MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design Architectural Association Graduate School
Sam Jacoby
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
Platon Issaias
Mark Campbell
Spyros Efthymiou
Students
Claudio Nieto
Dario Marcobelli
Ilias Okonomakis
José Ignacio Vargas
Seyithan Özer
Suchendra Akula Venkatesh
Talia Davidi
Gaston Navarro
Lucia Alonso Aranda
Raül Avilla Royo
Ricardo Palma Prieto
Susana Rojas Savinon
Vasav Vakilna
The MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) supports original enquiries into the contemporary city within diverse political, economic, social, historical and cultural contexts. The programme independent piece of interdisciplinary research across the boundaries of architecture, urban design and planning.
The research in Projective Cities is motivated by two central enquiries. research. This is both an intellectual problem, exploring how theory and practice relate to knowledge production and disciplinary knowledge, as practice. Hereby, design and writing are deployed as complementary design research. Second, to develop architectural urbanism as an alternative approach to conventional spatial design methods able to overcome conventional disciplinary separations. Rather than being a singular problem, the city and its design consist of interrelated sets of
Projective Cities is a critical forum to study ideas of governance as a design problem through the conception and formation of the city. Its objective is to respond to contemporary political, social and economic crises and challenges by rethinking what ‘political’ means in terms of spatial design. These collective enquiries are framed by a number of propositions: That architectural and urban plans are formal and theoretical products of disciplinary action as well as a collective outcome of socio-political and economic forces. That design and research are inseparable. That knowledge production and formal production are methodologically linked. That architecture and urbanism are symbiotic spatial.
by Claudio Rojas
The notion of urbanity is increasingly associated with airports, as they have become a key political, economic, and urban driver in a globalised world. Many of the recently designed airports take the form of aviationoriented urban development, an emerging paradigm proposing a encounter between city and airport.
Discussions of how airport and city relate have been on-going in the US and Europe since the 1970s. However, primarily based on an economic perspective. Terms such as ‘airport city’ and ‘Aerotropolis’ have been coined to describe when these models are applied as tools for urbanisation, for example, in the Middle East and China. The case of Dubai South is exemplary for the urbanity or lack thereof that can emerge from this.
Contrary to the economic approach that has created a problematic nonspatial urban discourse based on the economic function of building clusters that surround the airport, this dissertation argues that its urbanity must come from the airport itself, from the distinct functions of aviation and their spatial design. Infrastructure, in this case the airport, should be considered as an important design problem with great relevance to the city. The spatial typologies developed in the dissertation explore the potential that architecture has for dealing with these urban infrastructures. When they are confronted with architecture’s inextricable spatiality and tensions, the design challenge is to create a coherent urban system for the contrasting characteristics of the city and infrastructure in relation to scale, politics, economics and society. The spatial negotiations that presence of a large infrastructural element such as the airport.
by Seyithan Ozer
The dissertation examines the relationships between spatial agencies and pedagogy in schools. Current policies and research reduce the buildings in terms of environmental comfort. School buildings, resultant of such discussions, become limited in the ways in which they operate spatial and pedagogical implications of these quantitative arguments, second, to rethink school typologies and their spatial elements with School buildings materialise power relationships and pedagogies in their formal, organisational and material systems or patterns. They in the form of the classroom, in the form of the schools and in the form of the city. Thus, they negotiate social relations and policies, Their quantitative argument has led in the UK to equal-sized classrooms classroom without recognising other forms of learning and teaching. in relation to pedagogies, proposes the partitioning and creation of classroom clusters. Through this strategy, diverse teaching and learning methods within a cluster with a local sense of community becomes possible.
