AArchitecture 21

The AArchitecture Salon kicked off the new academic year with a kaleidoscope of different takes on paper, that ubiquitous material. As banknote, portfolio or passport, paper’s many contemporary roles are often as politically charged as they are diverse.

It is already a tired cliché that a new digital age has arrived to replace this ancient fabric, but many of the articles in this, the 21st edition of AArchitecture, challenge this assumption.

Arturo Revilla, for example, demonstrates that the paperless aspirations of four wellknown architects in the 1980s resulted in quite the opposite outcomes in their work. The work of Intermediate Unit 2’s Takero Shimazaki, on the other hand, embraces the fleeting qualities of extremely fine tissue paper, which holds onto his designs for only limited periods of time before it fades. Similarly, DRL student Mel Sfeir gives an account of his recent paper manipulation experiments whilst First Year’s Monia DeMarchi rejoices in the sense of possibility that a clean sheet of A4 holds.

There are several new units to the AA this year in both Intermediate and Diploma schools. What better way for Dip 3, Inter 5 and Inter 12 to introduce themselves than with a speed-dating event with our very own editorial team in which they each express their unit as a sketch? In a similar sketching event, AA Foundation and PhD students compete in

21

News from the Architectural Association

AArchitecture

AArchitecture 21 / Term 2, 2013/14 www.aaschool.ac.uk Š 2014 All rights reserved Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

Please send your news items for the next issue to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Eleanor Dodman Radu Remus Macovei Roland Shaw Editorial Board: Zak Kyes, AA Art Director Alex Lorente, Membership Brett Steele, AA School Director Graphic Design: Claire McManus AA Photography: Valerie Bennett and Sue Barr Printed by Blackmore, England Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

Cover: ProtoPaper pattern ProtoPaper is a technical paper used to design, create and visualise 3D prototypes from its triangular mesh. www.protopaperlab.com

The AArchitecture Salon kicked off the new academic year with a kaleidoscope of different takes on paper, that ubiquitous material. As banknote, portfolio or passport, paper’s many contemporary roles are often as politically charged as they are diverse.

It is already a tired cliché that a new digital age has arrived to replace this ancient fabric, but many of the articles in this, the 21st edition of AArchitecture, challenge this assumption.

Arturo Revilla, for example, demonstrates that the paperless aspirations of four wellknown architects in the 1980s resulted in quite the opposite outcomes in their work. The work of Intermediate Unit 2’s Takero Shimazaki, on the other hand, embraces the fleeting qualities of extremely fine tissue paper, which holds onto his designs for only limited periods of time before it fades. Similarly, DRL student Mel Sfeir gives an account of his recent paper manipulation experiments whilst First Year’s Monia DeMarchi rejoices in the sense of possibility that a clean sheet of A4 holds.

There are several new units to the AA this year in both Intermediate and Diploma schools. What better way for Dip 3, Inter 5 and Inter 12 to introduce themselves than with a speed-dating event with our very own editorial team in which they each express their unit as a sketch? In a similar sketching event, AA Foundation and PhD students compete in

21

News from the Architectural Association

AArchitecture

a game of consequences, devising towers by folding paper and blindly drawing on from the previous fragment.

Meanwhile, projections are the theme of Alejandra Celedón and Gabriela Garcia de Cortazar’s interview with Sachiyo Nishimura and Alejandra Celedón’s piece on paper as a site of inscription. Mark Campbell writes instead about film, namely the mediative capacity of writing in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Student Editors: Eleanor Dodman – Diploma 9, 5th Year Radu Remus Macovei – Intermediate 9, 3rd Year Roland Shaw – Diploma 4, 5th Year Contributing Editors: Assaf Kimmel – Intermediate 7, 2nd Year Buster Rönngren – Intermediate 2, 2nd Year Costandis Kizis – PhD, 3rd Year Ema Kacar – Intermediate 9, 2nd Year Jingming Wu – PhD, 2nd Year Patricia Souza Leão Müller – Intermediate 11, 2nd Year

Contents 2 Paper Intention 3 I Can’t Pan Paper 4 Let the Paper Fold and Unfold 6 The Autonomy of 1:1 Paper Architecture?

8 Generation X(erox) 9 Borges and the Blasé 10 The Place of Paper 13 Paperless 14 Towards Provocations 16 The Mark Fisher Scholarship 17 Contingency 19 Kiosks: Heritage or Utility?

20 All Work and No Play 22 Less is a Copy

Graduate Gallery

25 26 28 30 32 34 36 40 42 44 45

Recommended Reading Thoughts Poured Out onto Paper The Book That Hasn’t Been Borrowed for Decades A Smashing Party The AA’s Frankenstein Towers The Magician and the Surgeon Speed Dating Inscribing Sites A History of Architecture in Five Minutes AA Publications Bedford Press

46 News

Next Issue’s Theme School Announcement Student Announcement

Joshua Harskamp, Intermediate 2

2

Every New Year, we choose the most memorable image out of a project from the past year to be screen-printed onto tissue paper. Texture and colours are carefully handpicked and we spend a month, or two, working on the subject that eventually gets printed. It can be a hand drawing, photographs of a building fragment, a computer-generated drawing, and so on.

In a limited edition of 100, these screenprinted tissue papers are hand folded, placed within a perfectly matched envelope, and posted to our dearest friends and contacts – those who have supported us during the previous year. On the most delicate, fragile and ephemeral material, the prints will eventually fade in direct sunlight. Some people have chosen to frame these artefacts, and after a year or two, the images are washed and transformed by the light. There

is a sense of time and fragility of the objects and artefacts in these prints. Tissue paper can only hold the information it carries for a short space of time.

Almost all of our architectural design and intent also occurs on fine, delicate translucent papers. Pencil lines, on this fragile material, create the most surprising accidents on the elevations or plans that we draw over. Disrupting the speed of a line, the pencil can rub the texture of the specific paper surface, and the straight line is subtly distorted, giving the drawing a ‘character’ and a ‘personality’. Drawing the same elevations or plans in a program such as Vectorworks, the outcome will lack this initial and sensual drama, with rather flat and efficient lines appearing instead.

We return to the tissue paper and pencil, tracing over the CAD drawings, to ‘bump into’ those characters again. Sometimes, the accidental ‘characters’ appear to have a force of their own, potentially being transformed into the architectural material and fragments of a building that we are trying to conceive. It is a journey that has no certainty or expectation. Somehow, the pencil lines drawn over the translucent tissue paper trigger that initial hint for an idea that may be materialised into a completed building. Or they may not – it all depends on what we see in them.

stoned muppets watching football from rear gate into

To read more about Tak and his work, please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/inter2

Takero Shimazaki, Intermediate 2 Unit Master, describes a tradition that never repeats itself

Screen-printed tissue paper from 2012 courtesy of Toh Shimazaki Architecture

Paper Intention

3

I Can’t Pan Paper

To read more about Tobias Klein and his unit’s work, please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/dip1

Tobias Klein, Diploma 1 Unit Master, explores paper, or rather, what one would write outside of it

Asked to write about paper, I was spontaneously reminded of an RSA 1 animated video drawing by Sir Ken Robinson that speaks of the idea of industrialised education and the value of lateral thinking. He explains lateral intelligence through the device of a paper clip, describing how academics and specialists have a reduced capability to imagine what to do with a paperclip compared to a child who has not gone through the mill of institutional education.

In general the educated academic comes upwith maybe 200 ways to use a paperclip, whereas the child’s response multiplies that ten-fold. Other than being amazed by the academic’s lack of imagination, I was drawn to the medium of the presentation – a white space onto which a gentle hand draws at incredible speed what Robinson is talking about, panning along as his discourse flows and creating an entire lecture on digital paper. Had we seen the sheer size of the paper beforeforehand, it might have come as less of a shock (bearing in mind the fable by Borges, referenced

by Baudrillard, and the architect’s tendency to freeze in front of white emptiness).

But pondering this thought of the seemingly endless crisp paper surface and the problem of projecting ideas, we might speculate further on the idea of a medium that has, since Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work, become the message, influencing and dictating, as well as translating idea into condensed proposal, form and construct.

In this context, the evolution from a piece of DIN-normed, framed paper, might not be adequate anymore. To think laterally, what should a space without limitations be?

An endless panning space, where zooming

and referencing need to have the same importance as the transparency and texture of paper once had? Here it comes – the digital space that imitates a paper surface is an interface that has already started to change the architectural profession and the way in which we project ideas onto paper. Superseding the paper space – due to the limitations of the material as a substrate for ideas – it should henceforth lead to an end to what we call paper-architecture – a confusing and technologically outdated concept.

Now, in conclusion, I am a great admirer of paper as a building material, be it for models, laser-cut, folded, assembled or in built architecture. Yet I am dubious about its capacity to be the projection ground for contemporary ideas and the space for enduring and colossally imaginary architecture. But then again I might be wrong since a friend’s four-year-old, annoyed by my rambling, pans me out of his view with a gentle but precise move of his right hand, making no difference between the beloved iPad and reality.

1. Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce

mediocre bread smelling corner-shop poor wine selection

4

Let the Paper Fold and Unfold

Paper tested as a viable structural material

Melhem Sfeir, Phase 1 DRL Student, gives an account of his recent paper manipulation experiments

We recently investigated how paper reacts to different folds and loads, and the objective was to deliver structurally stable furniture designed out of the discovered folds. With this aim in mind, we applied different strains on the paper while marking the various pressure points (or straining points) and we let the paper guide us. In this process, we recorded a series of patterns on the surface which consisted of mountains and valleys. Once set, we refined and smoothed out the pattern into a defined geometric shape. Different iterations resulted from the

shape which we further developed and scaled up, straining the pressure points to reach the maximum supporting strengths. First we tested in cardboard and then to polypropolyene, which displays similar reactions to paper. In the end, we folded 50 paper iterations of study models, always fascinated at its folding and supporting capacities.

Workshop led by: Shajay Bhooshan Team members: Sai Prateik, Arunachalam Karthikeyan, Eric Chen and Melhem Sfeir

Boogie on my scoot bambino Quick fucks in alleyway

Please visit http://drl.aaschool.ac.uk if you want to find out more about the Design Research Laboratory and its work.

From top Evolution of the pattern in series; Alternative #3; the resultant iterations in series

5

Pay gateman once more today, Then “get out�,

6

The Autonomy of 1:1 Paper Architecture?

Jingming Wu, a current AA PhD student, explores the way in which Shigeru Ban’s work has shaped, and often misled, our understanding of the applications of paper in architecture.

Is there an autonomy of 1:1 paper 1 architecture?

For years, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has tried to justify this argument in structural, moral and aesthetic terms.

He has argued that the paper tube features structural advantages due to its cheapness, solidness and convenience to manipulate.

However, a simple comparison to other materials, such as glass and concrete, makes the case problematic.

Let’s not stick to aesthetic criteria, which can be subjective, and let’s only examine here the suspicious structural advantages and the moral aspects claimed

by Shigeru Ban. By reviewing the technical details and management of his work, I will investigate the structural and moral factor of his paper architecture, and thus question its autonomy.

To build up autonomy on a structural level, paper tubes and panels in Shigeru Ban’s works are mainly supposed to be columns or truss elements, all members of a grid structural layout. But sometimes they are not as important as they look.

