*SUMMER SCHOOL AS A STAGE* 22 June 2018 Zurich/London/NYC
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUS (in: The Savage Mind, 1966) ‘It might be said that the engineer questions the universe, while the bricoleur addresses himself to collection of oddments left over from human endeavors…’
INTRO: The AA building consists of an amalgamation of townhouses, secondary structures and interventions, providing the backdrop to a history of academic life and education.
There’s not one part, not one facade, not a single hall that represents the school as a whole. Rather it is comprised of an accumulation of anecdotes and scenes——memories of canonical events, mythologisations of personal recollections. SUMMER SCHOOL AS A SCENE
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The Association is a summary of its fragments, impossible to define in one particular architectural moment, beyond the sum of its pieces——an anatomy reflected in its educational set-up. The unit will seize on the capacity of summer school participants, often visiting the AA School for the first time, to revisit the building ‘as found’. The participants will explore its spatial potentials, questioning relationships, mirroring, echoing and enhancing its character as a bricolage and add to its narrative themselves.
London Summer School Architectural Association Monday 2—Friday 20 July 2018
ANNA VIEBROCK (img.2) (on her working method as a set designer) ‘Sometimes I feel like a hunter, when I find something, a place, a house, which tells me a lot about history, (MORE) 2/12
JAN DE VYLDER (img.3) (on DVVT’s extension-by-replication for the Twiggy store in Ghent, 2013) ‘We need two, three, four extra stairs, we get a garden, and extend the back facade, for the stairs, just for the stairs.’
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atmosphere. I take pictures of these places often without having a plan, what to use them for. Often later I recall these pictures and I use them for a set——a little bit like an archaeologist.’ We will reconsider the AA building complex and its direct surroundings as the stageset on which the Summer School will take place. In doing so, we will explore defining moments as they present themselves and are uncovered over the course of the three week studio. Subsequently we will assemble and reconfigure these stagesets into a new, synoptic whole——a summary of situations with the capacity of framing scenes that lie between the everyday and those mythologies found, remembered or yet to be constructed.
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUS (cont’d) ‘The engineer is always trying to make his way out and go beyond constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the bricoleur by inclination or necessity always remains within them.’
Participants will reveal and utilise the fragmentary nature of the building, not by attempting to create clarity but by adding to the complexity, through rehearsal and restaging, replication and reprise. 3/12
... MADAME POMPADOUR’s apartment at the Palace of Versailles: The replication of interior surfaces and ornamentation allows for the reconfiguration of rooms in plan and section, providing sheltered walkways where the walls used to be, by the rearrangement of an architecture already present. (img.4) Employing a specific set of model building and construction techniques characteristic of scenography and set-design, we will be working on several scale levels simultaneously, from 1:20 to 1:1 studies on-site, restaging the AA building onto and into itself in preparation of the final presentation.
SAVVAS CIRIACIDIS & (img.5) ALEX LEHNERER ‘During the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 the German pavilion featured a full-size partial replica of a building made famous through its function as a backdrop to 30 years of political news (MORE) 4/12