Aarchitecture 23

AArchitecture

23

This issue is addressed to us:

written by some who take care of what architecture objects to. From the moment of the first wall on site, the linear aspirations of our occupation have Health and Safety at stake. Alas, an occupation with building, and conversely, the occupation of a building, means to test life itself. At another level, architecture will just move circumstances around. Adding towers to a shelter, making up new risks, collapsing, building on top of ruins – architecture neither settles down nor up. This instability suggests that dead matter still responds to a motive. A flower grows through urbanity however, as Marco Poletto’s article implies. Smaller things know only how to outlive, while buildings will have to learn.

For other use than a projective screen, Patrik Schumann exemplifies a purpose drawn from actually watching the weather. Before the ether are not clouds but paratroopers, rockets, and questions, such as: ‘which bridge?’, in the dialectics of Aristidis Antonas and Philippos Oreopoulos. The first wall is in turn a second wall, Tula Amir reminds us, outlining the current security conditions of Israeli civilian architecture. Jan Willem Petersen calls for

News from the Architectural Association

care of Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

AArchitecture 23 / Term 1, 2014/15 www.aaschool.ac.uk © 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: Ema Kacar Assaf Kimmel Costandis Kizis Buster Rönngren Patricia Souza Leão Müller Jingming Wu Editorial Board: Zak Kyes, AA Art Director Alex Lorente, Membership Brett Steele, AA School Director Graphic Design: Claire Lyon AA Photography: Valerie Bennett and Sue Barr Newsbriefs and obituaries edited

by Bobby Jewell 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: Flag for the letter A or Alfa, in international maritime signal flags, meaning ‘I have a diver down; keep well clear at slow speed’. While conventionally hoisted to indicate the presence of a diver in the water, the cover of this issue points out a safe place to submerge, and furthermore, to raise a warning flag to those who come across a reader, deep in text.

AArchitecture

23

This issue is addressed to us:

written by some who take care of what architecture objects to. From the moment of the first wall on site, the linear aspirations of our occupation have Health and Safety at stake. Alas, an occupation with building, and conversely, the occupation of a building, means to test life itself. At another level, architecture will just move circumstances around. Adding towers to a shelter, making up new risks, collapsing, building on top of ruins – architecture neither settles down nor up. This instability suggests that dead matter still responds to a motive. A flower grows through urbanity however, as Marco Poletto’s article implies. Smaller things know only how to outlive, while buildings will have to learn.

For other use than a projective screen, Patrik Schumann exemplifies a purpose drawn from actually watching the weather. Before the ether are not clouds but paratroopers, rockets, and questions, such as: ‘which bridge?’, in the dialectics of Aristidis Antonas and Philippos Oreopoulos. The first wall is in turn a second wall, Tula Amir reminds us, outlining the current security conditions of Israeli civilian architecture. Jan Willem Petersen calls for

News from the Architectural Association

care of Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

updated strategies in the reconstruction of the second wall – Afghanistan – to be put in place first. On building a structure with no walls, Joshua Penk owns up to the reification of the Dom-ino House, and to safety measures taken after the event. The image is intact, for at least Ocean Liners did have railings. Scanning the abyss of the AA archives, Norman Chang uncovers an uncertain conscious, and a certain unconscious. The thought of a room behind the facade occurs in the room between the thought and the facade – Oliver Pershav looks back on a mental wake. And the times they are a-changin’ as Charles Lai Chun Wai shows the signs of when buildings learn to control our lives.

A plan of action is a policy, a policy is a corridor, a corridor wants regulation, regulation belongs to institutions, institutions make sorry excuses, is it ever safe to be sorry?

The emergency exit notice that points to the front door of 36 Bedford Square is a rather sad sight, Mark Cousins writes. But buildings couldn’t care less about Health and Safety: this issue addresses us.

Student Editors: Ema Kacar – Intermediate 13, 3rd Year Assaf Kimmel – Intermediate 3, 3rd Year Costandis Kizis – PhD, 4th Year Buster Rönngren – Intermediate 1, 3rd Year Patricia Souza Leão Müller – Intermediate 12, 3rd Year Jingming Wu – PhD, 3rd Year

Contents 2 4 6 8 9 12 13 14 16

Two Bridges Bacterial Ecologies in Architecture Safety measures on the Dom-ino House Sick City Rehab Safe Haven Under the Iron Dome Sigmund Freud at the AA School 1929 The Anonymous Administration of Lives A Cautionary Tale Health and Safety = Subsistence and Sustainability

Tales from the Woods

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20 22 24 27 28 29

Three Elements of a Fundamentally Renewed Biennale Health and Safety and the Vocation of Architecture Second Priorities First Mr Todd Poster Recommended Reading AA Publications Bedford Press

30 News

Next Issue’s Theme School Announcement Student Annoucement

Ward 211 by Oliver Pershav (Diploma Unit 9) contemplates what it means to be unhealthy and unsafe in a controlled environment: In my home town, a small city of 35,000 inhabitants, there is a mental hospital. We all joked about its ugliness in school, its malfunctioning, external window blinds, and washed-out yellow brick facade, a testament to the existentialist-tinted years of brutalism and late CIAM conferences. When I was interned there, a total of three times, between the winters of 2010 and 2011, I saw the building from the inside, I met nurses and doctors. I watched the snow fall. It was there I realised the importance of another kind of health, that of the mind.

This poem is an attempt to recall that time.

2

Two Bridges

The two bridges of Tavronitis river, photographed in 2005.

Aristidis Antonas and Philippos Oreopoulos talk about the seemingly simple issue of replacement of one redundant structure by a new one.

We were separated. Men and women in separate rooms,

For more information about Antonas’ work please visit: http://aristideantonas.com

3 The project focuses on the area around the metal military bridge and the parallel reinforced concrete bridge, located a short distance away along Tavronitis river in Crete. Two bridges (one abandoned and the other used by a present-day highway), the river bed and the surrounding facilities constitute the site around which the project revolves. Twenty kilometres west of Chania, the Tavronitis river passes through its namesake village, close to Crete’s military airport at Maleme. The village of Tavronitis is a junction along the main road network that traverses this northern region of Crete east to west. The high-capacity, reinforced concrete bridge standing next to the military metal bridge was built to serve this network’s growing needs. The two bridges install a spatial redundancy: one has replaced the other. The construction of the concrete bridge has turned the metal bridge into a ruin.

The substitution of one bridge by the other seems to be a simple fact; it is still not offered as the obligatory interpretation of a complex installation; if we focus on the two neighbouring space junctions we observe that at many levels the new bridge does not replace the other.

The area under question is the one where German paratroopers landed and well-known clashes in the Battle of Crete occurred. On 3 July 1941 the Germans executed 12 men from the village of Tavronitis, located near the bridges, in reprisal for the execution of the crew and paratroopers of a German plane that had made an emergency landing near the Tavronitis river bridge. The ruin of the first bridge is also a monument of the past.

But it is not only that history demands its own right to transform the old set to stable scenery or to a simply talking background; the old bridge and the riverbed do not form a monument that would merely remind the viewer of this memorable fact.

Much more recently, 50 metres in front of the bus station entrance, a PATRIOT rocket from an A-7 CORSAIR military aircraft plunged into the Tavronitis,

possibly released from the Souda Bay firing range according to an article published in the local newspaper Mesogeios on 3 July 1998. A large army camp is located next to the two bridges and the Maleme military airport is visible to the northeast.

The sustainable development programme for the region of Crete refers to Tavronitis as a village with tourism prospects (beach, archaeological sites) and its river is considered to be one of Crete’s major wetlands.

The highway bridge therefore proposes an aspatial link and an abstract idea of connection. The highway bridge participates in the growing culture of ‘non local’ junctures and in the abstract world of networks and circulation as well. The highway bridge contributes to an invisible and familiar connection between places.

Emblematic crossing and invisible connection are confronted; the relation between the two constructions, the surrounding spaces and the different stories and disciplines that are related to them organise different material meanings for ‘replacing’. The two bridges were proposed as a question, a theatre piece and a creation of finds.

some of them old enough to be the mothers of the others

4

Bacterial Ecologies in Architecture

Two years ago, ecoLogicStudio completed an installation in the Front Members’ Room of 36 Bedford Square. Our intent was to transform the space into a biodigital garden, given the acronym H.O.R.T.U.S: a hydro organism responsive to urban stimuli. Following the tradition of the hortus conclusus, the garden became a selfcontained artificial ecology engineered to grow within the boundaries of an architectural space. It was to include diverse plants, devoted to the cure of the body and stimulation of the mind.

H.O.R.T.U.S. featured six species of edible living microalgae, cultivated in suspended photo bioreactors. Cannula tubes connected to each bioreactor made it possible for students and other visitors to feed carbon dioxide to the algae, and to be fed in return, if brave enough to sip the nutritive solution. This symbiotic system also featured a set of bioluminescent bacteria, hosted in specially designed ‘briccole’, that would feed on the oxygen produced by the algae.

After weeks of testing, and just hours before opening, the biologist in residence arrived for the final inoculation of the bacteria. As he discovered that the garden was siding the AA Bar, he forbade us to exhibit the bacteria, taking the cultures with him as he left. The microalgae again had to be analysed, in case of ingestion while inhaling/exhaling into the bioreactors.

Despite bacteria and microalgae being ubiquitous urban dwellers, their deliberate inclusion in the fabric of architecture caused

chaos. Is this the legacy of modernity, with its emphasis on sanitation and hygiene?

