Aarchitecture 26 - NON-SENSE

AARCHITECTURE ISSUE 26

NON-SENSE

NEWS FROM THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

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The first issue of AArchitecture, released nine years ago, contained no introduction. It was a brief document that began with a major exposé

by Ed Bottoms of the history of AA journals since their inception. Having such a piece to position the inaugural issue removed the need for an independent piece by the then managing editor Nicola Quinn. All it contained was a brief paragraph adjacent to the list of contributors, for the purpose of explaining the cover image.

In 2009 it invited its first student editors: a paragraph in which the future editors were rallied to the task by being entrusted to create the ‘shape and the feel of each journal’, nestled on page 54 below the new call for submissions for AA Agendas and the back page news articles, (one imagines students back then to have been close readers, perusing to the very end). Come 2012 and the editorial task, through a takeover initiated by Manijeh Verghese, was to be exclusively the task of student members. They were to do more than create the shape and feel, but she encouraged ‘to curate the content communicated to the AA Community’ for the purpose of the continued evolution of the school. (Curiously, the following issue was on curating and provided many expanded definitions of the term).

In typical AA fashion, the subsequent themes began to be understood within almost all realms of possibility, (and like any good piece of criticism, styled in the revelatory advertising rhetoric of that which was never known).

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Here we note the importance of issue 18, an issue which attempted semantic streamlining instead of an unfettered expansion of the thematic phrases or words. Taking an article from the winter issue of 2012, ‘Against Research’, a piece

by Tom Weaver that could really be construed as for reading. But to read, ‘to look at and comprehend the meaning of’ as the first definition by the Oxford English Dictionary could itself be easily misconstrued. What reading AArchitecture does, is not provide a comprehension of the school in any tangible variety, but is more of a lens, an optical device, to look at, its makeup compressing that one term into a single moment: what is printed, but also in between those printed lines, (and the many lines left unprinted). The role of the editor has traditionally been to make such decisions, to modify, correct, condense (and ultimately edit out). Commissioning particular voices, approving select submissions, ‘curating’ the output of the journal to show that really, acting as therapist and so diagnosing: all is as it should be at the school.

The introductions in the following issues were very much a means for the reader to know what might be of interest to him or her. It was a quick summation of each of the individual bits of work, (which happened to come together) to form the journal as a whole. As the years progressed, each issue began to gain less and less in terms of submissions, editing began to contain more email-based pleas and arm twisting than it did grammatical correction. Many an

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awkward encounter was seen as promised contributions, contributors and (now belligerent) editors crossed paths in the small confines of our corridor-ridden school.

An editorial is ‘the parts of a newspaper or magazine which are not advertising’. It is our concern that we do not become the marketers of the design profession, deducing knowledge, but actually producing it. In the same pleading tones of the essay by Latour ‘Why has Criticism run out of steam?’, we ask that we begin to regard what, as both community and school are our matters of concern, (not those matters of fact that we so love to research and reveal).

In an interesting case of reverse psychology, this current issue, Non-Sense refutes the lack of contributions that were received. Seen perhaps as a therapeutic form of relief, outside of the sense of the expected, the serious, the matters of fact.

If the journal is a house built collectively by the community of its subscribers and contributors, the editor is that which haunts that house. The spectre, invisible, behind the scenes. Yet like in every classic horror movie, there is that scene in which the ghost appears. This is that opening scene.

An early error with the equipment, some funny business. Non-Sense.

Konstantina Koulouri and Moad Musbahi, AArchitecture Editors

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AARCHITECTURE ISSUE 26

NON-SENSE

NEWS FROM THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Contents

New From AA Publications & Bedford Press ...... 70 AA Bookshop’s Recommended Reading ................ 76 AA News ........................................................................ 79 AA Notices .................................................................... 87 Issue 27: {Theme} ......................................................... 89

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Prelude to a Utopian Non-Sense ................................ 8 Comic for a Cosmic Island ........................................ 14 Reneisidore-panmuphle ............................................. 16 Blablabla ....................................................................... 20 Photo Elicitation: Moad Musbahi Engages The Dept. of Not-Usually-Valued-Knowledge ....... 22 Insides With No Outsides ......................................... 38 AA Personalities No 2: Hope Bagenal .................... 44 Dance: a Turn From, a Rupture, and a Break ....... 50 The Titleer .................................................................... 56 Excerpts from ‘the Bemusing Musings of Scheherazade A Prufrock’..................................... 60 Rear-view Mirror ........................................................ 66

PRELUDE TO A UTOPIAN NON-SENSE — Alvaro Velasco Perez and Stefan Popa

Alvaro Velasco Perez and Stefan Popa, (AA HCT) discuss the hidden meaning behind Thomas More’s text Utopia.

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http://hct.aaschool.ac.uk

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Is Utopia simply non-sense? It has long been argued as to whether Thomas More’s canonical Utopia (1516) was the presentation of an ideal social system – following the tradition of Plato’s Republic – or the critique of pursuing that idea. The debate is not without basis, the text is full of ambiguities and subtle comical interjections.

The book Utopia, from the Greek ou-topos, nonplace, was initiated by the Portuguese half-sailor half-philosopher, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who visited the island of Utopia in the New World and narrated its structure to More. Hythlodaeus gives a first-hand testimony to the real existence of a utopian system, ‘not things which he had learnt of others only by hearsay, but which he had with his own eyes presently seen and thoroughly view’ (136), More defends. However, the possible double reading of More’s text is embedded within the last name of the traveller, as it seems suspiciously foreign to his Iberian origins. That is because the fictional character is one more mockery: his name literally translates as ‘skilled purveyor of nonsense’ from ancient Greek. More connects tightly the non-place (ou-topos) with non-sense (hythlodaeus).

The introduction of this character in More’s narration is what casts the shadow of doubt on the intended meaning of the text: a philosophical presentation of an ideal social system, or a critique of pursuing that idea?

To add to the polemics of the double meaning of the text, if the system is the actual organisation of an island in the New World, why doesn’t

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More provide its location? To this More replies, excusing his lapse by explaining that someone coughed loudly right at the moment when Hythlodaeus mentioned the precise geographical location: ‘one of the company, by reason of cold taken, I think, a-shipboard, coughed out so loud, that he took from my hearing certain of his [Hythlodaeus’] words.’(138). Again a comical ambiguity.

The moment when More chooses to introduce the character of Hythlodaeus and the excuse for the unknown location offers relevant clues towards determining the purpose of More’s text.

The ‘letter to Peter Giles’ – a missive that More wrote to his friend, presenting him the content of the book and the context of its writing – is placed, in the first edition of the book (1516), as an introduction. It is through this literary device of the opening that More gives a hint to what his intentions are. It is not by chance that the justification is previous to the explanation of the political model.

More uses the introductory letter as pre-lude, as a set of rules previous to the game (ludus) he will develop in the form of a philosophical text.

Through the prelude, More moves the discussion to a space devoid of sense – irrational, or better, previous to any reason – and place. His space is Hythlodaeus’ Utopia or the non-place of the skilled purveyor of nonsense. As the water surrounds the island of Utopia isolating it from the terrestrial constraints, in the same fashion the reader is

Non-Sense Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1518 edition of Utopia.

The lower left-hand corner shows the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus describing the island.

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being extracted from his reality and introduced, through a defined set of rules, to the world of More’s philosophical space. When opening the book, the ‘letter to Peter Giles’ operates as a liminal geography that transports the reader to the island.

Thus, through the prelude, the book itself, a literary space, becomes an ou-topos, an island displaced from reality.

In this way, the book can be read as a farcical critique to the idea of achieving a perfect organisation of society; the space for discussing these ideas is the non-place of non-sense. The nonsense can thus be associated with the space of the paper, where material constraints are excluded and ideal visions can be constructed.

