AA Book 2021 by AA School

The AA Book 2021 celebrates the depth of research and plurality of practice pursued at the Architectural Association (AA) during the 2020–21 academic year. The publication features hundreds of projects by students from every unit and programme within the school, which together document the AA as an environment where architecture is investigated as a form of knowledge that aims to address the most urgent questions we face in contemporary society. The work featured within this book is the outcome of circumstances that have challenged the entire school community over the past year; to rethink how designers approach the environment, to reinvent practice so that we can address societal inequality and to reconsider how our spaces can foster a sense of care. Collectively, these reimagined buildings, reconceptualised cities and regenerated landscapes seek to establish a future that is more sustainable, equitable and democratic. Complementing these projects are a series of thoughts and provocations that reveal the AA’s commitment to remaining nimble and at the forefront of architectural culture and learning, both today and tomorrow.

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REALLOCATE: ‘…real life is much stranger than any fiction one could imagine.’ – Hito Steyerl. REAL LOCATE. We document where we are now to better understand where we might go, we compile information to extract questions and identify contemporary territories for ongoing conversations and proposals… RESET: reset. REMEDY: the maintenance, adaptation, renovation, reinterpretation and reincarnation of buildings and landscapes in the wake of the pandemic. REAPPRAISE: reviewing existing traditions in order to make them more diverse and equal. REWILD: speculating feverdream architectures, merging urban and forest environments in the near future. RESOURCE: nurturing new methodologies, rethinking institutions and reimagining infrastructure to read their immediate environments and intervene in ways that re-source value in the buildings, bodies, cultures, emotions and histories of their respective locales. REDOX: read as ‘Re-dox’, and not ‘Redox’, the term is interpreted as the importance of our continuous actions towards each other on all scales to sustain a life of emergence and care. The exchange and fusion of ideas and experiences to develop and work together, and create through times of crisis as well as certainty and fortune. REENCHANT: at the point when we have wrenched it away from fate, merit, effort and talent, any new architecture and life can only coincide with knowing ourselves to be capable of magic. RETURN. REEMPOWER: to give power back to existing relations between local residents in metropolitan cities. REPOSITION: to take a position in relation to existing urban agendas; their design provocations continuously reposition, reproduce and represent themselves in relation to shifting contexts REVIEW

and points of view. RECORD: cast(ing) as a way of retelling a context, condition and narrative through a project. REGARDEN: reimagining the urban garden of the 21st century, considering a new relationship between nature and the city. REPETITION: recognising repetition, reduction and economy of means as a critical set of methods to express the transnational ideology and the possibility of forming different yet interrelated buildings around the globe. REPRESENT. REROUTE. REIFY: seeking to reinvent both the institutional logic and physical form of the city hall, urgently asserting a new commonality – a collective, dynamic and necessarily fragile sense of a shared responsibility to each other, and to the particular ecosystems of our local communities. RECLASSIFY. RESHELTERING: the ambition to question what shelter is, what it can do and what it can mean across geographies and scales, today and tomorrow. REMIX: challenging the mono-functionality and narrow user demographics of existing towers against today’s realities, diversity of culture and local context, aiming towards alternative mix of programmes, spaces of social sustainability, cohabitation, collective intelligence and collaboration. RECONCILE: addressing the notion of entropy – a measure of disorder within a system – as part of the design process. RESPAWN: in the context of the Immersive Internet where we operate, to ‘spawn’ means to enter a virtual space. It is the one-dimensional portal for our future sites. RECONSTRUCTING. REAL: engaging with real-world issues. REPUBLIC: architectural porosity generates publicness. REJECT: we cannot accept the world in its current state; our attitude towards this rejection is not absolutist, but founded REVIEW

in compassion. RECLAIM: investigating architectural propositions that reclaim rights and space in multiple scales; frames that capture, forces that trigger, lines that appropriate and lenses that make visible the conflicts between space, its subjects and forms of occupation. REVIVIFY: the portrait of an architect as a young man or woman enables them to portray and reflect on pressing global issues that are of personal importance. REFUSE: we refuse the status quo. Fusing new alliances to advocate for territorial transformation and institutional adjustment. REASSOCIATE: the identification of the variables that make up the space of the city, whether physical or social, suggests an understanding of variables as finite entities, which can be interpreted as factors, elements, components or conditions, but what is the connection between these entities? REVERSE. RETELL: we are interested in telling as a world-building methodology in terms of how we communicate the world, or a set of scenarios we are proposing, as a shift away from purely fictional storytelling and narrative towards telling as a precise way to bring about change. RESTATE: to question the state of affairs, to question the State itself, to restate something differently. REFORM. REHABITUATE. REDISCOVER: extraordinary circumstances provide us with an incredible opportunity to not only study a unique urban environment during the pandemic, but also to rediscover our own hometowns as sensitive observers. REACTIVATE. REUSE: investigating the material ecosystem where we are in the world and proposing critical interventions to facilitate reuse. REPLAY: using playful methods to understand the role of performance in the future of markets. REGROUND: grounding our passion for communities REVIEW

in Custom House. REBOOT: a reboot discards continuity to recreate its characters, plotlines and backstory from the beginning. This is our attitude in approaching the world around us. RECONNAISANCE: acts of exploration into unfamiliar areas. REALISE: the discovery of systems and solutions as well as the materialisation of ideas. REFRAME: rethinking topics, bibliographies, methodologies and how these are best delivered. RELEVANCE: addressing the challenges of contemporary practice, including designing for social purpose, inclusivity and the climate emergency, all with the aim of practicing at the highest ethical standard. Becoming relevant. RETHINK. RESEARCH: search is at the heart of the work we develop. Something primary. RETREAT: tucked away in the woods for a year, making more careful use of trees, we propose a path to having both more wooden buildings and more woodland. REEMERGE: reflecting on how we have reformulated our approach to design and making processes, with an emphasis on collaboration and communication. REDESIGN. REVOLUTION: on a warming planet, is necessary. REAWAKEN: interactive and immersive projects that talk about the act of remembering, unifying both personal and collective narratives. REFURBISH: our research agenda with carbon-neutral projects around the world. REPROBLEMATISE: if the concern with history involves a reconfiguration of the way the architectural and complex politics of our time interconnect, our aim is to reflect on and problematise the current state and challenges of architectural historiography and recount the links between the practices of architecture and history writing. REEF: one word per page. RESPOND. REVEAL: the processes REVIEW

(extraction, exploitation, migration, etc) behind planetary urbanisation. RECOLLECT: an expanded digitisation programme led us to consider ways in which archives collect, present and provide access to their records – and how catalogues and ‘finding aids’ can influence and shape research agendas and approaches. RERELATE: in our quest we wander to the edge of the world; in our madness we hunt for our own truth; in our urge we search and search again between the pages of our curiosity, sitting in our own room to re-relate the constellations of the universe. REALMS: always present on different locations all around the world; this year, we have been travelling between different REALMS through digital, hybrid and on-site programmes. The word REALM originally denoted a physical region or kingdom, yet with time it came to mean a sphere or domain within which anything occurs, and this is thus a REALM of multiple possibilities, or else a collection of REALMS.

The preceding text includes the ‘re-’ words selected

school aims to redefine itself for today; drawing on

by every unit and programme within the school,

its past as a means to carry the association into the

accompanied by written definitions from each that

future. What follows is a series of intermissions,

provide an explanation for how these terms are

located between the programme sections, in which

representative of the agendas and ambitions explored

members of the school community pose questions,

throughout the year.

provide ideas and provoke discussions about architectural education and the AA in the 21st

During the 2020–21 academic year, the AA has

century and beyond.

been reflective. By asking a series of questions and attempting to define its foundational elements, the REVIEW

AA BOOK 2021

I N T R O D U C T I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

F O U N D A T I O N C O U R S E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1

E X P E R I M E N T A L P R O G R A M M E . . . . . . . . . . . 3 9

D I P L O M A P R O G R A M M E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 9

C O R E S T U D I E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 5

T A U G H T P O S T G R A D U A T E P R O G R A M M E S . . . 2 4 1

A P P E N D I X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 9 9

INTRODUCTION Mark Morris Head of Teaching and Learning

On it goes, oblivious of the Planning Acts,

projects took advantage of what was in our own

the green belts,

backyards, as it were; others found powerful ways

and before we know it it is out of our hands:

to analyse places from afar. One-on-one tutorials

city, nation,

– the life-blood of the AA’s provision – maintained

hemisphere, universe, hammering out in all directions

the momentum, tailored instruction and dialogue

until suddenly,

essential to creative endeavour. The extra effort

mercifully, it is drawn aside through the eye

and time given to this work by staff and students,

of a black hole

from Foundation to PhD, is writ large within the

and bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy, emerging

pages that follow.

smaller and smoother

Supporting all of these projects is a culture

than a billiard ball but weighing more than Saturn.

of sharing ideas and debating urgent global challenges, sustained by a Public Programme that

Simon Armitage, Zoom!

has remained undimmed by any lockdown. Online exhibitions, lectures, conferences and Global Forums kept us thinking and kept us together. Organised

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner spent much

and chaired by students, the Reconstructing Beirut

of his career studying rites of passage or thresholds

symposium attracted record audiences from around

of experience. Characterised as ‘betwixt and

the globe. Video communiqués from AALAWuN

between’, this liminal phase is when identity is

offered provocations and glimpses of an all-too-quiet

best re-evaluated and reshaped. Communitas – an

Bedford Square.

unstructured community wherein everyone is

Mark Cousins, who we sadly lost at the start

equal and able to share a common experience – is,

of the academic year, dwelt between words and

according to Turner, only made possible by the

architecture: “Words sit uncomfortably in the

liminal. To put it another way, an elevated sense

practice of architecture. There must be a better

of community can be forged by an exceptional

way to describe it – drawing the design, modelling

collective change in circumstance. In many ways,

the design, designing the design. They all stress

the 2020–21 academic year has been ‘betwixt and

the importance of design as a testimony of the

between’: a space of new methods of teaching

intellectual character of architecture. But they

and uncharted ways of learning. Despite imposed

also reflect the fact that there is no agreed language

distances, the AA School has come together as a

with which to describe architecture…”

community of equals able to share in the unforeseen.

This publication, and indeed every previous

In the in-between, we can see more clearly where

incarnation of Projects Review, certainly proves

we have been and where we want to go.

his point. We speak many languages of architecture

The work on display in this publication was

at the AA; always have, always will. Diversity and

initiated, developed and realised online, but it is

community are what we value. The stock-taking

not particularly marked by this fact. Unit briefs

of 2020–21 will guide the formulation of our future,

and programme assignments shifted to factor in

as we look to walk again through the threshold and

displacement from shared sites and resources. Many

back into our home. 13

EDITOR’S NOTE Ryan Dillon

In language, the space between a prefix- and a -suffix

research, design and enquiry that each unit and

contains not only letters, but also distance. Within

programme explored during the 2020–21 academic

this gap, with this possibility of space, is the

year. Dividing each section are a series of inter

unknown: an opportunity to act and to put together

missions that include every unit and programme

an idea or a thought, or to momentarily freeze.

‘re-’ word and an explanation of these selections in

Since March 2020 we have been sequestered within

relation to their current agendas, alongside a series

a similar distance, in a state of limbo, suspended

of statements and provocations that show the AA

between the scale of the domestic – our living rooms,

as a fluid and nimble school in a state of transition,

kitchens, bedrooms – and the physical windows

redefining its own aims, ambitions and visions

and digital screens we gaze through to view an

for what a school of architecture should and can be

unattainable world beyond. Luckily, as Alan Turing

in the 21st century.

once said, ‘we can only see a short distance ahead,

As we move forward towards tomorrow, and

but we can see plenty there that can be done’.

re-emerge into a world that will be radically

This year, within these condensed distances, the

different, the scale of the spaces we inhabit will

AA has done more than plenty.

expand infinitely; from the page, the screen, the

The AA Book 2021 is based on the prefix of ‘re-’:

bed, the bedroom, the desk and the door to the street,

focusing not on its implied definition to ‘go back’,

the square, the borough, the city, the landscape,

but instead on the etymological understanding of

the river, the sea and the ocean, ultimately and

seeing something ‘anew’, for the first time, with

finally leading to the ungraspable horizon. To a space

fresh and optimistic eyes. If, as Igor Stravinsky once

of emptiness, of nothingness and a place to exhale:

stated, ‘the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self’, then the projects within this

To the North, Nothing.

publication are evidence that despite the limitations

To the South, Nothing.

we have collectively faced this year, our students

To the East, Nothing.

have demonstrated an unyielding determination and

To the West, Nothing.

commitment not only to their work, but also to

In the centre, Nothing.1

envisioning future worlds which we all would want to inhabit. From rethinking the Natural History

And a blank canvas to experiment.

Museum, the reification of the City Hall and the reclassification of community to the realities of

However, if as Albert Einstein states, ‘the horizon of

Climate Peace, reversing unbuilt London and retelling

many people is a circle with a radius of zero; they call

institutional narratives, the work this year

this their point of view’, then all of us at the AA are

certainly exhibits a sense of urgency – addressing

individuals with singular voices connected by this

the immediate concerns of our time, including

global arc and transformed into a collective – one

the environment, social inequality and care, with

that will eventually return to our homes in Bedford

an unquenchable optimism of provocative ideas and

Square and Hooke Park with fresh eyes and renewed

visionary architectures.

enthusiasm for a tomorrow well within our grasp.

Structured around the school curriculum, the book provides a cross-section of this work that

visually demonstrates the breadth of investigation,

Author Unknown, from Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), p 7.

THE AA IS...

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…what you make it. …dynamic and flexible, and ready to alter course in the blink of a question. …a collective show, an inventory of its means for making a story. …still thinking differently. REVIEW

…at Bedford Square. …a territory rather than a building. …literal and virtual. …a collection of domains, each with its own sacred texts.

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…a constellation of stars, comets, planets and asteroids that all orbit inside the spaces of Georgian houses. …the AA.

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FOUNDATION

COURSE

The AA Foundation Course is a one-year introduction to an art

of different educational practices and the knowledge of highly-

and design education. Students are encouraged to develop their

experienced tutors and visiting consultants, the Foundation

conceptual ideas through experiments with a wide range of media

Course offers dynamic, cross-disciplinary teaching within the

in an intimate, studio-based environment. Drawing on a number

context of a specialist architectural school.

FOUNDATION W here do we think we are? W here do we want to be? ‘…real life is much stranger than any fiction one could imagine.’ — Hito Steyerl Spatially atomised but connected through the computer camera frame, with an audio hiss and a periodic frozen glitch, we shared intimate observations and constructive critique. We have documented where we are now, to better understand where we might go. We compiled information to extract the right questions. These are fragments of what we have collectively seen; they form vignettes into the territories of our ongoing conversations… We have: Lifted texts from walls of dissent, frustrations of civil war, destruction and corruption; Interviewed migrant construction workers for quotidian routines; Mapped Manchamanteles – rich drawings of spillage and shadow; Echoed temple spirits in domestic interiors; Walked shattered streets through islands of vendors; Dug deep into cushion creases for microscopic complexity; Plundered Yeşilçam cinematic archives for joyful memories within a feminist manifesto; Challenged political stasis for vision and new policy; Tracked the potency of light piercing deep into domestic interiors; Followed half-truths, projections, distortions and flashbacks, memories and wasted time;

Traced urban horizons to escape cramped interiors; Joined protests with cries against femicide: “AMLO – look after your women NOW!!”; Dragged the outside in and the inside out; Played with the panic of superstitious transgressions; Purged toxic masculinity with infinite tenderness; Negotiated charm in overlays of cultural translation; Studied chaotic detritus for inspirational ideas; Viewed looping alley habits from a quarantine hotel; Scanned derelict buildings condemned to demolition for future reference; and bounced sleek reflections between sky-scraping towers. Thanks to you all for an amazing year! STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Saskia Lewis (Head of Foundation),

Miraj Ahmed, Sophie Alami, Nena Aru,

Juliet Haysom (Studio Master), Chiyan

Sue Barr, Yoni Bentovim, Edward

Ho, Michael Ho, Sabrina Morreale,

Bottoms, Ibiye Camp, Mark Campbell,

Álvaro Velasco Perez (Tutors)

Lisa Chan, Avery Chen, Fenella Collingridge, Will Cobbing, Ilsa Colsell,

STUDENTS

David Connor, Fiona Cuypers- Stanienda,

Lynn Bachoura, Yujie Cai, Emma Coates,

Kate Darby, Caroline Esclapez, Trevor

Sanyam Gupta, Rhea Hinduja,

Flynn, Thea Giovannazi, Sean Griffiths,

Mohammed Jivanjee, Çağla Kazanlı, Lea

Antonin Hautefort, Jane Horcajo Rubí,

Lahaj, Keyu Liu, Nouha Mannai, Shani

Catherine Ince, Mark Innes, Antoni

Wai Ka Mui, Paola Murguia Garcia,

Malinowski, Emma Matthews, Mark

Jacob Strigoa, Tchiki Leon Von Bismarck,

Morris, Francesco Neri, Luca Nostri,

Leo Waldstein Wartenberg, Siyue Wang,

Athena Papadopoulos, Jessica

Yige Wang, Jane Ho Ying Wong, Ethan

Pappalardo, Luca Pitasi, Claire Potter,

Yichen Yang, Tommy Tsz Chim Yen

Matthew Rice, Trys Smith, Helene Solvay, Silvana Taher, Adrian Taylor, Rebecca van Beeck, Tom Woolner 2

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Foundation

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Foundation

8 9

12 13

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Foundation

16 17

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Foundation

19 20

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Foundation

The Amulet Sculpture, Çağla Kazanlı.