Beyond the building scale, the dissertation argues that a quantitative communities especially at an urban scale. Thus, the strategy of partitioning is extended to urban scales, and the dissertation investigates the extent schools can organise their surroundings, and consequently contexts. This challenges current policies and regulations governing school designs at the scale of the classroom, the schools and the city in relation to pedagogical arguments.
by Ilias Oikonomakis
The research deals with the housing problem in London and its social, political and economic origins and consequences. One of the consequences is the common phenomenon of house sharing due to high rental prices. Although house sharing is the starting point for the search of new housing typologies, the purpose is not to increase its shft from house sharing to collective living is not new. It appears, most importantly, with historical transformations of domestic space. The in England from the 1840s to the 1920s and the communal living projects in the Soviet Union from the 1910s to the 1930s. In both cases, overcrowded shared houses caused an informal collective of domestic space. Arguably, collective living emerges at historical moments of housing crisis and economic oppression from domestic coexistence found in house sharing. This historical tendency and its possibility in metropolitan London is the motivation of this dissertation to revisit collective living as a design problem.
Collective living is not a stable but dynamic form of living; it is a procedure and a tendency. Its ambition is to create a common life between inhabitants through the collectivisation of domestic tasks and activities. Domestic labour becomes not an individual but a collective lfe. It searches for housing typologies capable of supporting this transformation, and questions the urban role of collective housing by asking how domestic collective space can extend into the urban.
collective living. In this way, the research becomes a reinterpretation and re-conceptualisation of collective living in the present context. Its mutated common meaning is opposed by proposing a re-evaluation of its original economic, social and political ambitions.
by Talia Davidi
The thesis examines the unique relationship between the Israeli state, the local real estate market and its consumers. Through studies of policy, typological analysis and a social and cultural inquiry, it wishes to uncover the ways in which residential architecture and urban planning were used in the process of nation building. From the formation of the Zionist movement to the Israeli state today, land and development were consciously used to form a coherent Jewish society from culturally diverse groups. Therefore, the thesis deals with the local real estate market through three problems: the use of land under governmental control, housing developments as a political project in comparison to the consumers and their individual needs.
As a result of a policy, the Israeli urban fabric is formed by disconnected neighbourhoods and homogenous building typologies. Its urban plan is largely based on the Modernist neighbourhood unit, resulting in homogeneous urban islands. Moreover, in recent years the vast majority of residential construction was composed of apartments with 4-6
Israeli household compositions and necessities. The Israeli consumer on his part accepts this and is leaving the big cities in favour of smaller, socially predictable, urban settlements.
The acceptance of this process is at the heart of the research enquiry, while its aspiration is to provide an architectural framework to a new kind of dystopian political form. Thus, the design proposals are a reaction to
to neutralise a political real estate market and bring to the surface social tensions in local societies. The suggested image of the state at its centenary becomes an opportunity to examine a social trajectory and its future architectural implications.
by Suchendra A. Venkatesh
The Sanskrit word ‘vistara’ means expansion. It was used in the 1980’s in an international exhibition showcasing the evolution of Indian architecture – Vistara: The Architecture of India. The exhibition, curated by Charles Correa explains: ‘the transformation that occurs to a new architecture with every changing time through the external intervention and resurfacing of one’s own past, and the evolution of Indian architecture has been an progression of such Vistaras’.
On this basis, the research project Another Vistara proposes, based on a typological analysis of legislative assembly buildings, a new civic and regional architecture in the State of Karnataka, India. In the context of the recently built legislative assembly building in Karnataka, the Suvarna Soudha, the dissertation argues that this building typology is no longer meaningful in the State’s representation and identity, but instead becomes a symptom of regional political events. In order to improve the relationship between state and population, the project proposes the legislative assembly building as a new infrastructure for the urgently needed education and training in emergent technologies. This develops the assembly as a new campus model.
The analysis of legislative assembly buildings in India reveals two existing models, a complex and unitary model, which are both unsuitable to the regional climatic conditions and increasing security and safety concerns of the contemporary city. Their architecture has remained resistant to the regional context, being limited to the incorporation of symbolic elements and replication of buildings from the past. Through typologies as important elements of vernacular styles and regional architecture adapted to the context, a new vistara is proposed.
http://projectivecitiesaaschoolacuk