This discussion opens up the possibility of imagining a better world not engaged directly with reality and physical place (topos) but the creation of ‘another reality’ that can face reality tangentially, a space of metaphoric significance – as Robert Smithson puts it in his Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968). Liberated from the constraints of preconception and tradition, the architecture of this utopian world offers many possibilities which have been explored by many architects and thinkers coming after More. The space of the sheet of paper is what enables the philosopher to build up his system, the same way as the architect is allowed to dream of an ideal city only on paper.

However, what maybe has not been that much considered in relation to Utopia is More’s prelude.

Through it, non-sense becomes operative: the

prelude presents something which cannot be demonstrated in itself – something previous to the rationale of sense, yet which gives sense to everything – a nonsensical a priori. The prelude establishes a game, and, as we have seen, it happens that there is something very serious in the game, as much as there is something very sane in non-sense.

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The quotes are extracted from More, Thomas, Utopia. Everyman History, London, 1974.

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Image: Jiadong Qiang

COMIC FOR A COSMIC ISLAND — Jiadong Qiang

Jiadong Qiang, AA Diploma student, uses the form of the comic in order to ask a series of questions.

Why can’t we read architecture like reading a comic? Why can’t we read a comic to form an architectural project? Why can’t we use comic drawing to miscommunicate architecture? http://jiadongqiang.co.uk

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RENEISIDOREPANMUPHLE — Hunter Doyle

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Hunter Doyle, Second Year, presents a manual for his digital archive

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Reneisidore-panmuphle, a website in absurd triplets, of nine hundred and ninety-nine hyperlinks – divided into four cantos, was composed in Paris during the last twenty days of August 2015. The digital archive, a year of his research, from which the present site has been faithfully coded, consists of one hundred and fifty-three folders, in each of which the first item has been reserved for heading (1_NAME,_DATE_Canto #_Ref Code) where the reference code identifies to which of the three key voices the folder refers and used the desktop for organising these tidy folders, whose titles were written in minute 6pt helvetica font, always using a fresh folder to begin a new reference.

Using a highly methodical system the author has organised the previous days’ research into the archive every morning at 6:30 prior to his breakfast but directly after his coffee so as to remain sharp. Each of the four cantos consists of an argument divided into three voices.

There is an incessant flurry of birds outside my current window.

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www.reneisidore-panmuphle.com

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Instructions for Reading 1. Set Screen Resolution to 1920 x 1200 2. Open Google Chrome Browser 3. Click Chrome > Preferences > Advanced Settings 4. Toggle Web Content Zoom to 80% 5. Allow Pop-ups 6. Follow the web address provided on the left hand page 7. Please ignore all pop-ups and focus on what occurs on the main page 8. Only address links or images that are directly related to physical space 9. Notes, provided as numerical footnote links, are arranged in a running commentary.

Read these notes in full prior to the content of the site itself.

10. Take a screenshot by holding Command + Shift + 4 after every third link, including the footnotes, to use as a manual for your second reading.

System requirements: Apple Retina display

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BLABLABLA by Roberto Equisoain (submitted by CanoScan LiDE 120, Eleonor Audi, Fifth Year)

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Photo Konstantina Koulouri and Moad Musbahi

PHOTO ELICITATION: MOAD MUSBAHI ENGAGES THE DEPT. OF NOTUSUALLY-VALUEDKNOWLEDGE — Samantha Hardingham and David Greene

Samantha Hardingham and David Greene, tutors of Zone 7, talk to editor Moad Musbahi on 10 July in the AA Bar. dip7.aaschool.ac.uk www.invisibleuniversity.org

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Is Zone 7 an experiment of the Invisible University (IU)?

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David Greene You know it’s just a bit of plastic with a tail coming out of it…

It’s the most important bit of technology in the building. Funny.

1969: Black Dwarf against Country Life, under chandelier … 2015: _____________ against _____________ under chandelier

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DG That chandelier is still there. A lot of non-sense beautifully spoken still. Special AA language…

There was another thing, not only Black Dwarf. There were the North Vietnamese bags. I wish I kept mine…

I could never decide whether the AA was a supermarket or a petrol station, could I? Come out Lyndon with your hands held high! https://youtu.be/jk68d91htxw – Superbird, Country Joe and the Fish, Woodstock…

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Red brick universities: 1990s … Plate Glass universities: 1961 … Open University: 1969 …

Invisible University: 1971 … IU Prospectus: 2006

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DG The Open University actually just mimics the regimes of the normal university, doesn’t it? The point about the IU was that it was designed to be much more random. It was about something else.

Samantha Hardingham I don’t know what made the IU very different to the 1971 version, other than changes in technology of course. The changes in technology made the pictures look different.

Pictures for IU 71 look more like a conceptual art piece. The practice of thinking through the visual arts glasses rather than architectural spectacles. It’s increasingly difficult to imagine how ubiquitous certain ways of behaving with technology have become now, ten years since the IU Prospectus was published. That way of

exchanging information is much more about a very very fluid exchange between anybody without any form of hierarchy. The only structure of the 24hour clock. It’s already adopted behaviour, that’s what we were really noticing. An ideal condition where there are no courses anymore, you can design and structure an education on that basis.

DG When was Photoshop released?

Editors Early 90s DG At least 20 years before Photoshop, no mobile phones. So as Sam said, more conceptual art.

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Can even the faculty be replaced with this stuff?

SH In the IU you don’t need a passport, a certificate, a bit of paper for authorisation.

Everything is in that white box. Whereas in the IU, because it remains invisible, you don’t have to talk about the passport thing because it all resides in that white box.

DG The poster – on the newsagent’s facade – is the timetable. Mimicking a TV listing guide I found in a Japanese hotel.

SH So the IU takes out that mechanical, logistical part, in theory.

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‘Burn, University, Burn’ people are serving structures, not structures serving people.

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DG I always think that one of the purposes of the Zone is to change people’s heads a bit…

It showed didn’t it? It took us two years.

But hopefully they will go home and tell their father what for…

There used to be a sign when one student’s education is changing, that they change their way of dress. It doesn’t seem to happen as much.

SH They change their haircut as well…

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Remember – Time, Memory and Battery – Life!

DG Everything is time-based. All education is time-based. But everybody has to work to the same timetable, don’t they? This is something that would not happen in the IU. You might be able to do the Fifth Year before you did the Foundation course.

We’ve both taught at all the levels and what is the difference between a First Year student and a Fifth Year student?

SH Well, a lot, but not in the way one would assume the difference to be, at all. There’s a lot that gets unlearned as both a student and a tutor progress.

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Can’t you just jump to Diploma?

(Image – p22)

DG Do you want a job? How about provost? The young Provost? But you wouldn’t have an office.

His office doesn’t exist anymore.

Did it ever exist?

DG They demolished a building but there was a conservation order on the clock, which is still there. I’ve forgotten how many hours you could be in that.

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I think I’d like St Pancras clock tower, getting demolished slowly by the trains, ironically as they signal the time going past.

DG I wish you could get a diploma by putting this on the table. Is it worth a try?

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An AA sample texture – ‘scratch people where they itch’

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DG Artists are trained to think. And to think visually.

SH Architects desire volumes of imagery and to master a way to think up a project.

What does the Invisible University sound like?

The Inaudible University? Conceptually it’s deafening.

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DG What do you think it sounds like?

SH A coffee machine [conversation set on the table closest to the bar].

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Apple Maps over Bolivia (13.473196, -65.872690)

It’s just a seduction.

Where can I go away for this year?

SH I don’t think we should be confusing ourselves with high-end travel agencies. That’s not what we do. But there is stuff to find out for sure.

DG They don’t stay there very long do they?

Somewhere for ten days. They don’t go for three months. It’s just being a tourist, isn’t it really? But it obviously appeals.

SH I am flabbergasted. It’s nine years since we did that newspaper. Is that really how it is?