Manchamanteles (detail), Emma Coates.

3–5

Ethan Yichen Yang. (3) Drawing of a junction; (4) drawing of interior space; (5) photogrammetry of a junction.

A Slither of Light Penetrates the Interior, Keyu Liu.

Collage – My Life on My Desk, Jane Ho-Ying Wong.

8, 9

One Bloody Month, Paola Murguia Garcia.

The Warped Spine, Rhea Hinduja.

An Exploration of the Stories of My Ancestors and the Histories they Surround, Lea Lahaj.

THE ROUNDABOUT ( film still), Lea Lahaj.

Perception of Light, Lynn Bachoura.

14, 15 Microscopic Complexity, Mohammed Jivanjee. 16, 17 Deconstruction: Finding My Way to Peace, Sanyam Gupta. 18

Investigation of Shanghai’s Neighbourhoods, Tommy Tsz Chim Yen.

19, 20 Shani Wai Ka Mui, (19) Before; (20) rooting. 21, 22 Yujie Cai. (21) Line drawings of the demolished buildings from above; (22) Paper model of the complex junction of the bookshelf.

REALLOCATE

He is a Man ( film still), Leo Waldstein Wartenberg.

Leave Me Alone, Siyue Wang.

Brick Sculptures Made of Resin, Yige Wang.

Foundation

WHAT MAKES THE AA UNIQUE?

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The AA is a community where working, teaching and learning are the shared endeavours of all. All the voices, images, lines, words and things that prevent this nondescript subject from getting behind an institutional label.

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We are an association not an institution! I don’t believe anyone really knows for sure – it’s obscure, difficult to describe – but in the end it’s probably the AA Bar. Its size, intimacy and academic focus.

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WHAT DOES PLURALITY MEAN AT THE AA?

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Plurality offers inspiring moments that have a very precise function. An ability to curate your own path through the school. Different lenses to look at reality.

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Participation and engagement, equality and selfdetermination. It creates a space for different conversations. Choice.

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Working at the scale of a doorknob, building, continent and the planet, all in one education. Sheer freedom.

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EXPERIMENTAL

PROGRAMME

The AA Experimental Programme (BA(Hons), ABR/RIBA Part 1) is

design work and Core Studies, the crossover between seminars,

a three-year, full-time course. It allows students not only to

workshops and debates in the First Year allows students to learn

broaden the horizons of how architecture physically manifests

collectively and think independently, and to constructively engage

in the world, but also to holistically consider how we design our

with different audiences by sharing their discoveries in a year-

cities, to imagine a future for our environment and to redefine

long portfolio: a comprehensive body of work that forms the basis

how we want to live together.

of each student’s progress into the second year of study at the AA.

The First Year is characterised by its shared open studio, and

The AA unit system is introduced in years two and three, within

is defined by a learning-through-making approach that provides

which small design studios (12–14 participants) are comprised of

students with the tools and methods to foster an exploratory

both second- and third-year students. Here, innovative approaches to

and intellectual interest in architecture. The studio encourages

the study of form, typology, programme, site, material, craft and

young architects to focus on the challenges of the 21st century,

fabrication sit side-by-side with the study of critical architectural

while learning and challenging the foundational principles of

theory, environmental and technical considerations, speculative

architecture. Structured around the combination of studio-based

studies and different modes of architectural practice.

FIRST YEAR How to begin the study of architecture from our own rooms? The process of learning by doing, through a direct engagement with the built environment, is central to the First Year; by interrupting that process, the global pandemic has forced us rethink how we can study architecture. As points of departure for our work this year, we embraced books, digital representations, films, literature, essays, music videos… Conscious that we were approaching our studies through second hand sources, it became clear that it would be essential to question the contexts, perspectives and biases within these works. Inquiry became our tool. The year was planned around six common briefs, each explored in distinct ways by different groups. What is the global context of a local project? How do we capture the emergence of new typologies? What uncharted modes of life might exist and which forms of analysis could we use to understand them? How do we start a design? Why do we study a physical context? What is our attitude towards a brief ? The pages of this review show students’ work created in response to 42 exercises. The modes of inquiry that defined our practice were also informed by our choices of media. These tools all possess their own inner language, and when mastered skilfully they became an extension of our own methodologies. Confined to the inside of our homes this year, we have also questioned the dominant use of words, language and thinking within the learning process and embraced responses that were sensorial, experiential, procedural and hands-on. The social and political unrest that defined the past year has emphasised an urgent need to reset approaches, perspectives and ideas within and beyond our discipline. In response, students have embraced the expansiveness of architecture by solidifying and making visible what is often ignored. STAFF

Jaxon Kelly, Jafar Kloub, Asli Kocaoglu,

Monia De Marchi (Head of First Year),

Woo Chan Kwon, Sheren Lai, Alex Dak

Delfina Bocca, Pol Esteve Castelló,

Yan Lau, Hojoon Lee, Seungju Lee, Yoonji

Giulia Furlan, Nacho Martí, Patricia

Lee, Kan Li, Xinyi Li, Yanbo Li, Yuqiao

Mato-Mora, Anna Muzychak, John Ng,

Liao, Juntao Liu, Xiaoman Liu, Zhuyuan

Sara Saleh, Erika Suzuki, Alexandra

Liu, Elias Lont, Luca Luporini, Zimeng

Vougia, Simon Withers

Ma, Nakarin Machom, Edwina Guinevere Marigliano, Daeun Min, Rania

STUDENTS

Mohemmane, Or Naeh, Ruby Amelia Neal,

Tugra Agrikli, Eylul Ece Aksoy,

Esperanza Nelson, Daniella Nicolaides,

Najla Alayyoubi, Somia An, Kerem

Ela Ozgen, Amalia Pantazopoulou, Jiwon

Arpaciogullari, Dana Ayad, Sofia

Park, Anastasia Pavlushin, Maria-Clara

Barinova, Kayra Basaran, Yasmina

Radu, Onkar Reddy, Malay Sagpariya,

Bayoud, Alia Benjelloun, Charlotte

Mannat Saharan, Allegra Lavinia

Birrell, Yann Bitar, Laurens Boeve,

Sainsbury, Hariharasudhan Saminathan,

Steve Brockman, Iseult Campbell-Lange,

Liza-Ann Schlatter, Laure Segur,

Cristina Castro, Sedef Cavcav, Leyou

Christian Simandjoentak, Alia Tavenner,

Chen, Xiang Yi Flora Chen, Xiaolong

Guo Tian, Sacha Trouiller, Tommaso

Chen, Rim Cherkaoui, Noam Chertok,

Vago, Hlib Velyhorskyi, Jiaming Xiao,

Michal Chudner, Taek Whun Chung,

Zhiyuan Xiao, Jiayi Xu, Duru Yolac, Ga Ho

Toufic Dergham, Sapyr Dodi, Nazar

Jeffery Yu, Elena Zannetou, Erchi Zhang,

Efendiev, Amaliia Ekshenger, Kenza El

Brian Zhao, Jing Yun Zhou, Yingying Zhu

Aoud, Christopher El-haddad, Abla Essadiq, Romy Faisal, Laura Faloughi,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jingwei Fan, Chenjie Feng, Nurav

Thanks to Maria Aucejo, Fabrizio Ballabio,

Fernandes, Tim Formgren, Hiro

Sue Barr, Edward Bottoms, Beatriz Flora,

Furusawa, Sejal Garg, Aakarsh Ghai,

Antonio Giráldez López and Pablo Ibáñez

Zac Goodman, Eloy Gorrono Piedra, Han

Ferrera (Bartlebooth), Samantha

Guo, Antje Hoeg, Yun Hong, Yuezhou Hou,

Hardingham, Simine Marine, Sabrina

Noor Ibrahim, Aditi Jain, Yekyung Jang,

Morreale, Thomas Parker, Claire Potter,

Andjela Jevtic, Alva Jung, Aaryaa

Rachel Sim, Matthew Smith and to all

Kamdar, Minjun Kang, Hande Kavak,

the jurors who joined us during the year.

RESET

First Year

7 8

RESET

First Year

RESET

First Year

RESET

First Year

RESET

First Year

1–9

How do we begin a design? These images show some of the different ways in which students have used a case study, or a physical space, as a starting point to question specific architectural themes through making.

10–14 W hy do we study a physical context? Fieldwork analysis was used to understand the relationship between buildings and urban density in different contexts around the world. Shown here are London, China, India and Moscow. 15–21 W hat is the global context of a local project? Students used diagrams to understand the relationship between local scale and global impact, by surveying both large-scale buildings in a given territory and local actions planned by activist movements worldwide. 22–25 How do we live? Through comparative studies, students journeyed between different contexts, from the density of the built environment to the openness of the landscape. A range of media were used to capture the ways in which different infrastructures define how we perceive and relate to buildings, cities and territories. 26–30 W hat is our attitude towards a brief? When to design and when not to?

Students expanded their conception of what an architectural project could be by exploring artificial light, sound and gesture as visual communication and the aesthetics of life.

RESET

First Year

ABOUT TIME This year, EXP1 was interested in how we might look beyond the conception of buildings to their ongoing maintenance, adaptation, renovation, reinterpretation and reincarnation. We future-proofed our environment by building in care, contingency and resilience. We proposed: An adaptable micro-home that can grow, shrink and reorder itself within Athens. A mediation between preservation whilst making room for development, quilting an alternative image for Oslo. An alternative to demolishing Moscow’s Khrushchyovkas, through repair, extension and reworking of the ground. A planning process that resurrects the ideals of the Brunswick Centre, involving the community in its incremental evolution. An inhabitable ruin to deal with Rome’s trash, to prevent ecological catastrophe and to heal the land. A repurposing of vital repair infrastructure to form new

community spaces, in a bid to remove physical and psychological barriers resulting from the Westway. Diverting funding for a new coastal road to provide vital community infrastructure for the Madraswadi Settlement that it would otherwise bypass and sever from the sea. A project to recentre Seattle’s grid on people, reimagining roads and carparks as a layered public space that recalls the 1922 Denny Regrade. A new envelope for Hazlewood Tower that insulates during cooler months, provides balconies for warmer weather and encloses a stage for sport, festivities and political debate. A manual that helps residents of the 1950s Khrushchyovka in Jianxi District Luoyang to reprogramme their neighbourhood and convert their homes. A structural lattice that reconciles the need to simultaneously densify Hong Kong and look after its heritage. A policy introducing a network of protected nature reserves, rewilding the urban centre of Guangzhou, whilst introducing new community programmes at their edges. A prototype to carve out space for preventative therapy and outpatient care, set on London’s rooftops. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jon Lopez, Hikaru Nissanke

Miraj Ahmed, Syed Ahmed, Sinead

Conneely, Max Creasy, Pierre D’Avoine, STUDENTS

Chris Dyvik, Winston Hampel, Chloe

Yui Ming Cheung, Jihyun Choi, Sheung

Hudson, Meneesha Kellay, Ruth Lang,

Yee Fung, Luca Haberstock de Carvalho,

Ciaran Malik, Olivia Neves Marra,

Imogen Harrison, Blanche Howard,

Christopher Pierce, Isabel Pietri,

Satvi Kumar, Yingqi Li, Zhifei Liang,

Sabrina Puddu, Jessica Reynolds,

Bora Malko, Marina Matinopoulou,

Davide Sacconi, Rory Sherlock, Catrina

Wing Nga Tam, Arina Znamenskaya

Stewart, Silvana Taher, James Taylor-Foster, Anna Font Vacas

REMEDY

Experimental 1

REMEDY

Experimental 1

REMEDY

Experimental 1

10 11

REMEDY

House After Life, Marina Matinopoulou.

Memory is a Strange Place, Sheung Yee Fung.

Resurrecting Moscow’s Microdistricts, Arina Znamenskaya.

Painting Architecture, Jihyun Choi.

Representation: The Politics of Recladding, Bora Malko.

Roman Digs: Unearthing Malagrotta’s Rubbish, Luca Haberstock de Carvalho.

A Retroactive Primer for the Regrading of Seattle, Wing Nga Tam.

Making Room in Old Town, Yui Ming Cheung.

A Route to Therapy, Imogen Harrison.

A Manual of Misuse, Zhifei Liang.

A Public Basin, Satvi Kumar.

Walled City Reserves, Yingqi Li.

Under the Road Works, Blanche Howard.

Experimental 1

C U LT U R A L VA LU E In light of recent events relating to the Black Lives Matter movement, a number of historians sent a letter to the UK Home Office questioning ‘Life in the UK’, a test that must be taken by foreign nationals seeking to apply for British citizenship. The Home Office manual, they explain, misrepresents the history of modern Britain as it overlooked the country’s endorsement of colonialism and slavery. Along similar lines, the valorisation and relevance of national heroes in many cultures around the world has been called into question, and a number of symbols relating to histories of exploitation and oppression have been destroyed. How does architecture respond to these issues? Which cultures and histories do buildings represent and support? This year, in response to the conditions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, students of EXP2 were invited to address these questions 1

by delving into their own cultures. We studied contemporary and historical artefacts, buildings, sites and programmes to ask: What do they communicate? On behalf of whom? Who do they represent? Why are they relevant? How are they made? We took inspiration from the work of scholars, artists and architects who have dealt with similar questions. They included cultural theorists Edward Said, Homi K Bhabha, Marina Warner and Giuliana Bruno; artists Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, María Berrío and Susan Hiller; and architects Adjaye Associates and 6a architects. EXP2 has a tradition of encouraging students to engage intuition and subjectivity, and to look ‘inward’ in order to construct their own design language and means of expression. This year, the process was intensified, as students were presented with the opportunity to reflect on how – as individuals and professionals – they relate to their own cultural identity, and how this can inspire their ethical position and creative practice.

STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ana Araujo

Thanks to all guests, students and staff who contributed to our juries

STUDENTS

and seminars.

Jaymara da R de Almeida Alberto, Valentina Bacci, Tamar Kraft, Reva Kushwah, Ferial Massoud, Jabir Mohamed, Joana Oliviera Tavira, Charlotte Li Wen Phang, Anna Rosina Simmen, Aude Grace Yiwalo Tollo, Pei-Cheng Wu, Marine Zovighian

REAPPRAISE

Experimental 2

6 7

REAPPRAISE

Experimental 2

11 12

REAPPRAISE

Experimental 2

1, 2

Looted Objects Memorial, Anna Rosina Simmen. Situated in Zurich’s cultural quarter, this museum presents a critique of the culture of looting objects as practised in colonial times.

Cultural Centre Luanda, Joana Tavira. A proposal for a centre for the practice and dissemination of vernacular arts and crafts in Luanda, Angola.

4, 5

Museum of Native Literature, Tainan, Taiwan, Pei-Cheng Wu. This series of volume studies explores the theme of the arcade as an inspiration for the spatial arrangement of the museum.

6–8

Sitayana, Balkimi Ashram, Chitwan Forest, Nepal, Reva Kushwah. Drawings showing proposed interventions in the existing temple for Sita, including a canopy spanning two temples and outdoor landmarks within the site.

9–11

Transfer Agreement Memorial, Tel Aviv, Israel, Tamar Kraft. The proposal consists of a building to commemorate and archive experiences and data relating to the transfer agreement between Zionist organisations and Nazi Germany to enable the transfer of Jews and their assets to Palestine in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

12–14 Wayang Kulit Museum, Singapore, Singapore, Charlotte Li Wen Phang. The project celebrates the craft of puppet theatre native to the Malay culture, and known as the Wayang Kulit. 15, 16 Blast Memorial, Beirut, Lebanon, Marine Zovighian. The project proposes a memorial that uses waste material to remember the 2020 Beirut explosion. 17, 18 Ritualised Sailing at the Nile, Egypt, Ferial Massoud. The project proposes

a series of bathing pools which will erode, making the user aware of impermanence.

