AA Mexico City Visiting School 2015 brochure

ATLAS OF MEXICO CITY SPECIES OF SPACES ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION VISITING SCHOOL MX CITY SUMMER 2015

Architectural Association Global Visiting Schools In the world of present-day architecture, AA alumnus, Rem Koolhaas, was one of the first to write, design and diagram his globetrotting into a contemporary conscience. The AA has taken that nugget of an idea and transformed it into its own ‘council of architecture’ – the AA Visiting School. In more than 50 workshops, laboratories and nomadic studios, a Night School, a One-Year and two Semester Abroad programmes, a Summer School, Visiting Teachers’ Programme and Independents’ Group, a wide spectrum of students of all ages and backgrounds will gather in London and around the world to make, think, discuss and debate actively shaping the future of architecture.

While cultural externalisation has so often been about exporting an established and dogmatic model to far flung places, the aim of the AA Visiting School is to completely invert that practice.

It enables learning, exploring, collaborating and experimenting with a diverse group of international partners – schools, cultural institutions, local teachers and practitioners – in order to reimagine the shape, form and expectations of architectural education.

The AAVS in Mexico City takes this scheme to the next level and invites AA graduates from the Americas to relocate themselves, for 10 days, in the heart of one of the biggest metropolises on earth, to practise the renowned AA unit system and explore its possible futures.

No two of the AAVS Mexico City’s programme agendas, described in the next pages, are alike: the scale, material and methods are unique to each unit, but what they share is the AA’s unquenchable thirst for the unknown.

Contents AA IN THE AMERICAS 04 ATLAS OF MEXICO CITY SPECIES OF SPACES 06 ATLAS OF MEXICO CITY FRAMEWORK 08 AAVS UNITS: AAVS 01 Sidelong Glances AAVS 02 Street Battles AAVS 03 Public Space and the Border Condition AAVS 04 Atlas of Urban Disruptions AAVS 05 Capillarity 09 AAVS SYMPOSIUM & EXHIBITION 20 AAVS LOCATION 22 AAVS FIELDWORKS 24 AAVS DIGITAL PROTOTYPING LAB 26 PARTNERS AND SPONSORS 28 STAFF 29

Architectural Association in the Americas In recent decades the AA has witnessed waves of individuals travelling from the Americas to Bedford Square eager to experience the distinctive architectural culture of the school. Today, many of them are already contributing to shape the architectural culture in their own countries, imagining, experimenting and difussing that part of the AA culture now embedded in their own practices.

The AA Mexico City Visiting School proposes to reverse this process and learn from the experiences and practices of the graduates from the Americas. Using the AA’s renowned unit system of teaching and learning, the AAVS will run a series of methodologies, developed by each individual, in order to explore the boundaries of what we define as ‘Space’, with the aim of putting together a Spatial Atlas of Mexico City.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

Atlas of Mexico City Species of Spaces In his ‘Species of Spaces’ essay, Georges Perec states ‘to live is to pass from one space to another’ and goes on to name the myriad ways in which they are presented to us: open space, enclosed space, outer space, living space, projective space, deep space, Euclidean space, blank space, parking space, lost in space, staring into space, null space, three dimensional space...

Inspired by this essay and in particular, the categorisation of space according to scale (the page, the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment building, the street, the neighbourhood, the town, the countryside, the country, Europe, the world, SPACE), the AAVS Mexico City and its units will embark on a quest to understand the different species of spaces produced in Mexico City. They will use the experience of local AA graduates and the scale at which they tackle space in order to map and propose a collective project of Mexico City.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

Atlas of Mexico City Framework In Lewis Carroll’s tale ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ the crew of a small fishing boat are looking for a strange creature. To facilitate ‘the task’, the sailors are equipped with a blank map framed by geographic coordinates and a scale reference to facilitate their frantic search for the animal.

In this context Martin Peran1 asks: What kind of map can be drawn in order to search for a monster in constant movement, an animal that eludes its predators and never stays in the same place?