Or is it the inability of architecture to deal with the infinitely small, in size, as well as the infinitely large, in numbers? If this is the case, then engaging the obsession with microbiological control and functional segregation could provide a radical point of departure for the ones, like me, interested in an architecture of bio-digestion, phytodepuration, photosynthesis, and so on: an architecture of symbiosis, reaching another level of co-evolution within an urban milieu.

Dealing with nature’s infinitely small sizes and infinitely large numbers is arguably the job of microbiologists, but the material substratum and the spatial/ morphological framework of their experimentation is pertinent to architecture.

Any urban pond or kitchen could potentially be a microbiological lab, and vice versa: a lab could be seen as a future pond or kitchen. The actualisation of such latent capacity is a function of the ability of architecture to redefine the notion of zone and boundary/limit, to encompass the infinitely small, and the infinitely large.

Exploring this area of mathematical, morphological, and material fuzziness exposes the illusions that underpin the paradigm of microbiological control in architecture and urbanism, and will open up new territories of experimentation, beyond this surprisingly enduring legacy of modernity, towards a bio-technological future of architectural bacterial ecologies.

The corridor went in a loop around the doctor’s office.

To get more details on the algae and bacteria that were involved in the garden, please visit http://hortus.aaschool.ac.uk

Marco Poletto, former Inter 10 Unit Master and Director of AA Visiting School in Milan, on the many small things that matter.

Top: Post-Waste City – Wet model for analogue testing of living bio-digesting building envelope, BioUrban Design LAB, UCL, photo Marco Poletto. Bottom: H.O.R.T.U.S. – Hydro Organism Responsive To Urban Stimuli exhibition in Front Members’ Room, photo Sue Barr

5

If I was in the mood for jokes, I would have called it the grey mile.

6

Safety measures on the Dom-ino House

For over a century, members of the Mohawk people have found employment in the Manhattan building industry. The common myth is that these workers possess some curious ability that makes them suitable for the dangers involved in bridge and skyscraper construction. Tracing back to a bridge over St. Lawrence River in 1880, the first Mohawk ironworkers initiated the tradition of Iron Walking, as a way to prove their bravery and skill in the modern world.

Presumably, they experienced just as much fear as the next man.

Building in our time, requires less bravery. Perhaps it was a combination of the setting, the company, and the height limitations, that rendered the construction of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino House, virtually terror free. In no small part, this has also to do with the panicked addition of a remote controlled crane that took all the heavy lifting out of our hands.

On investigation, the Dom-ino model is a high-risk structure, with three floors ranging from 0.6m to 6m. In its patented form, it has no balustrade, or any form of fall restraint. When detailing the 1:1 model it was well known that a faithful reproduction of the iconic drawings would make it impossible for people to ascend and access the first and second floors. Wanting to be faithful, this fact was accepted.

Although one could walk freely to the edge of a precipice on any cliff or canyon, in the pursuit of adventure, it would be inconceivable to grant public access to a 6m unprotected drop, from an exhibition piece expected to have crowds of visitors. The

The nurses were grey, the floor was grey.

situation is arguably too public, too easily accessible, and would make the Biennale, and the AA, targets for a potential lawsuit.

As an obstacle, an inverted section of white stair was positioned to remove access to the first and second floors.

Upon opening the pavilion in June it didn’t take long for the brave to venture onto the ground floor, colonising the space throughout the day. An online reviewer wrote that we had ‘created an interactive pavilion that visitors can use as a naturally shaded seating area’ 1. A fairly accurate appraisal, only the concerned mother shepherding her toddlers around the ground floor gave any indication of danger, having been elevated 0.9m from the ground.

By the end of the opening weekend it was clear that the Biennale stewards had been instructed not to let anyone access the structure even for sitting. As we left the scene, the Dom-ino was kept under constant observation, and visitors were informed to stay off.

And so it stands, I am told, by people going to the now empty Biennale site. The Dom-ino model is to be observed, for better or worse, as part of OMA’s Fundamentals Exhibition, serving its intellectual purposes for those who appreciate it and not for those who simply want some pleasant shade.

1 Amy Frearson, www.dezeen.com/2014/06/09/ le-corbusiers-maison-dom-inorealised-at-venice-architecturebiennale, 9 June 2014

To see Joshua Penk’s AA work, please visit: http://pr2014.aaschool.ac.uk/inter-02/joshua-penk

Joshua Penk, Part I year-out student, on why native is better than naive, for a construction taller than no floors.

Entrance to the Dom-ino. ‘… No, You can’t get in there ...’. Photo Valentin Bontjes van Beek

7

The glass that was broken and thrown out in a can out of reach was grey as well

8

Sick City Rehab

You were probably born in a hospital and you will probably die in a hospital. You will spend hundreds of hours of your life in hospitals, either for yourself or visiting friends and relatives. Hospital medical errors (usually caused by stressed doctors) are now the third leading cause of death in the USA. Half of you will receive a cancer diagnosis during your life and visit hospital for treatment. 1 in 4 will have irritable bowel syndrome, 1 in 7 will have trouble conceiving children, and 1 in 30 will have dementia if you live over 65. Most of you are developing the potential for these conditions now, and don’t even know it.

Hospitals are places where we contemplate the fundamental questions of existence: birth, death, fragility, and pain – so why do the designs of healthcare facilities seem so alienating?

This year new Intermediate Unit 13 is focusing on health-care institutions.

Spaces of health, and hospitals in particular, are often places of intense environmental control, governed by hyper-functional super-cleanliness. The typologies of health need to adapt to the constantlychanging concepts of health-care, disease prevention, and institutional structures.

New health conditions are emerging: chronic diseases are on the rise, often linked to complex environmental factors of the city, requiring multi-faceted long-term treatment programmes. As populations live longer, the burden on public healthcare facilities increases and introduces new medical requirements; global epidemics such as Swine flu and Ebola seem increasingly threatening, requiring measures of quarantine, policing and surveillance.

The medical profession itself is also changing; Spas provide medical treatments, hotels are used as hospitals, and hospitals as shopping malls. Selfmedicalisation is slipping into everyday life: we eat chocolate sweets, take supplements, recreational drugs, do meditation, yoga, and fitness. Because a healthy population contributes to a healthy economy, the state and corporations have vested interests in medicine and the quality of urban space. In the nineteenth century the city was sanitised through improved housing, public infrastructure and environmental legislation. By the twentieth century, new urban and health typologies emerged that looked to outdoor space and nature, such as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, or Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse. Subsequently, much of modern architecture focused on the positive impact of sunlight, fresh air, and white reflective surfaces. Following the Second World War, the creation of the welfare state introduced the concept of good health as a social right of every citizen. Today, nearly 70 years after its conception, the NHS is the fifth-largest employer in the world, with a 1.7 m workforce. Its increasing bureaucracy (typical of many institutions) is constantly criticised, and compromised through budget cuts, privatisation and costly equipment. To respond, Unit 13 will create new typologies of health, that can more effectively engage with our contemporary horizontal networked society. We will activate a new type of health institution, using it to challenge the status quo, and create modes of engagement that can heal our sick city, and turn it towards a City of Care.

When you arrived they gave you grey pyjamas with the hospital logo.

For more information on the Unit’s brief, please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/downloads/briefs2014/ sickcityrehab_inter13_extended_reva.pdf

Lily Jencks and Jessica Reynolds, Inter 13 Unit Masters, take a shot at predicting your death

9

Safe Haven Under the Iron Dome Architects Tula Amir (AADipl 1989) and Shelly Cohen describe the architecture of protected spaces

A war took place this past summer between the state of Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. As always, it was an unnecessary and tragic war, causing destruction and injury on both sides, with an atrocious inequality: 2203 Palestinians were killed, in comparison to 67 Israeli soldiers and five civilians. In this war, the range of Hamas missiles grew, reaching almost everywhere in Israel. More than 4,000 missiles and bombs were fired at Israel. On the other side, the IDF attacked more than 62,000 targets and destroyed more than 10,000 buildings in the Gaza Strip. For more than 50 days, the issue of civilian defence and its resistance to daily missile firing became a central issue on the Israeli agenda.

In this article we will return to two key steps in the history of the civilian defence in Israel: the transition to defence through ‘Mamads’ – protected spaces within apartments – and the decision to safeguard towns in the area around the Gaza Strip.

‘Mamad’ Defence During the First Gulf War (1990–91), the period of time between the siren and the missile fall left only a short time in which to take cover, and a need arose to bring the protected space nearer to the civilians.

As a result, in 1992 Israel established a new defence policy, focusing on the Mamad, which comes from the Hebrew initials for ‘protected space within an apartment’. This was to be built in every apartment and on every floor in new buildings.

The concrete shelters, which had dominated large parts of the public spaces in the past and were often used for community activities in quiet times, disappeared from new neighbourhoods and were replaced by these Mamads. The transition to private protected spaces actually shifted the responsibility for civilian defence from governmental authorities to private hands.1

In favour of the Mamad it can be said that in an ongoing emergency situation, it enables the integration of defence into the routine of daily life. However, it appears that its financial advantage for developers is the reason that this solution was embraced throughout: its size is not calculated as a principal living area but rather as a service area, thus excluding it from the calculation of various taxes while increasing the size of the apartment. In this case, legislation regarding security considerations had an influence on real-estate forces. This can be seen as evidence of the IDF’s successful integration in the market economy – a process that had already begun in the past decades.

We ate in silence.

Additions of protected spaces to apartments (above) and Kindergarten (below) in the city of Sderot in the south of Israel, 2009–10. Photos Roi Boshi

10

Somehow, this was like a hotel for those who didn’t want to journey.

11

For more information on protected spaces in Israel please visit The Home Front Command website at www.oref.org.il/894-en/pakar.aspx

The IDF’s Home Front Command and the Israeli public both consider the transition from bomb shelters to Mamads to be a success. Taking shelter in Mamads has saved many lives in the course of the last wars.