For example, in the disaster relief projects in Ahmadabad, India 2001, the main paper tube in the four corners of the structure served not only as a column, but as a mould as well: ‘Liquid POP (plaster of Paris) is poured into the four corner tubes so that the steel rods are firmly held in place’.2

That is to say that paper tubes have to be reinforced by steel rods and liquid POP to adapt to post-disaster environment.

Its structural capacity is limited by the

stupid Englishman!

nature of long paper tubes, that is, the fact that they are easy to bend. This detail is not frequently shown in Ban’s work publications. The paper tubes or panels in selected photos and diagrams seem to function as metal tubes or panels, but actually they don’t (see image right) .3 Without being aware of these structural details, we mistakenly identify paper panels and tubes as structural elements and therefore believe in the structural autonomy of paper architecture.

My second point of suspicion regards the moral contribution of paper architecture to disaster relief projects. After earthquakes, temporary shelters should firstly consider safety and the capacity to withstand extreme conditions, such as floods and climate. Paper architecture does not seem a convincing solution compared to light steel structure architecture. Another important consideration in such cases is the need for psychological reassurance after traumatic events. Ban has argued that the natural tactile attributes of paper would make refugees feel comfortable. 4 However, the paper’s fragility creates a sense of insecurity, and many refugees have refused to live in Ban’s paper houses. 5 Because of the two points above, the Indian local government was reluctant to accept Ban’s paper architecture as an emergency solution. By contrast, charitable trusts firmly supported his projects.

I would argue that the charities’ decision was motivated more by a desire for self-promotion – through association with

The monograph Shigeru Ban, Paper in Architecture, is available at the AA Bookshop at aabookshop.net

A typical paper house in disaster relief project

7

an architectural celebrity – and less about the contribution of Ban’s ideas to emergency situations. It is still debatable whether paper architecture meets the needs of people who have experienced natural disasters.

Paper, like every material, has its own nature. Whether paper is able to find a place in architecture depends on its use. When paper is used as a structural substitute for metal tubes or panels, it can hardly compete with other materials because the grid structure or truss is based on the attributes of steel. I’m not trying to argue against the autonomy of paper as a building material; what I’m suggesting is that the most celebrated application of 1:1 paper architecture – that is, Shigeru Ban’s work – has led us along an unconvincing path. But why do not we change our mind towards an architecture created just for paper? This might lead us to a new type of structure, or else to an entirely different point of view, instead of ‘structure’.

1 By ‘paper architecture’ I mean here practical projects that are built at 1:1 scale, including pavilions in exhibition, disaster relief projects, houses and public buildings.

Installations in exhibitions, stage design and furniture are excluded since they are not required to bear loads or climate challenge.

2 Plaster of Paris, a fine white powder used for cornices and false ceilings, does not require curing and is cheaper than cement.

3 ‘Paper-Tube Housing’ by Shigeru Ban and Kartikeya Shodhan, Perspecta, 34 (2003).

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

Small size car (fiat?)

8

Generation X(erox) Chris Pierce, Intermediate 9 Unit Master, provoked by Ema Hana Kacar, editor of AArchitecture, amusingly questions the apparent division between paper and technology.

The entire premise I’ve been set is pants – that ‘technology is replacing paper documents’. Hah! Not to swing this into a unit- or school-centric conversation, but on more than a hunch I’d say that more than half of the current units are enslaved to paper. It seems that the ‘world’s most international school of architecture’ just can’t get enough of the International Paper Company’s main stuff. Where would the Dip 9 Honours machine and PV posse, not to mention my own paper pulp problem, be without it? Have you really not seen the number of books Diploma School (and now some followers in the Intermediate School) students are churning out? That’s not even mentioning the forests felled in those two digital daddies, the DRL and EmTech. It feels like 1439 in Mainz all over again. Think back to Projects Review 2013. When did a book become an obligatory architectural output? And don’t say Vitruvius – neither he nor most of his fifteenth-century followers could write.

I might know why – because even at 19 they all ain’t too keen on the 42” plastic Samsung plasma screen! Kate and Liam and Sam and David seem to have the knack; otherwise I know that I’m not the only one who’d prefer to lie flat on his back in Dr Wolfe’s surgery than face another PowerPoint jury.

Technology is not an either/or issue as luddites, techies and editors frequently cast it. It’s an AC/DC thing – know what I mean? If not, look it up. I absolutely love ‘the machine’ and I spend a lot more time caressing and fondling its 41 different Californian forms than I do my Midwestern wife’s ones. How many hours a day are your

Don’t forget the milk!

hands on your partner and on your Apple?

That’s doing nothing for what’s left of your cherry. But you’re quids in if you’re talking Kindles. Like most things hailing from Washington State I’d rather be reading the Bible than messing around with a soft grey thing from Ann Summers, oh I mean Amazon, in my Vividus. I guess that’s also why those contemporary Victorians Rachel (Weisz) and Daniel (Craig) recently pronounced that they leave theirs in the other room.

Technology has revolutionised paper, its production and what we can do with it.

I might be old, though not as old as Ema seems to think (I had Pong and Pac-Man on my Atari 2600!), but I’ve also got a sneaking feeling that the young Mancunian on the other side of this ‘printed page’ has an even softer spot for moveable type and a handsewn binding than I do. And the way this has been staged I’m supposed to be the one with the Jungian crisis. People do still buy and covet books and journals (where would Tom Weaver be if they didn’t!) and an iPad Air – but they don’t buy CDs. Come to think of it, what you should be doing right now Ema, instead of working on this rag, is popping down to Paperchase. Rock-paperscissors, anyone?

9

Borges and the Blasé

Should you like to know more about Intermediate Unit 9 and its approach to paper and technology, please visit www.mis-architecture.co.uk

Rory Sherlock, Intermediate 9 Student, equally provoked by Ema Hana Kacar, commends the uplifting presence of paper in our lives.

Jorge Luis Borges was not only a man of literature, a revolutionary of contemporary fiction in the twentieth century, but a man fundamentally concerned with books.

Spending time as a child in his father’s 1000-volume library would prove to be the ‘chief event’ in the writer’s life, leading him on to work cataloguing books at the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. This extensive early submersion in a world of physical volumes had a profound effect on the content of the Argentinian’s prose, almost every short story and essay to subsequently flee his pen finding its prosaic device or framework in a book or library, and the intriguing, inherently labyrinthine nature thereof.

In ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges describes a universe consisting of a series of interconnecting hexagonal rooms, each lined floor to ceiling with 410 page volumes. In this library, in these volumes, there is a physical transcription of every combination of letters and punctuation that can possibly exist. There exists somewhere in this vast construct every book ever written and ever to be written. The books, to this end, become one. The content of the library is more information than anybody can process, and thus the volumes become meaningless, unnavigable tomes.

This bombardment of content renders the readers indifferent, in the same way that Georg Simmel describes the blasé attitude of the metropolitan man, degenerated by overexposure into a state of indifference.

This infinite and labyrinthine library is becoming a digital reality, slyly slotting neatly into pockets worldwide. Through sumptuously designed products such as

the iPad and Kindle, the physical volume is increasingly being binned as its sleek, backlit counterpart is pawning its contents on whim for tuppence. The perpetual expansion of the library, along with the massively reduced costs of the texts, has proved successful for the proselytising campaigns of the device manufacturers, with hardcopy sales tumbling over the last two years. However, in the grand scheme of things, what this really entails is a large increase in rough, and a very small increase in diamonds. Get digging.

As a child of the 90s I grew up surrounded by this exciting and rapidly developing world of technology. However, it is precisely this (over)exposure to a vast and infinite world of information and literature, all available with no effort at all, that has made me indifferent towards it.

Would Borges have become the influential literary pioneer he was if his dad had decided to flog his books and get a Kindle instead? It is precisely the commitment, the vested interest, involved in the purchase or sourcing of a physical text in a library that enhances our consequent understanding of value of it, and it is through this physical manifestation of text that meaningful progression of knowledge will persist.

‘The fact is that poetry is not the book in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.’ – Jorge Luis Borges

Skimmed for the water lovers, semi-skimmed for the ordinary, and full fat for the picknees

10

The Place of Paper

Courtesy of Bureau Alexander Brodsky

Buster Rönngren, Intermediate Unit 2 Student, interviews Alexander Brodsky on matters of origin, in an attempt to orientate paper architecture in the present

‘Local? I have never thought about it that way.

Paper is a material, different from stone.’ – Alexander Brodsky Once the unmoved mover of the phenomenon of paper architecture in 1970s Moscow, Alexander Brodsky worked alongside Ilya Utkin, creating etchings of potentially better places, seeing paper architecture as presenting another possibility to the uniformity of the sanctioned architecture of the Soviet city.

Under the authoritarian state, Brodsky opted to stay on paper, drawing, as if the project was an antonym. Today, the architect, who in the 1980s worked as sculptor of objects and site-specific installations in New York, continues to address his practice, in a now-liberated nation that once hired no architects.

(Well, architects didn’t have names in the first place, other than the mark of the state, to sign the documents of building.)

On the topic of paper, Brodsky is at variance with the attempt to relate paper to matters concerning commonplaces. From topos (a place), a paper is linked to the term topic, at most, in the sense of determining the evidence of a place.

There is perhaps no topographical agenda in the material itself, for right reasons.

‘It means that it exists only as an idea,’ explains Brodsky during our interview.

‘Even if a project is not a critical piece of paper, but exists in the computer, it can still be called paper architecture.’

Parked here, and under fragrant pine over there

11 Buster Rönngren: Where do you draw the line between paper architecture and built form; is there a distinction between idea and architecture?

Alexander Brodsky: For me personally, paper as a material is an important part of the whole thing. This has nothing to do with paper architecture as a movement or whatever, but it somehow worked with it at that time. It was paper architecture as an idea, and paper architecture on a real piece of paper...From the moment a structure is built it becomes a real thing and it stops being paper architecture.

Before the realisation of the building is the border between what I am drawing and what I am building. I am always trying to destroy this border. When I think about the old paper projects, theoretically many of them, let’s say all, could be built. But, nobody wanted to build them at the time, so they remained on paper.

When there is no authorship to find behind building, paper architecture can be seen as a reaction: writing the name of a place before there is an actual place to go to. The reason for paper architecture is, in this sense, not about informing the unseen reality, depicting unrealistic places, but about envisioning real places where one is not allowed to go. Acknowledging that state buildings in 1970s London carry signatures of different architects, although initiated as projects on paper, the reaction came from a retroactive elsewhere.

With regard to the the material, are there specific types of paper that you prefer or find useful in your work?

For a long time, in this country and city, there was a restricted amount of material. I used what I could get. For instance, producing a master print for a project back in the 80s, there was only one type of etching paper available. And even this etching paper was rare at times.

If there was a store supply, you would ask for five metres at once.

When I first came to New York though, there was an idea to print an edition of our etchings. At the print shop, they asked about what type of paper I had in mind for the publication. At that time I couldn’t reply since I only knew of one type. So I was taken to an art store for reference. 150 different types of etching paper, I didn’t know what to say, I wanted to use all of them. A man explained to me that ‘these ten types are German, and these are Italian, and these are French’, and so forth. Initially the difference between them was only a question of origin, but after some time, I could say I liked the texture of a certain type, no matter where it was from.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation when paper proves insufficient to express an idea, that the medium is too narrow?