Normative cartographic approaches permeate design practices.

The encyclopedic project compels us to use maps to accurately locate things in space, thus making cartographic representation lose its projective power and become a powerful but restricted analytical tool.

The AAVS Mexico City will use this reference and ask the same question in regard to Mexico City. What kind of maps can be drawn to image the futures of Mexico City. What kind of maps can be drawn to image the species of spaces posed by each of the AAVS units. The workshop will explore in 10 days the potentials and possibilities of the metropolis by reinventing and redefining the idea of a map and in turn of an Atlas, a collection of ideas, concepts and tools to design unknown scenarios of Mexico City.

1. Peran, M. Maneras de hacer Mapas, Revista de la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Costa Rica. V 2-2013. Numero 4. ISSN 2215-275X

Holiday, Henry. (1876) Ocean-Chart. The Hunting of the Snark: an agony in eight fits by Lewis Carroll. http://www.lewiscarroll.org/

AA Visiting School Mexico City

AAVS U N I T S

A R CH IT E C T U R AL ASSO CIAT IO N

sidelong glances

street battles

Alejandra Celedon & Valeria Guzman

Jose Arnaud

public space and the border condition

atlas of urban disruptions

Arturo Revilla Perez

LyonBosch Arquitectos

capillarity Armando Oliver Suinaga

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

AAVS UNIT 01

Sidelong Glances As an approach to the issue of architectural knowledge and representation, this workshop will draw on the images of photojournalist Enrique Metinides, who from 1946 to 1993 photographed crimes and accidents throughout Mexico City. In their ambiguous status as morbid evidence of death and suffering, or –to paraphrase Cuauhtémoc Medina– as documents of the urban ‘catastrophe of the machine age’, these images, which where first published in the yellow press and now circulate in art galleries, possess a seductive and challenging quality.

Mexico City appears as a collection of fortuitous sites: the city caught in the sidelong glance of the lens over a span of 50 years offers an alternative reading, a montage of the city observed through its contingencies. What traces, what forms of the city, do these images inhabit? What kinds of cities do they depict?

What do they articulate about Mexico City?

Metinides’ images will be taken as much as a historical register through which to map the current Mexico City as a framework for the selection and observation of sites to visit. The photographs will lay out the rules of the game for the unit work, which will generate an Atlas. This Atlas is not a positivist classification of places, events and dates (reducing knowledge of the city to a mere list of visible features), but a potrayal – through Metinides’ visual workroom – of the city in its disparities and unnoticed orders. The Atlas will entail a passage from image to space, from page to map, from space to diagrams, and from objects to words.

At stake, then, is the Atlas as a new epistemological arrangement for architecture: form and content in constant imbrication.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Alejandra Celedon Alejandra Celedon (Edmonton CA, 1979) is a Chilean architect (Hons., Universidad de Chile, 2003), and MA in Advanced Architectural Studies (Distinction, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, 2007). She just completed her doctoral studies with a scholarship from the Chilean government at the Architectural Association School of Architecture on ‘Rhetorics of the Plan’ (2014). She has been Visiting Scholar at Universidad de Costa Rica (May 2014), and part of the Study Centre at the CCA in Montreal (CCA-AA joint scholarship for archival research 2011). She has worked as an architect and academic in Santiago and London, and presented and exhibited her work internationally.

She has organised the Architectural Humanities Research Association Symposium “The City: Language, Planning and Politics” (2011) and the exhibition and catalogue “Sachiyo Nishimura: Random Structures” (AA Gallery, London, November 2013). Currently she is Graduate Studies Director at Universidad San Sebastian and teaches at Universidad de Chile.

Valeria Guzmán-Verri Architectural Association MA, PhD in Histories and Theories of Architecture (2010). Her research interests focus on architectural representation and the relationships between form and knowledge.

She has published on the visualisation of information in 19thC Europe, Otto Neurath’s Visual Autobiography, and the work of artist Harun Farocki. She is a researcher and associate professor at the School of Architecture,University of Costa Rica.