Safeguarding the area around the Gaza Strip Soon after Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the tension between Israel and the Palestinian Authority quickly escalated. The Olmert government decided in 2008 to safeguard residential buildings on the front line, in towns and villages that are exposed to direct rocket fire.2 This included adding nine-square-metres of Mamads to approximately 6,000 apartments in all residential areas that are at a range of 4.5 km from the Gaza border, at a cost of one billion shekels (approximately 170 million GBP). An Iron Dome air defence system was expected to defend areas outside of this range.3

Adding Mamads to existing buildings took the form of building additions.

The Home Front Command’s instruction according to which civilians should reach a Mamad within 15 seconds at the most from when a siren is heard, dictated that the entrance to the Mamad should be from the residential unit itself, and that every residential unit should have one such.

Despite planning efforts 4 , the additions changed the façades of buildings considerably, as well as the spaces between the houses and the streets themselves.

They testify clearly to the tremendous effort of maintaining a routine of life in a threatened area. Paradoxically, the very fact that the new Mamads did not blend well into the existing buildings, but remained rather visible, is a calming factor in such areas and it is seen as evidence of Israel’s commitment to these civilians.

In the war of summer 2014, although the Iron Dome system has succeeded in intercepting missiles and protecting Israel, Hamas opened a new channel of attack through a network of underground

tunnels, ‘shaking’ the ground beneath the Israeli homes. Furthermore, the Mamads’ success in saving lives enabled a normal daily routine only in the centre of Israel, but not in areas closer to the borders. Many residents in the Gaza Envelope found that it was impossible to live for an extended period of time in one room, protected as it may be, and many left their homes and the area for many days.

The architecture of protected spaces in recent decades is a testimony to the military and security involvement in civilian building and civilian life in Israel.

Throughout the years, the various sides in the conflict between Israel and its enemies created a diversity of threats, and a variety of new defence strategies against them, most with spatial aspects. While great efforts were made to attack and protect, establishing an endless cycle of conflict, not enough has been done to reach a political agreement between the parties. We believe that the solution for the long conflict is not architectural, but political. Until the parties reach a peace agreement, both attacks and defence are an atrocious waste of resources, space and of course human life.

1 Shelly Cohen and Tula Amir, ‘From a Public Shelter to a Safe Room’, In: Shelly Cohen and Tula Amir (eds.), Living Forms: Architecture and Society in Israel (Tel Aviv: Xargol and Am Oved, 2007), pp. 127–144 (Hebrew) 2 The government’s decision to safeguard residential homes was made in response to residents’ petitions to the Supreme Court to intervene. These legal proceedings encouraged the state to form a civilian defence policy.

3 Shelly Cohen, Tula Amir, Nir Rotem, Dafna Levin and Ofir Zenathy ‘Safe Haven: Built Civilian Defense’, (Tel Aviv University, The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, 2010, Hebrew).

4 The new Mamads were located as far away as possible from the direction of potential threats, while trying to retain openness to light and to air.

We were here because we were told it was for our own good.

12

Sigmund Freud at the AA School 1929

Hidden in the vaults of the AA Archives is a badly decomposed cardboard box with the name Sigmund Freud indifferently handwritten on the side, dated 1929 with a stringed label marked ‘The Unconscious Mind’ and on the reverse, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. It is not clear which side of the label is the front, as if this ambiguity was intended by the writer of the label in order to examine a prospective reader’s sense of reasoning and cultural interest in the problems facing architectural students on how they create something physical and tangible out of abstract intangible thought. One asks if this was meant by Freud who may have been the author of the double-sided label when he trained as a physician, to be an entrance examination for potential AA students before opening the box and if these students, who could be personified into a single type, were in pursuit of dreams or if creation of architectural thought was due to an unconscious mind or a consequence of intellectual labour, and that suffering was a necessary component of that creative process.

Apparently, Freud had been employed by the AA to give advice to its distraught students whose health suffered from the competitive nature of the school. Freud of course, had earlier, before the Great War, advised a distressed and suicidal Gustav Mahler when his wife, Alma, had had an affair with a then unknown architect, Walter Gropius. Freud could do nothing for Mahler other than recommend he enter into seclusion and compose music to divert

We were separated from the world

his mind. He simply handed him blank music sheets with his invoice.

The AA Council on hearing this from a tutor recently returned from Vienna on holiday to visit a Secessionist Retrospective, decided Freud was just the man they needed, who had trained in medicine before specialising in psychology and the analysis of disturbed minds. The question that arose almost immediately from Freud when examining his first patient in what is now the AA Front Members’ Room where Freud’s couch was installed – was whether the student should have entered the AA in the first place, given its high reputation and standing in the world.

It seems the over-riding problem and the nature and complex creative process troubling the AA student was the creative act itself. Why did an architect by the name of Le Corbusier, who had almost shocked the architectural world four years earlier in 1925, appear to make creation look effortless in his Villa La Roche? Freud advised the student that suffering was indeed a necessary element of the creator as an architectural form of tuberculosis, that even Le Corbusier had a state of mind verging on uncontrolled anguish. The student should emulate Le Corbusier’s method of release through relaxation on a long sea voyage home from South America, where he drew nude studies of his companion Josephine Baker as a diversion from the rigors and pressures of architecture and its inspiration – and is presumably why Freud’s name is on a blue plaque outside 36 Bedford Square.

To see more of Norman Chang’s current and past student work, please visit http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/ norman-chang/53/321/b8b

Norman Chang (AADipl 1982) writes about a fictional account of Sigmund Freud as the resident AA psychologist.

13

The Anonymous Administration of Lives

To read more by Charles Lai Chun Wai, please visit http://thinking-in-practice.com

Charles Lai Chun Wai (​ AADipl 2012)​explores the alternative of a ‘Dump-home’ as an escape from the potential threats of the ‘Smart-home’.

Today our lives are administered not by any conventional forms of power but by devices that govern our comfort level. Smartphones remember our personal preferences and relay that to the ‘Smart-home’ gadgets that control our living environment. Take the thermostat as an example: everyone has a different perception on temperature but often there is only one thermostat in the room. Hence the control over the temperature of the room is always a social matter. It is the resolution between each individual member of the room and their different preferences on room temperatures.

Each of them needs to make a certain compromise and sacrifice a certain amount of comfort while staying in the same room.

Smart-home gadgets, however, turned room temperature into a private matter. The subject matter shifts from the collective to the individual. With the advancement of the smart-home gadgets, we will soon be able to customise public spaces outside of our home according to our personal preferences. The autonomy towards our personal comfort level will soon become so extensive that it allows us to reign over our daily spaces and constantly monitor their quality in terms of temperature, humidity, or even ambience.

The smart-home device automatically adjusts its threshold according to preset personal preferences without seeking our further acknowledgement. This mechanism is never exposed to the inhabitants of the space and no one is ever in full knowledge on how these devices operate. Therefore this detachment between the users and the

space alienates us from our very own home.

This is the tyranny of our own comfort.

As Stanley Kubrick had predicted, soon our very own room will say: ‘I’m sorry Dave, I am afraid I can’t do that.’ 1

In the final days of his life, Le Corbusier retreated to his little wooden cabin at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. It was as if he were seeking sanctuary in a space that is primitive. Perhaps the austerity of the space would allow the architect to achieve autonomy on how he lived in his space and be liberated from the invisible administration of the comfort and indulgence of city-life. He understood that those simple hinges on the cabinet and window shutters would never betray him.

Perhaps to embrace the ‘Dump-home’ is the only escape from the anonymous administration of the ‘Smart-home’.

1 2001: A Space Odyssey. Director Stanley Kubrick. Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1968

But what the nurses didn’t know

14

A Cautionary Tale Mark Cousins, director of the Histories & Theories programme, identifies the flaws and analyses the concept of ‘health and safety’.

The need to make society as free as possible from dangerous working conditions and a poisoned environment is so obvious that the case hardly needs to be made.

Since industrialisation, working people have continuously campaigned for safer conditions of work and life. Indeed the model of health and safety has spread throughout our society in an attempt to prevent violence and neglect towards other humans. To oppose any of this would seem to be a perverse response to the very obvious problems which need to be addressed. Nonetheless, I would like to raise some objections, essentially political ones, to the form that we seem to have generated as the mechanism for dealing with these issues. My argument will be that because the objectives of health and safety are almost universally accepted and supported, we pay too little attention to how these objectives are realised, and we do not search for alternative solutions.

The first and fundamental point to make is that the way in which we try to deal with unsafe conditions has changed very much since their origins in Victorian society. Initially, the opposition to these circumstances was based upon political campaigns partly stemming from trade unions and partly from reformers.

Landlords and employers were the obvious targets for producing poisonous and dangerous conditions at work and at home.

This struggle was obviously political and the outcome was the beginning of law, which criminalised the neglect of employees’ and tenants’ conditions. The Victorian period saw a large growth of Inspectorates whose task was to ensure

Was that it also joined us.

that minimum standards were enforced.

Political struggle and the criminal law were the agencies which dictated and enforced very minimal standards. Nonetheless, the system of law and Inspectorates were widely admired, and Lenin himself was a conscious supporter of this mechanism, which in the Soviet Union was named ‘The Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection Teams’. But if we look at this field today, we see a completely transformed field of powers and authorities.

The whole arena of safety and health has emerged as a form of administration.

Each institution is regulated not only by health and safety, but also by many other regulatory bodies: they all operate through the mechanism of regulation, which is different from the operation of law. In criminal law, if the law is broken, the responsible agent is open to prosecution.