Every project begins with a piece of paper. Even if the end product is an installation or sculpture, it is a continuation from a pencil sketch.

Paper exists in everything I do, it is the very beginning. When I seek what can be done with a specific piece of paper, I sometimes find that it is too beautiful to do anything with it. The sad thing is that I have a lot of paper that I never used because I somehow don’t dare to. I have

Salami colored broken vase trickling marble and

12 some amount of paper that came from my father. Some of this paper is from when he was a student in the 40s, really old paper that he got somewhere, but never used himself. He gave it to me many years ago, and I still haven’t used it. It is strange, but sometimes I look at it and I think, no, I am not ready to take a pencil to draw the line.

Although the AA is based in London, it is not an institution of the city as such.

At a place where creative people are motivated, have a kind of sovereignty, what is there to respond to? In this laboratory environment, what is the relevance of paper architecture, traditionally a form a retreat or defiance? In fact, where acknowledged authorship merely exists in building and where drawings are not even signed, the reverse of paper architecture is true. Projects in this visionary category at the AA, tend to lack an opposition, simply becoming a thing of the school. Perhaps the reaction can only come from building in 1:1.

Admitting that there was no agenda in paper, no political act to be drawn from paper architecture itself, makes it inaccurate to relate it to the notion that the idea is as good as the building. Furthermore, it is careless to think that paper architecture even matters to us, when we are free to build, and when there is nothing stopping us from making a name of our own. Alexander Brodsky did what he could do under the circumstances: paper architecture was an invention out of necessity, out of materiality. However, Brodsky’s concern for paper, to the extent of not wanting to draw on it at all, suggests that there is something besides just the materiality itself. Arguably, this is part of his process. By not drawing and by not building, Brodsky destroys the border, authorising the two practices to be equal. Since his first building commission in 2002, Brodsky is proving that, as an architect, it was the context that was political, not his work when drawing that which would not be built. Having a historical frame of reference is, notwithstanding, what the architect student falls short of. Never have we found ourselves in a political context and unable to get out. In our free society, paper architecture can only go as far as being a material exploration. Thus, what the commonplace of paper is, where paper architecture can be orientated in past and present, is in the matter of making proposals. Now, Brodsky is like any architect: The main thing is to do good architecture, the rest is less important.

wet blouse hanging

To find out about the role of paper in Intermediate Unit 2, please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/inter2

May I add a comment on this? (Brodsky’s colleague, Kiril Ass, states further) We grew up in a time when paper was the main medium for producing any kind of ideas, to affix any type of idea. If we take it, not as a presentation method, but as a thinking method, paper is as efficient as talking. Even if you speak in another language, you will still speak better in your mother tongue. This is possibly why this question of relevance is not rising in our own business. We are simply used to do it like this. If you are relating paper architecture to a school project then it is a completely different thing.

13

Paperless

More Info Text: For more info on the Toolkit 2013 and the CCA go to www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/2162-toolkit-2013

Arturo Revilla, a current PhD by Design Candidate at the AA, evaluates the work of four architects with regard to paper, questioning what effect the rise of the digital in architecture has had on its use.

Last summer the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) invited Greg Lynn to put together an exhibition under the name ‘Archeology of the Digital’ which would ‘take us to the foundations of digital architecture at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s.’ Lynn brought together models and drawings of four architectural projects (The Biozentrum by Eisenman, the Lewis residence by Gehry, the Iris Dome by Hoberman and the Toyama Gymnasium be Shoei Yoh) to trace the genealogy of the digital in a more concrete fashion, hoping to end the days of the digital as a project restricted to the future.

In an effort to distinguish different lines of thought and establish some sort of clarification about today’s architectural hot topic, the CCA accompanied Lynn’s particular curatorial project with The Toolkit 2013, a seminar attended by scholars with a direct link to digital culture and 15 PhD students from the most renowned architectural schools in America, the Bartlett and the AA. The different themes of discussion ranged from software and the construction industry to authorship, information and meaning.

Here, Columbia’s GSAPP Paperless Studio came about as an indisputable milestone. Started in 1988 by Bernard Tschumi and a team of young architects, roughly in their 30s at the time, the experimental studio erupted at the heart of a ‘left-behind conservative school’.

Wrapped in an attitude of innovation, young tutors set out to explore the wrinkles of the old problem of language with new tools, methodological formats and means

of representation. Computers, were immediately used to supersede the role of paper and physical models as the ultimate formats for capturing, translating and communicating architectural ideas. Screens, fly-throughs, light projections, formal iterations and eccentric perspective angles mixed with physical installations were exposed during the different presentations as the devices of an emerging sensibility that in the following years would flood Columbia’s design studios. As Tschumi, Lynn, Rashid and Allen explained in their talks, members of the studio faced the challenge of ‘a new mode of notation’, an interface in which dynamic procedures, real time feedback, forms of connectivity and fluidity challenged the traditional role of tools to communicate architecture.

Contrary to common belief, and despite the fact that the studio came out with a range of experimental proposals, Tschumi commented that ‘the computer did not generate a new language, it simply accelerated the existing concerns of a talented group of people’.

The Paperless Studio famously produced more paper than any other studio at the time, although it used the digital to replace some of the traditional means of architectural production. The Toolkit 2013 reminded us that this particular moment in the history of architecture has to be reconsidered for its capacity to generate a state of uncertainty that unleashed a creative symbiosis and speculative spirit branching from academia to design processes and all the way to established practices and the construction industry.

Lover’s graffiti dog shit unkempt garden

14

Towards Provocations (Or Whatever Happened to Paper Architecture?)

Maria Fedorchenko leads Intermediate Unit 7’s work on Shadow Cities and Cultural Processors

In the wake of all those post-, afterand beyond- departures, our position on the architectural project is confused at best. Pressured to deliver ingenuity, resolution and impact, we remain plagued by uneasy questions: Do we focus on social responsibilities or personal preoccupations, and do we solve or pose problems? How does one engage discipline and city, or design / research? Do we foreground theoretical or practical experiments, concepts or structures? What do we construct: visions or prototypes?

Communicating process or products, how do we choose between broadcasting and private conversations?

Whichever way we lean, there are even tougher choices ahead. If we play it safe, responding to topical briefs as professional information-managers with expanded technological bases, we could achieve dutifully contextual, sustainable, efficient, yet disappointing outcomes. All the by-products of methodical exercises – rapidly researched, programmed and prototyped with intimidating skill – may not add up to quality or difference.

Conversely, if we aspire towards biased projects made of conceptual and imaginary constructions, don’t we begin to slide into the dangerous realm of ‘paper architecture’? The problem is that we

tarnished entirely

grow highly anxious with regard to the paper project and mistake it for yet another double-edged sword: fantasy or utopia.

On one hand, we tend to conjure experimental structures, theatrical events and hybrid imagery as developed autonomously in a creative vacuum.

Linked to dreams and memories of individualistic architects, spatial fantasies and compositions don’t seem to line up with reality. We are drawn to dense imaginary worlds of interwoven histories, references and fragments, but with all our responsibilities, can we afford intellectual games? On the other hand, we are haunted by the ghost of utopia.

As radical experiments associate with political activism and social engineering, we see paper projects as loaded, yet impotent, and would rather avoid their subversions. In addition, utopian diagrams don’t seem to apply socially and spatially.

We respond to the manifestos and the singular visions, but question uniform and homogeneous mega-installations.

Secretly, we yearn for colourful personalities, loud statements, drastic measures, extreme propositions and dramatic gestures. But we hold back. And in our double avoidance, we miss the opportunity to animate the truly visionary, radical and catalytic behind paper architecture

To see the work of Intermediate Unit 7, please refer to Projects Review at www.aaschool.ac.uk

15 and to come forward with our own design ‘provocations’. As a long-standing preferred domain for architectural experimentation, architectural provocation could help us deal with previous excesses and obsessions with just the right dose of realism and impatience. Provocations can be lean, mean, fast and most effective – an evolved breed of paper architecture.

Provocations are not only a quick way to visualise a strong idea. They also allow us to access and engage larger contexts, both disciplinary and urban.

They situate our work within wider streams and longer cycles of precedents as distinct extensions or oppositions, eg erasing and tracing, distributing and densifying.

To frame views and stir debates, we collide and distort our precedents. In the process, we build up our own agendas and identities, while restoring avant-garde modes of repetition that go beyond following master figures or myths of the new.

Similarly, provocations operate fluidly within and on the messy realities of the contemporary city, fuelled by paradoxes, inconsistencies and difficulties. Adult concerns coexist with childish curiosity in urban games driven by need and pleasure, affordability and extravagance, austerity and mischief. Research gives way to pragmatic diagnostics, as we extract hidden rules and orders from the city to condense them into new projects. The line between artificial excavations and projections is blurred; we learn from the city as we transform it.

Paper cities are made of ‘samples’ from real and imaginary cities, re-combined using scenarios and transcripts. Working diagrammatically, provocations are tools of the ‘virtual’ used to construct alternative worlds, yet unlike utopian diagrams they don’t diminish in force or purity on contact with reality. In this sense, they are a perfect bridge between abstract and concrete – they enable ideas to take shape, scenarios to carve spaces, diagrams to affect form, etc.

Notably, these in-between urban worlds don’t claim permanent or absolute power. Fantasies suggest coincident and

parallel shadow cities, not only before- and after-cities. Going beyond utopia’s emphasis on eternity, the golden past or the bright future, they mark presents, moments and flashes-in-the-pan. Contestable and transient, provocations are concerned with complex collages and junkyards of provisional utopias. While inspired by manifestos and social programmes, they reveal the fragile nature of architectural hypotheses and radical experiments.

Marking a pluralistic project, heterogeneous multidimensional constructs entertain diverse visions. Aptly, as opportunistic mixtures of images, drawings, diagrams and texts, provocations offer a compact yet diverse tool-kit for realisation of our ideas as distinct from terminal ‘building’.

With rediscovered freedoms, provocations allow us to exploit histories and settings to animate alternative worlds, play with samples and loose affiliations, and catalyse our conceptual and formal propositions. Combining both the functional and the fantastic, they respond to critical utopias and imaginary projections. They leap between concepts and structures, while remaining easy and light. In the expanded paper realm of provocations we can make a splash and make a difference. We can dare to challenge revered masters and rising stars, old and new methods and tools. So come on – let’s smooth the collages and drown the archipelagos, explode stop-cities and iron out data-towns, arrest junkspaces and animate monuments. Provocateurs: choose your enemies, weapons, strategies and tactics. This is a call to arms.

Eroded china cabinet mind fuck

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A new AA Scholarship has been established in memory of Mark Fisher, a graduate and inspiring teacher at the school who sadly died in June 2013. The Mark Fisher Scholarship Fund has been initiated

by James Fairorth and Tait Towers, who worked closely with Mark on groundbreaking music performance events around the world.

Mark combined his skill as an architect and designer with a passion for rock and roll, pioneering the modern stadium performance and with it reimagining what we understand as the architectural spectacle.