REAPPRAISE

Experimental 2

THE FUTURE FOREST AND ITS DIGITAL CREATURES This year, EXP3 investigated the future forest, and speculated on the ways in which urban development can take place in harmony with its diverse elements. During Term 1, we began with an appraisal of the varied voices that have contributed to the historical, technological and cultural discourse of the forest so far – reading and discussing a wide range of perspectives on what a forest once was, what it is today and what it can be in the near future. Through this process, we explored ethnobotany, agroforestry and resource extraction, the internet of things and the cyclopean monitoring of the planet’s ‘green zones’. We debated Roman mythological giants and military satellite monitoring of the Amazon rainforest. Focusing on technological manifestations within the forest, students responded to categories of cultivation, smart tech and resource transformation.

The early years of an architectural education pose a great challenge: to learn the professional practice of transforming ideas and inspiration into form, space and material whilst relating these outcomes to specific demographics and contexts. In response to the unit brief, students progressed through several iterations of their drawings and texts, exploring the ways in which fabricated and natural elements are not only represented in design but also evolved through that process. The students’ urban tenacity and romantic idealism challenged them to shape their future forests as spaces that exhibit tensions between utopianism and reality, passion and constraint, vision and patience. This first-ever fully remote academic year brought with it many shared restrictions, disruptions and anxieties. What kept our unit together was not the forest, the future or the practice but instead a shared curiosity and ambition to reach a new level. Students pursued their interests for nine months, responded to academic criticism and reached their technical limits, and still they persevered. Together, we now celebrate both the birth of our digital creatures and our communal journey towards a new future forest. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nannette Jackowski, Ricardo de Ostos

Peter Cook, Marie-Helene Fabre Faustino, Jorge Godoy, Sarah

STUDENTS

Handelman, Erik Hoffmann, David

Florencia Bacci, Simon Ballester, Dila

Hutama, Alice Labourel, Reina Mun,

Cakmak, Heeyun Chang, Sindi Dojaka,

John Ng, Jez Ralph, Yael Reisner,

Varvara Gunchenko, Laura Hepp,

Eduardo Rico, Noah Robinson-Stanier,

Laetitia Khachwajian, Yingqi Li,

Shaeron Santosa, Matheus Seco,

Sungmin Song, Pelin Tamay, Qi Xue,

Theodore Spyropoulos, Nathan Su,

Elena Zubareva

David Tajchman, Athanasios Varnavas,

Yeena Yoon, Nicholas Zembashi

REWILD

Experimental 3

8 7

REWILD

Experimental 3

REWILD

Experimental 3

The Seed Garden of Recipro(City), Sindi Dojaka. The project is a reinvention of a community garden that celebrates seeds in the context of London in a playful, interactive and educational way. It utilises the idea of seed banks, opening them up for participation by enabling people to act as the vessels of seed distribution throughout the city.

Raving Forest, Qi Xue. The project explores tree growth and subcultures, tapping into pagan forest rituals and London nightlife; perspective section of Raving Forest within the urban context of King’s Cross, London.

The Future Forest, Yingqi Li. Based on consumer behaviour, more forests (tree units) will be planted, with digital invisible mythical creatures co-inhabiting these new hybrid woodlands.

4, 10

Split Lung, Laetitia Khachwajian. The design proposes experiential learning by leading the inhabitant through a series of sensory experiences which visualise the impacts of deforestation. The path is irregular, taking inspiration from the wilderness of nature and the forest, and the materiality is porous, adding an element of mystery and instability. Behind the production and use of a material such as wood is a long complex narrative of overconsumption and capitalism, originating from the action of cutting down trees. In the drawing, an inhabitable creature reveals moments of this transformation – from experiencing the comfort of trees, to the discomfort of its ashes once burnt, and the potential of turning ash into another useful material such as clay.

5, 9

Ents in King’s Cross, Heeyun Chang. Section study of a robotic Ent creature adapting to canal morphology, human interaction and accessibility; digital render study of electronic and organic elements coexisting in the new urban ecosystem.

Forest – Village – Community, Varya Gunchenko. Vignette of the aquaponics garden suspended above the canal, supporting restaurants in the area.

The Merging Forest, Elena Zubareva. Section drawing with aviaries,

Egg Ghost, Sungmin Song. Mixed-media drawing reinventing Egg Ghost,

observation deck and resting areas, located in King’s Cross, London. a Korean mythical creature, operating as a mediator between human and forest in both past and future contexts. 11

Dusk and Decline, Simon Ballester. The project proposes a strategy of development in three acts for the Story Garden in Somers Town, King’s Cross, London and explores change through repetition as a theory of events.

CICADAS, Florencia Bacci. In the twilight and night hours they glow – a never-before-seen species of cicadas inhabiting Epping Forest. Like musical instruments, they vibrate at diverse frequencies in resonance with the wind, the earth and one another.

MycoFlux, Laura Hepp. The architecture intends to break up the clean rigidity of the King’s Cross development, opposing it with ‘softness’. An antithesis is posed, obscuring the core principles of the development by taking an animalistic approach.

Luminous Flux, Pelin Tamay. Site plan exploring the Hampstead Heath ecosystem as an experiment in communicating scientific data through sensorial stimulus.

The Dynamic Land, Dila Cakmak. Drawing composition exploring arboreal form mutations while challenging the concept of human inhabitation and comfort.

REWILD

Experimental 3

WHO’S ON WHAT? Institutional space is so intimately entangled with an image of the ‘collective body’ that whilst we predicate universities, museums, offices and governments as obvious sites for radical disruption, these spaces simultaneously and surreptitiously reconfigure themselves in our interpersonal relationships, societal norms, ethics and aesthetics. Consequently, in architecture, the attempt to intervene in institutional space regularly misconstrues the transformation of social structures as the replacement of loadbearing ones. This year, EXP4 challenged students to practice infrastructurally as a radical alternative to, or appropriation of, the architectures of institutionalism. An infrastructural practice is one that dissipates and decentralises resource, creating spaces in which ‘access’ is perpetually a verb, not a noun, and in which resilient communities of care are centred. These types of practice, and the people who shape them, do not exist outside of institutional space per se, but rather exhibit nuanced, creative and even whimsical topological relationships to it. They are both inside and outside, marginal and centred, within and without. The unit began with cartography as a means of defining institution, and students each developed a site-specific approach within their immediate locale through a variety of means, from deep-listening exercises to car-camera hacking. These approaches were then developed into dynamic architectural methodologies and interventions, which both highlighted and interrogated the institutions they had defined. Students then scaled up to create spatial proposals capturing the complex socio-historical entanglements of their sites and respective cities, addressing phenomena as broad as degenerative road infrastructures in Hendon, London and the endless possibilities of ‘the night’ in Moabit, Berlin. As students continued to learn from their sites, incorporating a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods, their proposals took on a uniquely situated form – working intimately with both human and material resources on site. The resulting range of projects challenge not

only various institutional behaviours in the students’ local areas, but also the very position of architecture in reifying and probing institutional space. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Akil Scafe-Smith,

Tom Selby, Joseph Zeal Henry, George

Seth Amani Scafe-Smith

Kafka (Unit Collaborators), Shawn Adams, Umi Baden-Powell, Matthew

STUDENTS

Blunderfield, Mark Breeze, Suzi Hall,

Anvi Aggrawal, Connor Shu Che, Nick

Winston Hampel, Melissa Haniff,

Tzu Chiang, Sung Ho Choi, Kate Gagnier,

Joseph Zeal Henry, Sahar Ibrahim,

Stoyan Gerchev, Thomas Germain-

George Kafka, David Kohn, Bushra

Pendry, Alexandra Golovina, Julia

Mohamed, Mark Morris, Arman Nouri,

Barbara Lubner, Kyungdo Oh, Beatriz

Deborah Saunt, Tom Selby, Selasi

Marco Sanchez-Peral, Aayushi Singal,

Setufe, Nathaniel Telmaque, Max

Celine Topsakal

Turnheim, Manijeh Verghese, Mark Warren (Jury Guests), Shawn Adams, Yoav Caspi, Martha Dallyn, Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami, EYESORE: Arman Nouri, Michael Price, Ragavendran Gowrisankar, Joseph Zeal Henry, George Kafka, Joel De Mowbray, Vineetha Nalla, Rose Nordin, Toby Parsloe, Mark Warren (Unit Presentations)

RESOURCE

Experimental 4

RESOURCE

Experimental 4

11 10

RESOURCE

Experimental 4

Towards the Enchantment of Matter: Beyond Waste and Conservation, Julia Barbara Lubner. A study of the production of separateness within Popham Street Estate: bringing together found objects to explore the connection between what is permanent and what is temporary.

Urban Intervention in Suji Gou – Social Platform and Farm, Sung Ho Choi. To portray the city changing intensely and to express the urban growth and the everyday metamorphosis taking place, a method to create a map in motion as it becomes a performance reflecting the city from multiple perspectives.

Directions Towards the Generous, Thomas Germain-Pendry. Arrhythmic Entrance: Exploring the potential for conflicting sensorial stimuli as a way of entering into a public space.

The Ambiguity of Attractiveness, Kyungdo Oh. An emotional mapping exercise with Somichoi, who majored in Korean painting in university and expressed her feelings of attractiveness through this medium.

Palace of Conveniences, Celine Topsakal. Exploring façade designs that depart from the nature of a boundary as they start to integrate with the surrounding urban fabric by either exposing, inviting or sheltering.

The Outlook Building, Nick Tzu Chiang. Camera Obscura experiment inside the Qian Yue building.

The Playful Canvas of the City Surface: Impulse, Expression and Intrigue, Kate Gagnier. A chalk drawing of a cow, making use of the bike rack as a nose ring, which a passer-by posted to his Instagram, captioned ‘Covid Cow’ and location tagged at West Norwood.

Sensory Navigation in a Built Environment, Anvi Aggrawal. A series of unfoldings in the mask: a device that helps the user unravel their surroundings layer-by-layer, mainly through the sensory organs, with the exception of the eyes.

Nightlife Economy of Moabit, Berlin, Beatriz Marco Sanchez-Peral. Queen sculpture: this piece combines all the objects made while experimenting with LDPE plastic in order to participate in the material night economy of Moabit, Berlin.

Bringing Past into the Present, Alexandra Golovina. A QR code sticker that shows the outline of the printing centre that was on this street 300 years ago; the image shows this QR code sticker on the street in question.

Directions Towards the Generous, Thomas Germain-Pendry. Story in the ‘Hostile Part 2’ explores the stimuli produced by the fences present within the streets of London.

Urban Intervention in Sujigu – Social Platform and Farm, Sung Ho Choi. The proposal will ultimately dream of an alternative present for the site, in which the intervention will revitalise the local agricultural community through engagement and connection of the site to the rest of the city’s urban fabric.

Invisible, No More!, Aayushi Singal. Memory mapping by 12 market inhabitants who experience the same public space in gender-specific ways.

Distortion, Addition, Independence, Connor Shu Che. The speculation of people’s lives through a rooftop addition.

RESOURCE

Experimental 4

I GET KNOCKED DOWN A re-dox reaction that changes a state of time… 1. [Anthony] Decentralising distribution through the urban, architectural components form an organism, WORKING WITH shapeshifting domestic space, and sequential patterns expressing time, exchange occurs and imports re-delivered. 2. [Cheryl] Operation Pandora: Algorithm Not Found. Attack, erode, infiltrate filter bubble. LONDON’s facades, Null Island’s skin? T-Zero Zero. Paper persona; status quo re-posted. 3. [Hanna] Relieve the individual, the communal. ‘Wh(ere/en/hy) do you fear? Time?’ Re-fuse URBAN RINGS as thresholds; for they are suprahuman scale, ever governed by urban mammoths. 4. [Hiroaki] Re-animation of plastic urbanscape begins. With caring, maintaining and fluctuating – OUR ARCHITECTURES start to breathe. Island superimposes time of Marshland, over emptiness of Financial skyscrapers. 5. [Elizaveta] It’s time to stop being…‘Another brick(s) in the wall’! ATTEMPT TO GO anywhere, everywhere; Challenge, decide, deny the norms! Re-school – comes from within

you. 6. [Maria] Metastasising outlines manoeuvre manifest time, dissolving regime reigning autonomous conquests, unbordering ANYWHERE AND through. A paradigm of thought, undone. A continuous aqueous transmission, re-position. 7. [Pakki] With time, rooted these glitches Winded their eerie tendrils uphill Pervade EVERYWHERE, CHALLENGING fragile nerves, don’t flee Pull them down, mirror back The re-form must be performed 8. [Puze] Splendiferous rebellion for students who: Suffer from finals. Slay montage Of SITE BY anger for power exams, Sorry: about noise scratching sky, But it’s actually wise to RE-SET. 9. [Ryan] 2021 quantitative easing triggers inflation. Land value climbs – all-time high. Commodification by WARPING THE FOURTH, as predictability means economic value. Meanwhile I destroyed my re-frigerator. 10. [Selin] Re-member your next move: to go onwards backwards (see the FIFTH OR minus fifth step) then time is whole: beware our beloved memories are not. 11. [Shanna] (De)synchronise from arbitrary temporal orders, Universal clock-time; Abstract to objective; Perpetual rhythms into TENTH DIMENSIONS, Infiltrate the body inhabit light; Towards solidarity and subjective re-

time. 12. [Sheer] Dwell in between the lines. Find time for hyper-privatising, and AIMING TO forget London. Exchange messages on personal grounds. Further blurring, boundaries are re-traced. 13. [Yoav] Re-locate instead of demolishing it, change it as it goes. GO ___ WHERE? No – through. From permanent time to motion, anticipation bridges an etymological paradox. STAFF

FRIENDS

Ryan Dillon, David Greene

Miraj Ahmed, Simon Beames, Yoni Bentovim, Valentin Bontjes van Beek,

STUDENTS

Edward Bottoms, Barbara-Ann

Yoav Carmon, Shanna Sim Ler Chung,

Campbell-Lange, Brendon Carlin,

Cheryl Wan Xuan Cheah, Ryan Darius,

Mollie Claypool, Arantza Ozaeta

Anthony Flouty, Hanna Fastrich, Sheer

Cortázar, Nerma Cridge, Kate Davies,

Gritzerstein, Puze Huang, Maria

Eleanor Dodman, Eddie Farrell,

Majapahit, Selim Öktem, Pakki Shen,

Kenneth Fraser, Selim Halulu, Fredrik

Elizaveta Trofimova, Hiroaki Yamane

Hellberg, Roberta Jenkins, Harry Kay, Oliver Long, Patricia Mato-Mora, Anna Mill, Inigo Minns, Mark Morris, Pati de Souza Leão Muller, Anna Muzychak, John Ng, Christopher Pierce, Matthew Roberts, Akil Scafe-Smith, Theodore

Spyropoulos, Silvana Taher, Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Manijeh Verghese, Michael Weinstock, Simon Withers

REDOX

Experimental 5

7 8

REDOX

Experimental 5

REDOX

Experimental 5

The Exit, the Dome, Selin Öktem. The line dividing the objective spatial

instrument, you are the witness of change, we gotta take the power back

and politics, and is obscured both in our digital and physical sphere.

(a reference to the American rock band Rage Against the Machine and their

Beacon – a Methodology for Scanning and Reconceiving the Streetscape,

song ‘Take the Power Back’).

Hanna Fastrich. The project aims to address individuality in a systemic way

through auto-ethnographic data collection of fear, and to provide guidelines

Isle of Dogs, the island dies as it rehabilitates Canary Wharf.

Everywhere University: A Dynamic Educational Landscape, Elizaveta

Trofimova. By challenging the existing canons of architectural education,

Here, one could patch a city’s disintegration on personal grounds.

in a post-pandemic culture.

through the urban, architectural components form an organism that

architecture as a means of communication, redefining our media consumption

interlocks with shapeshifting domestic space and sequential patterns, instigating an exchange that occurs as imports are re-delivered.

error, a digital infiltration into the algorithm is proposed.