In regulation, by contrast, the regulations set out a kind of administrative utopia of all the conditions which must be met if there is said to be compliance with the regulations.

Failure to comply is not seen so much as a crime but as a reason to withhold, in part or in whole, certification for the institution to continue its work.

As a consequence of this turn to regulation, a number of profound but often unnoticed changes occur. The first is that employers and landlords see that the practical route for them is to comply with the regulations, so that the certification of their activities is not impeded. This means that even employers of good will are distracted from the attempt to use their knowledge of the institution to make the building or the employment or the living conditions as safe and as healthy as possible

For more information on Mark’s lectures, please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/video/lecture.php?id=1630

15 and to become drawn into what we might call a fetishisation of the regulations.

The second component is a financial one.

Employers and landlords are anxious to avoid any litigation against themselves for negligence if and when an accident or illness occurs. Showing that they have been compliant with the regulations gives them a certificate of good conduct from the regulatory boards, and minimises the risk of any legal action for damages against them.

Health and safety regulations together with the means of complying with the regulations creates an enormous industry, but one which has less and less direct relation with the actual issues of care, health and safety, and in some sense has become an administrative sanctuary for bad employers.

The second effect of regulation is very dramatic, but somewhat mysterious.

Undoubtedly the regulatory bodies have created in the last few decades an extraordinary intensification of the institutionalisation of space. We should imagine that architects would be the first to protest against this, but collectively architects have not grasped this as an oppressive issue. Students need walk no further than the surrounding colleges of London University to see the vandalism which occurs in older buildings. The east side of Gordon Square has a series of quite elegant houses, which until the mid century were private houses. Now, it is the home of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and if there were a competition to turn four houses into a preposterously oppressive alienating environment, it would be difficult to find a better candidate. The college closed all but one of the front doors, whereas the remaining open door gives on to a pompous and pointless reception area. The route through the buildings, the fact that in parts of it in order to go upstairs you first have to go downstairs, creates a labyrinth. Off the corridors are placed horrible little cupboards called offices and the whole building is a joyless and creepy achievement. Unfortunately, this example is hardly isolated. In a sense,

it raises to the level of architectural analysis what we mean by institutional space. One element, undoubtedly, is the uncontested supremacy of the corridor. If this analysis were deepened, it would really show that the corridor is the primary instrument of the institutionalisation of space. You know you’re in an institution because of the corridor, and because of the office doors, which seem like the only life in the building.

Institutional space has as one of its allies the proliferation of notices, which concern H&S regulation itself.

Everybody knows that it is illegal to smoke inside institutions but this does not stop institutional space with placing no smoking signs in every visible part of the building’s interior. I don’t even know whether it is one of the H&S regulations that H&S regulations must be placed on all walls.

At a more domestic level it seems to me remarkable how many fire-exit notices there are in the AA, especially when many of them point to the main front door.

You might have thought that everyone who used the AA actually knew that it was a door to the outside. As you leave the AA by the front door, if you look up above the initial swing door, you will see a sad sight – there is a little 18th century bas-leaf of small happy putti playing. Above it there is the ideogram of a stick-like human being running downstairs pursued I suppose by sheets of flame. It would be difficult to think about any architectural question which everyone at the AA might agree to, but one might be that the pleasure of working at the AA is that it avoids being and feeling like institutional space. If you doubt this, try spending an hour wandering about the Bartlett…

We became a gang of mad minds

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Health and Safety = Subsistence and Sustainability Patrik Schumann, researcher and tutor at AA Graduate School in the 1990s, describes working at scale 1:50.000.000.

New Mexico is a microcosm of climate change and laboratory for sustainability.

It straddles Rocky Mountain divide and upper Rio Grande, ranges sub-arctic to temperatures bordering on sub-tropical, covers alpine tundra, forest, woodland, grassland, and low desert. Atlantic and Pacific botanical provinces overlap. This beautiful land is given to subsistence nomadism and dryland horticulture.

After beaver trapping, over-grazing, tree-felling, commercial agriculture and urban development, largely driven by outside capital, we retain just 5% of surface water flows. Average precipitation is a fifth of evaporation, 15 years’ summer monsoons and winter snows mostly failed, the last three years that drought became extreme.

This summer good rains came, high desert is green, landscapes are weedy, and last month we had a 100-year odds cloudburst: 3” in an hour.

Summer night-time warming has abruptly caused two months of uncomfortable crop failures, while winter warming sublimates slow-melting snows and confuses flowering of fruit trees.

Drying and warming foreseen for 2050 have already arrived, and unreliable irrigation supply and soils are becoming saltier.

I came out of the squatter settlements of Khartoum and worked in the AA Graduate School with this idea: ecOasys – an economic Oasis ecosystem. This convergence model, to which under-

developed societies could aspire and over-developed downsize, aims at a liveable future. The courtyard house brings outdoor space in and indoor living out, its built environment provides for human comfort plus species with which we need symbiosis – after impact reduction and resource conservation it pursues ecological regeneration and economic production.

It is the 20% house – cutting consumption below 20% of local averages and raising in situ production of food and income above 20% of basic needs. Since early days we’ve surpassed those in all but water use and food production – though we exceeded Albuquerque’s 15-year water conservation target throughout. That’s on 1/10 acre of native wildlife habitat, edible plantscape, orchard-gardens, year-round hoophouse, intensive and breeding plots, seed bank, grow boxes, garden starts, and container nursery with over 600 adapted edible species and crop varieties.

I set out with an architect’s and builder’s mindset of designs and manufactures, but life-cycle costing, technology retirement burden, and mindless consumption profiteering reduce the set of quantum threshold sustainability solutions toward zero. I became more of a grower, with an integrated portfolio of production operations in horticulture and forestry, continuously seeking ecological thinking, restoring natural processes, sating myself in sun, water, soil, plants, food, and woodstove warmth.

I folded a paper crane for an old lady who was going home

Tales From the Woods On the occasion of the AA’s 167th anniversary, ‘Tales from the Woods’ reintroduced the school’s legacy of theatre and performance with a contemporary twist, by transforming the AA’s home into an immersive theatre for one night on Friday 10 October.

Our aim was to alter the familiar into augmented spaces to disorientate, and to host wonders of experience. Trees from Hooke Park, undeniably beautiful yet alien when installed within the Georgian interior space, provided an environment for happenings to take place. Attention to detail was important: new signage, ambient lighting and sound (via AAir) and the fragrance of the forest all contributed to the sense of theatre.

The Birthday team and the first year cohort were the inhabitants of the Woods, enticing the audience with stories choreographed in time and space. The white and red bodies performed in the crowd, and the AA’s music talents staged further enjoyment – all was by the AA for the AA community.

However, the mass of bodies and energy of the guests, it turned out, eventually came to be dominated by inhabitation. As the evening unfolded the team of performers negotiated evershrinking Woodland space for movement and improvisation.

The project saw nothing short of the process of architecture. Back in June, the team developed its visions through intensive choreographic workshops and discussed how to deliver the ideas as realities. As the team rehearsed extensively, the space came to life. Then the whole thing disappeared in a blink of an eye. The Woods now only exist in the minds of the residents of the night. The ephemera stays with us after the physical architecture is no more.

For more information on the process of the AA Birthday Party, please visit http://conversations.aaschool.ac.uk/ aa-birthday-party-summer-workshops

Makers Team: Andrew Hum Cheng Feng Men and many more individuals

Birthday Core Team: Shahaf Blumer (phase 1) Yee Thong Chai (phase 1) Jiehui Avery Chen (phase 2) Yiota Goutsou Veronika Janovcova Gabriela Nu単ez-Melgar Molinari Patric Morris (phase 2) Patricia de Souza Leao Muller Fancy S Laura Lim Sam Gloria Lei Pou Wai Andreea Vasilcin 60 First Year students and First Year tutors

Direction and Curation: Takako Hasegawa

Photo Eduardo Andreu Gonzalez

Chile: Monolith Controversies, 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Fundamentals, la Biennale di Venezia. Photo Andrea Avezzù, courtesy la Biennale di Venezia

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Three Elements of a Fundamentally Renewed Biennale Costandis Kizis writes on the new challenges that Koolhaas presented at the Venice Biennale.

Health and safety is one of several issues alluded to in the central pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale. Entitled ‘Elements of Architecture’, this highly debated pavilion is a live and full-scale index of building components, a catalogue of the evolution of building technology, and a pessimistic examination of architectural technology. What is conveyed as foremost is not technological advancement, but rather the fact that the ghost of standardisation prescribed by health and safety regulations now, more than ever, haunts architectural

technology and no longer pertains to architects.

In Koolhaas’ call to go back to basics one finds the toolbox of the architect empty, since other building specialists have claimed most of the tools. This is not to say that the analytical approach and the breaking down of architecture into its constituent parts that Koolhaas explores, in collaboration with his GSD Harvard students, is not of use for architects. On the contrary, all fifteen elements are products of thorough research and it is quite unlikely that one will find no

She was afraid, I think she is still afraid,

Behemoth: Architecture of Fulfilment: a Night with a Logistic Worker, 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Fundamentals, la Biennale di Venezia.

Photo Francesco Galli, courtesy la Biennale di Venezia

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interest at all in them. For instance, one can only be impressed by the stair collection, problematised by the ramp exhibit (where Claude Parent’s Oblique Function is juxtaposed to a ramp that follows Health and Safety regulations), and delighted by the array of toilets. But these discoveries can only be made after close inspection; the message conveyed by the exhibit as a whole is a certain melancholy of architecture’s lost battle with the standardisation of technology.

but maybe she’s still got that crane

The timber reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino by the AA, installed just outside of the pavilion (even if not part of it), stands as a reminder of another category of fundamentals that architects are still in possession of – that of architectural and structural concepts.