Selection of images from Enrique Metinides’s book: 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

AAVS UNIT 02

Street Battles When considering the growth of Mexico City, its spaces and how they affect each other, the discrepancy between official regulation and the physical city that we experience seems obvious. The question is: what other set of rules, agreements and policies, not official but culturally assumed, does this city respond to?

From spiked sidewalks to avoid the settlement of street vendors, to metal structures on the street to protect the ‘right’ to park in front of one’s house, matter has become the preferred law enforcement method, whosoever’s law it might be. Then the city becomes an assemblage of assemblages, an aggregate of histories of governmental policies, private enterprises and individual battles.

Our object of study will be the novel architectural and urban orders that emerge from the gaps between formal law, informal agreements and silent social consensus. We will survey, dissect and index them with a threefold goal: to unveil the legal and paralegal aspects that shape them, to discover their unexplored potential and to extrapolate their evolution, envisioning, in a scifi manner, the kind of urbanism they could lead to.

We will depart from the scale of the street and move up and down to the scale of the building and that of the neighbourhood.

Students will be expected to conduct field and documental research on at least three typologies that fall into the unit’s area of work. Each typology is to be studied, in a taxonomical manner, through the drawing of various cases that exemplify it; an index card is to be produced for each case. Finally, students are to construct a scenario that extrapolates the surveyed typologies into unprecedented urban configurations; this will be presented by the combination of a text description and a drawn illustration.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Jose Arnaud-Bello An artist and architect based in Mexico City. His work focuses on the reciprocal process of formation between culture and material conditions. His practice makes use of research, documentation, reflection, speculation and physical intervention as modes of participating in this process. An AA graduate, he has taught at the Architectural Association, Cornell University, Berlage Institute and Universidad Iberoamericana.

Viaje a las cuatro esquinas del mundo La paradoja de Descartes Jose Arnaud

As in many streets of the city, this sidewalk of Periferico has been populated with enormous planters to avoid the set-6 Apuntes sobre el mundo intermedio tlement of street vendors. Jose Arnaud Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

Public Space and The Border Condition

AAVS UNIT 03

Understood as a symbol of collective welfare, communal gathering, political achievements and civic culture, public space has played a central role in the formation of the city. Founded on a global electronic infrastructure in the last decades, new forms of communication and unprecedented access to information have redefined traditional notions of place, territory, space, communication, community and urban life in general, diluting the lineage of the agora, square, town hall, cafeteria and other traditional forms of public space. Our ways of approaching the public sphere have expanded drastically giving us, not only new ideas, formats of information, interfaces and vocabulary but new spatial, political and material logistics. Although evident, this new condition is far from certain, inevitably exposing the limits and forms of operation of disciplines with an intimate relation with the formation of the city. This is the case of architecture.

Micro Borders With the ambition of exploring innovative relations between architecture and emerging forms of public space, the workshop uses the border condition as a conceptual, spatial and material device from which architecture can reframe its relationship to the city.

The workshop will start with identification and study of conflicted urban borders. Using photography, video, digital diagramming and physical models, students will set a range of possible intervention scenarios. Prototypes, relational diagrams, design strategies, large-scale models and direct proto-architectural interventions will follow as tools to articulate design problems and engage in a wide range of projects from single 1:1 scale site-specific micro interventions, to strategies for large parts of the city. Finally, the proposal will be presented in the form of a document with the ultimate objective of creating a comprehensible, tangible and novel understanding of the relations between architectural design, public space and the city.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Arturo Revilla Perez Arturo studied Architecture at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City and at the AA MArch-DRL in London. He has collaborated with Zaha Hadid Architects in London and codirects the AA Houston Visiting School. Lectures and teaching include University of Kent, UAA Aguascalientes, Chelsea College of Art, The Architectural Association, ITESM and Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. Arturo is an AA PhD in Architectural Design candidate.

