarily affected by this categorisation, with its legitimacy, although never its power, in perpetual

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT doubt. This research cluster begins the process of re-evaluating and restructuring the frame of this apparent contradiction. The cluster seeks to develop a set of spatio-chromatic methodologies, and forms them into a combined figure of complementarity, rather than subordination or opposition, with theoretical and scientific discourse.

The most immediate and direct of the multitude of interfaces through which architecture can engage with its occupants is that most highly evolved of our perceptual apparatuses – the eye; its language is of light, its vocabulary chromatic combinations. Reflected off an inexhaustible range of environments and materials, colour, in all its forms, is the architect’s first and most consistently powerful line of atmospheric influence.

As techniques of fabrication and modes of materiality proliferate in architectural production, new possibilities arise to orchestrate an unprecedented level of spatial richness. At the same time colour is beginning to be rediscovered as an area of interest in art theory, neuroscience and neuroesthetics. With the process of design, fabrication and discussion as the linear core around which to weave these bodies of knowledge, the Saturated Space generates and documents creative feedback loops between design teams, art theorists, historians and scientists, with influences and reconsiderations reverberating in all directions.

Location Ground Floor: Salon Cluster Curators Fenella Collingridge Antoni Malinowski Adam Nathaniel Furman

Urban Prototypes The ‘urban prototype’ describes a mode of design related to contemporary computational and industrial processes, and a conception of urbanisation as

responsive both to the efficiencies of reproduction and the flexibility of differentiation. Prototypical approaches, now prevalent within architectural and urban design, have acquired their currency in the context of contemporary conditions of urbanisation. The design and operation of urban prototypes are consistent with demands for organisational efficiency, flexibility and speed, and with the management of environments, networks and information. By conducting research across a range of disciplines and practices and addressing social, economic and ecological concerns, we are working towards a critical understanding of the problematics and potentials of the urban prototype.

Location Ground Floor: Salon Cluster Curators Clara Oloriz Sanjuan Douglas Spencer

Night School Launched in 2013, the AA Night School deals with alternative models of architectural education. Though we often imagine the idea of architectural education to be a natural and inevitable phenomenon, it is of course as much an accidental by-product of educational politics and economics, of demands of professional training and of murkily subjective disciplinary ideas. Against a background of turmoil within both higher education and the profession, AA Night School offers timely experiments in other ways of learning, other forms of generating knowledge and expertise. As much as it promises new pedagogical platforms, it also recalls the origins of the AA School itself, which began as evening classes in the 1860s.

The AA’s composition of school and membership provides a unique

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT landscape in which to reconsider relationships between education and practice. AA Night School proposes a pedagogical platform aimed at students and members alike, offering continuing professional development and student engagement with professional practice.

By crossing established lines of practice and education, AA Night School hopes to invigorate both.

Location Ground Floor: Salon AA Night School Danielle Hewitt Sam Jacob

Membership The Architectural Association was formed as a Members learned society in 1847, and today the AA is made up of over 6,000 Members across the world. AA Members are a community of professionals, alumni, students, researchers and academics from many fields who share architecture as a common interest.

Members are involved in the life of the AA in many ways: organising and enjoying trips and events, volunteering time and expertise and supporting students in need, as well as accessing the many benefits of Membership including the AA Library, Photolibrary and AA Archives, and receiving annual subscriptions to AA Files.

AA Membership is open to anyone with a genuine interest in architecture and is keen to hear from people looking to join, visit aaschool.ac.uk/members Location Ground Floor: Salon AA Membership Bobby Jewell Jennifer Keiff Alex Lorente Joanne McCluskey

Exhibitions AA Exhibitions seek to bring together new audiences for architectural ideas and projects. The AA exhibition programme, both at the gallery and through its international touring exhibitions, investigates and promotes architectural practice in all its complex and multidisciplinary forms.

This year’s exhibitions included the construction of One-to-One Dom-ino at the Venice Biennale, GUN Architects’ Rainforest pavilion in Bedford Square and gallery shows by San Rocco, Smout Allen, Lynda Gaudreau and Dogma.