The Scholarship will be managed by the AA Foundation and given annually starting 2014/15 for the equivalent of one full year’s school fees in support of a student

grandmas pajamas.

of exceptional talent and interest in the intersection of architecture, performance, media and engineering. Undergraduate applicants must state their interest in an AA scholarship in the ‘Scholarships and Awards’ section of their application form for entry to the school.

For more information on the Scholarship, or to make a donation to the Mark Fisher Fund and help commemorate his important legacy to the worlds of architecture and performance, please visit markfisher.aaschool.ac.uk or email markfisherfund@aaschool.ac.uk.

For more information please visit http://markfisher.aaschool.ac.uk

Established by Tait Towers in support of AA Students

Mark Fisher, inflatable pig at Battersea Power Station, launched to celebrate the release of Pink Floyd’s album, Animals, in 1977 © Mark Fisher

The Mark Fisher Scholarship

A make-your-own paper pig based on Mark Fisher’s infamous inflatable flying pig moored at London’s Battersea Power Station.

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Contingency

Left to right: Andre Corboz, Peinture militante et architecture révolutionnaire: à propos du thème du tunnel chez Hubert Robert; Giorgio Agamben, What is the contemporary?, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, War Primer 2

First Year Tutor Fabrizio Ballabio replies to Intermediate 2 Student Buster Rönngren’s letter on the question ‘what is the contemporary?’, in a discussion of the First Year brief ‘Architecture and Time’.

This means that the contemporary is not only the one who, perceiving the darkness of the present, grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; he is also the one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. He is able to read history in unforeseen ways, to ‘cite it’ according to a necessity that does not arise in any way from his will, but from an exigency to which he cannot respond.

Fear of snakes

I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary‌ The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgement.

He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.

Big mirrors sundowning sicilians Waking up

Should you like to respond to this letter, or write a letter to your tutor, or conversely, to your student, please email your proposals to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk.

Carl Gustav Jung and Liber Novus, On Architecture as Type, Censura, AAFY 2012–13

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If you would like to read more by Bobby Jewell, see http://conversations.aaschool.ac.uk/the-institute-of-making

Swedish Meganews Magazines; photo courtesy of Meganews

Kiosks: Heritage or Utility?

Bobby Jewell in AA Membership explains the reasons behind the downfall of kiosks

Kiosks are a familiar site in the urban landscapes of many cities; they act as news sources, community hubs and meeting points. Yet with the decline of printed media, kiosks are facing redundancy and re-appropriation. Even in Paris, a city that prides itself on its iconic kiosks, public authorities had to come to the financial aid of newsagents this year and set up a promotional campaign ‘Paris aime ses kiosques’ to encourage Parisians to use them on the occasion of their 150th anniversary.

Elsewhere, disused kiosks have been remodeled as miniature galleries, such as HOK’s San Francisco Street Museums (bizarrely exhibiting puppetry) or Gunther Vogt’s Republic of Common Ground exhibition as part of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 aimed at encouraging discussion within the city.

Conversely, Thomas Heatherwick’s 2009 Paper House design aimed to turn the kiosk

into a sculpture itself and in Stockholm MEGANEWS kiosks cut out the social aspect altogether, electronically printing newspapers while buyers wait. As wellmeaning or creative as these ideas are, the fate of kiosks mirrors a wider downturn in retail as a whole. Local kiosks are losing out to free information online just as retailers are to online shopping.

Though kiosks with community support could well survive in Europe, things are different in London where corner shops act as newsagents and red telephone boxes as heritage. The bigger change here will be shown in how the high street develops, especially considering the recent declarations of current Tory Planning Minister Nick Boles, who argues that inner-city retail units should be used for housing and offices in an attempt to end, or at least assuage, the UK’s housing crisis.

Fear of snakes

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All Work and No Play Mark Campbell, Intermediate 1 Unit Master, writes about the mediative capacity of writing in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

Curious at the results of her husband’s solitary industry, Wendy Torrance finally steals a glance at the manuscript of his new ‘writing project’. Horrified, she begins to read, laid bare against the page with malevolent intent, the same perfect sentence, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, All work and no play . . .’ repeated obsessively over several hundred pages of close typed manuscript.

A labour, one might say, of love.

Of course this is an infamous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining (1980), adapted from the novel of the same name by the horror writer Stephen King. As King noted, part of his ambition for this work lay in the desire to write a book about writers or, more accurately, about the torments of writing, about the violence and contempt of the blank page. A failing writer, Jack Torrance faces this abyss with unwarranted bravado, rebutting his employer’s concerns by noting how the position of winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel would afford him the quiet isolation necessary ‘to write’.

Despite his obvious interest, Kubrick’s annotations on his copy of King’s manuscript frequently denigrated the writer’s conception as ‘stupid’. (‘Idiotic’ was another typical comment.) The animosity between the pair was unsparing. Kubrick rightly considered King a hack and, for his part, King found the director’s adaptation of his gothic novel ‘maddening, perverse and disappointing’. (He also thought Kubrick’s torturing of Shelly Duval, the actor who played Wendy Torrance, reduced her role to that of a misogynistic caricature.) The critic

Pauline Kael, a frequent Kubrick-detractor, simply found the finished film ‘dumb’, expressing the prevailing critical dismay that an auteur like Kubrick could preoccupy himself for almost two years shooting a ghost story which would take a B-grade director less than two months to make.

So what is there, amidst all this character assassination, overacting and dumbness to say about writing? Or, by extension, what is there to say, however briefly, about paper as a medium for writing, suggested by the creased sheets of Torrance’s manuscript?

For me, Kubrick’s Shining illustrates the inherently mediative capacity of writing.

Mediative in the sense of facilitating an – albeit insane – absorption in concentrated thought, ‘All work and no play’, while also insisting on the primacy of the act of writing, which comes before all others.

(Prefiguring, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, all other forms of language and certainly any mode of drawing.) Set in these terms, I am interested less in the capacity of a sheet of paper for endless invention, than I am in the capacity of that page for singular inscription. For fixing, arresting and, in a kind of foreclosing of extension, opening up the possibilities of reading.

Naturally, one form of this foreclosure lies in the gravity of sheer volume, with the weightiness of Torrance’s manuscript suggesting that all possibilities of invention, variation, and scale have been incorporated within it. (As Roger Luckhurst has recently noted, in this sense it resembles nothing so much as a proto-modernist masterpiece.)

Another, perhaps even more interesting characteristic, lies in its repetition, which –

Ethernet cable into baroque wall drooping in breeze

For more information about Mark Campbell’s Research Cluster ‘Paradise Lost’, please visit http://paradiselost.aaschool.ac.uk.

Screen grab from Stanley Kubrick dir., The Shining (Peregrine Productions / Warner Bros., 1980).

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through its constant restatement – becomes impossible to erase, or to change. In this way, the compulsion to repeat ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ complicates the suggestion that the mediation could actually bring about a reconciliation or resolution, producing only open-ended variations. As Kubrick suggests in his Shining, this repetition not only produces familial distress, but is also enacted through architecture.

In another famous scene, the Torrance’s psychically-gifted son, Danny, walks across his parents’ bedroom carrying a butcher’s knife in one hand and red lipstick in the other to write the word ‘REDRUM’ the bathroom door.

Chanting, trying to establish the meaning of ‘REDRUM’ through its repeated incantation, he wakes his mother who looks over Danny’s shoulder to see, reflected in the dressing table mirror, the single word ‘MURDER’. While his actions illustrate how the building has become the surface on which to write, replacing the sheet of paper in conveying an even more essential message, her scream, which emanates from this reflected acknowledgement,

also demonstrates how the Outlook Hotel provides the spatial and cinematic means to manifest its own murderous intent.

(Again, words before actions.)

This exposition differs significantly from King’s novel, which described a nightmarish ‘blackness where one sinister word flashed in red: REDRUM’. Dragging this sentiment out of the darkness, Kubrick mirrors it in the most domestic of the hotel’s interiors, the Torrances’ ‘homey’ caretaker’s apartment, lit with the tawdry banality of the everyday. (The director’s note for the design of this apartment wryly observed, ‘the rooms they occupy have to be interesting and useful . . . a lot happens there’.) The final mirror-shot in a film full of mirror-shots, this masterstroke reminds us that Kubrick was an entirely different kind of hack. One whose elaborate and often maddening cinematic constructs, assembled as much through the protoDemandian paper models used to conceive the hotel’s labyrinthine interiors as through any revisions to the script, encompass us all in their beauty, leaving us with a series of images that are incised into our memories with the perverse sting of a paper cut.

Hot traffic sounds

22

Less is a copy Buster Rönngren, Intermediate Unit 2 Student, visits three corridors, in and about the premises

…a circumferential passage consumes a large area, which is eligible, by most methods of reckoning, to be called waste space. Indeed, many state building agencies distinguish circulation spaces from rooms...1 There is no pretension for realism in the longing for site-specificity: the gallery is a local form of a corridor. If there is a real limit to a collective architectural knowledge, it does not require a specific author to be exhibited. Furthermore, the first exhibition of the semester, titled Book of Copies, is an example of how the outsourced selection of references can make up a tentative index for a project that nonetheless endures the medium.

To produce architecture, from packets of black and white A4 photocopies, assembled by a multitude of producers – visitors were advised

to borrow examples out of the archive of printed images at hand, to collect content for one’s own operating manual of sorts.

Using the copy machine placed in the corner of the gallery, the categorically organised b/w prints could then be used as the basis to make addressed books of copies. Reproducing what is available becomes a direct operation, what is already on paper can remain on paper, but it can still be re-employed. For example, images from the exhibited categories formula 1 race tracks, concrete structures, and offices for more than 1000 employees, can provide references for something other than Fiat’s Lingotto Factory.

Having the visitor enforce the distribution of the content creates a definition of locality in the interdependence between situation and medium, between

street lights with orange gaze through spiked tall green ones peering over short

The third corridor – the Photocopier, photo Sue Barr.

Opposite: The Picture Rails in the AA Gallery, photo Valerie Bennett

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neighbour and hood. Beyond copyright, if an image is treated as material, a weather report is true to what neighbours agree on not seeing. Being aware that an idea is given the situation, its tolerance relies on the coherence of the medium in which it is distributed, being the closest parallel to the idea where resolution is none. Reducing the reference, or the image of an idea, to a material can be justified accordingly: when

a print passes through the copy machine, it has to pass through matter. And during this passage that print is replaced by another print, and another one. The purpose of our line of work is increasingly experienced as something introverted, and outside becomes less interesting in the first place.

Like a corridor in transformation, the Book of Copies exhibition was narrowed down by the growing collection of paper

walls,

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maybe medium height.

It is inconsistent that corridors be so common in a world where direct resonance is so rare. Although there is plenty of room for ideas at the AA to be localised, only a few of them are echoed within.

The Book of Copies made one exception, at a low frequency of conversation. Current things that matter, and projects in general, tend to be transmitted to a receiver away from school, as if the corridors do not lead far enough. By comparison, information enters a school project from far and wide, as if a discourse occurring from within the building is too close to suffice. The signal weakens when its limit is moved out, what is taken out as a reference from a distant source runs the risk of being nondescript, its intactness being conditional on the medium. Arguably, by detaching an idea from just any paper, its …entire form vanishes, as when an indescribable truth is lifted out of silence and formulated into an inert mass...3 To avoid the surfacing of words to a mere monologue about architecture, to debate a lecture before applauding it, one ought to listen and speak of what is within reach.