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

Process city: Architecture and the border condition Arturo Revilla

Atlas of Urban Disruptions

AAVS UNIT 04

Large metropolitan areas in the Americas have experienced exponential growth over the last decades, materialised mostly as the cumulative aggregation of housing in large expansions of peripheral territories. The interaction with topography has produced unique disruptions within the generic urban growth, defining a myriad of empty spaces that pose opportunities to rethink typologies of public space, infrastructural networks and ecological systems.

The unit will address the issue of urban disruptions and topography as a possibility to engage with social, infrastructural and cultural issues. The research will be conducted at the Barrancas of Mexico City for the AA Visiting School Mexico City and at the Quebradas of Valparaiso for a Design Studio taught at the Catholic University of Chile (UC).

A sequence of scales will reveal different issues and qualities associated to: -ravine as geographical system scattering large metropolitan areas -micro basin as urban and ecological element in relation to infrastructural network -sequence of public, green and cultural spaces in the slope -stairs, contention walls and canals as basic supports for the body and articulation of the topography.

The process will combine analytical maps using geographical information systems and experiential surveys using Debord´s dérive to discover the spatial qualities of the site.

The outcome will emphasise an experimental approach to representing urban disruptions relating topography, infrastructure and spaces. This approach will include the use of photomontage, cognitive maps and a series of physical and digital models in different techniques and scales.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

LyonBosch Arquitectos is an architecture office committed to design research and experimentation to produce innovative forms and spatial organisations that catalyse new relationships between ecological, programmatic, social and material conditions.

Arturo Lyon is an architect from Universidad Católica de Chile and MArch from Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab. After working for Zaha Hadid Architects in London he founded Lyon Bosch Architects in Chile. As well as the professional practice he teaches at the design studio and develops research in technologies of design and fabrication at PUC. Alejandra Bosch is an architect from Universidad Católica de Chile and MA of Landscape Urbanism at the AA. In London she worked for Edaw and Groundlab Collective. She combines her professional practice in Lyon Bosch Architects with her academic research in landscape representation and design studio at PUC. Alejandra is part of SAP, an applied research network that endorses the role of design within rapidly transforming geographies of the South American Continent.

Mexico City’s west Ravine landscapes Map data@2014 Google Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

AAVS UNIT 05

Capillarity The unit will explore the rapidly fluctuating margins of Mexico City where different urban scales coexist with an agricultural condition related to water systems. The unit’s objective will be to provide potentials for new organisations that maintain and enhance this condition, presenting alternatives to the depredatory urbanisation happening in this area.

Following Georges Perec’s essay, we will explore two kinds of spaces: A material one, through the specific scale where the project will be located, trying to define what constitutes a neighbourhood, or town, in the rapidly changing borders between Chalco, Tlaltenco, Xochimilco and Mixquic. We will investigate the different urban conditions and agricultural systems that have emerged in this area, and learn how they work and function, aiming to generate diverse fields of information.

The second space will be a virtual one, constituting a parallel investigation through the concept of design space in evolutionary thought, as defined by Daniel Dennet. We will explore urban organisations that are able to adapt through the concepts of population variation, persistence, combination, cooperation and competition.

As a methodology we will explore this through a physical model of the area that represents the diverse fields of information. In a parallel investigation, virtual components will be developed to be 3d-printed to form organisations that operate on the cartographic model. Different drawings that explain both fields and components will be produced to understand and explain the projects.

The unit will attempt to present urban alternatives that are able to accommodate adaptation and resilience, and that understand culture and urban systems as another emergent phenomenon of evolution.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Armando Oliver Suinaga A Mexican architect with a MA in Landscape Urbanism from the AA-2001, APEC Architect and member of the National System of Art Creators 2011-2013.

He has practiced mainly in México City (office twentyfoursevenº) in projects of diverse scopes and scales while conducting research and teaching in RMIT Australia from 2009 to 2010 and ITESM, UIA and UNAM in México City since 1992.