DG No one dared to say you can choose any unit in the school, did they? Is it really nine years?

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SH I’d love it if we had half Intermediate students and half Diploma students. That would be good.

DG I mean hard work because you’d have to attend all those things at the end of the year. It’s an interesting topic to study with, because nobody really knows what it is. It’s just a kind of endless discussion, isn’t it? I think too many tutors are afraid to admit but they actually don’t know what it is. They are just trying to find out.

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Can we agree that the environmental effects are unclear?

SH There is a sort of openness. We call it an approximation. In order to be approximate, you have to be incredibly precise about what you need to know…

With the proliferation, with all that infinite information, then how do you operate?…

Searching rather than research. Search tends then to go into research but if you can’t research effectively…

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Searching really means being observant actually and when you pick something up to notice it and quite often you pick entirely undervalued bits of knowledge and make meaning out of them and that’s what that bank of information is full of …

Placeholder

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SH I think there are only two conceivable posts for the IU, which are Provost and Caretaker. And searchers of which there is an infinite number.

DG That’s a much nicer name for students, searchers.

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Representation of Oxford Circus Tube

INSIDES WITH NO OUTSIDES — Ryan Neiheiser

Thirteen First Year students attempted to make sense of six important public spaces in London; their tutor, Ryan Neiheiser presents the outcomes. http://www.aafirstyear.com

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How do we make sense of the public spaces of our city? How do we comprehend the shape of a space with no exterior, an inside with no outside?

If public space is understood as a kind of void (whether urban voids in the form of a public square or park, literal voids in the earth as with a tube station, spatial voids in extra-large works of architecture, or simply public voids in the increasingly privatised built environment), how does the public spectator conceptualise (and therefore stake ownership in) this type of formless interiorised space? The challenge is that there is no way to get any distance from these void spaces, no exterior vantage from which to ‘take it all in.’ The single gestalt or plan view denied, the public spectator is forced to move through the space in time, comparing current views to previous ones and then assembling these collected memories together, with the hope that comprehension will emerge from a sort of parallax of spatial observations.

Yve-Alain Bois has traced the emergence and evolution of this radical concept of space, one legible only to the moving spectator. In his article ‘A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara’ of 1983, Bois identifies a strand of thought working against the classical notion of a unified, a priori sense of space and suggests in its place what he calls a modern picturesque space. He writes, ‘this space, from Rodin to Serra, is one of passage and displacement from the centre, a space interrupted by the discontinuous time of involuntary memory,

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Top: Model of the British Museum Bottom: Drawing of the Barbican

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Top: Drawing of Borough Market Bottom: Representation of Trafalgar Square

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a slender space whose divergences it is up to the spectator to explore, while eventually connecting its threads for himself.’ Legibility in this case demands an active engagement between spectator and space – a desire to participate in the making of one’s surroundings, a willingness to operate on the boundary between sense and non-sense.

This past spring, thirteen First Year students tried to make sense of six well-known public voids in London – The Tube: Oxford Circus Station, The Garden: Barbican Centre Gardens, The Square: Trafalgar Square, The Market: Borough Market, The Street: Regent Street at Piccadilly Circus, and The Public Institution: The British Museum – using a range of mapping and representational strategies.

All started from experience, looking and moving and thinking and looking again. These spatial observations were then translated into plans, films, unfolded elevations, written descriptions, and models. Coloured by our wandering minds and inflected by the particular capacities of our individual bodies, the shapes we described were often unexpected: fleeting, discontinuous, and sometimes jarring projections of our participation in the city.

Students: Napat Chayochaichana, Marion Beatrice Edmee Delaporte, Minju Kim, Tanya LeeMonteiro, Chak Hin Leung, Tzu-hsiang (Andy) Lin, Ananya Nevatia, Natalia Pereverzina, Jonas Phillip Simon Popp, Jocelyn Patricia Tang, Zi Ken Toh, Xiaohan (Sharon) Yin, Alix Marie Biehler.

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Hope Bagenal, Harlequinade, July 1927, AA Archives

AA PERSONALITIES NO 2: HOPE BAGENAL — Edward Bottoms

Bringing to light a past personality who influenced the shape of the School today, archivist Edward Bottoms writes about the pioneering acoustician and librarian of the AA. www.aaschool.ac.uk/archives

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For a generation of inter-war AA students, one of the most instantly recognisable sounds would have been the distinctive hollow clunk of Hope Bagenal’s calliper along the wooden floor of the AA Library. A pioneering acoustician of international standing and the AA’s first full-time Librarian, Bagenal is an intriguing figure. In the only known photograph of him taken within the premises he has his back half-turned to the camera, his face in shadow. Descriptions of him vary – from recollections of him as ‘perhaps the greatest genius ever connected with the AA’ to memories of him resembling ‘the reincarnation of some biblical or medieval saint’. For Harlequinade, the AA student journal of the 1920s, he was an easy target – his campaigns to maintain quiet and orderliness in the library and to obtain the return of stolen or ‘lost’ books, giving rise to a personification as the Carpenter from Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.

Born in Ireland in 1888, Bagenal initially studied engineering before taking up an articled pupilage and joining the AA in 1909. By 1914 he had already begun to explore the field of acoustics, corresponding with Wallace Sabine, the Harvard physics professor who had been McKim, Mead and White’s consultant for the Symphony Hall, Boston.

However, two years later, on the outbreak of the First World War, Bagenal’s acoustic research was put on hold. He volunteered as a stretcher bearer for the Royal Army Medical Corp and after two years of service in France was severely wounded

in the leg at the Somme. During this period he appears to have written a significant amount of poetry and prose, some of his writings being gathered together in 1918 as Fields and Battlefields, published under his Regimental number of ‘31540’.

Many of the pieces deal with poignant and often comic encounters behind the lines and describe life in picturesque and, as yet untouched, French villages. Nevertheless, his most intense prose is reserved for the sounds and sights of battle:

During Bagenal’s convalescence at the Eastern General Hospital, Cambridge, his interest in acoustics was encouraged still further, striking up an acquaintance with the physicist, Alex Wood, with whom he was to later collaborate on the seminal Planning for Good Acoustics (1931).

On his full recovery, Bagenal was appointed as AA Librarian and editor of the AA Journal, also lecturing on acoustics and history. He was closely involved in the life of the AA, composing music for a number of the AA drama group productions, but his personal eccentricities were apparently the butt of many jokes. Two students recall how Bagenal would visit remote country churches and, regardless of others, fire off a blank cartridge in order to measure the reverberations. He was

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As we stood the guns were silent. There was a silence and the mute witness of the dead. The earth was hideous, eyeless, burnt blind. In our forsaken trenches the rats reigned supreme.

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a prominent member of the Noise Abatement League, his articles for their journal Quiet including one entitled ‘Silencing a Noisy World’.

Such sensitivities were not lost on AA students and, according to Jane Drew, a group of students rounded up all the barrel organ players on Oxford Street and paid them to play outside the AA whilst Bagenal was lecturing – reportedly driving him apoplectic with rage.

Aside from the student leg-pulling, Bagenal was highly respected as a lecturer within the AA and collaborated with AA Principal Robert Atkinson on what was to become one of the standard inter-war textbooks, Theory and Elements of Architecture (1926). Alongside his AA work, Bagenal’s private acoustic consultancy flourished and he became one of the UK’s acknowledged experts, advising on numerous concert halls, theatres and public buildings at home and abroad.

His most significant projects include the New Delhi Legislative Chamber, the Royal Festival Hall and the Free Trade Hall, Manchester.

If the acoustics of today’s busy AA Library would still perhaps be somewhat challenging to Bagenal’s sensitive ear, his legacy endures in the form of the heavy mahogany tables, designed and carefully detailed by him in the late 1930s.

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AA Pantomime curtain 1921 (detail), AA Archives.