The outset is that there is actual material to immerse in our current location, our current medium. Think of what the AA would be like if the inside did not become outside: acting in a vacuum, being ever more specific. Perhaps, one fails to see the proximate parallels, what is in the education of an architect, if contemplating school as a means to an end. Through the waste of time, corridors will cease to exist. The need for reflection of ideas is constant: one should strive to project onto a close analog wall to make sure that what is being announced can resound and feed back all the while.

1 Gerald Allen, Charles Moore and Donlyn London, The Place of Houses, p 161.

2 See AArchitecture issue 20: Time, centrefold.

3 Tomas Transtromer, Baltics, p 14.

To read the interview with the authors of ‘Books of Copies’ please visit: conversations.aaschool.ac.uk/san_rocco.

in it. At the 2012 Venice Biennale, its archive was presented in prints laid out flat on a table. In the AA Gallery, the same prints were displayed on two parallel picture rails, forming the outer boundaries of a model corridor that divided the gallery in two. Prints that existed in this corridor within a corridor, went on to a third corridor, the photocopier, where two parallel surfaces met to close the gap, directly resonating in a document for a potential room. A light was thrown on something as the print was passing through; by another method of reckoning, the corridor is not waste space, but a space wasted – no longer in the service of communication.

In due course, a corridor can take the form of a domain. In a building filled to capacity, where rooms for matter are scarce, a passage will soon be governed by a machine, or even literal waste. Smith’s Passage, the new corridor connecting the AA Diploma units to the rest of the school,2 is bound to be appropriated by elements that do not care for circulation – stacks of paper, a copy machine that finds no vacant corner: things that take place. Paradoxically, through this eventual accumulation of things, one finds the corridor to be a transition in transition. Its immediate function, linking rooms, becomes immediate simply because a corridor is becoming a room itself – from the first dust that finds it. Even the first layer of paint in a corridor begins to narrow it down: the gallery is a local form of a corridor. Walls that mark the boundaries of a room inwards act in the opposite direction – the proximity to another type of place, and towards a different, possible, state of the typology, is revealed. Evidence of this having taken place can be seen at the basement level of the AA, where the room of the Digital Prototyping Lab has engulfed the corridor that used to connect the restrooms to the Accounts Office. Articles and paper, once omitted in the transit, now have to find other domains to waste. To the rest of the school: go and appropriate Via Christina!

Graduate Gallery

The new Graduate Gallery was opened for the Project Review exhibition 2012–13.

Located in the former Materials Shop space, behind the lecture hall in 36 Bedford Square, it was built to showcase work by AA students present and past. Since opening the gallery has shown the Director’s selection of student work from 2012–13 as well as an exhibition representing the work of highachieving graduates from the AA Graduate School. Exhibitions will change regularly so please check the AA website for updates.

For more information on the current exhibition please visit www.aaschool.ac.uk/exhibitions

Photo Sue Barr

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Recommended Reading

Order these titles online at aabookshop.net where a selection of new books, special offers and some backlist titles are available

Architectural Inventions: Visionary Drawings Matt Bua and Maximillian Goldfarb 336pp, 280 x 216mm Hardback London, 2012 ÂŁ12 Born out of the drawingbuilding.org online archive, Architectural Inventions presents a stunning visual study of impossible or speculative structures that exist only on paper. Soliciting the work of architects, designers and artists of renown, Maximilian Goldfarb and Matt Bua have gathered an array of works that convey architectural alternatives, through products, expansions or critiques of our inhabited environments. Highlighting visions that exist outside established channels of production and conventions of design, Architectural Inventions showcases a wide scope in concept and vision, fantasy and innovation.

Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form Paul Jackson 224pp, 220 x 220mm, illustrated Paperback with CD Oxon, 2013 ÂŁ19.95 Many designers use folding techniques in their work to make three-dimensional forms from two-dimensional sheets of fabric, cardboard, plastic, metal and many other materials. This unique book explains the key techniques of folding, such as pleated surfaces, curved folding and crumpling. An elegant, practical handbook, it covers over 70 techniques explained in clear step-by-step drawings, crease pattern drawings and specially commissioned photography. The book is accompanied by a CD containing all the crease pattern drawings.

Joy Matashi, Intermediate 2 student

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Thoughts Poured Out onto Paper

Quick projects by First Year students.

Monia DeMarchi, Head of First Year, finds the power of paper in its liberating quality

Architecture is Like a Cup of Tea

If you want to know more about the work of First Year students, please visit: http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/first-year

27 Using a piece of paper can be liberating – liberating not in a therapeutic and sedative sense, but in a provocative one. A blank sheet of paper is a thrilling place for our mind; it can take us somewhere else and save us from sleek apathies.

Here, I am not writing about paper (printed or drawn on) used by architects to present and publish architecture projects as books, drawings, illustrations, visual scenarios; nor do I have a nostalgic affection for drawings on napkins sketched out by architects in a sort of ‘creative’ impetus.

Here, I am writing about paper used as a tool in the moments of discovering, thinking, and figuring out projects and positions: the disposable paper stripped down from any visual craft; the paper that starts to pile up while a project takes form within a juxtaposition of intuitive and logical questionings.

Unlike other tools for expressing one’s self, the liberation of paper lies in its simplicity. An A4 stack of paper doesn’t help me, but it doesn’t limit me either – there are no interfaces with countless possibilities balanced out by a series of limits, and there is no need to master anything before its use; there are no introductions and no help buttons. Instead, we can just dive in and pour out the ideas rushing through our mind, and this is what takes our investigations into unpredictable territories.

Our mind’s wandering suddenly becomes visual through written words, sketches, notations, enquiries and signs by overlaying imaginative speculations and sharp observations. We embrace not only what we know, and what we see around us, but also what we guess by juxtaposing things that are real, surreal, imaginary and projective. A piece of paper is a place where we can visualise an idea, a curiosity and a theme that we love, one we are passionate about. We start to pin it down with words and sketches, we make visual connections with what we remember and what we see, we start imagining other possibilities, we move to different associations with things we experienced in other places, projects, films,

texts, novels, and chats in a multiplicity of dimensions for possible architectural scripts where forms, figures, spatial qualities, symbols, facts, and relations talk and fight with each other.

Let’s put this idea into practice and try out a few situations – just grab a project (a theme, a question, a word), a pen, a piece of paper, and an hour of your time.

What if we sketch out, draw and notate a hypothetical project we are curious about and imagine it as real, surreal, imaginary, fantastic, mythical?

What if we sketch and write a possible table of contents of a project, or of a portfolio?

What if we embrace the different meanings of a spatial project by questioning it in various ways, such as drawing it accurately, sketching it as a series of visual similarities and analogies, outlining its timeframe in a storyboard, or in writing it out as a brief?

What if we take a project or a topic and search for a synthesis? What if we write it down in a short sentence, or sketch it with an icon, or cut it out from a sheet and reassemble it?

One hour of thoughts poured out onto paper can inspire us and shake our explorations. This extension of time and place free of imposed distractions is something we should embrace, a luxurious excess that keeps our mind and hands from wandering.

Now pick up a pen and a paper, and let’s get started.

The English Way

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The Book That Hasn’t Been Borrowed for Decades The AA Library holds thousands of titles, some of which have not been borrowed for a very long time. Eleanor Gawne, AA Librarian, presents one such, Staircases and Garden Steps, which was last borrowed in 1989.

AA Library staff constantly re-evaluate the stock to make sure it remains relevant.

The Library also holds several titles which although not in regular use, record the history of pedagogy at the AA. One of these titles is Staircases and Garden Steps

by Guy Cadogan Rothery, published in 1912, presented in 1934 by Enid Caldicott, AA Librarian. Before computers, books

were checked out with a date stamp and a checkout slip in a cardboard pocket inside the front cover. The stamps in this book show that it had a lively history of borrowing from 1960 until 1989, when it became a reference copy. Perhaps the popularity of the book is linked to the AA’s syllabus at the time. The American edition is available online at OpenLibrary.org

It may be the best way, but what is an English cup of tea (or English Breakfast Tea shall we say)?

For more information on the Library’s collection please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/aalife/librariesarchives.php

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Do we defend a certain brand?

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A Smashing Party The AA’s 166th Birthday celebration took place on 8 October 2013, and offered a diverse programme including a piñata-smashing contest.

There’s a saying at Tesco’s...

For more information, please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/aa166birthday Photos Valerie Bennett

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‘A cupboard without a box of PG Tips is a cupboard in despair.’

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The AA’s Frankenstein Towers AA Foundation and PhD students competed in raising towers with a game of folding paper and blindly drawing in continuation from the previous fragment.

The Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, 15 km from Palermo, in Sicily

For more information on the AA Foundation and PhD please visit www.aaschool.ac.uk

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Lawn gnome progenitors

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Artist and photographer Sachiyo Nishimura’s recent show in the AA Bar was called Random Structures. She is interviewed here by AA PhD candidates Alejandra Celedon and Gabriela Garcia de Cortazar, who organised the exhibition.

In architecture, the drawing of plans registers in a two-dimensional plane a three-dimensional reality, impossible to actually view. Until aerial images became available, plans were the only tool to offer a view of a plot in a single glance.

In addition to that, architectural paper also offers a single archetypical shot (form), which acts as a diagram with the potential for variability and manipulation.

Nishimura’s work explores these features from the photographic language, aiming to construct a two-dimensional whole by means of reproduction, distortion and transformation of an original photographic shot.

Sachiyo Nishimura’s work takes place both in the regularity of a twodimensional grid (as the one instructed by Dürer’s engravings on orthogonal projection) and the distorted, displaced and cropped images of the photographs occupying the spaces in between such grid. These two languages and magnitudes, the painter’s and the cameraman’s, mediate between the three (or four if we include time) dimensions of the photographed landscapes and the two dimensions of the paper. This is how both an objective and detached subject is behind her grids and lines (the magician), together with the subjective and proximal viewer in charge of the camera (the surgeon). This dialectic between distance and proximity, object and subject, original and copy, explains the function of paper in both architecture and photography.

Heard of measuring water before pouring into a mug?

Sachiyo Nishimura, Landscape Fiction 14, ©Anise Gallery-artist

The Magician and the Surgeon

35 What does the possibility of the copy reveal in your work?

When an image can be mechanically reproduced, there is a certain sense of proximity and intimacy towards the copy that is opposed to the distant sense of ‘respect’ towards a unique original piece. This proximity entails a sense of freedom and fearlessness to touch, cut or modify the copies, opening a wide range of possible actions, from the very subtle to the daringly radical. The photographic medium in particular has quite a large range of image plasticity, which makes the process of modifying the image reproduction even more interesting: changes of scale, tone and intensity, acts of cropping, overlapping, etc.

To find out more information about Sachiyo Nishimura’s work visit: www.snishimura.com

Your work is not only photographic: aside from the ‘original’ images, you draw subtle lines on top. What is your view in relation to the proximities and/or distances between photography and drawing?

