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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

Close your eyes for a moment. Listen to the city you are surrounded by for a full minute and then try to make a decision according to what you hear; not only according to what you see.

 – Taneli Mansikkamaki, Intermediate Unit 12

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

We can describe the relationship between words and images as follows. The word is a determinative force. It is determining what the image is about. The image itself is resisting this determination and trying to escape it.

– Wim Nijenhuis, author of ‘The Riddle of the Real City’

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

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

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

By walking through urban and suburban architectural projects, I believe I have perceived the most interesting notion of territory: its ‘scalelessness’ entity.

-Michela Bonomo, Fifth Year

When Pier Vittorio said Rome had the best pizza in the world, he really meant it.

-James Mak, Fourth Year

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

Applied research requires an inquisitive engagement with the materiality of architecture. The objective is to reconnect architecture with the environment through a rigorous investigation of matter and its organisation.

-Marco Vanucci, Intermediate 7

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

Located in rural environments, but in association and dialogue with London schools, both Grymsdyke Farm and Hooke Park are concerned with the role of making in design education in the context of a specific place.

 – Clementine Blakemore, Lacey Green Visiting School Director

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

Because Dom-ino was a diagram and a sketch, it was closer to something that was complete, like a piece of furniture. It was self-contained. It didn’t need to become anything else. I felt if we were going to rebuild it we should capture this quality about it. 

– Valentin Bontjes
van Beek

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

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