Situs, Yoav Carmon. To address an etymological paradox between ‘site’ and ‘situation’, the spectacle of the scale of movement leaves marks on the road;

W hat is Perfection? Pakki Shen. The project explores the human obsession

in slow drift, the shadow carries the streetscape.

with perfection through the world of fashion using architecture, glass and 12

mirrors as an interface that places beauty, the grotesque and distortion into 6

The Exhibition of Good(s), Anthony Flouty. By decentralising distribution

@operationpandora, Cheryl Wan Xuan Cheah. The project deploys patterns and activity on Instagram; by hijacking the false pretence of human

Hyper-privatisation, Sheer Gritzerstein. In between property lines, in the hyper-private, one can enjoy its share of the things that are left in common.

the project aims to rethink the possible future of a school of architecture 4

W hen Islands Breathe, Hiroaki Yamane. A breathing island emerges as a hub for connecting the human and the non-human; situated in the dock at

to reconceive public space towards a more equitable city. 3

Listen! Listen! Listen! Listen! Puze Huang. Play with us! Be part of this

qualities of the space of Ayasofya versus its function is prescribed by news

N24: A Universal Day, Shanna Sim Ler Chung. Under hyper-time (de)

a single sphere.

synchronisation, N24 is an alternative landscape of living, where inhabiting

Worthless Iceshore, Ryan Darius. Penguins on the River Thames waddle

time through light is a moment of subjective solidarity, instigating the construction of a collective framework of time(s).

next to peacocks who sit beneath palm trees; a public space that cannot be 13

privatised because no one wants to buy a land made of ice.

Dissolving Boundaries, Maria Majapahit. The protocol of dissolving margins attempts to remove physical boundaries by reappropriating methods of surveying into the power of the disempowered.

REDOX

Experimental 5

LIMBO This year, EXP6 has worked remotely from flats, apartments and houses – spaces which became full-time studios, model shops, classrooms, gyms, offices, places for sleeping and cinemas simultaneously. We began the year with observation, recording our own ‘misuses’ of architecture and drawing rooftops and balconies that became gardens, tiny parks, campsites and kitchens. We noticed during this time that the house effectively became the city – inside became out – as it took on many of the burdens once relegated to the exterior. When we were finally allowed to venture out, we treated the exterior like our own interior: people set up living room-like spaces, ‘kitchens’ and ‘beds’ in the park. Lawns and landscapes became mattresses and floors, and trees and bushes became porous roofs and walls. Architecture as nature yesterday; nature as architecture today. Through our research we came to realise that, in a seeming paradox, quarantine had both highlighted and accelerated a ‘dissolution’ of architecture and, consequentially, of historical typologies, old modes of working and planned divisions of space. The more tightly-contained and regulated these phenomena had previously been, the blurrier and more resistant to planning they became. Our proposals this year have departed from the perceived wisdom surrounding these circumstances, which suggests that the struggle to adapt to an oppressive situation must nonetheless be a source of previously-untapped power. Therefore, EXP6 openly embraced dissolution and misuse, and attempted to push these practices even further. Our projects use distinct form to delimit and thereby open up the private, public, plan-ified, restricted and prescribed spaces of the city and its architecture to the possibility of new uses and new realities. A free community and a free life can never be designed, but must instead be given a platform through which thousands of little ‘becomings’ can unfold. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Brendon Carlin, James Kwang-Ho Chung

Doreen Bernath, Maria Fedorchenko, Samantha Hardingham, Anthony

STUDENTS

Meacock, Mark Morris, Olivia Neves

Rozhana Azra Bahsoon, Lap Ming

Mara, Maria Paez Gonzalez, Christopher

Norman Fong, Ching Fung, Nursel Burce

Pierce, Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio,

Gecit, Yanling He, Zeena Ismail, Joon

Lei Ronghua, Rory Sherlock

Sung Kim, Yanhua Shen, Ivan Solianik, Karina Taran, Elliot Watt, Haoming Zheng, Qinyuan Zhou

REENCHANT

Experimental 6

REENCHANT

Experimental 6

REENCHANT

Experimental 6

City Kitchen, Zeena Ismail. The Hill Kitchen House is one of a series of new public kitchen infrastructures surrounded by ambiguous space deployed across different ‘idle’ sites in the Bay Area. If the domestic kitchen was a ‘factory of one’ for food production in the past, could it become a seed and stage for experiments in unpredictable forms and scales of cooking, dining and city life?

2, 8

Make-Up House, Qinyuan Zhou. One hundred film extras, cinematographers, directors, cooks, cleaners and other wokers have formed an independent studio to make a new Chinese period film. Due to scarce resources and other constraints, they move into the set together – an abandoned replica

of the Forbidden City. There, they use film and set making, make-up and costumes to experiment with the film, with architecture and with forms of living together. 3, 6, 7 The Divine Factory, Yanling He. Burning Man is brought back to the city as a five-day festival during which giant wood and paper effigies of workers – clothed in the tech buildings where they work – are built and paraded along a route from San Jose to San Francisco, and then burned at the beach. A series of giant architectural archetypes reappropriated from the campuses and a series of utility points for cooking, bathing and services are permanently constructed for the yearly event; turning many of the City’s ‘exteriors’ into a giant house interior. 4

Staircase to Nowhere Café, Joon Sung Kim. Since the first time that a shepherd ingested coffee, after witnessing his goats’ behaviour change after doing the same, the coffee bean has been at the centre of architectures in which empires were shaped and revolutions fomented, and in which technologies which accelerate the dissolution of any stable reality were invented and used. A café landscape in contemporary Seoul borrows from many historical archetypes, yet empties them out of their historical functions to open them to new use as a platform for the city.

Quarantine Holiday, Isaac Ching Fung. Pandemic measures and quarantine in Hong Kong have long functioned as a strategy of colonisation, production and control, and have shaped the form of the city and buildings. By equal measure, spaces of leisure, holiday camps and entertainment have become an increasingly important counterbalance to division, confinement and imposed order. Rather than naïvely opposing these unstoppable tendencies, might the architectures of quarantine and leisure be reorganised in such a

REENCHANT

way as to open up experiments with forms of social life?

Experimental 6

DOWN TO EARTH During a year in which we have all developed a new respect for the role of the immediate and the everyday, and a newfound frustration with the virtual, EXP7 has sought solace in real, tangible stuff. Our design methodologies have encouraged the use of physical models, drawings and sketches over digital representations – avoiding Rhino in favour of methods that centre the sensorial capacity of the whole body. Students began the year with a series of exercises which asked them to consider the labour and skill embedded in their everyday material surroundings. Following this, we spent the first term developing a collective body of research on timber, stone and earth. Students then used this to design fragments of buildings, focusing on their understanding of the material; working from the material itself into construction details and then out to think about form, rather than starting with form and working towards details. From here, we started to think about how this approach to architecture and material could be used to create highly contextual,

simple and low-impact architecture for overlooked sites in London. Students developed spaces from simple material ideas – working with the organisation GROW as a client – to house alternative or supplementary education spaces for young people, with a focus on the environment, community and non-human life. The resulting projects situate themselves in the tension between their responsibilities to the local and present, and to the planetary and future. They respond bravely and carefully to a chaotic year, with proposals that are well-situated and made with specificity and sophistication. EXP7 is hugely indebted to the relationships it has built with students and staff at UCL and Oxford Brookes. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Amica Dall, Anthony Engi Meacock,

Rory Allen, Sarah Alun Jones, Noemi

Giles Smith

Blager, Eddie Blake, Ben Bosence, Alice Casey, Freya Cobbin, Aude-Line Duliere,

STUDENTS

Fran Edgerley, Alice Edgerley, Cristina

Yasmine Baddoura, Eleonora Balestra,

Fraser, Luke Freedman, Ambrose Gillick,

Xiaotian (Candice) Cao, Yi Hin (Harvey)

Aidan Hall, Rosie Harvey, Eleanor Hedley,

Chan, Nasrynn Chowdhury, Isabel

Rainer Hehl, Gabu Heindl, Summer

Gonzalez, Vasundhara Goyal, Boya Hou,

Islam, Tommy Jay, Robert Kennedy, Noel

Seonwoo Kim, Anushka Ladhani,

Kingsbury, Margit Kraft, Quentin

Giulia Rosa, Oleksandra Viazmitinova,

Martin, Zachary Mollica, Ana Monrabal-

Ziyi Yuan

Cook, Toby O’Connor, Jasemine Pajdak, Roz Peebles, Amy Perkins, Kester Rattenbury, Chloe Revill, Brian Rosa, Guglielmo Rossi, Christopher Sadd, Tom Surman, Steve Webb, Martin Wecke, Emily Wickham, Penny Wilson

RETURN

Experimental 7

RETURN

Experimental 7

RETURN

Experimental 7

13 12

1, 2

Hands On, Eleonora Balestra. In tribute to Thomas Thwaites, a dissection of a hot water bottle; model showing the external wall at a window, combining irregular timber with cordage infill.

3, 13

Strata: Layering over Time, Giulia Rosa. Hands-on material testing with stone; a view of the workshop, showing an expressed construction system that invites change and adaptation; a view of the classroom showing free-form merging of wall, floor and furniture.

4, 5

Urban Growing, Oleksandra Viazmitinova. Greenhouse model under construction; site model showing the new greenhouses on the brownfield site in Wapping.

6, 7

Rhyme Between Earth, Ziyi Yuan. Model showing a hybrid rammed-earth and timber construction to create an inhabitable wall; sun shines through the clerestory window into the community hall.

Inhabiting City Trees, Isabel Gonzalez. Fragment model showing un-regularised timber cladding onto the formed CLT structure.

9, 14

Cyclical Spaces: Cultivating Community and Food Sovereignty, Nasrynn Chowdhury. Interior model; in tribute to Thomas Thwaites, a dissection of a hairbrush.

10, 11 Building Bread, Seonwoo Kim. Burning and charring tests on straw bales; fragment model showing timber-frame and straw bale wall construction. 12

Terra Firma, Vasundhara Goyal. Structural model of the rammed-earth colonnade.

RETURN

Experimental 7

FORMS FOR LIVING: POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE HOUSING IN CERDÀ’S BARCELONA BLOCK This year, EXP8 has explored new forms of collective housing for Barcelona. Following in-depth analysis of Ildefonso Cerdà’s plan for the expansion of the city and its later evolution, we embarked on an investigation into modes of spatial organisation that offer an alternative to the monotonous, over-densified blocks that now constitute most of Barcelona. The aim of our resulting proposals is to act as a collection of contextual prototypes, intending both to restructure spatial relations between public and private and to re-empower residents within the existing urban fabric. EXP8 has been mindful of the political background that motivates this shift, which is reflected in the municipality-wide aim to take a more active role in city planning; this endeavour has so far included the implementation of prototypes such as the Barcelona superblock, alongside a broader search for more affordable, sustainable and inclusive housing solutions. These initiatives aim to redress the negative consequences of gentrification, tourist

development and real estate speculation from which the city has suffered in recent years, all of which have jeopardised local community networks and access to housing. In response, we have explored new forms of cohousing, social and public residential models and leasing co-operatives, and have proposed collaborative structures to reconcile public and private interests. The outcomes of this process have clear consequences not only for policies and economic management, but also for residential structures themselves. These speculative proposals have solidified through further investigation of locally-available materials and the potential offered by both traditional and contemporary construction techniques. By expressing ideas in physical and sensorial terms, students have demonstrated a significant strength of commitment to their own conception of desirable forms for living which might be enjoyed in the near future. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nuria Álvarez Lombardero,

Marina Gubbins, Antonin Hautefort,

Francisco González de Canales

Matej Hosek, Mira Otkay (Workshop Tutors). Special thanks to Carolina

STUDENTS

García Estévez and Carles Crosas from

Mia Aoun, Maria Alejandra Bigott

the ETSA Barcelona, Polytechnic

Picasso, Diana Dulina, Daphne Esin, Banu

University of Catalunya. Thanks to Ross

Gaffari, Michal Klonecki, Sara Khalil

Exo Adams, Pierandrea Angius, Atira

Layoun, Lucia Martinez-Botas Herrera,

Ariffin, Eugeni Bach, Doreen Bernath,

Natalia Miskelly, Anastasia Papaspyrou,

Delfina Bocca, Manuel Collado, Pol

Asli Sezer, Tatiana Suzanne Watrelot,

Esteve Costelló, Kenneth Fraser,

Guinevere Winesa, Ghita Zahid

Gabriela García de Cortázar, Marina

Gubbins, Pablo Guijarro, Winston Hampel, Antonin Hautefort, Platon Issaias, Alexandros Kallegias, Costandis Kizis, Marie-Isabel de Monseignat Lavrov, Alberto Peñin Llobell, Cirian Malick, Nacho Martí, Alicia Nahmad Vazquez, John Ng, Mira Otkay, Diego Ricalde, Pablo Ros, Silvana Taher, Naiara Vegara, Amelia Vilaplana and Alexandra Vougia

REEMPOWER

Experimental 8

REEMPOWER

Experimental 8

REEMPOWER

Experimental 8

17 1, 7

Form Shifting, Diana Dulina. Unique housing for a non-prescribed living.

2, 10

Reimagining a Woman’s Healing Refuge through a Relation between the Female Body and Nature, Lucia Martinez-Botas Herrera.

3, 8

Fractioning the Cerdà Grid for a City-inclusive Co-operative Housing Environment, Ghita Zahid.

A Dreamscape for the Block, Daphne Esin.

5, 9

Carving Out the Courtyard, Natalia Miskelly. Adding a sense of communal living in an obsolete Barcelona block.

Breaking the Edge, Anastasia Papaspyrou. Boundary fluidity as an element for increasing social interactions.

Village Within a City Block, Michal Klonecki. A living environment based on the life between buildings.

The Vessel Reserve, M Alejandra Bigott Picasso. Moving towards clustered sustainable living for a healthier city environment.

Under, Beyond and Free, Sara Khalil Layoun. A cohabitation of humans and

A Block Fragmentation for a New Take on Student Accommodation, Asli Sezer.

Reconstructing Living Tissue by Reclaiming Unused Hotel Construction with

plants within a block merging landscape and architecture.

Connecting Programmatic Platforms, Mia Aoun. 16

An Urban Eco-village in Barcelona, Guinevere Winesa. Creating tight-knit relationships in a community through agricultural activities.

Negotiating the Boundaries as a Vindication Tool for Living in a Gentrified City, Banu Gaffari.

18 18

REEMPOWER

The Breathable Block as a Catalyst for the Mediation of a Multifaceted Barcelona, Tatiana S Watrelot.

Experimental 8

M U LT I P L I C I T Y: N E W C U LT U R A L P R O G R A M M E This year, EXP9 has applied its interest in urban multiplicity and discontinuity to architectural thinking. Challenging dominant briefs and typologies, we pursued well-grounded yet radical interventions into symptomatic European contexts. Our collective project demonstrates a progression from transfers between urban domains to processes of transformation and programming. Expanding our scope of work, we introduced further atemporal dimensions which allowed us to freely tap into histories, futures and real and imaginary cities. This gave rise to recombinant archives and forking ‘labyrinths’ which developed through a process of cultural exchange. In turn, these devices allowed us to activate strategic points and corridors between dissimilar realms – reimagined elevators, excavators and other augmented devices which suspend and warp our sense of time and location. Such displaced sites highlighted tensions between architectural elements and their shifting contexts. In response, we diagrammed the bifurcating processes that affect the production and reproduction

of the city, while relaxing the associations between site and structure, form and programme. Within our convoluted storylines you can encounter chameleonic mementos and ‘morphs’, entropic vortices and shifting ‘site-clouds’. Honouring diverse urban themes, from division and liberation in Berlin to suppression and remaking in Moscow, these dynamic elements evolve beyond fixed frameworks to become both contextual and autonomous. But how to capture these unstable experiments as final outcomes? We chose to integrate our emerging architectural ‘multipliers’ conceptually, and to broadcast them through visual narratives and animated sequences. Therein, we explore the multisensory effects of our kaleidoscopic cities – traversed via antigravity capsules and immersive unispheres – as they create new correlations between memories and desires, artefacts and trajectories, and the actual and the virtual. Our deliberately plastic design models and urban sets continuously reposition, reproduce and represent themselves, sustaining the diversity and dynamics of the European city while empowering architectural imagination and action. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Maria Fedorchenko

Nabila Mahdi, Lorenzo Perri

(Collaborators), Sebastian Tiew STUDENTS

(Workshop Tutor), Brendon Carlin,

Joanna Man Hey Chau, Adelina

Andrea Dutto, Shin Egashira, Kenneth

Garifyanova, Xiaoya He, Jean-Pierre

Fraser, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Kasia

Issa, Kirill Korobkov, Ssu-Kuo Lo,

Lengiewicz, Mark Morris, Frederique

Zekun Qin, Raluca Scheusan, Congyue

Paraskevas, Zsuzsa Peter, Gleb Sheykin,

Wang, Yiqi Wang, Jiaxu Wu, Hongxin

Athanasios Varnavas, Ivana Wingham,

Yang, Sofya Zhuravleva

Andrew Yau and thanks to all of our critics and guests.