If ‘Elements’ is a confrontation with the profession’s blunt reality, the same cannot be said for ‘Monditalia,’ the exhibition held in the Arsenale where Italy is scanned by forty-one case studies

For more information about the PhD programme please visit: http://phd.aaschool.ac.uk

19 intended to render the country’s path through modernity. This is AMO at its best; their managerial and curatorial abilities made it possible for a long yet fascinating exhibition to take place. The exhibition is organised along both sides of a veil printed with a medieval map of the area of Italy. The exhibits follow the geographical points of the map, and the old OMA technique of radical and unexpected juxtapositions becomes productive again.

The inclusion of dance, music and cinema events on the one side of the veil are aimed at a synthetic result of the four elements of the Venice Biennale, and act as refreshing intervals facilitating the visitor to follow the exhibition relentlessly and tirelessly.

By walking along Italy’s map, one realises what the pun of the title suggests: a country that has condensed so many aspects of modernity and modernisation that it is still radiant to the rest of the world. One can hardly think of a better argument for Italy, and Venice in particular, being the place where architecture deserves to be discussed biannually. In Monditalia there was space for everything: Radical Pedagogies, the installation by Princeton University where the presence of architectural press and education diachronically is shown, the epitome of the country’s importance for architecture. A remake of a Superstudio installation of 1978 in the ‘Secret Life of the Continuous Monument’ by Gabriele Mastrigli was one of the pleasant surprises and a must-see, but the piece that steals one’s heart is the tiny installation ‘The Architecture of Fulfilment – A Night With a Logistic Worker’ by Behemoth.

There, a harsh critique of online commerce corporations and the controversy between their public image and the reality of their logistic working spaces, sneaks into the Italian architectural panorama.

All this has formed an intriguing exhibition, yet the novelty of this Biennale is the challenge that the national pavilions had to face. The countries participating in the exhibition had to respond to the topic of absorbing modernity, a much more

difficult challenge than building a pavilion by interpreting à volunté as a keyword (one easily thinks of ‘next’ of 2002). Hopefully this was the end of a long series of Biennales where nations were featuring their latest built work, or for the lack of it a series of random and vague installations, which were at times interesting yet rarely critical.

The intensity of the question put forward by the curator led to some outstanding results – exhibits that reveal the political and social connotations of the long and painful process of absorbing modernity: Austria has exposed the architecture of national parliaments around the world with smashing-white simplicity, through an arrangement of same-scale models that let the visitor draw their own conclusion on the irony of today’s democracies. France put the question as straightforwardly as it gets, with Jean Luis Cohen wondering whether modernity is a promise or a menace (and with Mon Oncle’s house model as a central piece cheering up the atmosphere of the dilemma). Most cynically of all Russia set up a grotesque scene of a commercial expo where the history of modern architecture is being recycled and traded by historians – dealers, fair enough, but none has hit the target as centrally and smartly as Pedro Alonso with his Chilean pavilion.

In Monolith Controversies, a prefabricated concrete panel becomes the tangible paradigm of the process of digesting modernity, which is woven together with the political history of his country and the social implications that it bears.

One may witness the three changes that this year’s Biennale brought until the 23 of November. The question now is whether this will be the starting point of a series of more critical and useful architectural gatherings, or just an exception that will be only remembered as one of Koolhaas’ idiosyncratic and cynical expressions of the state of architecture.

There were separate areas for all things,

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Health and Safety and the Vocation of Architecture Oskar Johanson investigates the histories of Health, and Safety, unbundled.

229. If a builder builds a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

(Code of Hammurabi, c 1772 BCE) In eighteenth-century BCE Iran, a kind of building code emerged alongside the famous dictum ‘an eye for an eye’. Several millennia later, architects must work within a vast body of law known as Health and Safety. It is the mark of a society that has legislated for the protection of its working population, rather than the price margins of employers, but in its laminated ubiquity, it is sometimes derided as ‘Elf and Safety’; patronising bureaucracy gone mad. It might be counterintuitive to consider Health and Safety, unbundled, as historically two of architecture’s most significant sources of legitimacy. But far from being constraints, architecture’s commitment to secure both health and safety for its clientele has been a way to validate the existence of the practice.

Good health and safety by design.

Health That an improperly loaded wall might collapse and kill was a tangible enough relationship between designer and building to be regulated by the Code of Hammurabi in Babylon. Conversely, when a threat to health was only half-understood but represented a drain on a nation’s working

One was the central medication room.

population, such as tuberculosis in the early twentieth century, architecture as a discipline found its vocation.

The sanatoria movement originated as an answer to the magnified threat of diseases such as TB which had seen unprecedented urban growth in western Europe following industrialisation. Until the discovery of streptomycin in the 1940s, sanatoria were still the primary answer to TB. It was in this period that the cultural practice of modernism emerged1.

Sanatoria worked with two ideas: treating patients of TB and lunacy by separating them from the community and overcrowded cities, and establishing a ‘curative environment’, of maximised sunlight and airflow. This theory drew on Hippocratic wisdom and contemporary micrography alike. Household dust was believed to harbour TB among other pathogens, and sunlight thought to destroy the tubercle bacilli2. An architect who could design her building according to the formula Freiluftkur and Freiluftliegekur3 was therefore practising good medicine as well.

In 1908 Otto Wagner designed a clinic at Entwurf with generous terraces.

Four years later, Henri Sauvage’s houses in central Paris featured stepped terraces, maximising light to each level and the street below. The same section would resurface again, even after a drug-based cure to TB was discovered, such as in Patrick Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre

To read more by Oskar Johanson, please visit http://therottenorange.tumblr.com and oskarjohanson.com

21 (1959–71) and the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate by Camden Council’s Architect’s Department (1968). TB sanatoria provided architects with opportunities to test bold building systems, such as Jan Duiker’s clinic Zonnestraal (sunbeam) and its progeny, Alvar Aalto’s clinic at Paimio, which in turn were applied to non-medical commissions.

Le Corbusier’s own borderline paranoiac rants on hygiene and his gunning for the death of the street, evidenced an extreme tendency to medicalise the discipline. Using hygiene as validation, his architecture extended the scale of its mandate to the entire population. His arguments for a city dispersed throughout a field, preferring the ‘gramophone over the germ-ridden concert hall’, must be seen within this tendency4 .

Even if a developer favours a lowsecurity scheme, comprising squares permanently open to the public, insurance can still demand the provision of private security. However, measures demanded

by Secured by Design can sometimes be rejected with rigorous argument by either the architect or the client. Murray Fraser reminds us of Peter Barber, who threatened to walk from the Donnybrook project when the developer insisted on a wall between the socially-housed and private tenants6 .

Though it can be difficult, architects must resist the tendencies of the practice and the nonsense now crystallised as bureaucracy. Architecture is neither a branch of medicine nor of the police.

It is the business of putting in terraces because people deserve the sun.

Safety Today, these medical justifications appear outmoded. But a new code of Hammurabi regulates the practice. With the sanatoria movement it shares the same exclusionary logic and the idea that complex social problems can be solved with the right placement of a wall.

Secured by Design is a governmentbacked design policy that first sprang into legitimacy in 1989. Much like Health and Safety, it provides standards that must be met in order to secure planning permission.

It derives from architect and planner Oscar Newman’s questionable research into ‘defensible space’ in New York housing projects in 1972, which argued that an environment’s design was the key influence over human behaviour5. The marking out of ‘territoriality’ by walls and boundaries would therefore encourage residents to maintain the area, discouraging strangers from entering, reducing crime. Newman’s theory migrated to the UK before the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure. It now dictates the level of security a new building must meet based on local crime rates, with the result that new schools and public buildings in typically poorer suburbs of the UK have military-grade security measures.

1 Margaret Campbell, ‘What Tuberculosis did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture’, Medical History, 2005, Vol. 49, 463.

2 Ibid, 469.

3 Literally ‘climactic control’ and ‘outdoor rest’, Campbell, 465.

4 Simon Richards, Corbusier and the Concept of the Self (London: Yale University Press, 2003), 4.

5 Joyed Aked and Anna Minton, ‘Fortress Britain’: high security, insecurity and the challenge of preventing harm’, New Economics Foundation (2012), 5.

6 Murray Fraser, ‘Beyond Koolhaas’ in Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian (eds.)

Critical Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007), 336.

It was where they prepared our doses.

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Jan Willem Petersen, AA Diploma Honours Student (AADipl 2005) and founder of Specialist Operations, about the reconstruction of a nation in its own right.

For Afghanistan, war is not a single event but a recurring one. Its astonishing landscape is littered with the detritus of endless conflicts. As a strategic spatial planner, operating in this far-flung territory, ‘health and safety’ has a certain connotation: it is personal. The spectrum of threats faced while conducting fieldwork requires a level of safety measures unknown to most in the spatial discipline.

Who do you choose as travel companions, knowing that the Italian government is known to pay vast ransom sums for kidnapped, journalist nationals, rendering your vehicle a potential target?

Which room do you ask for in a hotel, knowing that the vast majority of vehicle born bombings occur at the front side of a building, by the main entrance lobby? How

In a bookshelf there was a folder,

do you behave at an armed checkpoint when being offered a biscuit by its commander?

Risking insult by refusing such gesture or jeopardising the risk of having to ‘return a favour’? What do you take in your ‘drag bag’– and especially what not – knowing that additional weight will surely slow you down when having to run? While travelling in the Middle-East, would you risk not checking medical gear for small unsuspicious labels ‘made in Israel’?

During a three-day training – led by the Dutch defence force – much practical advice was given to mitigate some of the risk of immediate physical danger and warrant a sense of short-term personal safety.