AA staff are depicted as the Gods on Mount Olympus, Bagenal standing in centre.

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DANCE: A TURN FROM, A RUPTURE, AND A BREAK — Davi Weber

Davi Weber, AA HCT, writes about Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, and Sol LeWitt’s collaboration for an unconventional dance piece.

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http://hct.aaschool.ac.uk

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Dance by Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, and Sol LeWitt, performed in 1979 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a new way to address the dancer – through dissolution, dematerialisation, and reproduction. With a lack of hierarchy in their collaboration, the artists were preoccupied by infinite outcomes and the freedom of movement that evaded a dominant or explicit message. Glass originally suggested to Childs that they partner with LeWitt in their experimental performance. In an interview Glass remarked, ‘It was a leap of faith… We were experimenting, we were overthrowing the notion of a narrative.’ 1 Individually, the movement, sound, and scenery could be conceived of as ‘minimal’, but together they manifested an expressive, immersive spectacle. Thus, some critics declared Dance the end of modernist and postmodernist experimentation.

LeWitt’s gridded background – set against stripped-down, serialised dancers both recorded and live – problematised the nature of the frame in Dance. The dance continued in many ways to break from the confines of ballet’s hierarchical staging and LeWitt, Childs and Glass preoccupied themselves with a centreless work. Like Merce Cunningham’s collaborations with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, multiple movements occurred simultaneously without privileging one portion of the stage. Cunningham equated Albert Einstein’s proclamation, ‘There are no fixed points in space,’ to the idea that the entire stage

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possessed opportunity for development.2 LeWitt’s film similarly conveyed this notion through a grid overlay that continued to change size and fill the stage according to the camera’s zoom.

Thus the grid with aggrandised, virtual performers collided with the live dancers and contributed to the general obfuscation within the expansive staging. The shift in focus permeated throughout the piece as dancers overlapped and their repetitive movements and a repetitive score further negated a particular subject.

Movement itself usurped any particular story.

Set to Glass’s repetitive and cheerfully delusional score, the choreography in Dance continued to test the physical presence of the dancers and the possibility of dissolving the stage’s boundaries.

Lindley Hanlon, a critic for the Millenium Film Journal, described the piece: The dancers, singly or in groups, begin to move in regular parallel lines from left to right on and off stage. Later they trace precise diagonal lines… These figures turn and reverse their direction in abrupt strenuous and elegant motions. As the work continues on relentlessly, one marvels at the energy and endurance of the dancers who move on, across, and off the stage hundreds of times, as if motorized by the push-pull mechanism of a projection loop.3

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The rapid, machine-like process forced the viewers to reconsider the singularity of an individual

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dancer; they flickered in and out of focus on stage and on screen, refuting any perception of finitude.

It should also be noted that Krauss in analysing the ‘antinarrative’ and ‘antidevelopmental’ spatiality of the infinite and ‘centrifugal’ grid, concluded her 1979 essay ‘Grids’ with a timely announcement of the then upcoming and unnamed project, Dance.4 The structure of the grid allowed artists to converge in a space of regularity. Less a fixed object of containment, the framework consisted of continuous regularised spacing that served to demarcate nuance. LeWitt believed the grid important for the manifestation of relationships between artistic endeavours that included movement and music, and proclaimed, ‘Regular space might also become a metric time element, a kind of regular beat or pulse. When the interval is kept regular whatever is irregular gains more importance.’ 5 More analogous to the illustrations in treatises on physiological optics of the nineteenth century that Krauss described in ‘Grids,’ the matrix foregrounded particle interaction just as the grid invoked awareness of subtle irregularities (insertions, inversions, etc.) in both the music and the dancers’ movement.

Historian Henry Sayre, in recounting the Derridean ‘trace,’ eloquently summarised the disruption of a ‘self-contained’ work through repetition. ‘There is always, in the repeated occurrence of a thing, a reference to some former occurrence, and in the sustained repetition of a thing a growing awareness that duration alters

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it.’ 6 Elements did not refer only to themselves but referred to the previous element. Sayre elaborated, that as each phrase of music contained traces of the previous, it also deviated from it in a play of differences. Glass anticipated and welcomed this suspension in the purity of his music. He reflected on his listeners’ perception, ‘Psychoacoustical phenomena are part of the content of the music – overtones, undertones, different tones. These are things you hear – there is no doubt that you are hearing them – even though they may not actually be played.’ 7 When an element was sustained it drowned or silenced itself in a monotonous, drone-like manner allowing subtle effects to rise to prominence.

During a period questioning individual autonomy, the spatial implications of nonauthoritative, expansionary and ‘repetitive’ compositions therefore enabled the audience to determine their own focus within the persistent abstraction and numbing euphoria. Millennium’s Hanlon condensed the performance: ‘The overall effect of this collaborative effort of three hitherto labelled “minimalist,” “conceptual,” or “systemic” artists is quite spectacular. In a most positive sense this is a ‘three-ring circus’ charged with energy and vitality, and even a sly sense of humour…’ 8 1.

2.

3.

4.

Walker Art Center 2011 Sayre 1989: 106 Hanlon 1981: 44 Krauss 1979: 64

5.

6.

7.

8.

LeWitt 1967: 83 Sayre 1989: 116 Ibid.: 114 Hanlon 1981: 46

Bibliography Non-Sense

Hanlon, L. (1981) LeWitt/ Childs/Glass: film/dance/ music. Millennium. vol 10–11.

Krauss, R.E. (1979) Grids.

October. vol 9, summer.

LeWitt, S. (1967) ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ Artforum, vol 5, no 10.

Sayre, H. M. (1989) The Object of Performance: The American Avant-garde Since 1970, Chicago: University of Chicago.

Walker Art Center. (2011) A Look at Lucinda Childs/ Philip Glass/Sol LeWitt’s Dance.

[Online] Available from: www.youtube.com/watch? v=cbyoefokgra Accessed: 20 March 2015

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THE TITLEER — Caroline Rabourdin

Caroline Rabourdin, AA Media Studies and History and Theory Studies tutor and PhD candidate at UAL, explores the space between meanings that language is capable of creating.

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www.carolinerabourdin.com

Thrippsy pillivinx, Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs?

– Flosky! beebul trimble flosky! – Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble toga-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinkywisty pomm, Slushypipp.1

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These are the words of Edward Lear in a letter to his friend Evelyn Baring. They are also the first of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s book The Violence of language in which he explains that all linguistic and semantic studies fail in their attempt to decipher the letter. Linguistic studies, like many analytical sciences, don’t like ambiguity. Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, none of those safe and established Saussurean probes can make sense of the words on the page, yet Lecercle eventually manages to make sense of what looks like words and sentences. He goes looking for meaning in various interpretations of his own, through connotations instead of denotations, though he concedes the method itself leads to results that remain unstable; Flinkywisty pomm for instance could mean Best Wishes just as well as it might Go to Hell! Still, he professes that the author intends for nonsense to make sense. In another book, titled Philosophy of Nonsense, starring Lewis Carroll as the main object of study, Lecercle explains that nonsense is not so much the negation of meaning but an oscillation between meanings and adds that

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‘writing outside sense proves to be surprisingly difficult, for meaning puts up a fight’. We seek to understand; we want to make sense, for otherwise we are condemned to perpetual movement. When we are confronted with polysemy, with the single expression of multiple meanings, we try and settle for one of them, we vacillate endlessly to assess the appropriateness of one, or the other, or one, or the other, or one, or the other… we move, we sway.

We dwell in this dynamic space, somewhere in the middle, oscillating between meanings without ever landing on the shore. As Derrida declaims to his perplexed audience, waiting for the title of his ‘Title to be Specified’ conference: ce malaise dure, the unease endures.