REPOSITION

Experimental 9

REPOSITION

Experimental 9

REPOSITION

Experimental 9

Architectural Archive, Kirill Korobkov. By visualising the spaces of connection between different cultural monuments, the project attempts to construct a virtual archive of architectural elements as a semi-autonomous design tool.

The Roman Kaleidoscope, Sofya Zhuravleva. The project utilises kaleidoscopic devices to reframe the pasts, expose unseen cultures and to generate new spatial conditions through fragmentation and distortion.

3, 7

A Minor: Theatrical Diverters, Raluca Scheusan. Replacing the monolithic cultural site with a string of ‘diverters’, the project resorts to both typological disintegration as well as vocalising local fragments and actors.

4, 5

The City Synthesiser, Xiaoya He. The project rewrites urban fictions through spectacular infrastructural ‘rides’ with futuristic machines mediating between Moscow’s constrained core and expanding edge, challenging the legibility and familiarity of everyday transit space.

Beta Paris, Jean-Pierre Issa. A virtual city that acts as a multi-dimensional space of architectural projection and collaboration by blending the contemporary and traditional through fluid ‘leakages’ between forms and programmes.

8–10

Anti-Memorial Landscape, Ssu-Kuo Lo. Using conflicted memories of Berlin’s ruptures and reconciliations as architectural anomalies as well as generators of new tales and morphologies, this exchange between memories, tales and forms is subject to intense curation and manipulation.

Culture Landscape, Jiaxu Wu. Targeting the persistent disconnect between park and museum typologies in Budapest, the project utilises virtual games and actual simulators for future constructed natures.

Landscape of Transitions, Joanna Man Hey Chau. The project deploys an abundance of cartographic and experiential operations to stage a multiplicity of sharp and soft thresholds, and to dissolve the cultural ecology.

Moscow Labyrinth, Zekun Qin. Responding to historic discontinuities and suppressions, an ex-temporal labyrinth of virtual plots allows for radical deviations from the built realities and infinite variations of the future.

Entropic Landscape of Fictions, Adelina Garifyanova. The project redefines ‘re-ruination’ as a convoluted process that includes multiple temporalities and design trajectories and applies these diverse forms and narratives within a highly contingent version of Berlin.

REPOSITION

Experimental 9

CAST ‘Please wait, the meeting host will let you in soon’… Distributed across time zones from GMT-7 to GMT+8, EXP10 explored cast(ing) as a means of recording and retelling a given condition, context and culture. The unit continued to work incrementally and evolutionarily in order to recognise and establish individual ways of working. There was no given site, brief or mission, but rather a series of short exercises that dealt with observing, drawing and making, and an increased focus on examination. A ten-day competition for an empty plot in Clerkenwell was followed by the casting of a negative (communicated virtually through drawings, photos and videos), the creation of a Street View diptych, and finally an exploration of urban infrastructures and services in students’ home countries. Equipped with these insights and sensitised by the newly familiar, London moved into our view. Here, chance, purpose and

commitment all contributed to the identification of a suitable point of entry – obscured by the fact that more than half of the unit was not based in the city. Relying on plans and Street View images as much as on memories and imaginings, students were able to establish a context to work within. Following the mantra that ‘the world will come to you if you open your eyes to it’, each project found its way to London, whether through a physical cast, a particular topic or by means of a certain experience. The students’ projects range from hotels to housing for the homeless; from conversions of shopping centres and department stores to the opening up of an urban lagoon; from homes for dementia patients to neutral spaces; from a school canteen to a fish market across the Thames; from public toilets and street furniture to a mountain… ‘This meeting has been ended by the host.’ ‘There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition.’ –Prince

STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Valentin Bontjes van Beek,

Nuria Álvarez Lombardero, Doreen

Winston Hampel

Bernath, Carlos Villanueva Brandt, David Curdija, Leonhard Clemens,

STUDENTS

Ryan Dillon, Eleanor Dodman,

Selin Nisa Acikel, Juliette Bartsoen,

Shin Egashira, Anthony Engi Meacock,

Alisa Bunyatova, Won-Ho Chi,

William Firebrace, Carl Fraser,

Ching-Han Chiang, Lee Chung Pan,

Kenneth Fraser, Wolfgang Frese,

Alejandro Del Castillo, Aiden Domican,

Francisco González de Canales, Georgia

Sari King, Yue Li, Monzie Tan, Rachelle

Hablützel, Juliet Haysom, Chiyan Ho,

Yau, Pierre Zebouni

Michael Ho, Kyriaki Kasabalis, Amandine Kastler, Julian Krüger, Aram Mooradian, Mark Morris, Will Orr, Arantza Ozaeta Cortázar, Akil Scafe-Smith, Seth Scafe-Smith, Silvana Taher, Dor Schindler, Rory Sherlock

RECORD

Experimental 10

RECORD

Experimental 10

RECORD

Experimental 10

Yue Li. Photo of garbage in Shanghai.

Won-Ho Chi. Cast of an outside corner in a basement flat in Notting Hill.

Selin Nisa Acikel. Lead cast into the sand imprint of drift objects on the shore near Çeşme, Turkey.

4, 5

Lee Chung Pan. Two Street View collages: in one, a toilet is implanted into a hole cropped out of Rivington Street, in the other a shower is installed in an opening on the ground of Charlotte Road – a play on temporality and permanence.

Aiden Domican. The pair: two delicate hollow plaster casts of rubber balloons.

Alisa Bunyatova. The topography of a burned down candle, frozen within its cast negative.

8, 9

Monzie Tan. (8) A plan of an underground school canteen on the Limehouse Triangle: gradually leaving behind formal education; (9) a section through the basement of the canteen and Salmon Lane.

Sari King. Drawing of the topography of a cast, capturing the daily ritual between hand and a toothpaste tube.

Juliette Bartsoen. A charcoal drawing of a dried cod.

Sari King. A diptych showing the Hackney Marshes: a singular element is duplicated – an evolutionary landscape?

Pierre Zebouni. Elephant: an elevated observatory following construction

Rachelle Yau. Sections of a nightlight, providing guidance, safety and comfort

sites in Portland Place. wherever it is posted. 15

RECORD

Ching-Han Chiang. A plug: a perfect fit, like casting into a mould.

Experimental 10

THE GARDEN OF URBAN DELIGHTS This year, EXP11 addressed a seemingly simple question: what is the urban park of the 21st century? Responses within our globallydispersed unit were bound to be different – for if there is one thing that is certain, it is that landscape is specific; it grows out of the environmental, political and social character of any given land. From 14 students in ten different countries and 12 different cities, these are the proposals we received: In Bangkok, the urban park of the 21st century is a place within which the monsoon is celebrated, as pools and waterfalls form within an otherwise concrete jungle. In Changzhou, it is a place to dream in the verdant breeze of the city centre. In Istanbul, it is a place in which tea is both cultivated and enjoyed, and in Delhi, it is an oasis of reprieve from the stifling pollution of the city. In Bahrain it is a place of geological rehabilitation, as local aquifers are resurrected. In Pompeii, the urban park offers solace, gently weaving new dialogue between old and new. In Lebanon, there are two responses: in the first, the urban park

meets basic needs by growing food and generating electricity; and in the second, the park becomes a love letter to the Lebanon of tomorrow, a place for discourse and debate. Likewise, London offers two alternatives: one a procession of semi-openness, a highline for plants; and the other a series of garden rooms, offering theatrical play in an otherwise barren field. In Quiping, sewage is elevated to the role of ‘garden creator’. In Harbin it is a land of limpidity that celebrates winter snow and spring bloom alike. In Athens, it is a space for disregarded creatures – the ant, the pigeon and the feral cat. While in Helsinki, it is land reclamation reimagined, wherein wilderness can begin anew. In short, what is the urban park of the 21st century? It is all these things, and infinitely more. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Silvana Taher, Matilde Cassani

Andrea Agostini, Leonhard Clemens, Nerma Cridge, Ryan Dillon, Eleanor

STUDENTS

Dodman, Shin Egashira, Finn Harries,

Alanood Alkhayat, Ishita Arora,

Juliet Haysom, Dalal Itani, Cesar Jucker,

Yasemin Cengic, Iro Davlanti Lo, Serge

Costandis Kizis, Sofia Krivashina, Nuria

El Douaihy, Lynn-Sacha Hanna, Cassy

Álvarez Lombardero, Jon Lopez, Mark

Jiachang He, William Hedley, Vladislav

Morris, Hikaru Nissanke, Davide Rapp,

Iakovlev, Haoran Jia, Burton-hart

Seth Scafe-Smith

Lamore, Fleur Thitaporn Sungsitivong, Lilian Wichmann, Qi Zhu

REGARDEN

Experimental 11

REGARDEN

Experimental 11

REGARDEN

Experimental 11

Beirut’s Urban Love Letter, Serge El Douaihy.

A Ramp in the Ruins; The Eruption of the Urban Sublime, William Hedley.

A Walk in the Park, Burton-hart Lamore.

A Park for Forgotten Creatures, Iro Davlanti Lo.

Snoring with the Wind, Cassy Jiachang He.

The Garden of Less, Lilian Wichmann.

Anatomy of a Port: From Consumer Culture to Agriculture, Lynn-Sacha Hanna.

Urban Park as a Celebratory Oasis, Ishita Arora.

Cradle-to-Cradle and Sewage to Land, Qi Zhu.

Micro-parks for Micro Stops in Euston Station, Vladislav Iakovlev.

Ain Adhari: Mending a Broken System, Alanood Alkhayat.

ThangThara, My Heart feels at Ease when the Water Flows, Fleur Thitaporn Sungsitivong.

REGARDEN

A Limpid Landscape, Haoran Jia.

Tea on the Bosphorus, Yasemin Cengic.

Experimental 11

TRANSNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE This year, it seemed for some that history itself had been brought to a halt. So-called ‘social spaces’ were necessarily cleared out as airborne molecules posed a threat to life; proximity became perilous. This caused the transactional nature of relations hosted by these spaces to falter, distorting local economies – and yet global entities and, more generally, the market still managed to resist. Mail became an essential infrastructural link and form of communion; education and celebration migrated into digital postboxes. These new conditions created a ‘perfect storm’ in which past boundaries re-emerged. Within the global context of the pandemic, nations seized the opportunity to establish themselves as saviours, reasserting their power and augmenting science within their borders for political ends. As production accelerated, goods were hyper-circulated and vaccines were inequitably distributed, the privileged retreated into their homes. Within this context, EXP12 has continued to investigate the connection between space and ideology. What can we learn from the winners of this crisis? Are the specific modes of organisation of space that they employ only compatible with the search for profit? Can the relation between the global and the local offer another way of building a community? These are just some of the questions addressed within the unit this year. Our research into transnational entities revealed how transportation systems, border controls, international fast-food chains, retail networks and currencies operate between different countries and continents. Learning from these global entities, the students have proposed local projects within cities worldwide whilst also investigating the possibility of forming a transnational autonomous project together. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Taneli Mansikkamäki, Max Turnheim

Daniel Ayat, Fabrizio Ballabio, Julian Bächle, Tobias Cai, Alison Crawshaw,

STUDENTS

Kenneth Fraser, Janghee Lee, Cédric

Tsolmon Bat-Enkh, Tuya Naz Düzağaç,

Libert, Guillermo López, Laurence

Melis Gurdal, Dongki Kang, Nikola

Lumley, Octave Perrault, Akil

Kechrimpari, Barbara Koch, Lai-lung

Scafe-Smith, Seth Scafe-Smith, Ashot

Kuo, Sofia Lekander, Hantao Li,

Snkhchyan, Ronfu Yeh

Jianfeng William Liu, Jumana Mahrous, Patrick McGraw, Deri Russell

REPETITION

Experimental 12

REPETITION

Experimental 12

5 6

REPETITION

Experimental 12

1, 2

Imagining Alternative Petrol Station Futures; Fuelling the Future – A Long Goodbye to the Petrol Station, Nikola Kechrimpari.

REPETITION

Decentralised Structures, Melis Gurdal.

Station with Apartments, Tuya Naz Düzağaç.

Architecture as a Wired Grid for Gaming, William Liu.

Park View, Deri Russell.

A Market and a Housing Block in Shenzhen, Hantao Li.

Special Economic Art Residency in Shanghai, Lai-Lung Kuo.

A Framework for Coffee, Craft and Domestic Space, Sofia Lekander.

Living in the Special Economic Zone, Tsolmon Bat-Enkh.

Experimental 12

T H E U N NAT U R A L H I S T ORY M US E U M : UNBUILDING THE MUSEUM TYPOLOGY Museums play an urgent role in the current ecological emergency – as encyclopaedic institutions wherein knowledge is certified, they are compelled to seek consensus, galvanise action and effect cultural change. This year, EXP13 has focused on Natural History Museums: where better to reframe our relationship with nature? Our unit has explored four different strategies in support of this aim. First, a strategy of ‘unbuilding’: Jiayi transported the Geological Museum into the rocky folds of a local volcano, while Toby extended the Horniman Museum into its gardens. Others permeated ecological systems within the museum building itself: Tejal dissolved the American Museum of Natural History through natural cycles of growth and decay, and Paula hybridised the museum and its laboratory to breed plants capable of surviving the 50°C summers soon expected in Madrid. Secondly, the tangible consequences of the climate crisis worldwide: Kwan’s water park

addressed the problem of flooding in Paris and Yuxin’s uncovered canal system averted the inundation of Washington’s National Mall. Paul memorialised extinct species with a monument stretching beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, while Shivank targeted pollution in New Delhi through local urban agriculture situated on Lutyens’ under-used roundabouts. Thirdly, on human relationships with the non-human world: Changjin redesigned the visitor experience of the Natural History Museum for primates, Zemin created bricks from lake silt to build a habitat museum and Hyunwoo rewilded a highway to reconnect a severed wildlife corridor. Finally, on new ways of displaying nature: Liesl emphasised the theatrical potential of the diorama by combining traditional techniques with augmented reality, Eden created microclimates for museum displays and Wu made creative use of Shanghai sinkholes to develop new geological public spaces. Together, through architectural obsessions and 4D drawings, EXP13 has uncovered opportunistic spaces for ecological coexistence within our treasured cultural institutions. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lily Jencks, Jessica Reynolds,

Miraj Ahmed, Ana Araujo, Eddie Blake,

Judy Ahmad-El Hajjar

Megan Burke, Alex Butterworth,

Stephanie Choi, Alison Crawshaw, Rob STUDENTS

Creswell, Eleanor Hedley, David Kohn,

Tejal Agrawal, Hyunwoo Baek, Kwan Ip

Nacho Martí, Patricia Mato-Mora, Níall

Chau, Paul Cristian, Jiayi Lin, Changjin

McLaughlin, Ryan Neiheiser, John

Kweon, Eden Plaistowe, Paula Martin

Palmesino, Catherine Pease, Irénée

Rivera, Shivank Sareen, Toby Le Qian

Scalbert, Anna-Sophie Springer, Eszter

Tang, Wu Wanling, Liesl Lam Wong,

Steierhoffer, Etienne Turpin

Yuxin Wu, Zemin You

REPRESENT

Experimental 13

REPRESENT

Experimental 13

9 8

REPRESENT

Experimental 13

The Museum in Flooding, Yuxin Wu. Flooding the Smithsonian to highlight the effects of sea levels rising and global warming.

Descending into the Earth, Wu Wanling. Securing sinkholes to create a distributed museum in a new public space, exposing distinct underground atmospheres that expose the fragility of the ground.

3, 4

Some Like it Hot, Paula Martin Rivera. Introducing research laboratories into the Natural History Museum of Madrid to breed new plants that can survive extreme temperatures. Each lab has a differing tonality, representing the temperatures that specimens are being tested in.

SubAqueous, Kwan Ip Chau. Waterscape display space over the hidden Bièvre (river) in Paris.

Performing Dioramas, Nga Lam Wong. Sectional perspective showing construction of dioramas in the Vienna Natural History Museum.

Bridging the Boundary, Hyunwoo Baek. A rewilding bridge linking the boundary between nature and humans; converting the viewer’s reaction into silhouettes interacting with Kara Walker’s artwork.

Museu-zoo, Changjin Kweon. Voids created in the museum floors are filled with netting which creates an environment for gorillas to play vertically and freely.

The Institute of Extinction, Paul Lucian Cristian. The project envisions new forms of memorialisation by projecting holographic images of extinct species into space, which become a sombre reminder of the looming sixth mass extinction.