But perhaps a much more serious issue, regarding the safeguard of long-term wellbeing, can be witnessed in a country

Armed check-point drill; ‘Please take a biscuit’. Photo Peter ter Velde

Second Priorities First

To read more by Jan Willem Petersen, please find AA Agendas: London + 10, at http://issuu.com/aaschool/docs/london_10

23 subject to the largest reconstruction mission in human history: Afghanistan. The United States has invested heavily in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. In the last decade alone, they committed more than 100 billion dollars toward reconstruction. But looking in isolation at projects intended to repair Afghanistan’s scar tissue, the reality is that many have inflicted lasting damage.

In 2012, the newly assigned US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John F. Sopko, proclaimed before congress that a significant proportion of this investment has had little or no positive impact, due to the absence of coherent planning, coordination, and execution. Almost all reconstruction interventions have an obvious spatial footprint: the output in the form of projects, the socio-cultural context in which they are placed, the scale of implementation and their impact, or the very communities they address. The failure of hundreds of postwar projects is due to a multitude of factors, but the almost total absence of spatial expertise in the chain of postwar reconstruction, currently being directed by military engineers, policy-makers, NGO project managers, and donor state diplomats, is an overarching and fundamental component.

Numerous projects were so poorly constructed that they had to be demolished, or were simply left unfinished, impossible to make habitable. Other projects followed the stringent technical criteria drafted by donor-states, but failed to recognise the actual location of implementation, they were simply out of context: concrete clinics, unable to withstand earthquake tremors, placed in known active seismic zones; government buildings, constructed with imported timber, placed in termite areas.

Of the estimated 44,000 projects undertaken, numerous examples form a stark physical illustration of a conflict little discussed: a chronic mismatch between western reconstruction doctrine and the reality on the ground. In 2004, a major international organisation initiated a project to provide education in all four hundred

districts of Afghanistan. This amounted to building six hundred schools in a period of nine months. Setting the building specifications to strict American standards meant construction cranes had to venture over impassable mountain ridges or drive on treacherous mud roads with numerous potholes. When implementation of western standards was deemed impossible, specifications were dropped entirely. As a result, roof structures became so thin they collapsed under the weight of winter snow. Eventually, the project was cancelled altogether.

The failure of contemporary efforts to shape positive changes in Afghanistan seriously questions the legacy left by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and perhaps more importantly, by the lack of response to a context, the long-term health and well-being of the population itself.

Despite the immense efforts that have been made in preparation for a challenging mission in an inherently complex environment, the projects, doctrine, and strategies for Afghanistan’s nation-building demonstrate that few of the ambitions that have been drafted – diplomatic, military, or development alike – explicitly take spatial knowledge into account in the formation or execution of policy. The examples show that established capacities and expertise derived from the field of the spatial discipline – design thinking, spatial analysis, design, long-term strategic planning, and the ability to integrate conflicting priorities – could contribute to the learning process of the key actors involved in conflictaffected environments. Pushing beyond generic models and established modes of operation, tailoring much more closely western ambitions to vernacular ways of life and local needs, is key to ensure the long-term sustainability of the projects.

Given the challenges in rebuilding the country, a better and more nuanced understanding of local spatial production and the planning component of nationbuilding is indispensable.

It said ‘catastrophe’, in big black letters

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Mr Todd Poster Sandra Kolacz of Intermediate 12 celebrates the memoirs of the ambitious Health and Safety Inspector, Mr Todd, as he revisits the Architectural Association as an (im)Poster.

I still don’t know what kind of catastrophe it was that we were waiting for

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For more information about Sandra Kolacz’s work please visit: http://pr2014.aaschool.ac.uk/inter-12/sandra.kolacz

Having endured years of failure as a starchitect, Todd Poster’s wrath returns with a green bottle and stained vest to render architectural practitioners’ lives insufferable. A Royal College of Neasden graduate, the recently qualified Health and Safety inspector aspires to make lives difficult by imposing a series of unnecessary regulations around the Architectural Association School of Architecture, ‘the damn architectural spawning ground of festerin-.’ Incensed, Todd compiles a handbook of suggestions – restrictions that technically fall under concerns for human safety, though out of context may be seen as the musings of a passiveaggressive psychopath.

‘Mr Todd Poster, licensed Safety Inspector’ read the letter, the only one Todd had guided out from the yellowing mountain behind the door. This was it; Todd jumped, he had waited for this opportunity for the best of seven months from the ‘not-reallydisrespectable’ Royal College of Neasden.

Equipped with his dearest green, glass bottle ‘of sparkling water’ – assured Todd – he extended a fleshy grip into the cardboard box beside the exhausted, patchwork sofa and salvaged a shiny hardhat.

He observed his reflection in the orange plastic and beamed.

‘I know exactly what to do with this!’ echoed through the hallway as a red marker hit the paper to form a rushed circle around the ‘photograph of a Georgian building’ – a relic that had been stabbed into his kitchen wall exactly twenty-one years ago. The door struck its frame and Todd pranced enthusiastically along a pebbled path for his first day at work.

A brown, lacquered door closed shut, separating Todd from the rain on Morwell Street.

‘Can I help you? The exhibition is closed.’ resounded through the staircase; the head of a close-shaven male dangled over the banister to examine him.

‘You what, mate?’ Todd yapped, ‘ I’m a Health and Safety Inspector…

but while I’m here I may as well inspect the exhibition.’

‘I said the exhibition is closed.’

The unnamed man, identified only as ‘SECURITY’ by his shirt grew bigger with every step. Todd’s eyes drifted.

‘Aren’t you going to do that thing, mate?’

‘What ‘thing’?’

‘That thing where you invite the H&S Inspector for scorching hot tea in the office so the other lads can have the extra four minutes whilst the tea cools to transform the building into a Health and Safety heaven? How about that, eh?’

SECURITY’s eyes focused. ‘I’m going to call the rest of security. Wait here,’ he struggled, ‘…please.’

Thick, maroon tape sliced off the Intermediate 12 exhibition space, the first he had spotted after manoeuvring around the considerably displeased SECURITY. ‘Pah, too easy!’ he chuckled, and the liquid in the green bottle jiggled with him. Sighing, brown eyes inspected the A3 multicoloured booklets propped up evenly along the perimeter of the grey, MDF shelves. He opened ‘Sandra Kolacz, Second Year’ and flicked through the pages, interrupted.

‘What are you doing!’ called SECURITY One, Two, Three and Four.

Todd spun around, offended.

‘Securing the perimeter and doing my job. Someone’s gotta do it! Hold on lads, I’m nearly finished, let me jus-’

The air squeaked out of him as he was hauled from the floor and towed outside, leaving behind a spectacle of maroon tape and warning signs. It was probably SECURITY Two that returned to investigate the contents of the papers stuck to the front of ‘Sandra Kolacz, Second Year’ – Todd reckoned he had been the most sympathetic to the cause.

Perhaps it was the collapse of the walls that would finally release us

Despite how ugly the building was

For more information about Sandra Kolacz’s work please visit: http://pr2014.aaschool.ac.uk/inter-12/sandra.kolacz

Health and Safety Report – Completed by Mr Todd Poster, licensed Health and Safety inspector

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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

Explore Everything – Place-Hacking the City Bradley L Garrett 320pp, 235 x 156mm, illustrated, paperback Verso Books, 2013 £12.99 What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L Garrett has tested the boundaries of urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the everyday. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban spaces to make them realms of opportunity. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-firstcentury metropolis.

Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture Edited by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini 376pp, 240 x 165 mm, illustrated, hardback Lars Müller and CCA, Montreal, 2012 £45 As health becomes a central focus of political debate, are architects, urban designers, and landscape architects seeking a new moral and political agenda to address these concerns?

Imperfect Health looks at the complexity of today’s health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions. Essays by Margaret Campbell, David Gissen, Carla C. Keirns, and Sarah Schrank deal with different aspects of the topic of health in the context of architecture such as: ‘An Architectural Theory of Pollution’ and ‘Strange Bedfellows: Tuberculosis and Modern Architecture - How “The Cure” Influenced Modernist Architecture and Design.’

I came to like it.

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Architecture Words 13: Flash in the Pan Sylvia Lavin 264 pages, 180 x 110 mm, b/w ills, paperback December 2014 978-1-907896-32-3 £15 In this collection of meditations on what Baudelaire championed (and Michael Fried chastised) as presentness, Lavin investigates the convergence of notions such as liveness, the provisional and the obsolete in revealing qualities of the contemporary.

Three sets of essays explore different forms of architectural time, particularly as they shape the differences between history, theory and criticism as genres of writing.

Colquhounery: Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth Edited and with an introduction

by Irina Davidovici 248 pages, 220 x 165 mm, color ills, paperback November 2014 978-1-907896-52-1 £25 Colquhounery celebrates 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.

I came to enjoy the shower in the wheelchair-friendly bathroom.

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

AA Publications

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Bedford Press is an imprint of AA Publications.

For further information visit www.bedfordpress.org

Bedford Press

Architecture Without Content Contributions from Kersten Geers, Joris Kritis, Jelena Pancevac, Giovanni Piovene, Dries Rodet, Andrea Zanderigo Five vols, (c 32 pages each) 210 x 297 mm, col ills, paperback January 2015 978-1-907414-41-1 c £15 Architecture Without Content comprises texts and student work generated from workshops held at Columbia University, Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Graz University of Technology and EPFL Lausanne. Beginning as a study of ‘The Big Box’, a big industrial building that could contain many things, the Architecture Without Content studio develops the idea of a possible architecture of the perimeter, a pragmatic kind of architecture that remains radical and precise.