But this moment of discomfit, these doubts drifting about the waves or the semantic froth in the air, you don’t dominate them. They leave you awash on the border of a shore where you want to arrive safe and sound or even, I would say, arrive yourself. 2 Here nonsense is a bodily experience, one that betrays our desire to make sense, to reach and arrive, somewhere stable. Nonsense only serves to exemplify, to amplify, what we always do but seldom notice: our propensity to reach for meaning. By positioning our body, by locating ourselves firmly on the ground, meaning will eventually be fixed, and whole. Yet no sooner should you land on the shore, than another might call. You will be drawn.

What happens to you (in hearing the titleer) certainly is neither for nought nor void, nor even totally indeterminate. You hear something quite well (the titleer), you begin to press towards several possible meanings of words [...] (the title…here, in three words, for example, or of a common noun placed and suspended like a title, if at least – another conceptual possibility opened – you knew the Old French word (the titrier spelled t.i.t.r.i.e.r [or the titleer spelled t.i.t.l.e.e.r.]).3

1.

Edward Lear, quoted in Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language, London: Routledge, 1990.

2. Jacques Derrida, Title to be specified, in Parages, trans.

Tom Conley, Stanford University Press, 2011 3. Ibid.

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And so the title here, like the letter from Edward Lear, lacks the fixed meaning one is looking for.

In his essay Derrida says – the essay originated as a verbal address, a lecture delivered in 1979 in two distinct locations, one in Belgium, the other in Germany – that titles themselves are devoid of meaning. They only make sense in relation to the content to which they are near.

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Š Dziga Vertov, Man with a movie camera

EXCERPTS FROM ‘THE BEMUSING MUSINGS OF SCHEHERAZADE A PRUFROCK’ — Nabla Yahya

Nabla Yahya, AA Intermediate student, invents a ghost-narrator and writes a series of short texts examining the role of the film camera. www.aaschool.ac.uk/undergraduate

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‘The Bemusing Musings of Scheherazade A Prufrock’ is an anthology of short texts, based on scenes from a range of films. What the scenes have in common is the ghost-like presence of the camera. Not only does the camera pan, zoom and track, it floats. The texts are written from the point of view of these ‘ghosts’, namely one ghost, Scheherazade A Prufrock, an invention. It is an attempt to explore the consciousness of a camera, and view the scenes from the unique, omniscient perspective of a phantom. The featured excerpts stem from scenes in Taxi Driver (1976) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007), respectively.

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Rhapsody in Red Cue orchestra.

Poof. He wants to disappear. Poof. He thinks he’s dynamite. Poof. He’s a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction. Is that a harp, I hear? And so it goes, the Rhapsody in Red, the score to your nightmares, extinguished by a not so super, superhero. My, my, what a scene this is… I suppose it would be best to get out of here. It’s time to fly away, to float and hover above the scene, like those wretched souls leaving their wretched bodies. Burst into flames and be gone! But first, let’s survey the damage, shall we? Oh, what’s this? Ah, yes, thank you for coming, dearest officers, you’re just in time to see the blood on the walls, on their hands, on their shirts, on the floors, in their eyes… Eyes sealed shut… Eyes bleeding tears… That poor sweet child…

Fly away home, little one. Fly, as I do, as I proceed on this interior journey through the remnants of a violent past… Down the staircase we go, another corpse, terribly morose… A desaturated mess of guns and roses… A rose garden of the macabre, fragrant with death and dismay… Rouge, red, vermillion, yet reduced… Not so carmine, after all… How wearying is the darkness… I must hasten to escape… Cymbals clash, the drums beat on.

Hearts beat on, except for the ones that don’t. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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Dr Darjeeling or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Play with Fire Well, you’ve got your diamonds and you’ve got your pretty clothes And the chauffeur drives your car You let everybody know But don’t play with me, ‘cause you’re playing with fire…

There lies some comfort in the act of twirling, of spinning, of mimicking the constant motion of the planet, fantasizing that you too are a somewhat grand celestial body spinning on, and on, forever, into the ether… Much like the whirling Dervishes of the Orient… Eyelids sealed… Channelling some form of Spirit… Mere mortals… Celestial caricatures… Look here, a family. Torn apart, forcing an impossible reunion. Eyes wide open.

Shared looks, shared emotion, shared blood, shared spirit… Communication without words, or grand gestures but through spirit, for that is how we’re connected, is it not? Innately, intrinsically, inherently… Supposedly but not so, for here I am, yet I am not. But I am spinning, and whirling, and we go spinning from spirit to spirit but not to me, yet I am all spirit, and yes, I’m still here, and yes, this is unjust, but just because this is how it goes, so justly because that’s all we know, all we know is the here and now, and that’s how the story goes, and it goes on and on like a merry-go-round, a carousel, shimmering and bright, so bright, it was so bright, it hurt my eyes and it went on, spinning around and mesmerising and loud and wonderful

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and bewildering and.. A glimmer! Yes. Spinning.

Yes. Praying. Yes. For love, and for gold, and for glory. Cut to: Flight!

Destination; a train… Somewhere… Exotic?

Oh, yes, complete with cobras and tigers and fears, oh my! We’re gliding now. What’s that? He’s leaving on a jet plane? Don’t you know that gliding’s the best form of travel? Oh dear, she’s at the Hotel Chevalier! Ma chérie, Natalie, a true nomad glides! Don’t you know that? We drift and we glide because gliding is elegance epitomised! Let’s glide through time! Traversing space… Traversing time…

Memories as compartments, as enclosures, as entrapments.

Now, fly back home to your mother’s eyes, whilst you can. … So don’t play with me, ‘cause you’re playing with fire.

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Vintage Dressing Mirror $30 (311 Jagoe st.) [x]

REAR-VIEW MIRROR — Sofia Pia Belenky

Second Year Sofia Pia Belenky presents a collection of photographs inspired by the work of Eric Oglander, photographs of mirrors for sale on Craigslist, yardsale of the internet organised into categories and browsed vis mobile from many miles away. These mirrors reflect a sense of domestic voyeurism.

The nonsense defined here is a surplus.

The object contains within itself a space separate from the sale: this space of the private home.

This domestic image defines the object. Now the ‘something else’ becomes the main focus, brought to the forefront.

The frame of the photograph contains the mirror’s frame, which captures its view, portraits of American interiors. https://newyork.craigslist.org/search/fua?query=mirrors

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Top: moving sale (United States) [x] Bottom: PRICES SLASHED - White, 42" mirror $75 (White Plains, NY) [x]

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Top: Plain Large Mirror - $95 (middle village) Bottom: **** LARGE mirror $150 (3115 W. Irving Park Rd.) [x]

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NEW FROM AA PUBLICATIONS AND BEDFORD PRESS

AA Publications is one of the world’s leading architectural publishers. The 2015–16 editorial programme includes the launch of more than two dozen titles by architects, artists, AA tutors and students. The AA’s own Print Studio includes architectural editors, graphic designers and an art director. AA Publications incorporates an in-house imprint, Bedford Press, publishing books and ebooks at the intersection of architecture, visual art, graphic design and theory.

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www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications www.bedfordpress.org

In Progress documents the history of the International Institute of Design (IID), an independent school of architecture founded and directed by Alvin Boyarsky from 1970–72.

Launched in the wake of the institutional upheavals that had swept schools of architecture during the late 1960s, the IID introduced an alternative model of architectural instruction. In Progress details this short-lived experiment and reveals how three architectural gatherings established a new model for architectural education.

Edited and with an introduction by Irene Sunwoo Contributions by Brett Steele, Nicholas Boyarsky, Grahame Shane, Dennis Crompton 272 pp, 297 × 215 mm Extensive col & b / w ills Paperback October 2015 AA Publications 978-1-907896-45-3 c £30

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In Progress: The IID Summer Sessions

AA Publications Book Launch 27 October, 6pm Lecture Hall

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Didier Fiuza Faustino: Misarchitectures Through drawings, photographs and essays this part-monograph part-manifesto explores the ideas that drive the architectural and artistic works of Didier Faustino: the political and ethical conditions for constructing sites and spaces within the socio-cultural layout of the city, and in particular how to approach the problem of the body in both private and public space. At the same time, the book revisits Faustino’s projects, offering new insight into the artist-architect’s perspective.