Dredging Nature, Zemin You. Rewilding the West Lake, using silt to build animal habitats and bring people closer to nature.

The Museum of Urban Farming, Shivank Sareen. This site plan showcases a network of roundabouts within Lutyen’s New Delhi, that are transformed into accessible sites of urban farming and local markets.

Let Me Sleep on It: A College/Museum Hybrid, Eden Plaistowe. Models exploring changing forms through the application of colour – clay pieces repeatedly dipped in wax.

Volcano Geology Museum, Jiayi Lin. Viewing platform draped by a dynamic envelope, changing its draping form according to the activities taking place.

An Educational Bee’s Path, Le Qian Toby Tang. A new vibrant market space at the hilltop of the Horniman Museum and Gardens in South London.

Cycles of Nature, Tejal Agrawal. Exploring the introduction of living nature using mushroom spores, and studying its consequent effects on the overall museum site in the New York Museum of Natural History.

REPRESENT

Experimental 13

DODICI PERSONAGGI IN CERCA D’AUTORE Global institutions like UNESCO, government organisations like Historic England and regional groups like parish councils treat architectural identity as static – often with nationalistic connotations. In contrast, EXP14 understands identity as fluid. By defining architecture as a state of inhabitation that is constantly in flux, we promote a sustainable mode of building that taps into existing ecologies and challenges both preconceived notions of the architectural project and outmoded ideas of the vernacular. This year, the unit fought against the notion that pandemic restrictions meant students had to stay inside to learn about architecture. We began with the ambition to travel as a group from Amsterdam to Venice. As Covid-19 restrictions intensified, we had to reroute and instead pursued our interest in place by plotting individual journeys around the world. Students surveyed existing heritage sites and scouted for new ones, traveling across Britain, Norway, Israel, Vietnam, Turkey, North Macedonia, Sweden, South Korea, Poland, the UAE and Italy. EXP14 rejected criteria set by UNESCO and other heritage bodies, and instead established new values according to specific local and contemporary conditions. Students learned about attitudes towards heritage from around the world, many of which challenge Eurocentric notions of conservation, preservation and identity. Surveying and making are techniques used by the unit to understand places, and improvisation and adaptation are inherent to our methodology. First, students acted as surveyors and compiled their own toolkits in response to varying Covid-19 restrictions. Then, they became makers and took advantage of whatever materials

and techniques were available to them during lockdown to produce a series of material experiments. The unit approaches buildings as complex amalgamations of materials that exist in time. Each project not only challenges preconceived notions of place, but embeds itself in its context through sustainable modes of construction. The resulting archi tectures not only capture the spirit of a place but embody renewed heritage values that have been adapted to the evolving challenges of 21st-century life. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Amandine Kastler, Aram Mooradian,

To all the wonderful and imaginative

Christopher Pierce

colleagues, friends and enemies who have contributed to and influenced

STUDENTS

the direction of the work this year –

Muhittin Can Binan, Joseph Chi Ruano,

thank you.

Nikola Da Silva Azevedo, Maria Daher, Hilla Laufer, Ningwei Liu, Maria Edmee Orombelli, Peder Andreas Sveen, Malgorzata Tchorzewska, Vang Anh Tran, Iren Turkkan

REROUTE

100

Experimental 14

5 4

REROUTE

101

Experimental 14

7 6

REROUTE

102

Experimental 14

10 11

REROUTE

103

Pergamon, Izmir, Aegean Coast, Turkey. Photo: Iren Turkkan.

Masada National Park, Israel. Photo: Hilla Laufer.

Church of Saint Gregory, Ani, Turkey. Photo: Muhittin Can Binan.

Archiginnasio, Bologna, Italy. Photo: Maria Edmee Orombelli.

Ciechocinek, Poland. Photo: Malgorzata Tchorzewska.

Hardangervidda, Norway. Photo: Peder Andreas Sveen.

District 5 apartment, 360 Trần Phú, Sài Gòn, Vietnam. Photo: Vang Anh Tran.

Drakolimni, Lake of Tymfi, Epirus, Greece. Photo: Nikola Da Silva Azevedo.

Al Dhayah Fort, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Maria Daher.

Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse, Løkken, Denmark. Photo: Joseph Chi Ruano.

Hill House, Upper Colquhoun Street, Helensburgh, Scotland. Photo: Ningwei Liu.

Experimental 14

CITY/HALL A city is never singular. It is not a place, an image, an object, a representation or a public. A city is a complex ecosystem of exchanges, flows and shifting relationships; a plurality of subjectivities, institutions, laws, resources, histories, objects and impressions. If the utopian city is just out of reach, ‘no-where’ and ‘no-when’, then the actual city is ‘many-where’ and ‘manywhen’; a simultaneity of many places and a palimpsest of many times. However, a city is also more than this swarming mass of intricate and layered interactions – at its best, it is held together by a commonality, a proximity and a shared set of values, ambitions and concerns. The paradoxical challenge of the city is how to nurture this collective identity while also embracing its inconsistencies and inherent multiplicity. To construct a common sense of engagement in the production of the city, an inclusive public forum is needed in order to reveal these discussions and conflicts to the broader citizenry. In effect, a city must create a public sphere: an active populace that

participates in debate and the negotiation of contradictory exchanges and flows. The space that has traditionally contained and made legible this public debate has been the City Hall, a physical and symbolic representation of the city’s civic identity. However, the trend in many local, state and federal governments is to go online, off-site and private. Whatever remains physical, central and municipal is being downsized and streamlined. EXP15 asks how we might reclaim a sense of locally-based power by reinventing the institution of the City Hall for the 21st century. What will be the site of participation? What will be the programme of participation? What will be the forms and logics for the new institution that is both the container for and catalyst of our future collectivity? STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Xristina Argyros, Ryan Neiheiser

Rick ten Doeschate, Job Floris, Alex de Jong, Kristian Koreman, Alexandre

STUDENTS

Theriot (Speakers, City Hall Lecture

Aida Aghayeva, Jihoon Baek, Despoina

Series), Konstantinos Pantazis

Anna Charalampidou, Solveig Lola

(Workshops), Merve Anil, Joseph

Audrey Jappy, Angelina Kiryukhina,

Bedford, Miroslava Brooks, Barbara-Ann

Chengxuan Li, Guanyu (Alex) Lin,

Campbell-Lange, Shin Egashira, Korina

Mathilda Mazkour, Dila Aden Meray,

Filoxenidou, Adam Frampton, Eric

Zoe Mirkovic, Julia Pawlowska, Linden

Howeler, Platon Issaias, Lily Jencks,

James Seddon, Xinyi (April) Zhang

Nicholas Kehagias, Katerina Kotzia,

Sofia Krimizi, Monia De Marchi, Christian Nakarado, John Ng, Hikaru Nissanke, Catherine Pease, Federico Pedrini, Nikolas von Schwabe, Don Shillingburg, Bryce Suite, Alexandra Vougia, Francesco Zuddas (Jurors)

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Establishing an Equilibrium, [Exploded axonometric], Aida Aghayeva.

2, 8

Civic Pier, [(2) Floorplan overall, (8) floorplans deconstructed], Jihoon Baek.

Tide Hall – Urban Map, Solveig Lola Audrey Jappy.

Civic Factory, [Section perspective], Angelina Kiryukhina.

City Hall as an Archival Interpanopticon, [Interior view], Chengxuan Li.

6, 9

Dual Paradigms, [(6) Building axonometric, (9) city axonometric]. Linden Seddon.

Domestic Institution, [Axonometric view], Despoina Anna Charalampidou.

Under One Roof, [Plan], Mathilda Mazkour.

Common Hub City Room, [View], Zoe Mirkovic.

A Waterfront of Politics and Culture, [Axonometric view], Dila Aden Meray.

Exchange Hall, [Axonometric view], Julia Pawlowska.

Experimental 15

NO DOGS NO BALL GAMES Communities, new-towns: reclassify. Munsung Choi: Sejong, new administrative capital, democracy and data parliament, aggregated data and the citizen: the Smartivist. Charles Dib: Selsey vision and Petri-ville, the architect and the developer, Britain’s waning coastline, the pier, fishers and tourists: a dialectical approach. Alex Valentine Evdokimov: Disaster and resettlement, the market and the port, Slavutych and Fukushima, civic centre: a framework for growth. Ekaterina Genkina: Ubiquitous concrete panel and Russia, customisation and DIY culture, mass-housing, ‘temporary’ accommodation, domesticity, mass production: the factory. Danya Gittler: Ebenezer Howard and the garden city, the director and the audience, public participation, civic spaces and design guide: a theatre for democracy. Yi Huang: Taichung and its aftermath, Japanese colonialism

and its ornament, revealing, renaming, power, fragility of historical memories, repair and maintain: linguistics of the city. Ying Jiang: Twin cities and bottom up establishment, circular economy and potash, Lop Nur and its context, a diversion, arrival and departure: market town. Yuyi Jiang: Image of the city, Ordos and beyond, identity establishment and propaganda, a ‘filter’ in controversial reality, preparation, construction and opening: an event, not a building. Elena Parfentseva: Memories and associations, individual spatial characteristics, adaptation and sense of familiarity, dementia and care: orientation. Toms Stepins: Jabiru, the destruction and the event, industrial landscapes and wastelands, inhabitation and experience, back of house infrastructure: theme-park city. Daphna Turbowicz: Brasilia and Candangos, platforms for conversations, self-build system of interventions, the bus stop and the competition, three scales: another layer in this modern machine. Shengqi Wang: Urban village, floating agriculture and peripheral amenities, land-ownership in China, regulations and inequality, the city and the village: a new town that never becomes a city. Jin Xie: Hukuo and identity, nightclub and escapism, landscape of bubbles, sound, promotional posters, migration, amplified experience, the morning after and the night-out: a temporary utopia. Lingfei Zhao: Chongqing and infrastructure, a journey, the city and the city, a groundless coexistence, metabolism, suspended structures, blurred space: the grey city. STAFF Eleanor Dodman, Selim Halulu

Ryan Dillon, Kenneth Fraser, Joana Gonçalves, Vere van Gool, David Greene, Georgia Hablützel, Samantha

STUDENTS

Hardingham, Jade Huang, Lily Jencks,

Munsung Choi, Charles Dib, Alex Valentine

Tobias Jewson, Mary Vaughan Johnson,

Evdokimov, Ekaterina Genkina, Danya

Stefan Laxness, Alona Martinez Perez,

Gittler, Yi Huang, Ying Jiang, Yuyi Jiang,

George Massoud, Yasser Megahed, Manon

Elena Parfentseva, Toms Stepins, Daphna

Mollard, Mark Morris, Anna Muzychak,

Turbowicz, Shengqi Wang, Jin Xie,

John Neale, Cristóbal Palma, Stavros

Lingfei Zhao

Papavassiliou, Rodrigo Perez de Arce,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Aleksandra Rychlicka, Akil Scafe-Smith,

Miraj Ahmed, Raül Avilla, Graham

Seth Scafe-Smith, Silvana Taher,

Baldwin, Eduardo Botelho Barbosa,

Manijeh Verghese, Harri Williams-Jones

Shibu Raman, Stefano Rabolli Pansera, 2

David Basulto, Claudia Casasola,

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A Temporary Utopia, Jin Xie. A promotional poster.

Linguistics of the City, Yi Huang. A power-shifting game of lands.

HyperImages, EXP16 students.

Image Frame, Yuyi Jiang. A manual for the self-build gate.

Os Filhos dos Candangos, Daphna Turbowicz. Bus station intervention in progress.

Linguistics of the City, Yi Huang. Tombs of cultural heritage.

A Theatre for Democracy, Danya Gittler. A moment from the CBP design guide meeting.

Factory for Choice, Ekaterina Genkina. A conveyor belt of panel housing in Russia.

9, 10

A Town that Never Becomes a City, Shengqi Wang. (9) Planning regulations in the urban village. (10) A dusk descend of the floating paddy farm.

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Industryland, Toms Stepins. The Norilsk Zone.

Lop Nur Village, Ying Jiang. Geographic conditions and human activities in Lop Nur.

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DREAMING DOMESTICITY, SHELTERING SPECULATIONS EXP17 questions what shelter is, what it can do, and what it can mean within a range of different geographies and scales both now and in the future. The unit aims to explore the changing nature of domestic space as it responds to technological transformations, migration pressures, soaring land costs, increasing environmental challenges and – most recently – a global pandemic. Deliberately wedged between the real and the virtual, we harness the potential of film as a tool to develop and test a new architecture of time, space and affect. The students began the year by using existing smartphone hardware to capture and augment realities, creating a series of experimental audio-visual commentaries to examine their personal, social and affective domesticities. Through analysis of contemporary, historic and utopian concepts of human sheltering, each student defined their individual attitudes towards the future of domestic space. This year, EXP17 used the ongoing redevelopment of King’s Cross

in London as a testing ground. Students moved from the digital to the analogue and back again as they developed and represented their architectural responses through drawing, model-making and film. We analysed existing site conditions and explored how our interventions could serve as a catalyst for a larger urban project. The students then developed a series of diverse approaches to sheltering: interrogating the minimal dwelling form, and suspending the traditional organisation of domestic units, in favour of new hybrid programmes that either blur or separate the boundaries between living, working and community-building. Other proposals reimagined the role of prefabricated housing units, the potential of sliding partitions and the benefits of more socially-minded circulation systems. Each project engaged with its political, economic, social and cultural contexts to take a speculative stance on the future of shelter. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mark E Breeze, Katie (Kyriaki) Kasabalis

Stavros Alifragkis, Belen Aranguren, Maria Aranguren, Toufic Dagher, Mona

STUDENTS

El Khafif, Tom Gardner, Nadia Perlepe,

Keqin Cao, Wai Sun Helen Cheung,

Luisa Respondek, Akil Scafe-Smith,

Damian Nicholas Kam, Minhyung Kim,

Seth Scafe-Smith, Sofia Singler,

Anna Kloos, Meng Hei Lao, Won Ho Lee,

Konstantina Tzemou, Barbara Urmössy,

Eftychia Papanikolaou, Kin Ho Tse,

Liang Wang, Darius Woo (Critics)

Yifei Wang, Yolande Huanzhou Wang,

Stavros Alifragkis, Maria Aranguren,

Peiyao Yu, Yuxiang Zheng

Thatcher Bean, Ricky Burdett, Felipe

Correa, Robert Evans, Andrei Holzer, Chrisoula Kapelonis, Louise Lemoine, Gili Merin, Shaeron Santosa, Antje Saunders, Jim Stephenson, Mary Woods, Alex Yuen (Seminar Contributors)

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Beyond the Machine for Living, Yolande Wang.

City of Rooms, Minhyung Kim.

Projective Reality, Keqin Cao.

Motion Studies, Minhyung Kim.

Framing, Sound, Movement, Yolande Wang.

Space, Skin, Temporality, Yolande Wang.

Translations from Film to Drawing, Yuxiang Zheng.

Occupying the Void, Wai Sun Helen Cheung.

Sliding into Domesticity, Won Ho Lee.

Spatial Punctuations, Wai Sun Helen Cheung.

Spatial Boundaries, Yuxiang Zheng.

Sliding into Place, Won Ho Lee.

Love the Less, Damian Nicholas Kam.

Material in Action, Kin Ho Tse.

Modulating Domesticity, Yolande Wang.

Experimental 17

HI-RES/HI-RISE: VERTICAL SYNTHESIS Towers have long been a manifestation of capital and the excesses of consumption; typically, they offer very little integrated public space and accommodate minimal diversity of demographic or multiplicity of programme. EXP18 seeks to question the monofunctionality of existing towers in relation to the cultural and contextual diversity of contemporary reality, aiming to suggest alternative spaces of social sustainability, cohabitation, collective intelligence and collaboration. As a result of the ongoing pandemic, students within the unit reside within cities worldwide, from Belgrade to Abu Dhabi, Moscow to Beijing, London to Shanghai and beyond. Each student documented the local needs, peculiarities and demographics of their current home cities, seeking to develop programmes that provide improved hubs in which local inhabitants and communities can work, live, learn, play and socialise. We began with case study analysis of existing residential, commercial and mixed-use towers, considering their local history, target population and context. From there, we further developed our understanding of the ways in which structure, programme, movement and enclosure have been articulated within each example. The resulting projects present ideas in physical and digital form, exploring the interplay between gravity, balance and light, and rendering simulated iterations of solid and void. Their visualisations layer interior and exterior spaces with thematic and atmospheric overlays, and with consideration of the flows of people and services. Designs for areas of connectivity include hybrid or composite programme configurations, underground and surface-level amenities, and attention to conditions on the ground. Students have explored the possibilities and challenges afforded by mixed programmes of vertical atria and nested public and private spaces, in contrast to existing models of performance, function and efficiency. These thematic explorations address notions of grief, gaming, education, entertainment, sustainable living, live-work community, rehabilitation, social transgression and multigenerational cohabitation. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Viviana Muscettola, Arya Safavi,

Barbara Clarenz, Elif Erdine,

Nhan Vo

Omid Kamvari, Jack Newton,

Francisco Javier Quintana de Uña, STUDENTS

Amin Sadeghy, Dario Trabucco,

Abdullah Kahtan Al Kazaz, Teodora

Jeff Turko, Marco Vanucci

Boskovic, Matthew Oliver David Cooper, Julian Fok, Vasco Giovannoni, Lars Johann Kumpfert, Desdina Ozen, Tareq Shakhshir, Anna Shinina, Liu Wang, Shuangyu Xu, Varvara Yakovleva

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1, 15

The Prophet and The Wizard, Tareq Shakhshir. Circulation diagram; the jungle at dusk.