Practice of Place Emma Smith Contributions from Can Altay, Dennis Atkinson, Ricardo Basbaum, Janna Graham, Lawrence Abu Hamden, Annette Krauss, Laura Marziale, Emily Pethick, Filipa Ramos, Louise Shelly and Ewa Wisieska c 288 pages, c 200 x 135 mm, paperback January 2015 978-1-907414-40-4 c £15 Practice of Place explores the role of social and participatory art practices to consider the contribution of artist and gallery.

Proposing present-tense practices including collaboration, commitment, imagination, play, forgiveness, reflexivity and trust, the book looks at the potential for tactics over strategy as a mode of being in place.

Texts ask how we might consider this theory in relation to the gallery as a bordered space, both physical and imagined.

Published in collaboration with Showroom, London

I came to enjoy the even temperature held by the climate control system.

30

AA News Careers & Prizes Having worked at the AA for over 40 years, retiring Registrar Marilyn Dyer (HonAADipl 2014) has been awarded a RIBA Honorary Fellowship. The Fellowships are awarded annually to people who have made a particular contribution to architecture in its broadest sense. This year’s list also includes Dalibor Vesely (former Tutor and AA Councillor, Hon AA Member), as well as former AA Tutors Mark Swenarton and Peter Carl. www.architecture.com/ stirlingprize/inthonfells2015/ honoraryfellows2015.aspx Stephen Lee Bun Tsang, architect educated at Oxford Brooks and the AA, was made a Bishop (Auxiliary of Hong Kong) on 30 August 2014.

Adam Nathaniel Furman (AADipl(Hons) 2009) won a Design Innovation award at the Blueprint Awards 2014 for his project Identity Parade. www.adamnathanielfurman.com Kristina Kotov (AADipl 1992) with ScanLAB ran the LT Ranch Space Project in Lithuania over summer 2014, carefully dismantling, moving, and re-assembling a vernacular barn with students, artists and local people. http://ltranchpr14.tumblr.com Juan Montoliu Hernandez (AA SED MArch 2014) was shortlisted for RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Master’s Degree Thesis, for ‘CRISIS Architecture: Colonizing existing concrete structures’. http://sed.aaschool.ac.uk/dissertations/ dissertation-projects/2014-2/juanmontoliu-hernandez Sevil Yazıcı (AA DRL MArch 2006) has won The Best Thesis of the Year award at the Istanbul Technical University in the field of Construction Sciences with her dissertation ‘A Material-Based Integrated Computational Design Model in Architecture’. www.sevilyazici.com

The Chilean Pavilion, Monolith Controversies, curated by Pedro Alonso (AA PhD 2007) and Hugo Palmarola, was awarded the Silver Lion for National Participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. Panel, an exhibition by Alonso and Palmarola, was also on view at the AA from May until June 2014. www.aaschool.ac.uk/public/whatson/ exhibitions.php?item=293 www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/ news/07-06.html A team of three recent graduates from the AA’s Housing and Urbanism programme have won first prize in the UN Habitat Competition for Brazil: Mushit Fidelman, Alok Kothari and Neris Parlak (all AA H&U MA 2013). http://issuu.com/aaschool/docs/un_ habitat_report?e=1383209/8067779 http://hu.aaschool.ac.uk/designworkshop/international-designworkshop-recife-brazil-2013 Many congratulations to Haworth Tompkins Architects on receiving the 2014 RIBA Stirling Prize for their redevelopment of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. AA Members enjoyed a brilliant tour of the project last June led by Steve Tompkins with historian Brian Hatton (former AA Tutor) and artist Antoni Malinowski (AA Tutor), whose murals bring alive the public areas of the theatre.

A collaboration between Hooke Park and The Bristol Robotics Laboratory (University of West England) has been announced. Financially supported by the government’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme, it will employ an architectural robotics specialist to develop innovative robotic arm fabrication processes. http://designandmake. aaschool.ac.uk/robot Aristidis Romanos (former AA Tutor) was awarded First Prize in the International Architectural Competition on ‘Utopia and/or Happiness’ sponsored by the UIA (International Union of Architects).

The work submitted was designed in collaboration with Pavlos Aravantinos.

The concept is an elaboration of the Ideal City Project issued by Aristidis in 1973 to Intermediate Unit 6. www.uia.archi/sites/default/files/ eLI07_2014_ang.pdf

I came to enjoy the white walls on which one could draw with one’s eyes.

Lectures & Events Ana Araujo (AA Inter 2 Unit Master) introduced the film ‘Precise Poetry/ Lina Bo Bardi’s Architecture’ at the Barbican on 5 October. The film explored Lina’s projects in São Paulo and Salvador da Bahia and posed the question of what remains of a person in the work they leave behind. www.barbican.org.uk/film/eventdetail.asp?id=16863 Ahmad Sukkar (AA DRL MArch 2006) presented ‘Structures of Light: The Body and Architecture in Premodern Islam’ at Setting Out: the 11th Annual PhD Research Symposium of the Architectural Humanities Research Association in Dublin, on 19 May 2014. http://settingoutsymposium.com Paula Velasco (AA EmTech MSc 2011), Alberto Moletto (AA SED MSc 2009) and Chris Pierce (Head of AA Visiting School and Inter 9 Unit Master) spoke at ‘New Perspectives: a Celebration at Balfron Tower’ on June 21 as part of the London Festival of Architecture. Their lecture was entitled ‘International Capital: The Role of the Émigré in London’. http://design.britishcouncil.org/ blog/2014/jun/06/new-perspectivescelebration-balfron Alexandros Kallegias (AA Athens & Greece Visiting Schools Director) and Elif Erdine (AA PhD Candidate) presented ‘Reprogramming Architecture: Learning via Practical Methodologies’ at eCAADe 2014 on 10–12 September at Northumbria University in Newcastle. Elif also presented with Evan Greenberg (AA EmTech Studio Master) ‘Computing the Urban Block: Local Climate Analysis and Design Strategies’.

Evan also spoke at the Timber Expo, presenting on 8 October. www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/ news-events/events/2014/09/ecaade2014-conference/ More than 40 people attended the reunion of the class of 1964 at the AA on 29 October, some travelling from Australia and the US. The reunion was organised by AA graduate Neil Steedman with the AA Membership Office. To discuss future reunions please contact events@aaschool.ac.uk.

31 Published & Exhibited Marisa Diyana Shahrir (AA Dipl 2008) was one of the exhibitors at Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 for Malaysia. Choosing the subject of Sufficiency, in line with Rem Koolhaas’ theme Fundamentals, Shahrir’s project LOOP aimed to confront the dying art of craftsmanship and juxtapose both digital ways of manufacturing with traditional methods in a single art ensemble. www.marisadiyana.com Jonathan Ball MBE (AADipl 1972) has recently published The Other Side of Eden, which Paul Finch described in the Architects Journal as an ‘account of how, as co-creator of the Eden Project, he was forced out of the client team, denied his legal claim to intellectual property rights, lost his practice, put his family house at risk, and only recovered his life after a prolonged legal struggle with the forces of the Establishment, who lined up to destroy him’.

LOOP>>60Hz, an audio-visual collaboration between musical pioneer John Cale and Liam Young (AA Dip 6 Unit Master) took place at the Barbican on 12 & 13 September. This unique live performance mixed Cale and his band with Young’s own choreographed ‘Drone Orchestra’. Liam Young & Kate Davies (AA Dip 6 Unit Masters) also screened a selection of films developed across their last four years of global expeditions at the V&A’s Friday late on 27 June 2014. They are currently exhibiting as part of Future Fictions at the Z33 Gallery, Hasselt (Belgium) until 4 January 2015. www.barbican.org.uk/news/ artformnews/music www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/f/ friday-late www.z33.be/en/projects/future-fictions The first public exhibition of architectural drawings from the private collection of former AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990) is on display at the Kemper Art Museum in St Louis, USA until 4 January 2015.

‘Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association’ features a collection dating from Alvin’s tenure as chairman of the AA from 1971 until his death in 1990. www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/ exhibitions/9926

Blueprint Magazine’s Issue 336 ‘Pick of the Graduate Shows 2014’ featured on its front cover Zhan Wang’s (AA Dipl 2014) drawing ‘Main Axis – Space Elevator Roundabout’ from his project ‘Lunar Special Economic Zone’. http://pr2014.aaschool.ac.uk Catja de Haas (AA H&U MA 1997) exhibited ‘Through The Plug Hole: Hidden Landscape’, a gigantic peepshow box installation at TESTBED 1 in London. www.testbed1.com www.catjadehaas.com Shantesh Kelvekar (AA LU MA 2011) curated the Architecture Dialect(ic) exhibition with 3rd year students of architecture in Bangalore. The exhibition documented the current architecture language (dialect) as well the present contradictory flux in architecture (dialectic). www.facebook.com/groundresearch Student and Tutors of the AA’s EmTech Programme collaborated with Arup, TRADA, and Hanson Plywood for the London Design Festival 2014 creating Fingers Crossed, a form-active timber structure that was exhibited at ARUP Associates and at the Timber Expo in Birmingham. Using both material and digital computational techniques, the design used plywood sheets CNC-milled at the AAs Digital Prototyping Lab, with a variable pattern of interlocking fingers to create a series of articulated arches that relied solely on friction as a joining solution. www.londondesignfestival.com/ events/fingers-crossed www.facebook.com/emtechstudio The first solo exhibition by Pier Vittorio Aureli (AA Dip 14 Unit Master) was presented at the Betts Project in London, October – November 2014. The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of 30 drawings produced since 2001 as an ongoing investigation into what Aureli has called ‘noncompositional architecture’. www.bettsproject.com The Directors of the AA Visiting School Las Pozas, Umberto Bellardi Ricci (AA Dipl 2010 & Foundation Studio Master) and Carlos Matos (AA Consultant), in collaboration with Kanto Iwamura (AA Dipl 2010) exhibited ‘Beton Machine’ at

Marso Galleria in Mexico City. The exhibition showcased pieces developed during their experimental concrete workshop at Las Pozas Gardens in Xilitla, Mexico.