Didier Fiuza Faustino Contributions by Brett Steele, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Steven Matijcio, Pedro Gadanho and Philippe Vasset c 160 pp, 270 × 200 mm Extensive col & b / w ills Paperback October 2015 AA Publications 978-1-907896-77-4 £40 Saturday Gallery Talk Undomesticated Places 10 October, 3pm AA Gallery

Features essays by the historian Dietrich Neumann on Philip Johnson’s List Art building at Brown University, the academic Diane Ghirardo on Aldo Rossi, the architect Guido Zuliani on John Hejduk, the scholar Andrew Leach on Australia’s Gold Coast and two conversations, one with the Pompidou Centre (through its architects), and the other with Scottish architect Gordon Benson.

160 pp, 297 × 245 mm Col & b / w ills, paperback December 2015 AA Publications ISSN 0261 6823 ISBN 978-1-907896-80-4 £15

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AA Files 71

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Auto-Destructive Art: Metzger at AA In February 1965 Gustav Metzger delivered a lecture at the AA that expanded on his theory of auto-destructive art, which ‘tries to link up and give expression’ to the current situation. In June 1965 the AA released an expanded version of his talk. This new edition, released on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Metzger’s visit, reignites the artist’s call to confront the detrimental effects of technology on human life.

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Gustav Metzger With a preface by Andrew Wilson 40 pp, 297 × 210 mm b / w ills, saddle-stitched paperback with jacket September 2015 Bedford Press 978-1-907414-50-3 £8 Bedford Press Book Launch 12 October, 6.30pm AA Bookshop

Practice of Place explores the role of social and participatory art practices to consider the contribution of artist and gallery. Proposing presenttense 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 The Showroom, London.

Emma Smith 316 pp, 220 × 165 mm b / w ills, paperback October 2015 Bedford Press 978-1-907414-40-4 £15

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Practice of Place

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AA BOOKSHOP’S RECOMMENDED READING: NON-SENSE

The AA Bookshop is one of London’s leading specialist architecture bookshops. Order the following titles online, where a selection of new books, special offers and some backlist titles are available.

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aabookshop.net

This is one of Deleuze’s seminal works. Ranging from Stoic philosophy to Lewis Carroll’s literary and logical paradoxes, Deleuze’s exploration of meaning and meaninglessness takes in language games, sexuality, schizophrenia, psychoanalysis and literature.

Written in an innovative form and witty style, The Logic of Sense is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as Anti-Oedipus.

Gilles Deleuze 180 pp, 200 x 130 mm Paperback New York, 2014 978-0-231059-83-1 £14.99

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The Logic of Sense

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Sir John Soane’s Museum, London The celebrated British architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837) created his extraordinary house-museum from three properties in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Written by the present director of the museum and featuring specially commissioned photographs by Derry Moore, this absorbing account of a unique, perpetually surprising cabinet of curiosities offers a fascinating insight into the genius of an exceptional man. explores this fascinating world from the 1960s until today.

Tim Knox 158 pp, 250 x 250 mm Ills, hardcover London, 2009 978-1-858944-75-3 £24.95

AA News

Careers & Prizes

Result of the Election of Officers and Council 2015/16

My Hotels Group in partnership with designjunction ran a competition for students at the Architectural Association to design a bespoke tea box to be featured in the 34 newly refurbished Double Rooms at My Hotel Bloomsbury. The three short-listed designs were exhibited at designjunction during London Design Festival and were selected by judges Vicky Richardson (AA Council), Johnny Tucker (editor of Blueprint Magazine) and Andreas Thrasyvolou (Founder of MyHotel & AA Dipl 1987).

Declared at 17:02 on 1 May 2015 Candidates Elected Christine Hawley Vicky Richardson Jane Wernick Rory Sherlock Oliver Domeisen Elsie Owusu Jonathan Ellis-Miller Marko Milovanovic

Council members remaining on the ballot without standing for re-election: Past President Sadie Morgan Ordinary Members John Andrews Joanna Chambers Patty Hopkins Sho Ito

Nozomi Nakabayashi (AA MArch Design & Maker 2012) has completed a ‘Hut on Stilts’ at a site a few fields away from the Hooke Park campus.

Working as the designer, contractor and maker of the project Nakabayashi was commissioned by a local writer and the building was largely pre-fabricated at Hooke Park. hookepark.aaschool.ac.uk/hut-onstilts-nozomi-nakabayashi GUN Architects (Jorge Godoy (AA MArch DRL 2004)) and AKT II Engineers’ exhibition for the AA in Bedford Square last summer was shortlisted for New London Architecture Awards ‘The Temporary’. rainforest.aaschool.ac.uk

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Officers formally standing for election, but running unopposed (as per the by-laws): President Paul Warner Hon. Vice President Hugh Pearman Hon. Vice President David Porter Hon. Secretary Richard Patterson Hon. Treasurer David Jenkins

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Natassa Lianou and Ermis Chalvatzis (AA March DRL 2011) of LC Architects were invited to submit a design for regenerating 93 hectares in Athens, Votanikos area.

‘Athens Vision’ was received well by the local authorities and the discussion for realisation of the proposal is underway. lc-a.uk/projects#/athensvision

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Blake Jackson (AA MArch SED 2009) was included in US trade magazine Building Design & Construction’s ‘Forty under 40’ Class of 2015. Given to ‘the emerging superstars of the AEC industry’, Jackson currently works for Tsoi / Kobus & Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. editiondigital.net/ publication/?i=270908 Sabrina Puddu (AA H&U MA 2008), Paolo Pisano (AA Third Year student) and Francesco Zuddas (AA H&U MA 2008) have won the first prize in the Think-Space competition with the project ‘Grand Hotel BeauxArts’. This year’s edition of the conceptual architectural-urban design competition asked for reflections on urban public space in the European context, with the team focusing on solving the lack of affordable housing in Cagliari (Sardinia). think-space.org

Dimitar Dobrev (AA Dipl 2015) won The City Academy Awards 2015, a design competition for architects & students under 30 in Bulgaria. Dimitar entered with a project from his 2nd year (The Slope City of Nested Ecologies) when he was in Intermediate Unit 10 with Claudia Pasquero & Marco Poletto. gradat.bg/news/2015/07/20/ 2575910_gradut_na_sklona_ dinamichen_oazisen_urbanizum/ thecityacademyawards.bg AA Writing Prize Winners 2015 – Sharp Prize Winner: Zeina Al-Derry (AA Dipl 2015), The Melancholic City of Mirages Sharp Prize Commendations: Mahsa Ramezanpour (AA Dip Unit 11), Incarcerating Gender in Captive Spaces Lara Yegenoglu (AA Dip Unit 14), Vernacular Politics: The Gecekondu as an Instutitional Apparatus in Istanbul Third Year Winner: Jane Wong, The Burning House Second Year Winner: Olukoye Akinkugbe, The Inescapable Bias of Representation First Year Winner: Simonpietro Salini, Novitatem meam Contemnvnt Ego Illor Vm Ignaviam: They Despise my Novelty, I Their Timidity Read past nominations and winners at writing.aaschool.ac.uk

RIBA has awarded £10,000 to conduct research on Sustainable Housing Design for the AA’s Sustainable Environmental Design MSc/MArch programme. architecture.com/riba/contactus/ newsandpress/pressreleases/2015/ theribaawards%c2%a335,000tosupportarchitecturalresearch.aspx Published & Exhibited

The AA Print Studio was featured in east-London based cultural magazine itsnicethat. com for the article Aesthetics, academia and architecture: inside the cool, considered world of AA Print Studio www.itsnicethat.com/features/ aa-print-studio

Bridport Arts Centre in Dorset held an exhibition on Hooke Park from 15 August to 19 September.

