THE (DIS)ENCHANTED SUBJECT OF ARCHITECTURE: BETWEEN NEOLIBERALISM AND NEOBAROQUE

History & Critical Thinking MA student Lennart Wolff reviews the Term 1 symposium in which a group of theorists discussed the possibility of a critical architecture, and going beyond, to critique the very notions of critique itself.

As the design was for an international sports event that brings together countries from around the world, I wanted to express the concepts of “diversity” and “connection.” I combined different shapes that, at first glance, didn’t appear to be connected.

– Asao Tokolo, artist and winner of the 2020 Tokyo Games logo design

A BREATHING CYBORG!

Following on from the article where a group of four First-Year students described the invention of a new drawing machine – the Coligopulmogram – here, History and Critical Thinking MA student Chris Doray continues this conversation, reviewing the device as a breathing cyborg.

FAKE NEWS

by AA 3rd Years Sofia Pia Belenky and Tobias Hentzer Dausgaard, Editors of DUE

COLIGOPULMOGRAM (CPG)

by Quentin Martin, James Lysaght, Tamara Rasoul, and Caspar Schols, AA First Year students

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN THE AGE OF METABOLISM

MA History & Critical Thinking student Chris Doray details the Term 1 Art & Architecture lecture at the AA by Pierre-Jean Giloux on Machinami, Japanese Urban Landscapes, which contemplated the notion of superimposing history and ruins.

THE THIRTY YEARS OF ARCHITECTURE: A short guide on abandoning accumulated memories at the mercy of inclement weather

By Paolo Emilio Pisano, AA Year Out student

AA 4th year and host of radio programme The Temple Show Joshua Harskamp discloses the details of their upcoming one-year anniversary episode featuring the landscape architect Pierre Bélanger, and encourages you to tune in.

BOOK LAUNCH: ARCHIPELAGO OF PROTOCOLS

MA History & Critical Thinking student Gili Merin describes the conversations between Archipelago of Protocols author Aristide Antonas, collaborator Thanos Zartaloudis, and Pier Vittorio Aureli, among others, at the book’s launch at the AA Bookshop.

By exploring this reality while immersed within the highly speculative environment of the AA, we imagine and generate immediate drifts of the city where fiction and reality collide, stretching our work to its limit in terms of precision, fantasy and innovation.

 – Arantza Ozaeta Cortázar and Álvaro Martín Fidalgo, Intermediate Unit 4

CLIENT STYLE: PIERRE D’AVOINE & COLETTE SHEDDICK LECTURE AT THE AA

Katerina Zacharopoulou, an MA History & Critical Thinking student, describes the lecture by architects Pierre D’Avoine and Colette Sheddick in which the pair question the idea of authorship in architecture from the client’s perspective.

HISTORY AND CRITICAL THINKING: FIELD TRIP TO PARIS

MA History & Critical Thinking student Gili Merin walks us through the vast explorations their group undertook across Paris, discovering the many villas and maisons designed by Le Corbusier.

Universities today can no longer operate as autonomous entities in the city. They need to question the established norms, critically evaluate their role in society, and propose new modes of learning as well as new collaborations between academia and the city.

– Xristina Argyros and Ryan Neiheiser, Intermediate Unit 15

Our unit envisages a building as the expression of specific and temporal needs, and thus as a pretext for amplifying uses and giving more. We are interested in unstable spaces- spaces for social encounters- these event fields that make a building remarkable, flexible, and ‘intemporal’.

– Salwa and Selma Mikou, Intermediate Unit 16

COUPLE FORMAT: The Identity Between Love and Work

AA Conversations publishes an excerpt from Shumon Basar’s review of his FORMAT lecture series from Summer 2016 for the online journal e-flux architecture.

CURRENT PREOCCUPATIONS: ROTOR lectures at the AA

MA History & Critical Thinking student Carolina Bettarello reviews the recent lecture by Rotor, a collective whose recent expansion to include a deconstruction unit explores the possibilities of material reuse within architecture.

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD- Intermediate 9 Unit Trip

Third year student Jake Parkin takes us through the many food explorations he encountered on his unit trip to Oslo and Lyngør,  Norway, with Intermediate 9.

We believe that architecture ultimately exists in our minds as an experience, therefore we are interested in developing methods where a designed experience informs the architecture and not the other way around.

– Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, Intermediate Unit 1

TANÉ KINCH

NOTES ON THE AA EXPERIENCE: Unit Interview Day

After being awarded the 2016 KPF Travelling Fellowship, AA Fifth years Anthony Shung You Ko, Jonathan Cheng, Lorenzo Luzzi, and Zipu Zhu ventured along the Yangtze River to discover its present day role in China.

THESSALONIKI: FOLDED FORCE: REVELATIONS: The 2015 Greece AA Visiting School

AA Greece Visiting School Director Alexandros Kallegias describes the 2015 programme in Thessaloniki and their installation ‘Eos’, ahead of this year’s school in Chania.

AA Part I Year Out student Matteo Agnoletto questions how an object can be transformed to have a different function as he designs the Street Fighter Lounge Chair- a Ducati motorbike and lounge chair hybrid. 

THE (NEW) MONUMENT, PATCHWORKING ENTROPIES

Summer School 2016 – Unit 7
Taught by Alvaro Velasco Perez, AA PhD Candidate & Javier Anton

MEMORY DEVICES

Summer School 2016 – Unit 6
Taught by Onur Ozkaya, AA MSc 2007 (EmTech) and Vikrant Tike AA MA 2010 (AAIS)

2 SECONDS CITY

Summer School 2016 – Unit 5
Taught by Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl2016 & Valerio Massaro, AA MPhil 2017 (Projective Cities)