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

Topography of light Armando Oliver Suinaga Office twentyfourseven

AAVS MEXICO CITY SYMPOSIUM/EXHIBITON The AAVS Mexico City will be part of a Symposium and an exhibition entitled ‘Species of Spaces’ at a venue TBC. For the symposium each AAVS Unit master will present their work, practice, and methodology alongside other graduates, and relevant lecturers and speakers to discuss their relevancy in relation to the metropolis.

For the exhibition each AAVS unit will produce a single piece of work – any format - (essay, physical model, drawings, maps, montages…) representative of their methodology and as an outcome of the workshop. The exhibition will present the results of the workshop in the form of an Atlas of Mexico City.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

ATLAS OF MEXICO CITY SPECIES OF SPACES SYMPOSIUM/EXHIBITION

AA G l o b a l V i s i t i n g S c h o o l s Chris Pierce & Brett Steele

Species

of

Spaces

Jose Alfredo Ramirez

Sidelong Glances Alejandra Celedon & Valeria Guzman

Street Battles Jose Arnaud

Public Space

and

The Border Condition

Arturo Revilla Perez

Atlas

of

Urban Disruptions

LyonBosch Arquitectos

Capillarity Armando Oliver Suinaga

AAVS MEXICO CITY SUMMER 2015/UNAM

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

AAVS MEXICO CITY LOCATION The AAVS Mexico City 2015 will be based at UNAM located within the Coyoacán borough in the southern part of Mexico City. In June 2007, its main campus, Ciudad Universitaria, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) (National Autonomous University of Mexico) is a public research university in Mexico City, the largest in Latin America and the oldest in the continent.

Besides being the most recognised university in Latin America, its campus is one of the largest and most artistically detailed. It is a World Heritage site that was designed by some of Mexico’s bestknown architects of the 20th century. Murals in the main campus were painted by some of the most recognised artists in Mexican history such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The UNAM is widely regarded by many university world-rankings as the leading university of the Spanish-speaking world.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

UNAM ‘s main library

AAVS MEXICO CITY FIELDWORKS The AAVS Mexico City will offer the opportunity to visit several architectonic routes across Mexico City curated by each unit and organised by ‘Recorridos Arquitectonicos’.

‘Recorridos Arquitectonicos’ is a series of documentary videos projected on to some particularly significant architectural works in Mexico.The project organises a series of tours covering some of the most representative historical stages of Mexico City’s history, visiting creations which range from the prehispanic to the viceregal, modern architecture, as well as significant natural sites in Mexico. The series is presented as an audiovisual experience which explores the different aspects of architecture and the spatial experiences they generate.

http://en.recorridosarquitectonicos.org/#home

AA Visiting School Mexico City

Espacio Escult贸rico UNAM

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

Xochimilco Mexico City

AAVS MEXICO CITY AA DIGITAL PROTOTYPING LAB The AA Digital Prototyping Lab (AADPL) is a facility set up in the summer of 2007, containing various prototyping machines and a teaching space designed to evolve with the latest developments in digital fabrication technologies. The lab intends to raise awareness of the potential of digital fabrication not only as a technique to produce final proposals but also as a design tool.

The Head of the AADPL will be running and teaching digital fabrication within the AAVS Mexico City. UNAM will provide the necessary facilities for the exploration of digital fabrications within the different AAVS unit agendas.

AA Visiting School Mexico City

DPL Model-making Landscape Urbanism 2012

Spatial Atlas of Mexico City

DPL Model-making Landscape Urbanism 2012

Organisation:

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Sponsors:

Media Partners:

STAFF DIRECTOR AAVS MEXICO CITY Jose Alfredo Ramirez

UNIT MASTERS Alejandra Celedon Valeria Guzman Jose Arnaud-Bello Arturo Revilla Perez Alejandra Bosch Arturo Lyon Armando Oliver Suinaga

AA GLOBAL SCHOOLS DIRECTOR Christopher Pierce

AA DIRECTOR Brett Steele

HEAD OF AADPL Angel Lara Moreira