Architecture, Making and Place presented studentdesigned architectural works from Hooke Park, through photographs, drawings, models, video works and fullscale prototype components of live architectural projects. bridport-arts.com Little Architect, the AA’s education programme for teaching architecture and the urban environment in primary schools, both in and outside London was featured in an exhibition at the Building Centre in London from July–August 2015.

Presented were designs for future skyscrapers, machines to purify the air, floating fun fairs, intriguing ‘Victorians versus Future’ collages and

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Umberto Bellardi Ricci (AA Foundation Tutor and AAVS Director) exhibited at the Architecture of Enjoyment exhibit at Horatio Junior Gallery in London, curated

by Marcelle Joseph. Inspired

by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s forgotten manuscript entitled ‘Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment’ written in 1973 and published for the first time in 2014, this exhibition will feature the visual art of six artists displayed alongside chairs and a daybed designed by six designers or architects. marcellejoseph.com

Mehran Gharleghi (AA MArch EmTech 2009) and Amin Sadeghy (AA MSc Emtech 2008) organised an exhibition in Asia House, London in Collaboration with British Council and SEA. Running in Spring 2015 and called EVOLUTION it was a multidisciplinary exhibition as part of a season of cultural exchange between UK and Iran. asiahouse.org/events/evolution-artarchitecture-exhibition

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bird houses all designed by school children of the course. buildingcentre.co.uk/exhibitions/ little-architect

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Little Architect Director Dolores (Lola) Ruiz Garrido also gave a talk at ETSAV Valencia on the schools’ programme on 28 May. littlearchitect.aaschool.ac.uk

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Christopher Pierce (AA Inter 9 Unit Master & AA Visiting School Programme Director) and Stewart Dodd (AA Inter 1 Unit Master) gave a tour of Architecture Universities in Chengdu, China on the subject ‘Conversations about the AA’ in June.

Conrad Koslowsky and Max Hacke (both AA Dipl 2013) exhibited with Roz Barr Architects with an exhibition ‘Adaptation’. As part of the London Festival of Architecture, Roz Barr Architects presented an inaugural exhibition of models that displays their work and working process through the theme of ‘adaptation’.

Exhibited in this space are projects that demonstrate how – through crafting – sites and existing buildings can be re-imagined and adapted. rozbarr.com

Jeroen van Ameijde and Brendon Carlin (Inter 6 Unit Masters) received an honourable mention at the City Plan Awards for their Changyuan CBD Masterplan provides housing for 90,000 people, retail, culture, services, green space, and a CBD area with a large mall, office buildings and retail in Changyuan, Henan province, China. The pair also spoke at RIBA about the RIBA Shanghai windows project,’When Retail Meets Architecture’ in June. arch2o.com/urban-nature-urbansystems-office Antoni Malinowski (1st Year Course Tutor) produced a major wall painting for the foyer of the new Mathematical Institute in Oxford, the Andrew Wiles Building by Rafael Viñoly. To celebrate and introduce the work Antoni and a series of distinguished speakers lectured on the different impacts and perceptions of colour produced by the micro-structure of the pigments, from an explanation of the pigments themselves to an examination of how the brain perceives colour.

Lectures & Events John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (AA Dip 4 Unit Masters) spoke at The Anthropocene Project Conference in June at Tate Modern tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/ conference/anthropocene-project

Eduardo Rico (AA Landscape Urbanism co Director) lectured at Décroissance/ Shrinkage seminar in May as part of the DÉCROISSANCE/ SHRINKAGE seminar organised by HEPIA School of Landscape and Engineering in Geneva. The lecture called ‘Pan European Atlas of Radical Territories’ described the current project of Landscape Urbanism in exploring forms of praxis that deal with active processes as design problems, outlining material on mapping, landscape simulations and studies of social structures behind landscapes. The lecture also outlined work on development

Elif Erdine (Studio Tutor EmTech, Director Istanbul VS, AA Summer DLAB) presented her paper ‘Tower Revisited: Simultaneous Integration Of Tower Subsystems During Conceptual Design Phase’ at eCAADe 2015. The conference theme was Real Time: Extending the Reach of Computation and took place at TU Wien in September.

Erdine also presented the final outcome of Summer DLAB 2014 with Visiting School co-director Alexandros Kallegias (Director Athens VS, Greece VS, AA MArch DRL 2011) at the conference. info.tuwien.ac.at/ecaade2015 Liam Young (AA Diploma 6 Unit Master) of the Unknown Fields Division and think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today performed ‘City Everywhere, Kim Kardashian and the Dark Side of the Screen’ at The University of Tokyo in June spoke on the Post Human City at ‘The Saga of Continuous Architecture’, a symposium at the Yokahama Port Terminal, an event also featuring Kengo Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima, Arata Isozaki, Jesse Reiser and Hernan Diaz Alonso. t-ads.org/?p=206

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Ana Araujo (AA Inter Unit 2 Tutor) lectured at the Museo Teatro, Commenda di Prè, in Genoa, Italy. As part of an event that celebrated the cultural exchanges between Europe and Latin America, Araujo spoke about Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. www.museidigenova.it

of interfaces and applications of digital technologies in the development of new forms of design agendas.

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Obituaries

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The AA was saddened to learn of the death of influential architect and teacher James Gowan, who died 12 June aged 92. Gowan, a Life Member of the AA and former AA Councillor, was a long time member of the AA academic staff, first teaching at the school in 1957. His architectural career included early work with Lyons, Israel & Ellis, an infamous collaboration with fellow Scottish architect James Stirling from 1956–63 and later working independently on housing and hospital projects.

Tributes have been posted by publications including Building Design and Architects Journal and a funeral was held at West London cemetery on 25 June. theguardian.com/global/2015/ jun/21/james-gowan Derek Brampton, founder and co-manager of the Triangle Bookshop, who died suddenly at his home in Kent on 31 August, will be remembered widely as London’s best architectural bookseller.

Soon after starting the Triangle Bookshop in Kennington, London, he and Alan Young were persuaded by Alvin Boyarsky, AA Chairman (1971–90), to re-locate to the newly refurbished basement of 36 Bedford Square. The business flourished as part

of Boyarsky’s vision of an alternative and dynamic Architectural Association.

To enter Triangle’s doors and browse the books was an essential part of time spent at the AA, made more pleasurable by Derek’s informed intelligence, wit and great sympathy for the seeker of knowledge and inspiration.

Most of the great names in architecture of this period would linger to chat and exchange gossip with Derek.

The shop closed in 2008 upon Derek and Alan’s retirement. Those who knew Derek will remember him for his great love of the arts, his early training and work in the London theatre, and his deep passion for painting to which he devoted most of his spare time, both at the easel and in visiting museums and exhibitions, always open to adventure.

His warmth, knowledge and spirit will be missed. He is survived by his husband and business partner Alan Young whom he met in 1969 and married last year.

The celebrated architect and former AA staff member Jonathan Woolf died 4 September, aged 54. In this obituary originally printed in Architects’ Journal Jonathan Sergison remembers his colleague and friend, with

a preface by former AA Councillor Brendan Woods: Jonathan Woolf who taught with Philippe Barthelemy at the AA in the 90s has died at the age of 54. One of their unit’s end-of-year show’s consisted entirely of models in birch ply sitting on a birch ply table that took up the entire centre of the room. They were one of the inspired pairings of Moshen Mostafavi, who enjoyed creating extraordinary teaching partnerships.

– Brendan Woods

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In the distinguished new English movement of ‘invisible architecture’ Jonathan is the sharpest and most spirited one. He stands for what I understand as English sophistication.