What we expect to see in a photographic image is a cut-out of a specific time and space transferred into a flat surface by means of the mechanical process of photography. If we leave the photographic device out of the equation, and stick only to the desire of finding a piece of the visible world retained within a flat image, our expectations are not far off from those pre-photographic era attempts. Before photographic technology, drawing, through the use of perspective and grids, achieved an accurate translation of the three-dimensional into the flat surface.

Although the means differs, both photography and these geometrical devices help us to put together an illusion of space onto a flat piece of paper that is fairly close to what we perceive. The grids, the drawn ones and the virtual ones, are the foundations for photography itself.

What is the importance of the final printed version of your images, when the work process is entirely digital?

What is the place of paper within your work?

Although we live in a digital era where photographic images don’t necessarily need to reach the final stage of paper print, I think there is certainly an added value to the photographic image in an actual, tangible print. I still get surprised when I see some of my work printed for the first time, noticing things that can only be perceived once the image is actually printed and materialised. As some aspects of the finished print (such as paper quality or scale) can radically change the character of the photographic image, it is absolutely necessary for me to think thoroughly on which kind of print and finishing would possibly enhance what I want to visually achieve. Further on, in order to emphasise the crossover between photography and purely graphic elements, I’ve chosen an etching paper and ink based print as it brings the photographic image somewhere closer to the ink drawing field but not quite there yet, creating a sort of hybrid graphic language in between.

Sachiyo Nishimura’s exhibition ‘Random Structures’ took place from 16 November to 14 December in the AA Bar.

Nope.

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Speed Dating This year the AA welcomed three new units into the Undergraduate School. Curious to find out more about the units, AArchitecture asked the tutors questions, turning the table on the student-tutor interview process.

Intermediate 12: Happening Architecture (Tyen Masten and Inigo Minns) What makes your unit different from any of the others?

Why should students pick it?

Inigo: We are very interested in the generation of buildings around events. That’s the kind of theme that we’re working on, and we titled it as ‘Happening Architecture’.

Tyen: Partly because we wanted the idea of the event to be more ongoing rather than seeing events as kind of a one-shot thing.

The ‘happening’ has a looser feel to it and it suggests something that is more ground-up in terms of the generation of architecture and how architecture can evolve through that event and have a legacy that’s beyond just the single moment.

If you were to draw an advert for the unit, what would it be?

Is the unit Now or New? Tyen: It’s Now. There’s no such thing as New.

Inigo: We are really interested in the temporality of architecture. The starting point is temporality as a kind of gestation point, which makes way before the building, and it has a legacy that exists after the building. There are multiple side activities that happen within this range.

Neither have I.

37

Tyen: We gave them a range of events: Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s wedding was the small-scale, and the large was something like a tsunami. We actually started the year doing an event in which we set up a few key items in which the students went on a scavenger hunt in London and had to map that event. We found is that events that were shorter in time had higher impact because of the legacy they left on the students, who were sharing the stories after the event itself.

For example, they had to dance with someone random down at the tube station.

Inigo: I’m thinking about some of the things that they came back with and they all came back with 15 examples of events and took that down to their three favorites. We ended up with everything from Kate Middleton’s bum, Will and Kate’s wedding – Surely it’s Pippa’s?

Inigo: Oh yes sorry it was Pippa’s.

Intermediate 5: R & R (Ryan Dillon) What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked so far by students? Are they challenging the brief?

Ryan: The most difficult is somewhat challenging the brief and working with constraints. But overall they mostly embrace that idea.

Because I think it’s overbearing – here are these rules – and it’s actually more like a process of learning.

What are the criteria to get into your unit?

Students willing to take risks and engage, to open their minds to different sort of ideas and to be radical and visionary rather than just remain at the status quo.

Can you see that in a student in a 10-minute interview?

I think so, to some degree. When I see what they’ve worked on before; or just how they talk and what they’re willing to do.

What kind of questions would you ask them?

What interests you about the brief? – which sounds like a very basic question, but is very difficult to answer. Some people have a very distinct and clear response to that and then for others it’s almost as if they haven’t read the brief. So you can see right away where their interests are.

Other questions?

Well, there’s a basic one – what’s your favourite project?

Oh yeah, what’s your favourite building?

I asked my students that today!

Mug, Cup, Glass, whatever the container!

38 What responses did you get?

I was quite surprised. They had answers and they weren’t the typical responses. It wasn’t your favourite building, it was their favourite architecture practice and what building of theirs did they like.

Ok, so did they ask you to answer?

They did. I said Le Corbusier and the Assembly Building in Chandigarh, mainly from my personal experience of that building.

Who was your first architect crush?

Actually it would be the same answer because it was jammed down our throats when I was in undergraduate school, and we had no choice but to love it. But then I went through a period of hating him.

If you could choose, would you be an ant, a spider or a bee? In terms of how they build.

A bee. I am drawn to the spider as well for some reason. Actually I want to be a fly. I don’t want to be crawling around in dirt.

Could you draw a self-portrait?

Diploma 3: One:One (Marco Vanucci, Daniel Bosia and Adiam Sertzu) Marco: The unit was set up as a partnership while we were working at AKTII, an engineering firm, where Daniel, Adiam and I were working in the Parametric Applied Research Team. I’m currently running my own architectural firm – OPENSYSTEMS Architecture in London, and Daniel and Adiam are working at AKTII p.art team, respectively as Director and Associate. At AKTII we worked together on creating an interface between architecture and engineering, in an endeavor to create a new form of design practice. So the idea of setting up a unit at the AA was to bring back to academia the world of real practice and vice versa; to make a fertile exchange between the two worlds.

Tea must remain the same temperature from start to finish.

39 What would you say are the challenges that you face?

We try to bring new concepts; the novelty is something that needs to be understood. We teach an approach, a design method, more than anything else. It is not necessarily connected to a style or to an aesthetic output, but it’s more to do with thinking systematically. We understand design as the organisation of matter.

Could you draw your unit?

How is it going so far?

Things are going well so far. Students bring new ideas to the table.

We try to help them developing their own ideas and we enhance them through our design methodology.

For more information on the new units in the undergraduate school please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/study/undergraduate

What is your agenda?

The agenda focuses on 1:1 – real prototyping. We think that in the context of cross-fertilisation between academia and practice, prototypes can really help to unlock innovation for the design industry.

How do you work?

We divide the year into three phases. The first term is more to do with learning the tools and opening up to new possibilities by playing with computation and digital and physical form-finding. In the second term we will look into a real scenario – our site is Hudson Yards in New York: it presents a great dichotomy between a privately owned piece of land with the will to transform it into a public space. In the third term we will work on full-scale prototypes.

What are you looking for in a student?

We are looking for keen, open-minded and ambitious individuals; students who are interested in getting their hands dirty with material and have the ambition to go to real practices tomorrow and incorporate the knowledge they gained at school.

25m3 just won’t do.

40

Alejandra Celedon, a current PhD candidate at the AA, ponders the role of paper when we inscribe a site through drawing.

Architecture’s ultimate monopoly is the realm of projection, to construct lines between interiors and exteriors. From the napkin sketch to the detailed drawing, it is neither about construction nor about the future life of buildings; everything comes down to drawing and only drawing.

A division line, between ‘the art of building’ and ‘the art of drawing’, emerged along the development of orthogonal projections.

Such separation was only confirmed when architecture established as a taught discipline. Since architecture exists indeed

Architecture is like a cup of tea.

as Architecture, all has revolved around (and inside) paper. As the site of the drawing, writing, planning, plotting and inscribing, the paper has been thus the place where architecture could be itself.

The definition of an outline (a form) inescapably sets forth a conjecture about a territorial organisation that will develop in time, a narrative. By defining limits and inscribing the land, the drawing positions itself in relation to a site. The act of marking a surface first establishes a position within a disposition in which the paper, as both

Neighbourhood 1973. Transparentized paper, pencil, and colored pencil on wall, 160 x 90” (406.4 x 228.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of J. Frederic Byers III, 1978. © 2013 Dorothea Rockburne / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Inscribing Sites

Information about the work of PhD candidates can be seen at http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/phd

41 canvas and site, and the mark, as inscription and footprint, become one. It is not a figure/ ground relationship, but one in which the thing marked (the paper site) and the mark (the drawing) shape each other in a backand-forth movement from inside to outside.

The drawing and its site convoke on the paper. Here, the word ‘site’ might refer to the actual material flat sheet on which the lines are outlined, but likewise to the real material ground in which a building is to be inscribed. Furthermore, the ‘site’ becomes a discursive territory where the drawing draws (and writes). The paper as site is thus endowed with a rhetorical and pedagogical function, beyond its own materiality.

However abstract this site might be, the paper materialises the most essential architectural gesture, that of inscribing a site. The act of drawing is reduced here to a ‘trace on a paper’. By abstracting drawing to its minimal and archetypical expression a search for the essential instrumentality of the discipline is opened up. Yet, at the same time (and paradoxically), it addresses a territorial domain beyond its scope, that of the paper sheet. The word ‘type’ in Greek meant ‘imprint, impression’ (typos), which closely relates to the meaning of character insomuch as ‘marking, engraving,’ as the distinctive sign of something. In the Encyclopédie Méthodique Quatremère di Quincy traces the meaning of the word ‘plan’ to the ‘ichnographia’, where ‘ichne’ means the impression of a footprint. In turn, in the entry ‘ichne’ of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert the term is related to ‘trace’ and ‘vestige’.

‘Ichnographie’ signifies ‘the plan or track formed as a ground for the base of a corpus supported’. From ‘ichne’ and ‘graphein’, the drawing of a plan refers to the description of the imprint of the trace that a work leaves on paper.

Does this reduce architecture into the mere repetition of types? What if paper superseded its own site and escaped its own canvas for that of the city? Then ‘lines and angles’ (lineaments) would be traced directly there. The paper, becoming the city itself,

is now calling for frontiers and limits to the infinite and indiscriminate ‘urbanisation of life’. Then lines and traces can be seen as a possibility to confront the city.

The impression of a plan on a paper sheet problematises the drawing of a building as the precondition for the production of a site; in other words, the site is no longer the precondition for the existence of a building.

The plan imprint singles out the possibility of a certain friction between a figure and a ground, between the ‘mark’ and the ‘marked’, a confrontation amid the forces inside the lines from those left outside.

Positioning the drawing is an act of topography (from topos ‘place’ and graphi ‘writing’) and as such has the possibility to be critical. This critical potential resides in walling boundaries between interiors and exteriors, constructing frontiers between private and public, building borders between bare life and civic life, and eventually diluting the frontiers, boundaries and borders between the paper and the city itself. The paper is not a tabula rasa white sheet, it is not a virgin surface.

On the contrary it is a written and drawn (and rewritten and redrawn) saturated page.

In these terms, the relevance of the paper is not located in the border that separates and outlines the building but in the fact that the drawing might engender the paper – as site, and that architecture not only draws on paper with lines, but draws on the site with walls.

You can’t forget the sugar.

42

A History of Architecture in Five Minutes (Friday 8 November, 2013 – between 13.30–13.35) Maarten Lambrecht, a student on the MA in History and Critical thinking, recalls his part in the recent recitals at Open Week.