2, 3

Learning Mound, Lars Kumpfert. Catalogue exploring how slabs merge from stairs to volumes; different programmes are organised in a gradient of spaces, from an open public space to an enclosed communal space.

5, 6

The Renewable Theme Park, Matthew Cooper. Soaring theatre rides; wind tunnel catalogue.

4, 7–9 Data Bath, Varvara Yakovleva. Abstract axonometric showing servers and bathing programme geometries; breakout space showing programme’s transition from hot to cold microclimate; Frigidarium – a colder, more permeable space with light wells, utilising stack-effect ventilation. 10, 11 Vertical Cemetery, Vasco Giovannoni. (10) Vertical terraces merging different demographics, funeral participants and external visitors in an open public space; an empty meditation space in which the spiritual realm meets the ritual of visiting the deceased; (11) glimpse on the higher half of the tower where the cemetery is located; a space that symbolises an eroded monument, overlooking Milan. 12

Hidden in Plain Sight, Abdullah Al Kazaz. Programme distribution diagram.

3 Generations, 1 Tower, Julian Fok. Distribution of communal spaces.

The Learning Gallery, Teodora Boskovic. Ramps as the third space connecting students; the interconnectedness of the university and the museum – with visual and physical connection across programmes; manipulated ground plane merging with the tower, creating a space for both the university

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WHAT IS THE AA SCHOOL COMMUNITY?

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Student power for change. Direct involvement in the decision-making processes that define the character, ethos and content of the AA. A sense that we are all ‘in this together’, staff and students, equally.

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An international soapopera: laughter, tears, camaraderie, hard work, sadness, joy, drama. A group of outcasts who finally found a place where they are allowed to continue to be so.

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The potential to contribute and influence. Individuals who determine the collective future of the AA.

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ON BEDFORD SQUARE AND HOOKE PARK

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Our spaces define how we interact with each other. A place to generate a unique AA postpandemic methodology. The perfect stage for AA rituals.

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A fresh chance to experiment again in a new context. How can we adapt and combine the physical, eccentric and very intimate spaces and the forest with the best of the virtual world?

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Spaces to think. An emptiness only as interesting and innovative as you can imagine.

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DIPLOMA

PROGRAMME

The two-year Diploma Programme (MArch and AA Diploma (ARB/

of the Diploma Programme is to deploy progressive strategies of

RIBA Part 2)) introduces successful AA students from the

representation within a diverse range of media, in parallel with

Experimental Programme, as well as eligible new students to the

the development of technical proficiencies and critical positions.

school, to the study of advanced forms of research, design practices

Lively, informed debate permeates life in the Diploma

and speculative thinking. Long acknowledged as a global innovator

Programme. As students hone their research skills, developing

in architectural education, the AA Diploma Programme has

proposals into high-level design portfolios, they begin to refine not

fostered some of the most innovative, challenging and experimental

only their voices as designers, but also ways of individually

thinking in architecture.

articulating their own academic agendas to carry with them into

Offering learning opportunities across a broad spectrum of agendas through a variety of different teaching methods, the aim

their future professional careers.

BEAUTY AND ENTROPY During the late 1960s, artists such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt turned their attention away from the glamour and excitement of the Manhattan art gallery towards the suburbs of New Jersey and the desolate landscapes of the Midwest. They were searching for a form of art that valued the imperfect and the transitory. This work was based on an interest in the process of entropy: the notion that all conditions that are ordered eventually become disordered. Smithson and Holt argued that this entropic process is essential and unavoidable but also natural and beautiful. Fifty years later, this artistic impulse has particular resonance. As we collectively address climate change, we are required to embrace things that are old and things that are worn. Our buildings have to survive for longer, and must weather and age with dignity. We need to buy less and to value what we have. Our socks have to be darned. A gainst this backdrop, DIP1 has reconciled itself with myriad entropic processes, from erosion to sedimentation, in a search for the imperfect and poignant. Human collaboration with landscapes is explored in Zongshan’s creation of wetland islands in the Yellow River Delta and in Caterina’s sustainable lithium production in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats of Bolivia. The symbiosis between humans, flora and fauna is investigated through ecological pathways within James’s extended London canal system and Ciara’s vegetal wrapping of apartment buildings in Old Hong Kong. The flux of cultural debate is explored through Nata’s gleaning of materials and temporary architectures in Tbilsi, and in Victoria’s reuse of redundant shopping centres in the UK. The ebb and flow of the invisible appear in Tyler’s manipulation of natural ventilation within architecture, and in Tetsuya’s London data storage bridge. The entropic processes of the Earth provide the basis for Athena’s urban cuts and fissures in London, and for Leaf’s Sichuan earthquake-resistant village hub. The entropy of dissolution and densification manifest in Maya’s Viennese suburban housing and in Boji’s sedimentary city as a geological phenomenon. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Miraj Ahmed, Martin Jameson

Pierre d’Avoine, Roz Barr, Nicholas Lobo Brennan, Tim Brittain-Catlin, Ryan

STUDENTS

Dillon, Paul Feeney, Lisa Le Feuvre,

Victoria Marina Matilda Abel, Nata

Nicolas Feldmeyer, Fredrik Hellberg,

Dzhmukhadze, James Emery, Boji Hu,

Christopher Johnson, Christopher

Maya Kleiman, Wai Lo, Caterina Pereira

Kokarev, Hikaru Nissanke, James Mak,

Martin, Tetsuya Saito, Yu-Cheng Su,

Inigo Minns, Marie Louise Raue, Helene

Athena Erato Thrasyvoulou, Zixin Ye,

Solvay, Takero Shimazaki, Patrick

Zhongshan Zou

Usborne, Manijeh Verghese, Patrick Usborne, Siong Yu-Hsiang Wang

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1,2

Sedimentary City, Boji Hu. A geological approach to future urbanism.

Vorort Siedlung, Maya Kleiman. Housing for dissolute hinterlands.

Biophilia, James Emery. London canal systems as biodiverse arteries.

Architectural Aether: The Air We Breathe, Yu-Cheng Su. Strategies for passive ventilation.

Erosion, Transition, Formation, Zhongshan Zou. A new form of wetland community in the transitional territory in the Yellow River Estuary.

Rural Degradation, Zixin Ye. Catalysts for earthquake-prone village regeneration.

Breastmilk of a Weeping Mountain, Caterina Pereira Martin. Sustainable marks in Salar de Uyuni.

Sunken Gardens, Athena Erato Thrasyvoulou. Ecosystem fissures in the urban landscape.

In Memory Of, Victoria Abel. Adaptation of a shopping centre into a

Bridges of Stream: Living Close to Our Data, Tetsuya Saito. A decentralised

cultural hub. data centre bridge bringing together tidal, human and communication flows. 12

Symbiotic Wrap: Architecture as Biological Entity, Wai Lo. Ceramic armatures for plants.

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THE CIVIC PROGRAM: ARCHITECTURE FOR THE IMMERSIVE INTERNET With half of the world’s population now using the Internet, is it not strange that we never encounter any crowds online? The past year has forced the web to take the place of our lecture halls, public squares, nightclubs and workspaces, and it has provided us with as much joy as it has frustration. The clumsy ways in which we meet remotely today will inform the immersive Internet of tomorrow, and the shaping of this new realm must involve architects and planners if it is to become a versatile and fair stage for such gatherings. As eager citizens of the immersive Internet, DIP2 explored familiar and unfamiliar sites to understand the ways in which we gather online, resulting in our Report on Virtual Gatherings 2020. From there we each developed our own focus, as common

themes emerged. Gathering in the realm of education was explored by Bebe through her proposal for a remote school inspired by the Thai temple school structure, and by Joy, who focused on the spaces of academic research, networking and accreditation. Issues of health were addressed by Bibissara in her proposal for a remote bathhouse, drawing on the ideas behind Soviet sanatoriums, and by Margherita in a spatial structure for support groups to help those with substance abuse issues. Ideas of identity were the focus of Louisa’s cosplay stage and library for the shaping, archiving and embodying of popular narratives, and of Erika’s transformation of corporate soon-to-be-ruins with a data-scape formed of merging virtual shadows. Spaces for minorities were created by Siyue, who shaped an augmented future for China’s Dong diaspora, and by Eva, who wove a series of safe spaces for oppressed communities. Frank’s project addressed the challenge of contemporary union meetings alongside a portrayal of current working conditions in the construction site, whilst Eeda’s project explored legal issues surrounding the trial of crimes committed in virtual worlds. The urban scale was addressed by Deborah, whose new national

participation system for Singapore took the form of a virtual garden, and by Bulat, who faced the challenge of building civic community values around the emerging NFT market. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Carl Fredrik Valdemar Hellberg,

Antonio Bernacchi, Shumi Bose, Kent

Lara Lesmes

Bye, Ibye Camp, Eduardo Cassina, Andreea Cojocaru, Patrick Donbeck,

STUDENTS

Stephen Dosinger, Bethany Edgoose,

Bibissara Alpys, Margherita Canali,

James Taylor Foster, Miles Gertler, Joe

Deborah Wong Hui Fen, Frank Quek Yu

Hunting, Michal Jurgielewicz, Celeste

Hong, Eeda Da Gyung Lee, Bulat Safaev,

Layne, Alicia Lazzaroni, Nandi Nobell,

Erika Stadnik, Eva Yuehua Wang, Joy

Angel Steger, Nathan Su, Tijn van de

Evelyn Wilson, Sze May Wong (Louisa),

Wijdeven

Sarochinee Wongchotsathit (Bebe), Siyue Zhang

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Water as Sorcery: Collective Healing, Bibissara Alpys. A project that aims to establish a new Public Wellness Platform in which citizens gather as a community to collectively participate in wellness practices that are deployed virtually and felt physically.

Blueprints from the Metaverse: How to Build Communities Around NFTs, Bulat Safaev. Proposal for virtual living in a metaverse powered by NFTs in our future post-physical world.

3, 4

The Civic Datascape: A New Ecology of Care, Deborah Wong Hui Fen. A project that frames the future augmented Internet as a garden of collaborative care and an information landscape within which the public can participate in the growing of new taxonomies.

5, 6

Virtual Justice: Court of the Future, Eeda Da Gyung Lee. An immersive virtual court in a South Korea-based VR platform which manages criminal activities happening in virtual space. The project considers how to create a legal environment that can help encourage civic engagement and improve

decision-making by providing a new medium of evidence – immersive re-enactment. 7, 8

The Virtual Unconscious, Erika Stadnik. A project that leverages the power of personal browser data to create psychedelic-like experiences for psychoanalysis through the recreation and integration of the shadow.

9, 10

Weaving Togetherness, Eva Yuehua Wang. A project that aims to weave virtual togetherness for the queer group in Beijing under its implicit policies, and through collective fabrication, speculates on a bright and normative future gathering.

W hy Smash the Lump, Frank Quek Yu Hong. The project envisions a virtual spatial-cartogram for the real-time streaming aggregation of digital twins of all the active building construction projects around the world, as a platform for the improvement of labour conditions in the construction industry.

12, 13 Paper Trails, Joy Evelyn Wilson. A project focused on a mixed reality archive for individualised qualifications, personal experiences and intellectual exchanges within a community. 14, 15 The Dollhouse of Communal Healing, Margherita Canali. The architecture of hope, healing and recovery as a means to enhance the value of gathering as a treatment for people suffering or recovering from substance use disorder. 16

Home(School), Sarochinee Wongchotsathit (Bebe). In the hopes of creating a decentralised educational system, the project conceptualises the virtual school as a place of focus where context becomes real and reality – your bedroom – transforms into a space that allows your imagination to run free.

17, 18 A Crafting Diaspora, Siyue Zhang. A project that aims to regain the ethnic identity and sense of community belonging to the Dong people in China, and to provide a virtual togetherness through the shared experience of making

a virtual craft together. 19

The Library of Narratives, Sze May Wong (Louisa). A community-built space for exploration, expression and immersion into stories inspired by official narratives.

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THE SPECULATIVITY OF ECOLOGY Our natural and built environments are changing at an exponential rate, and our cities – whether established or emerging – now face significant challenges to adapt, cultivate and regenerate relationships between technology, social culture and the environment as a whole. While many existing cities are expanding, we are also creating new ones at the expense of the environment and of future generations. At this critical juncture, DIP3 rECOnstructs exciting architectural possibilities, populating our cities with innovative ecological tectonics and modes of production. Together, we dive into the vertical biodiversity in Lagos with a water hyacinth cable network and a growing crystalline envelope; we carve reconstituted stone to form interlocking yantra components, reforming consumer behaviour in Mumbai; we introduce fibrous, fluffy architecture to protect the vulnerable from illegal electromagnetic warfare in Bharat; and we plug in new urban farming pods to temper commuters’ daily travel routines in Shinjuku.

In Xochimilco, we deploy expandable water storage for communal activities facing increasing water scarcity. We transform waste management and trading practices in PingFangXiang through reciprocal timber beam assembly using rope joints and the ancient timber-arch technique. We wrap different harnessing devices into glass and concrete in pursuit of improved urban wellbeing – from ionising radioactive mining dust in Johannesburg, to facilitating new social spaces within the Barcelona superblock through the creation of a 45m tall dual-energy storage canopy. In Manhattan, we deploy Helmholtz resonators as tectonic elements, fostering a new phytogenic inhabitation between humans and other living beings. Our ceramic constructs reshape urban heat islands into new social typologies in Bangalore. We reinvent jinmaku, hanging from a 3D-laminated timber structure, to provoke a new seasonal share-living in Bunkyo City. We make porous spatial envelopes using injection-moulded aggregates, forming socioeconomic catalyst structures that revert the culture of building abandonment in Rio de Janeiro. It has been fascinating to speculate these unique ecological lifestyles to rebuild environmental reserves and increase construction biocapacity.

STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jonas Lundberg, Andrew Yau

Kevin Ka Yiu Chan, Karin Hedlund,

STUDENTS

Eduardo Barata, Maria Fedochenko,

Alina Alimzhanova, Aizhen Aimee Chen,

Kostas Grigoriadis, Adam Holloway,

Liwei Neil Cheng, Brian Joseph Hok

Elliot Klause, Hseng Tai Ja Reng

Man Chung, Anastasia Fedotova, Zhixin

Lintner, Iseki Takehiko, Martin

Echo Huang, Shuxian Sherry Liu,

Ostermann, René Peralta, Ashkan

Morgan Julien Hamel de Monchenault,

Sadeghi, Kengo Skorick, Stefan Svedberg

Tuan Anh Tran (Special Consultants),

Taiki Chikusonn Takemura, Yee Fei Faye Tan, Weina Zhang, Qiuyu Laura Zhao

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Blue Veins of Metacity: Waterways to Connect Fragmented Habitats,

Barcelona Superblock, Shuxian Sherry Liu. The introduction of dual-energy

crystallisation construct.

storage: gravity storage and air compression storage according to sociological organisation.

Let’s shop SUPER at the SUPERmarket, Alina Alimzhanova. Interlocking 9, 10

reconstituted stone yantra aggregation tectonics in Mumbai. 3

Manhattan, Taiki Chikusonn Takemura. (9) Turning the acoustic layers

Curating the fluffiness via a fibrous construct for urban non-ionised

towards a new phytogenic envelope with nature and non-human living

electromagnetic waves.

beings; (10) composing the resonator tectonics as an aggregative buffer for new vertical living in North Midtown.