These words by Valerio Olgiati underline the importance and status Jonathan Woolf had for many architects in Europe. His death last weekend has robbed British architecture of a special talent and I am struggling to come to terms with what this means at many levels.

Jonathan was an original thinker who resisted conformity and easy categorisation. The projects and buildings he created are imbued with ideas and an artistry that cannot be replicated. Above all, I feel

the loss of a loyal, kind and generous friend I had the pleasure and good fortune of knowing for 25 years and with whom I shared journeys through life and architecture.

His approach to life involved limitless humour.

What would seem commonplace, ordinary or trivial to many could be retold by Jonathan in a way that was extremely funny, revealing the comic and sometimes farcical aspects of the human condition. Something of this outlook found its way into his architecture – but one would need to look carefully.

Jonathan was born in London in 1961 and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He undertook his formal architectural education at the Kingston School of Architecture, where he was taught by Brendan Woods, Werner Kreis and David Dunster, among others. In fact Woods was so impressed with his degree portfolio that he instigated a prize for the best student, with Jonathan being the first recipient.

After working for Munkenbeck + Marshall among others, Jonathan opened his own architectural studio in 1991. He enjoyed early success, winning the Smithfield Market competition in Dublin (with Jonathan McDowell and Renato Benedetti) and

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an Italian furniture design competition.

Of the numerous projects he realised, many addressed questions of domesticity and notions of dwelling. Three projects stand out: the Brick Leaf House, Hampstead, 2003; the Painted House, Golders Green, 2009; and The Lost Villa, Nairobi, Kenya, 2014.

The Brick Leaf house came to represent what was perceived by many in mainland Europe as a ‘London architecture’; the Painted House is a radical remodelling of the English semi-detached house; and The Lost Villa is a plastic and topographic investigation constructed from local stone and intentionally suggesting timelessness; a sense that the house is an inhabited ruin. For these three great projects alone and their contribution to the discipline of architecture we should be grateful.

In addition to his work in practice, Jonathan was a gifted and inspirational teacher. Between 1995 and 1998 he taught at the Architectural Association with Philippe Barthélémy. In 2003 he was made professor of the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture, a position he held until 2007. Between 2007 and 2009 he was a guest professor at the Accademia di Mendrisio in Switzerland. More recently

he taught at his former school in Kingston, which only a few weeks ago recognised his outstanding career as an educator and architect by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Jonathan is survived by his wife Siobhan, two young daughters Olivia and Natalie, parents Ben and Josephine, sister Deborah, and by the many friends who have been touched by his exceptional personality. jonathanwoolf.com and architectsjournal.co.uk/news/ jonathan-sergison-pays-tribute-towoolf/8688771.article The AA also was informed of the deaths of alumni Stephanie Morland 1924–2015 (AA Dipl 1950) Gerald Murphy 1933–2015 (AA Dipl 1954), Alan Sewell 1926–2015 (AA Dipl 1949), David Felce 1924–2015 (AA Dipl 1926) Christopher Whittaker 1926–2015 (AA Dipl 1951) and AA Member Michael Sadler-Forster 1933–2015,

AA Notices

Didier Faustino: Undomesticated Places Saturday AA Gallery talk 10 October, 3–4.15pm Undomesticated Places presents two projects by the French artist and architect

Non-Sense

AAusterity Birthday Party 34–36 Bedford Square 9 October, 6pm The AA’s annual birthday celebration will this year focus around a reunion for our postwar graduates, 70 years on. Remembering AA life in those early years after the Second World War, we will bring AA staff, students and members together in the spirit of those times. The yearly Via Christina Foot Race will be a battle through the trenches of the Diploma Corridor, with afternoon tea waiting for the victors in the Lecture Hall. Performances will be dispersed throughout the evening alongside the opening of several exhibitions and installations across the school.

Your invite will take the form of a ration card, which you will need to collect your portions of food and drink. Our one concession to luxury will be a colossal birthday cake that will be cut by a special guest of honour to launch a night of festivities to ‘make do and mend’.

Didier Faustino, one inside the AA gallery and one in the public space of Bedford Square.

The first part of the exhibition, inside the building, takes the form of an immersive space in which the video triptych Exploring Dead Buildings 2.0 is shown on giant screens.

The spectator is invited to lie down to enjoy the images of a performance realised on the occasion of the 12th Havana Biennale. On the screens an explorer with a video device fixed on his metallic armour constructs a sensitive archaeology of the School of Ballet, a building designed by Vittorio Garatti in the early 1960s.

Outside, in Bedford Square, a second rendition of This is not a Love Song – created for the first time in 2014, in Meudon, France – will be built. This monochromatic performance-architecture will be a platform in the urban environment, welcoming everyday events to activate its meaning. The installation provides a site for action, in the manner of Speaker’s Corner.

The exhibition presents two approaches to performative practice in the closely-linked fields of contemporary art and architecture, representative of Didier Faustino’s obsession with the location of the body in private and public space.

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AA XX 100: Women in Architecture 1975–2015 36 Bedford Square 7 November, 9.30am – 5.30pm Forty years ago in August 1975 Monica Pidgeon, the editor of Architectural Design, was ‘egged by young women libbers at the AA’ to produce a special issue on Women in Architecture. AA XX 100 will be marking its 40th anniversary with a day-long seminar celebrating women’s creativity and ingenuity.

AA staff, students and members will be showcasing their work. Speakers include: Yasmin Sharrif, Deborah Saunt, Paul Warner, Helen Castle, Peter Murray, Barbara Goldstein, Clare Devine, Lucy Bullivant, Helaine Blumenfeld, Mary Bowman, Eva Alvarez, Judit Kimpian, Eleanor Gawne, Ed Botoms, Mariagiulia Bennicelli, Kate Macintosh, Santa Raymond and Nuria Alvarez.

The event is free for all AA members and non-members to attend but booking is essential.

To book, please visit: memberevents.aaschool.ac.uk Hooke Park Ideas Competition Members of the Architectural Association are invited to take part in an ideas competition that seeks design proposals for the new central academic facility at Hooke Park, the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset. The facility will house a

lecture hall as well as teaching, office and library facilities.

‘The Wakeford Hall’ is being funded by the Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest, the largest private donation ever received by the Architectural Association in its history.

The ideas competition will identify a design strategy that will inform the subsequent development by students of the AA’s MArch Design & Make programme culminating in a new building constructed at Hooke Park. The winner will be invited to Hooke Park to collaborate with the students on the development of the building design.

The competition seeks innovative design ideas for the building of Wakeford Hall, as well as those related to experimental ways of teaching and learning required to realise the building.

For more information and deadline dates please visit hookepark.aaschool.ac.uk/ competition

ISSUE 27 {THEME} A theme park is a combination of rides, on a computer a theme is a combination of colours and sounds, this newsletter will seek to combine your thoughts on {theme}.

We are interested in your interpretation. Essays, poems, drawings, sketches, diagrams or any other formats are welcome. Please submit a 100-word proposal by Friday 16 October 2015 to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk.

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AArchitecture 26 / Term 1, 2015/16 www.aaschool.ac.uk © 2015 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: Konstantilenia Koulouri Moad Musbahi

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Editorial Board: Zak Kyes, AA Art Director Alex Lorente, Membership Brett Steele, AA School Director Design: Claire Lyon Cover image: John Hejduk, preparatory sketch for ‘Victims’ exhibition, 1986.

AA Archives AA Photography: Valerie Bennett and Sue Barr Newsbriefs and obituaries editor: 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

CONTRIBUTORS Edward Bottoms Aleks Catina Hunter Doyle David Greene Samantha Hardingham Ryan Neiheiser Stefan Popa Jiadong Qiang Caroline Rabourdin Alvaro Velasco Perez Davi Weber Nabla Yahya

EDITORS Konstantina Koulouri Moad Musbahi

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