All I need now is paper. It’s the last day of the Open Week, and my turn to do a recital. But before I go on, bringing an end to the series of recitals held by students of the MA History & Critical Thinking, I hurry and quickly print 15 A4’s, to be cut in thirty A5’s. On the front of each paper it says ‘PARTS’, on the back ‘A History of Architecture in 5 Minutes’. Nothing special, but these pieces of paper will turn out to be essential for the recital.

Considering the goal of the whole exercise is for the audience to, literally, write a history of architecture. In my15 minutes of recital fame I’ll therefore try to point out to the audience how we can achieve this – how the construction of a history of architecture is, especially for architects, not so difficult to understand. Because when we understand parts and the whole, do we not also understand words and the text? Isn’t history not just text written on a piece of paper which leaves traces for new history? It should be clear that history can’t exist without paper because it is built with it.

From witnessing the event itself to the first ideas of the historian, sooner or later they’ll all become words, written, on paper. A simple A5 in this case, a small part in a giant construction. But then, what to write on this little piece of paper? Does

Joshua Harskamp, Intermediate 2

that actually matter? In the end, does it not all come down to the most basic and also most complex question ‘What do I like’?

To explain this over-simplification I need to refer back to my recital for a moment. By reading contradictory passages from Towards a New Architecture and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture I tended to explain how writing is purely a signifying practice which can be applied to completely opposite ideologies. This makes apparent that there can never be one text to dominate history. There is, just as well, not one definitive way to construct history.

We need to know that there is no ultimate origin, no fixed starting point, and there is no basic need anymore for a chronological structure, nor an all determining linear causality. Out of all these considerations, I propose a history of ‘parts’. It is a history wherein the parts only signify themselves.

As a result, there is a clear difference among the parts and, thus, a clear history as a whole. Concretely, this led to the construction of ‘A History of Architecture in 5 minutes’. For this experiment I asked the members of the audience to formulate in five minutes an answer to the question ‘What do I like to say about architecture?’.

The result is, indeed, an overly simplistic, perhaps irrelevant, delirious representation

To find out more on the MA in History and Critical Thinking visit www.aaschool.ac.uk/hct

Excerpt from ‘A History of Architecture in 5 Minutes

43

of history, a cadavre exquis, but it is in my opinion a perfectly valid history of architecture where anyone is part of it.

What is left now, are 26 pieces of A5 paper. Thus, I present here before you piece A of the evidence, black on white. These pieces of paper are the crucial evidence brought together in order to form an image of the event ‘A History of Architecture in 5 Minutes’. The first step to create such an image is thus setting up a paradigm and, more importantly, presenting it as valid. After all, history is mostly about presentation. That’s why, at the end of the day, it is the historian who makes history.

Even though the audience was asked to write history, it is the historian who ultimately decides on the form in which it will be presented to the world. This is the power of manipulation that belongs

to the one who occupies the last place in the production process. To construct a historical event, therefore, really means to understand its presentation. In this sense, an event constructed with the purpose of presentation almost automatically becomes history. Almost, because I would argue there is, especially in an age dominated by media, another aspect which we can not neglect. The presentation of history needs to be published. Even more, history wants to be published. Because if there’s no published image of the event, it might just as well not have happened at all. History, especially one constructed in five minutes, wants to become an image amongst images. And it is you, by looking at it, at this very moment, who has voluntarily accepted it as such.

Paper Sketch 1

44

Third Natures Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efrén Garcia Grinda 160 pages, 340 x 240 mm Extensive col & b/w ills, paperback February 2014 978-1-907896-48-4 £35

Colquhounery: Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth Edited by Irina Davidovici c 200 pages, 160 x 200 mm Col & b/w ills, paperback February 2014 978-1-907896-52-1 c £25

Published in tandem with the exhibition of the same title at the AA School in January 2014, Third Natures presents the work and ideas of Spanish architects Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efrén G a Grinda, and their Madrid-based studio AMID. cero9. Conceived as a micropedia, the book alphabetically arranges the terms that represent architecture’s Third Nature.

Comprised of entries by AMID.cero9 and invited contributors, the resulting publication is a constellation of objects and ideas that – through form and content – present a cumulative way of seeing the world.

Colquhounery is a commemorative volume celebrating the life and work of the architect and architectural historian Alan Colquhoun, who died in December 2012. Testimonials from friends, colleagues and students are gathered together alongside original photographs, sketches, letter transcripts, biographical and archival data tracing Colquhoun’s career as an architect, writer and educator on both sides of the Atlantic. Launched in tandem with a celebratory AA event, this anthology represents a collective effort to remember the work and the man responsible for some of the most penetrating and clear-sighted architectural criticism of the last 60 years.

am i architect? teaching paper to speak?

For further information on AA Publications or to order, visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications

AA Publications

45

Bedford Press is an imprint of AA Publications.

For further information visit: www.bedfordpress.org

Bedford Press

All Possible Futures Edited by Jon Sueda 112 pages, 200 x 130 mm Col ills, softcover February 2014 978-1-907414-35-0 £15

Real Estates: Life Without Debt Edited by Jack Self & Shumi Bose c 144 pages, 173 x 110 mm Col ills, softcover April 2014 978-1-907414-37-4 £ tbc

All Possible Futures accompanies an exhibition that explores speculative work created by contemporary graphic designers.

The scope of work encompasses everything from self-generated provocations, to experimental work created in parallel with client-based projects, to unique practices where commissions have been tackled with a high level of autonomy and critical investigation. The work highlights different levels of visibility and publicness within the graphic design process. Some projects were made for clients and exist in a ‘real world’ context, while others might otherwise have gone unnoticed: failed proposals, experiments, sketches, incomplete thoughts.

Neoliberalism as a wealth redistribution imperative has made property ownership impossible or unprofitable for much of society. Whether in the form of mortgages or rent, we are consigned to living in conditions of perpetual debt. Real Estates explores the moral, political and economic ramifications of property and ownership in neoliberal debt economies, and asks what role the architect might play in addressing these issues. Includes essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Neil Brenner, Mark Campbell, Mario Carpo, Keller Easterling, Ross Exo Adams, Peer Illner, Sam Jacob, Roberta Marcaccio, Roland Shaw, Brett Steele, Urban-Think Tank, Wouter Vanstiphout, Eyal Weizman, Finn Williams.

to curl into croissant

46

AA News Council

than two dates to be announced in advance in due course. As in previous years, Mi-Voice Electoral Services have been approved as scrutineers for the election, and will provide online and telephone support to members requiring assistance with their ballots and/or supporting information.

Timetable for the nomination and election of officers and council for the 2014/15 session:

– The results of the election will be announced no later than 5pm on Monday 5 May 2014.

At a General Meeting held on 16 December 2013, the Council agreed a resolution setting out the procedures and timetable for the election of Officers and Council for the 2014/15 Council session. As in previous years, it was agreed to open the periods of nomination and election on a slightly early timescale than that set out in the AA’s by-laws. The earlier timing allows for a period of handover between the incoming and outgoing Councils, which is important for new members of Council whose experience of governance in a large and complex charitable organisation may be limited.

As always, and as set out in the by-laws, Council members elected for the 2014/15 session will act in a ‘shadow’ capacity until they formally take their seats on 1 June 2014.

Questions regarding the timetable for the periods of nomination and election, or the eligibility and service requirements for members seeking nomination to the ballot may be directed to the Secretary at 0207 887 4047 /4018 or secretary@aaschool.ac.uk.

The following is the timetable as agreed by Council by resolution on 16 December 2013: – Council’s ‘house list’ will be reviewed and agreed at the Ordinary General Meeting scheduled for Monday, 3 March 2014.

– The period of open nominations (during which time any member of the AA may propose themselves or another AA member for election) will begin on Tuesday 4 March 2014, and conclude at 5pm on Tuesday 18 March 2014. Nominations will be requested in writing to the Secretary, who will carry out the necessary checks in relation to the eligibility and service requirements as set out in By-laws 35–37.

– The period of election will open at 10am on Monday 24 March 2014 and close at 5pm on Friday 2 May 2014.

Voting by both electronic and paper ballots will be available to members, as in years previous. On-site voting will also be available at the AA’s Bedford Square facility on no fewer

on white saucer cantilevered to creak under foot

Published & Exhibited Immanuel Koh (AA DRL MArch 2010) showcased recent experimental work at the Victoria & Albert Museum on 7 December, with a digital design drop-in session at the V&A’s Sculpture Gallery entitled Generative Glass. Koh explored the aesthetical, structural and assembly logics of glass using new computational and interactive fabrication production processes. http://immanuelkoh.com Francisco González de Canales (Inter 8 Unit Master and HTS Diploma Tutor) curated ‘RAFAEL MONEO: Theory Through Practice, Archive Materials (1961–2013)’ at the The Fundación Barrié, A Coruña, Spain. This is the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of the architect Rafael Moneo (Pritzker Prize 1996, RIBA Gold Medal 2003).

The exhibition will run until 30 March 2014.

The new issue of the academic journal RevistArquis includes Mark Cousins’ (Head of AA HTS) lecture ‘Technology and Prosthesis’, and Robin Evans’ (former AA Tutor) article ‘In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind’. Both were translated into Spanish by Valeria GuzmánVerri (AA PhD 2010). The issue also features papers by Doreen Bernath (Course Tutor in AA HTS & AA DRL Lecturer) and Robert Stuart-Smith (AA DRL Studio Master). http://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/ revistarquis Vanessa Norwood (Head of AA Exhibitions) has contributed an essay to The Architect’s Guide to Effective Self-Presentation by Andreas Luescher, released October 2013.

An interview with Mond Qu (AADipl(Hons) 2013) was featured in online magazine Indechs, where he discussed his Diploma Honours project ‘Aditnálta: An Island dispersed across the internet’. www.indechs.org/2013/10/theme-weekrealfiction-architect-mond-qu.html AA graduates Conrad Koslowsky, Frederik Bo Bojesen, Yannick Guillen (all AADipl 2013) and Scrap Marshall (AADipl 2012) along with photographer Lisa Stinner-Kun curated the Second House First

47 exhibition at the RAW Gallery of Architecture and Design in Winnipeg, Canada. Running from 13 September to 27 October, Second House First explored the tension between two contrasting forms of domestic dwelling: the vernacular architecture of the cabin and the ubiquity of the suburban house through an exploration of the cottages and cabins that surround the lakes of Manitoba. http://rawgallery.ca Jack Hudspith (AA 5th Year Student) and Max Hacke (AA Dipl 13) participated in group exhibition ‘Futures in the Making’ at the Architecture Foundation which ran from 4 October to 13 November. www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/ programme/2013/futures-in-the-making ‘Subject, Theory, Practice: An Architecture of Creative Engagement’ a film by Madam Studio (Adam Nathaniel Furman (AADipl.(Hons) 2008) and Marco Ginex (AA Dipl.

2009) was chosen to be shown as one of the 25 films at this year’s prestigious New York Architecture & Design Film Festival in October 2013. http://adfilmfest.com/portal/1483

Fabrizio Matillana (AADipl 2010) was part of the prize-winning team at this year’s Teambuild competition, an intense multidisciplinary competition for young professionals that takes place over one weekend. www.teambuilduk.com Sushant Verma and Pradeep Devadass (both AA MArch EmTech 2013) of ratLAB, were awarded the MAK Schindler Artists and Architectsin-Residence Programme scholarship.