A unique exhibition marking the centenary of visionary architect, former AA Student and AA Councillor Sir Denys Lasdun (1914–2001) is on show at the Royal College of Physicians in London until 13 February 2015.

Obituaries Former AA President and close friend of the AA Brian Henderson DA(Edin) FRIBA FCSD, who was instrumental in securing scholarships and bursaries for AA students, passed away in June aged 85. Brian was born in Scotland and graduated from Edinburgh University. He moved to London working briefly for Basil Spence before joining YRM, eventually retiring as chairman. During his five decades there Brian’s architectural hand was clearly visible in projects including Gatwick airport and his largest ever challenge, the monumental but simple design of the then controversial nuclear power station, Sizewell B. Brian was also closely engaged in The Michelin Building and worked in collaboration with SOM on the recently listed Wills Tobacco Factory. Beyond the practice, Brian was a supporter and advisor to many individuals and organisations.

He was elected AA President in 1987, the same year that construction began at Sizewell B. Under his Presidency the AA Council introduced the AA Foundation as a separate charity from the AA, with responsibility for safeguarding donations received for student scholarships and bursaries.

After retiring from Council he continued his support of the AA Foundation as a Trustee, and became Chairman of the Trustees from 1999 to 2010, when many of the existing named awards were established. Both his children studied architecture, Annabelle runs her own practice while Fergus, no doubt inspired by Brian’s sybaritic tendency, is the owner and chef of St John. Brian died at home in Wiltshire where he lived with Elizabeth, his wife of 57 years. In recognition of his lifelong contribution to the AA, he was made an Honorary Member of the AA in 2009. An essay

And that was the final sign the doctor needed

32 on Brian’s work and legacy will be published in AA Files 69. An obituary

by Simon Allford was published in RIBA Journal: www.ribaj.com/culture/ brian-henderson Amarjit ‘Amo’ Kalsi RIBA ARB FRSA (AADipl(Hons) 1981), architect and longstanding director at Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners died on 26 August 2014. Born in Nairobi in 1957, Amo’s family soon moved to London. His talent for technical drawing led to his enrolment at the AA in 1975 and having completed his Part 1 studies Amo was offered a placement at Richard Rogers and Partners under the guidance of Frank Peacock and John Young, and a full time position following the completion of his AADipl(Hons).

Amo worked on some of RRP’s most prestigious projects including the now Grade I listed Lloyd’s of London, the Millennium Dome, the European Court of Human Rights Strasbourg and the Stirling Prize-winning Barajas Airport in Madrid. Amo inspired awe and respect in generations of young architects. His guidance and creative mind will be forever evident at Heathrow Terminal 5 where his encouragement extended to every architect and engineer participating in the project. Other notable projects included street furniture for Adshel and Cemusa, a lighting system for the Italian company Reggiani and, most recently, two new major transport hubs in Naples, Italy. Kalsi became Director at the practice in 1988 at the young age of 30, stepping down in 2011 to become a Senior Consultant. His career also saw him appointed as a judge for the 1998 RIBA Awards, and from the late 1990s he appeared as a guest speaker at various events including the RIBA Architecture and Built Environment Lecture in Sheffield in 2008, the Corus Lecture in Liverpool in 2008 and annually at Pennsylvania University in the US. The family of Sir Philip Dowson CBE PRA RIBA (AADipl 1952) informed us of his death in the early hours of 22 August 2014. Sir Philip was educated at Gresham’s School, Norfolk and spent a year reading mathematics at University College, Oxford, before joining the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He returned to study Art History at Clare College,

to release me.

Cambridge, from 1947 to 1950, and then trained at the Architectural Association. He joined Ove Arup and Partners in 1953 as an architect and in 1963, with Ove Arup, Ronald Hobbs and Derek Sugden, became a founding partner and later chief architect of Arup Associates. Composed of an innovative and collaborative team of influential architects, engineers and quantity surveyors, Arup Associates’ approach to design was rational, scientific, and based on a belief that the function of a building, the nature of the materials used and the necessary methods of construction should form the basis of design. Among numerous awards and honours, Sir Philip was made a CBE in 1969, and received a Knighthood in 1980. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1979 and two years later was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. He was President of the Royal Academy of Arts from 1993 to 1999. He is survived by his wife, Lady Sarah Dowson MBE, his son, two daughters, and six grandchildren.

at larger (and smaller) scales and his ability to produce inspirational images and explain complex ideas in graphic form. The AA course encouraged his interest in planning and landscape design and after graduating in 1963 he studied Urban Design at Washington University, St Louis, worked for EDAW in LA and spent a year with SOM’s Urban Design Concept team in Washington DC. Back in the UK he was recruited to Milton Keynes Development Corporation in 1970. His joyful and exciting images of the future city did much to promote the project.

He also created several major landscape features including the Belvedere in Campbell Park, made from road construction spoil. Later he taught at the Bartlett, the South Bank Poly, UCL and USC in Los Angeles, which he much enjoyed. Subsequently at Conran Roche and then in his 18 years at YRM, he developed the masterplans for many new towns, hospitals and university campuses in the UK and abroad, most recently in India, his favourite location.

The architect and former AA Member Sir Richad MacCormac CBE MA(Cantab) PPRIBA RA died aged 75 following a long illness in July 2014. Founder and Director of MJP Architects for 50 years, he was described by the practice’s current managing director Jeremy Estop as ‘an architect’s architect’. He was President of RIBA 1991–93 and served as chair of the Royal Academy’s Architecture Committee and the RA Forum.

MacCormac was famous for his great character and spoke often at the AA as a visiting lecturer, most recently in 2003 with painter Antoni Malinowski and composer Michael Nyman. He was knighted in 2001. Obituaries were published in the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Independent amongst others.

Hermione Hobhouse MBE, who taught at the AA during the 1970s, was a prolific architectural historian, especially on Thomas Cubitt and the history of London, as well as editing the Survey of London and being a former secretary of the Victorian Society. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/11198533/hermionehobhouse-obituary.html

Architect and Urban Designer Andrew Mahaddie MArch ARIBA (AADipl 1963) passed away in April 2014.

Andrew was a Member of the AA throughout his career and became a Life Member in 2012. His wife Clare Mahaddie has kindly sent us this: I met Andrew (latterly known as Bo) in the first year studio at the AA in 1958, as did many of the friends who were at his memorial event in May. Although he could and did design buildings, Bo’s outstanding skills lay in design

The AA has also learnt of the deaths of the following: Antonio Diaz (PlanDipl(AA) 1972 and AA Member since 1969) b 1938, John Desmond Gentle (AADipl 1955) b 1930, Peter C Harrison (AADipl 1952) b 1928, David Ronald Harrison (AADipl 1952) b 1926, Edwin Jobling (AADipl 1953 & AA Member) b 1926, Magnus Jörding (AADipl 1989) b 1962, Jean Mcdonald (AADipl 1948) b 1926, Geoffrey Thomas Myers (AADipl 1952) b 1925, Clive C Plumb (AADipl 1959 & AA Member since 1956) b 1936, Peter John Squires (former AA Student and Member since 1965) b 1940 and Richard Thomas (AADipl 1951 & Member since 1949) b 1920.

Next Issue’s Theme

Escapes

Contributions to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk

School Announcement

Application Deadlines Undergraduate Early: 21 November 2014 Undergraduate Late: 30 January 2015 Graduate Optional Early-Offer: 28 November 2014 Graduate Early: 30 January 2015 Graduate Late: 13 March 2015

As has always been the case, applications received after the deadlines will be accepted at the discretion of the school.

The undergraduate scholarship and bursary deadline has also been moved forward. Applicants who applied by 21 November 2014 will be given priority.

However, the AA is committed to giving as many talented students as possible the opportunity to study. Therefore, for the 2015/16 academic year, we will continue to review all applications received by the 30 January 2015 deadline based on merit.

Graduate applicants wishing to apply for a bursary must submit their applications no later than 30 January 2015. Please see the website for full details. www.aaschool.ac.uk

Benefits for early 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

Mark Fisher Scholarship The AA School is pleased to announce a new scholarship, given in memory of one of the school’s most remarkable graduates, Mark Fisher.

The scholarship has been initiated through a generous donation by James Fairorth and established by Tait Towers in support of AA Students.

The school seeks a worthy student recipient for the inaugural award, for admission to the Diploma School in 2015/16. Eligible candidates include new and current AA students entering 4th Year in 2015/16. The Scholarship covers full tuition fees for two years, with a review after the first year.

Candidates for the Scholarship must demonstrate in their application a commitment to and excellence in forms of architecture that extend to performance and entertainment, in ways that resonate with the career of Mark Fisher.

Recipients will be expected to organise, design and/or give a performance event within the school prior to completion of their studies, as part of a new annual event in the AA Public Programme.

Applications will be considered by a distinguished jury of AA tutors, architects, friends and collaborators of Mark Fisher. To qualify for consideration applicants must meet the AA’s January admissions deadline for the 2015/16 year, and will be asked to attend an interview

by Spring 2015 prior to announcement of this year’s award. Further details regarding the application process will be provided in due course.

For additional information on the Scholarship, please go to: markfisher.aaschool.ac.uk