Location Ground Floor: Salon AA Exhibitions Sebastian Craig Vanessa Norwood Lee Regan

Publications Enshrined within the AA’s founding charter of 1847 was the mandate to promote architecture through publications, and today AA Publications continues this legacy with a series of innovative titles covering all aspects of architectural culture. Among our 2013–14 books is a new title in the popular Architecture Words series: The House of Light and Entropy, by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte.

This is complemented by Panel, written by this year’s Venice Biennale Silver Lion recipients, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, which examines the impact of the Soviet large concrete panel systems on architecture’s modernisation; Little Worlds, the latest in the Agendas series, which presents three years of work in the AA’s Diploma 9 unit, led by Natasha Sandmeier; Third Natures, a micropedia of architectural projects by Cristina DÍaz Moreno and Efrén Garcia

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT Grinda of the Madrid-based studio Amid. cero9; AA Files Conversations, which collates conversations from the past ten issues of AA Files, the long-running journal published by the AA, including interviews with architects Léon Krier, John Winter and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Forthcoming books include three new titles in the Architecture Words series – by Anthony Vidler, Sylvia Lavin and Ernesto Rogers; and the two-volume anthology, Cedric Price Works 1952 – 2003: A Forward-minded Retrospective, which brings together for the first time all of the projects, articles and talks by British architect Cedric Price.

In addition to these titles we have produced five new publications with Bedford Press, our own independent imprint, among them Real Estates: Life Without Debt, edited by the AA’s Fulcrum; Jesko Fezer’s Design in and Against the Neoliberal City, the sixth volume in the Civic City Cahier series; and Contestations: Learning From Critical Experiments in Education, edited

by Tim Ivison and Tom Vandeputte.

Lastly, this year we have again published two issues of our esteemed journal AA Files, which continues to promote original and engaging writing on architecture through a rich and eclectic mix of architectural scholarship and ideas from all over the world.

Location Ground Floor: Salon AA Publications Kirsten Morphet AA Print Studio Wayne Daly Sarah Handelman Pamela Johnston Zak Kyes Claire Lyon Rosa Nussbaum Thomas Weaver

Student Forum The AA Student Forum is an elected body of students that acts as a channel of communication between the student community and the academic, administrative and governing bodies of the AA. It operates through five committees, responsible for student concerns, student projects, travel bursaries, parties / events and networking.

Location Ground Floor: Salon AA Student Forum Tyler Bollier Sophia Chang Alexandra Chechetikina Liam Denhamer Andrew Haas Jane Horcajo Rubí Michael Ho Stefan Jovanovic Yasmin Keats Andreea Vasilcin Zipu Zhu

AA Archives, Salon & FORMAT FORMAT Issue 4 8–18 July 2014 FORMAT is ‘live magazine’ looking at the shapes that discourse takes. Guests mix anecdotes and analysis, seminars and screenings. Issue 4 focuses on four iconic individuals and the ways in which they innovated their respective disciplines and cultural fields.

Tuesday 8 July Kurt Cobain FORMAT Thursday 10 July Lina Bo Bardi FORMAT Wednesday 16 July Jacques Derrida FORMAT Friday 18 July Chelsea Manning FORMAT

Organised by Shumon Basar All events take place in the Salon (New Soft Room) at 6pm. Entrance is free and open to the public format.aaschool.ac.uk

0 1! 2 3 4 5 6^ 7 8* 9( The display typeface that appears throughout this guide is the result of a crowdsourced project conceived by the AA Print Studio. All units and programmes were asked to submit their own sets of quick sketches and photographs of specific letters and numbers, which were then reinterpreted and designed by Sueh Li Tan. A B C D E F G H I J K L M

Inter 10 Wayne Daly Projective Cities SED / PhD Dip 1 First Year Rosa Nussbaum Dip 4 Rosa Nussbaum / Inter 13 SED / PhD Dip 7 SED / Inter 10 Inter 10 / Dip 9

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