By working in the public realm, for a client that isn’t the AA, we’re taking the first steps towards combining the radical spirit embodied in the existing work at Hooke and applying this to the wider context of West Dorset, to create what might be termed a New Vernacular.
– Clementine Blakemore, Director of AAVS Kingcombe
When I deliver the lecture I don’t need notes, but I’m relying on a text that’s in my head. Perhaps the reason I do not use a word processor is that, in a sense, I am one.
– Mark Cousins, Head of History and Theory Studies at the AA
in conversation with History and Critical Thinking MA Student
Gili Merin
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
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
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
Nanotourism is a creative strategy through which we wish to change the perception and understanding of our contemporary world. We understand nanotourism beyond tourism: it is an attitude to improve specific everyday environments and a strategy to open up new local economies.
– Aljoša Dekleva, Director of AAVS Slovenia
Our pavilion is designed with maximum flexibility and it can adapt to the various locations and dimensions of each site. Simultaneously, since it is a tech-company we wanted to create a high-end, smart, and iconic design which will transmit a fresh and unique identity.
– Lianou Chalvatzis Architects
In my position as Director of the AA Haiti Visiting School it is always important to see what pioneers in the field of bamboo architecture are working on. What is their process, their technique, their belief in bamboo as a sustainable building material of the future?
– John Osmond Naylor, Director of AAVS Haiti
Let it die. It did well at the time, most people approved of it except certain political parties, and we’ve celebrated it twice now. We should look forward; we are the generation that’s always so interested in what is happening next! We have studied the past, but celebrate it again? That’s enough.
– Mary Banham on the Festival of Britain
Many competitions launched by ICARCH are meant as celebrations, as homages to important cultural achievements. They refer to memory, in an attempt to resist forgetfulness. They are also guiding marks within a culture ravished, I feel, by too much sensationalism, ephemerality and irrelevance.
– Dan Coma, ICARCH
It is a complex and loose brief so it expects the students to construct their specific and intellectual contexts, define the future visionary projects and the content for their programming stages, and challenge familiar typologies and spaces in novel cultural institutions.
– Maria Fedorchenko, Diploma 8
Our two keywords are “urgency” and “impact”. Each move, action or design impulse by the students will be weighed against these two touchstones. We will train them in stating why something is socially urgent and civically impactful, paired with the greatest attention to a maximized level of imagination.
– Intermediate Unit 13
We want to use film as designers. There has been this idea of fiction as a device to understand reality… So while it was meant to be an architectural design exercise, it’s also something that could become an architectural device for the conceiving of exceptional architecture.
– Brendon Carlin
Co-director of Tropicality
AAVS Costa Rica
I envisaged the blog as a kind of ‘notice board’ allowing researchers to stay informed about relevant new materials but also as an elegant means by which to introduce an element of serendipity within the collections- highlighting interesting projects, new discoveries, photographs, writings etc.
– Edward Bottoms
AA Archivist
We’re now interested in the properties of materials as well as the revolutions that are happening in synthetic biology and material science. There’s this huge technological development happening in materials, which fundamentally allow us to program them like we did computing and machines before.
– Skylar Tibbits, MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab
I prefer to take portraits with some context now, people in amazing spaces – so the place is as important as the person. At times I have been concerned that I never specialised in either architecture or portraits, but maybe, with this image, I have finally found a way to combine them.
– Valerie Bennett
People know to walk through doors and step down staircases, and it is through these elements that architectural representations truly function to draw people into their scaled or mediated worlds, no matter how strange, small, digital, filmic or collaged, via their imaginations.
– Adam Nathaniel Furman,
co-curator of Re.presence