Submitting an extension of their MArch thesis, ‘adaptive[skins]’ as a proposal, the team have been given the chance to realise the project during the 2013/14 academic year while working from the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. www.makcenter.org/mak_residency_ program.php www.rat-lab.org Rebecca Spencer (AADipl 2013, current AA Councillor) is teaching as a Visiting Professor for one semester at the Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) Cuernavaca Campus in Mexico, leading a History & Theory Class, a Projects Class (Unit) and an Introduction to Architecture class.

Maria Cox (AA Materials Shop) exhibited work at the Victoria & Albert Museum as part of ‘Type Tasting’ at the London Design Festival 14–19 September. Participants experimented with typography, exploring its expressive qualities while learning about type.

In October 2013 Robert Taylor (AADipl 2013) was selected as a runner up at the 2013 Global Architecture Graduate Awards for his Diploma 5 Project ‘Ahmedabad, Golden Temple of Trash’. www.architectural-review.com/ar-awards/ global-architecture-graduate-awards/ gaga-2013

Careers & Prizes

Vikrant Tike (AA PostGradDipl AAIS 2010) and Marie Isabel de Monseignat (AADipl 2008) have been appointed as design tutors for the 2013/14 BA Interior and Spatial Design course at UAL Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. They will be teaching DRS01 ‘ENTER- ACT’, a design research studio where the focus will be on students creating tools that will generate spatial interactions and events. http://baisd.wordpress.com/drs-01/drs-01

Building Design’s Architect of the Year 2013 Awards were held on 2 December, with AA President Sadie Morgan’s practice De Rijke Marsh Morgan going home with the Education Architect of the Year award (Nursery to Secondary) and the Shueco Gold Award, a prize for overall Architect of the Year. Former AA Councillor & Unit Tutor David Adjaye was awarded International Breakthrough Architect of the Year for his practice Adjaye Associates’s work in Qatar, Gabon and India, and John Whiles (AADipl 1973) won Education Architect of the Year (6th form to university) with his practice Jesitco + Whiles.

Alberto Moletto (AA MSc SED 2009) won the competition for a Regional Archives Building of the North of Chile, to be built near Iquique in Chile.

Robin Monotti Graziadei (AA MA H&T 2000) with his practice Robin Monotti Architects won both the European Property Award for Best Architecture Multiple Residence in Ukraine 2013/14 and was first amongst 900 entries in the Interior of the Year in Ukraine award 2013. Both awards were given to RMA’s project Yacht House in Crimea.

Scenario Architecture, the practice of Ran Akory (AA Media Studies Consultant) and Maya Carni (AADipl 2007) had their extension of Canfield Gardens site shortlisted for the Camden Design Council 2013’s ‘Best householder conversion, alteration or extension, large or small’ and the New London Architectures’ ‘Don’t Move, Improve’ 2013 awards.

‘Critical Juncture’, a symposium in celebration of the work of architectural critic Joseph Rykwert (AA Honorary Member) took place on 21–22 February 2014. Curated by Trevor Boddy, Yasmin Shariff (AA Councillor) and Manuel Cuadra and held at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the AA, the symposium will reflect upon key points within Rykwert’s six decades as a critic, examine the state of criticism today in a changing media landscape, and project how it may reinvent itself for the twenty-first century. www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/3101/ date/20140222 Mike Weinstock (AA MArch EmTech Course Director) was keynote speaker at the 12th meeting of AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning) Confronting Urban Planning and Design with Complexity: Methods for Inevitable Transformation, which took place on 16 January at Manchester School of Architecture.

AA SED MArch student Leo Sooseok Kim has won first prize for the Venice Biennale Pavilion competition hosted

by Arch Triumph, designing a new Art Gallery, Museum and Library that would float in the lagoon off Saint Mark’s Square.

and sway with my weight

48 Obituaries Edward (Ted) Fawcett OBE, founder of the AA’s Garden Conservation course, died on 19 October 2013, aged 93. Here he is remembered by former head of the course David Jacques:

Edward Charles Richard Fawcett came to prominence in 1969 when he was appointed the National Trust’s first Director of Public Relations.

He was responsible for expanding the membership greatly, and taking the measures (including the shops) for handling a huge increase in visitor numbers, especially to its gardens.

Retiring in 1984 with an OBE, he pursued his great private interest in historic gardens, getting involved at Chiswick, Osterley and in the Garden History Society.

His wife Jane, who was teaching on the AA Building Conservation course at the time, suggested to Alvin Boyarsky, AA Chairman, that Ted might run a complementary course in historic garden conservation.

Garden history and garden conservation were rapidly expanding topics, and the course, starting in 1986, was the world’s first of its sort. As with Building Conservation, the course was one day per week over two years.

Ted’s extensive network in that world paid off in the huge variety of lecturers, and the course thrived.

By the late 1990s it was clear that the course needed accreditation, and it first became a Postgraduate Diploma and then an MA. Meanwhile Ted retired again, aged 80, handing over to David Jacques.

Ted stood for an important shift in the status of garden history and conservation from an amateur pastime to a professional discipline.

Possessed of great charm and powers of persuasion, Ted inspired not only a generation at the National Trust but also on his course. Scores of his students currently occupy positions in English Heritage, the Lottery Fund, local authorities, consultancies and academia; others are authors of note.

He is survived by his wife Jane.

The AA was shocked and saddened to learn of the death of the much loved and admired Scottish architect Kathryn Findlay (AADipl 1979) who passed away Friday 10 January 2014.

Tragically, only hours before her death it was announced that she had been awarded the 2014 Jane Drew Prize by

the AJ Women in Architecture Jury ‘for her outstanding contribution to the status of women in architecture’.

Having studied at the AA from 1972 to 1979, Findlay formed the architectural practice Ushida Findlay in Tokyo in 1986 with her then-husband Eisaku Ushida. There they found recognition with a series of idiosyncratic and inventive buildings such as the Truss Wall House (1993) and Soft and Hairy House (1994). The practice relocated to the UK in 1999, with Findlay as Principal Director, working on notable projects such as the RIBA Nominated Grafton New Hall (2002) and Pool House 2 (2009). Her most famous project came in 2012 when she worked as delivery architect for Anish Kapoor’s monumental ArcelorMittal Orbit for the London Olympics. She was also made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) on the 11 September 2013.

She is survived by her two children Miya and Hugo Ushida.

Former AA Member Francis Golding died following a tragic fatal cycling collision in central London on 6 November 2013. A respected planning consultant, Golding advised on some of London’s most famous buildings of the twenty-first century including Jean Nouvel’s One New Change, Rafael Vinoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street and extensively with Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners on One Hyde Park, The Leadenhall Building and the soon to be completed World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre at The British Museum. Golding had previously been Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission in the late 1990s and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the RIBA. The family of AA graduate and architect Nicholas Roberts (AADipl 1972) wishes to inform the AA Community that he passed away on 21 September 2013. Nick was the son of Cambridge architect David Wyn Roberts, a professor of architecture at Cambridge University, and Nick’s mother Margaret MacDonald Baird was also an architect. Nick graduated from Cambridge University in 1969 and the AA in 1972. Several years after graduating, Nick moved permanently to Los Angeles where he practised architecture and met his future wife, architect Cory Buckner. Nick’s most significant

to crumble and snow onto tiled floors five metres below

contribution to architectural practice was as an Associate and Project Manager for Leo A Daly in Los Angeles from 1985–2003, where he was responsible for managing a number of monumental, wellknown Southern California projects such as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels by Rafael Moneo, the Los Angeles Convention Center Expansion by Pei Cobb Freed, and the John Spoor Broome Library at CSU Channel Islands by Norman Foster. Nick’s ability to organise vastly complex projects, negotiate diplomatically and inspire a team of collaborators brought these projects to spectacular realisation.

On a smaller scale, Nick collaborated with his wife Cory on the design of their mountaintop home in Malibu and renovations of houses and St Aidan’s Episcopal Church in Malibu, all designed by architect A Quincy Jones. In 2003, Nick found his true calling as professor of architecture at Woodbury University, and served as Interim Chair of the Undergraduate Program the semester before he passed away. He founded Woodbury’s study abroad program in China, taking the time to learn basic Chinese so he could communicate more effectively, and then started another such program in India, where his students researched how water conservation could inform architectural design. He was inducted into the Woodbury University Faculty Hall of Fame in August 2013. He is the author of Places of Worship ( John Wiley & Sons, Inc).

The AA also sadly learnt of the passing away of several Members and Alumni within recent months: Architect, Painter and Photographer Robert Gerald Boot (AADipl 1960 RIBA and AA Life Member since 1996) passed away earlier this year on 1 February aged 66. Architect and AA Life Member since 2003 Ronald Jones (AADipl 1956) died aged 79 on 14 October 2013. Architect and partner at London practice Tripe and Wakeham, David Nicholson (AA Dipl 1952 RIBA) died aged 90 on 10 October 2013.

Caroline Mary Collins (AAGradDipl GardenCons 1994) died 11 June 2013.

AA Alumni Member Eric Le Fevre (AADipl 1957) died 28 July 2013 aged 86. AA Alumni Member Howard Grant Foster (AA Dipl 1952), born 26 June 1928, also died this year.

Next Issue’s Theme

Language

Contributions to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk

School Announcement

New Application Deadlines Undergraduate Early: 18 November 2013 Undergraduate Late: 27 January 2014 Graduate Optional Early-Offer: 28 November 2013 Graduate Early: 31 January 2014 Graduate Late: 14 March 2014 As has always been the case, applications received after the deadlines will be accepted at the discretion of the school.

The undergraduate scholarship deadline has also been moved forward. Applicants who applied by 18 November 2013 will be given priority. However, the AA is committed to giving as many talented students as possible the opportunity to study, and due to the changes, for the 2014/15 academic year we will continue to review all applications based on merit.

Various benefits for applicants are: – A majority of undergraduate applicants will be interviewed and receive an offer earlier, allowing more time to focus on preparing for life in London and at the AA.

– Graduate students who take advantage of the Early Offer option will receive an offer in January/early February, providing security of a place in the school and allowing those who need funding time to apply for external scholarships/grants.

– The AA will be able to announce the outcome of scholarships and bursaries earlier.

– International students who require a visa will have additional time to ensure that all finances/documents are prepared and ready for a CAS to be issued mid-year. This takes some of the pressure off the often stressful visa application process.

Student Announcement

MISS 2014

Celebrating Fantastic Women in Design

MISS is the platform that celebrates femininity and self-expression in design. By hosting events and launching publications at the Architectural Association in London, we initiate the missing dialogue on the female character in the field of design and challenge the cultural stigma embedded within the profession.

MISS will kick off 2014 with Ellen van Loon. On 5 February, Ellen will guide us through her ‘Perfect Night In’ and will talk us through the cultural fragments that have been influential in her life – with popcorn. On 24 February, MISS will celebrate Eva Franch I Gilabert. While cooking her infamous paella, Eva will discuss the potential of food as a medium for conversation.

MISS was founded by Vere van Gool and Mary Wang.