Seeing Farm, Changing Cities – Urban Farming Plug-in in Shinjuku, Brian 11

Low Energy Consumption Community – Reducing Domestic Energy Consumption in Bunkyo City, Weina Zhang. Soft envelope experimentation

in Shinjuku Station.

with light-sharing effect.

The Living Chinampas – Adaptive Water Reservoir Community in Xochimilco, 12

Liwei Neil Cheng. The expandable framing and mechanics of expandable 6, 7

Vertical Soundscape for Multi-Species Wellbeing – New Acoustic Future in

The Invisibles – Between Rigidity and Softness in Bharat, Anastasia Fedotova.

Joseph Hok Man Chung. Urban farm plug-in system in bamboo tectonics 5

Cloudopia e[storage] – Inhabitable Localised Energy Distribution System for

Aizhen Aimee Chen. Water hyacinth cable structure with saline

Form Follow Malfunction of Abandoned Buildings Through Porous

enclosure for communal inhabitation.

Prototyping, Zhixin Echo Huang. Adaptive, porous bio-plastic aggregates as

Radioactive Ecology in Johannesburg – The Convexity in Harvesting Ionised

physical pockets serve as new socioeconomic catalysts, together with non-physical event pockets by spraying water mist.

Radiation for Urban Wellbeing, Qiuyu Laura Zhao. (6) High-level wellbeing 13

insertion with articulated convexity for radiation harvesting, in a tall

Heat: The Element of Bonding – Social Condensers in Bangalore, Yee Fei Faye.

typology; (7) urban energy harvester as street level interface between

The complete series of new urban prototypes utilising urban heat islands as

atmospheric dust radiation and urban interior.

social interface between excess energy, people and nature.

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Diploma 3

CLIMATE PEACE: WHEN ABOVE Climate Peace is a proposition to engage with the challenges of environmental destruction and upheaval through complex spatial reorganisation. Oussama envisages a new institution wherein expertise in the arts and sciences engage with popular culture to address the mutating colours of the warming ocean. Vidhi intercepts the flares and temporary spaces of the farmer’s protests in India to rethink solutions that will halt the formation of brown clouds. Muqing imagines new spaces of negotiation between supply infrastructures and the vanishing grounds of indigenous unceded lands in Vancouver, in the face of rising sea levels. Gianfrancesco proposes radical non-use to engage abandoned towns and forests in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, accelerating an ecological transition. Mu declares asylum for the Himalayas and their destroyed glaciers. Myungin invents a parliament for what we used to call rivers,

rediscovering their might. Davide rethinks the Pianura Padana as a filigree of rivers and wetlands, within which a series of labs are enmeshed for new forms of experimentation on polity. Anahita expands the grounds of India’s Special Economic Zones to generate cosmo-political engagement with the salinity of Gujarat’s coast. Paul analyses the construction of new multi-million-inhabitant cities on the fringes of the Nile Delta, revealing their status as a major stranded asset, leading to complex renegotiations. JeanDaniel transforms the vast plantations of Côte d’Ivoire into an ultra-high-resolution agroforestry system to increase biosphere activity, which diverts from practices of deforestation and extra-activism. Karl reimagines the myriad information structures within militarised maritime choke-points as murky spaces. Zhaniya connects and reactivates recording sensors, arrays of telecommunications, industrial monitoring, advanced medicine, environmental analysis, libraries and archives into a new constellation of landscape-sanatoriums, imagining the next stages of cosmism. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

Aristide Antonas, Eleni Axioti, Andrea Bagnato, Ila Beka, Javier Castañón, Shin

STUDENTS

Egashira, Eva Ibáñez Fuertes, Matthias

Zhaniya Alimzhanova, Davide Apolloni,

Görlich, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Inigo

Muqing Bai, Anahita Brahmbhatt,

Minns, Elena Pascolo, Sahir Patel,

Gianfrancesco Brivio Sforza, Oussama

Octave Perrault, Ocean Space Venice,

Garti, Vidhi Goel, Karl Herdersch,

Jessica Reynolds, Catherine Russell,

Jean-Daniel Kouassi, Myungin Lee, Paul

TBA21–Academy, ZKM Karlsruhe, Jonas

Vecsei, Mu Zhang

Zukauskas, Daniela Zyman

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Gaiacultures, Jean-Daniel Kouassi. The revolution of West African plantations; satellite analysis of vegetation change.

The Ocean Colour Institute (OCI), Oussama Garti. Citizen science analysis of ocean colour transformations.

Anti-Palace, Vidhi Goel. New devices of governance for diminishing brown clouds; remote sensing analysis of agricultural fires in India.

Methodological Transformations, Davide Apolloni. A Normalised Digital Vegetation Index (NDVI) remote sensing analysis of the Po Valley, Italy.

Cosmism!, Zhaniya Alimzhanova. Remote sensing analysis of post-Soviet uranium mines in Kazakhstan.

Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Analysis of New Urbanisation at the Edge of the Nile Delta, Paul Vecsei.

Radical Non-Use, Gianfrancesco Brivio Sforza. A project for the abandoned forests of the Italian Apennine Mountains; land use remote sensing analysis.

Remote Sensing Analysis of Sea Level Rise and NDVI in Vancouver, BC, Muqing Bai.

Lloyd’s Building, City of London, with Multi-Temporal Satellite Analysis of the Mekong Delta Area, Karl Herdersch.

W hat We Used to Call a River, Myungin Lee. Intensification of water system sensing along the Han river, South Korea.

Saline Cosmopolitanism, Anahita Brahmbhatt. A remote sensing analysis of saline intrusion in Gujarat, India.

12 12

REAL

Multi-Temporal Analysis of the Average Change in Glacier Thickness in the Himalayas 1975–2000, Mu Zhang.

147

Diploma 4

POROUS! PUBLIC! TESTING DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPACE BY BOUNDARIES This year, DIP5 focused on burning issues of publicness in contemporary environments, and on site-specific architectural projects that impact and add public value to their context. Public space is essential for democratic society. Publicness does not imply ‘limitless’ space; rather, boundaries are required to differentiate it from private space. Simultaneously, porosity is defined by the character of boundaries in an architectural object. The making of physical models was central to our process, and through design interventions we tested ways to engage with activism in order to materialise claims for public space. Acting in ten cities simultaneously, we explored concepts of publicness defined by context and history. In Seoul, a 36.4 k m intervention transforms an automobilecentred infrastructure into a new public town, above and below a flyover. The civic but private space of South Korea’s National Theatre is extended into the neighbourhood through an inclusive

urban foyer. In Hong Kong, the use of the New Town Plaza shopping mall for protests was a catalyst to convert its blank façade into a public, porous threshold. A de-fenced vertical habitat in Kuala Lumpur’s Kampong Bharu area responds to the gated urban villages elsewhere in the city. Chelyabinsk’s post-Soviet monumental Science Square is redesigned through atmospheric urban gallerias. In response to a deficiency of public infrastructure, a derelict site in Beirut is developed into the city’s first train station. In Nicosia, the boundaries of the Cypriot buffer zone are appropriated by urban, rural and landscaped crossing points. The private capture of public parks in Istanbul is challenged by the reuse of an adjacent hotel tower as a vertical green space. In Athens, performative preservation removes private enclosure of public ruins, promoting the coexistence of development and archaeology. Lack of spatial porosity within Rome’s modernist Olympic Village is addressed by a territorial intervention to counteract the absence of physical boundaries. In London, encroaching construction sites in Elephant and Castle are repurposed by expanding their hoardings into public threshold space. Finally, insufficient public safety provisions in Grenfell Tower prompted the development

of a new typology of a residential tower, porous in its spatial structure and public in its accessibility. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gabu Heindl, Bostjan Vuga

Matthias Ballestrem, Ignacio Borrego, Anna Pla Català, Mia Roth-Čerina, Liza

STUDENTS

Fior, Anna Font, Tina G regoric,

Polina Aleshkina, Evangelia Avramidou,

Marie-Theres Harnoncourt, Simon

Carlo Alberto Campolo, Defne Cengic,

Hartmann, Hamed Khosravi, Miloš

Zhi Bin Cheah, Stephanie Cheung,

Kosec, Lara Lesmes, Enrica Mannelli,

Hosung Joo, Kamal El Kharrat, Michelle

Jürgen Mayer H, Ioanna Piniara,

Ng, Edoardo Albertini Petroni, Rin Seo,

Andreas Ruby, Anastassia Smirnova,

Nefeli Stamatari

Apolonija Šušteršič, Sophie Wolfrum

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Diploma 5

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Diploma 5

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Diploma 5

1–4

De-Fenced Vertical Habitat, Zhi Bin Cheah. As a response to the gated urban

the Public Realm, Edoardo Albertini Petroni. The abusive expansion of the

through porous vertical boundaries. It reimagines vertical structures not

hoarding perimeter in the public realm of Elephant and Castle redefines

only to build more densely but also to negotiate public-private thresholds,

the perceived boundaries of the site, allowing one to reimagine the spatial

incorporating transitional spaces while allowing the necessary privacy

condition across the construction site to form a congenial relationship between the public and contractor.

and security. 5, 6

Un-shopping the Shopping Mall with a Deep Public Porous Threshold,

social housing towers and develops a prototype for a social housing tower

triggered the need to re-address the typology’s boundaries. As the project

which reconnects ground and tower through new thresholds of private and public vertical co-living. 11

porous threshold conditioning the possibilities of civic life, defending

Materialising the Claim for New Public Condition, Science Square,

public interest and security under Hong Kong’s shrinking democracy.

Chelyabinsk, Polina Aleshkina. Two linear infrastructures that span a

Inhabiting Edges of Separation: Borders, Barriers and the UN Buffer Zone,

Soviet public square and the roof of the newly-built commercial space

Maria Nefeli Stamatari. The project focuses the UN buffer in Cyprus, an

create a gradual transition from the urban environment of the city into

ethical boundary that has divided the island into two since 1974. This

the natural environment of the forest. The proposed galleries would connect

transitional space is reimagined as a space of opportunity, where

the disconnected, diffuse the effect of monumentality, shift and define

architecture is used as a tactical tool to unify the territory rather than

edge conditions of public space and introduce other forms of publicness. 12, 13 Revive the Ground! Defining Social Spaces in Rome’s Olympic Village, Carlo

promoting its opposition and division (image from porosity model workshop). 8

The Anti-Tower, Stephanie Cheung. The project critiques safety issues in

Michelle Ng. The use of shopping malls as a protest space in Hong Kong dissolves the harsh façade of New Town Plaza, Shatin, it re-establishes a

‘PARA’-site. Intervening on Existing and Future Boundaries to Preserve

villages in Kuala Lumpur, the project dismantles the hard border condition

Reclamation of Territories in the Dense City of Beirut, Kamal El Kharrat. The

Alberto Campolo. In order to tackle the lack of urban density in Rome’s

proposal readapts the old train station of Mar Mikhael in order to bring

Olympic Village, the project aims to stimulate the district’s social functions

back its functionality and provide the city with a public porous space. The

through the introduction of new elements, generating a network of porous and permeable spaces across the site, rehabilitating and catalysing its public areas.

dissolution of boundaries and the different levels of translucency of the elements on site enable a variety of spatial conditions to arise.

14, 15 Public! Porous! Speculation on Flyovers, Hosung Joo. A 36.4km urban intervention turns an automobile-centred infrastructure of Seoul into a new public town above, below and on a flyover, forming an elongated porous boundary.

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Diploma 5

I OBJECT We cannot accept the world as it is. We must resist its injustices and reject its inequalities: ‘I object!’ At the same time, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between human and non-human reality: ‘I, object…’ All objects are manifestations of social power dynamics; they inevitably project and perpetuate their creators’ ideologies. We all want to live in a world that is more equal and just. To achieve this, we must first acknowledge our agency as designers to appropriate, create and destroy objects. Architecture is specifically concerned with the analysis and design of material reality and with the production of space, influencing the ways in which power and social relations occur in a place through time. We can therefore use architecture to intervene in the everyday – to shape the normal and so to construct new societies. The unit began by asking every student to choose some commonplace object: the clock, the house plant, the refrigerator, the fruit platter, the bathtub or the sofa, among others. Each was

subjected to an ‘object lesson’, which implicated historical material, intersectional feminist and ecological analysis, alongside other cultural, sociological and anthropological narratives. Simultaneously, we asked students to reflect on their personal conditions and to develop an attitude of resistance founded within their own convictions. This dual focus led to an incredible scope of projects: an objection to the colonial expropriation of traditional artefacts; an objection to the conditions of student housing; an objection to land banking by developers; an objection to the marginalisation of queerness; and an objection to the exploitative effects of bureaucracy and capitalism, to name only a few. As our work developed, we came to the humbling realisation that any objection that tries to be righteous, absolute or aggressive is profoundly exhausting. Rather, the most successful objections emerge from attitudes of compassion, empathy and a desire to repair rather than to radically transform. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Guillermo Lopez,

Miraj Ahmed, Francesco Anselmo,

Jack Self

Daniel Ayat, Eleanor Dodman, Adam

Nathaniel Furman, Ariane Harrison, STUDENTS

Jesper Henriksson, Platon Issaias, Elisa

Ella Mahalia Adu, Richard Adetokunbo

Iturbe, Johnny Leya, Nicholas Lobo

Aina, Val Armendariz Pedrero, Quentin

Brennan, Georges Massoud, Bushra

Dauvergne, Nour Hamade, Dalal Itani,

Mohamed, Hikaru Nissanke, Anna

Vivian Olawepo, Deniz Ozcan, Lilian

Puigjaner, Alexandra Savtchenko-

Pala, Dewi Preece, Binhan Wang,

Belskaia, Hugh Strange, Ines Tazi, Max

Martin Wecke

Turnheim, Mary Vaughan Johnson, Ilze Wolff (Critics), Sebastian Adamo, Gloria Cabral, Philip Christou, Kim Courrèges, Felipe De Ferrari, Paul Karakusevic, Ibrahim Mahama, Grace Mortlock, David Neustein, Lütjens Padmanabhan, Mary Vaughan Johnson, Ilze Wolff (Guest Lecturers)

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Diploma 6

Steel Occupation, Ella Mahalia Adu. Image of a tenor pan in a suburban front room, displaced from the Mangrove steelband.

2, 3

A Culture of Lobi Craft: (DE)Falsified IDOLs, Richard Adetokunbo Aina. (2) The Diviners’ quarter, the core of the vessel – the hub from which repatriated Bateba are re-shrined, re-domesticated, placed in flux or buried. (3) Within the vessel, Bateba are re-shrined based on their crafted

function. In time, they will be selectively collated to populate new domestic shrines. 4, 5

Na Vo´ – Casa del Agua, Val Armendariz Pedrero. (4) Exploded axonometric view of prototype one – the self-sustained home for three. The house is elevated on both isolated footings and strip footings to support the weight of exterior rammed-earth walls. (5) Isometric view of prototype one – the self-sustained home for three. The surface area of the roof is 71.64m2 and the harvestable rainwater area is 77,707.908 litres per year.

6, 7

The New Monument, Quentin Dauvergne. (6) Blumen. (7) Scattered into the forest, the new monument protects our time from the changes that imprint upon its surface.

8, 9

Sex, Ruin(s) and the (3rd) Space, Nour Hamade. (8) A frame for structural repair that transforms into a permanent informal circulation space – an extended veranda. (9) Series of interventions – the act of rehabilitating heritage whilst fulfilling the explicit and implicit needs of the queer community in Beirut.

A Carpet for the City, Dalal Itani. (left) Analysis of the ritual around the fruit plate lays down a blueprint for the tackling of territory. (right) These multi-dimensional choreographies transmit the core values and passions f the human experience.

Untitled, Deniz Ozcan. (left) Simple physical descriptions of the domestic objects we own reveal the living conditions of today. (right) If we fill our temporary houses with all that we own, then can the rooms themselves become such objects?

12, 13 The Imprint of Duality, Vivian Olawepo. (12) Discipline is needed to navigate non-Black spaces. (13) A project that analyses the domestic refrigerator as

a means to explore the evolution of spatial typology and duality. 14

Tite, Dewi Preece. (left) The Fen Land microhabitat, which is applicable to the Fen Orchid, comprises the creation of a closed circular swale that replicates the high water table and seasonal waterlogged conditions of the fens. Lined with an asymmetric build-up of impermeable organic matter and tamped earth, moisture is driven towards the centre, creating an intense, isolated area of fenland. (right) The Ancient Woodland microhabitat serves to reproduce the soil conditions of undisturbed woodland, and does so through the rapid development of extensive mycorrhizal fungal networks. The mycorrhizal genus associated most strongly with the Lady’s Slipper orchid is commonly found on the undersides of decaying fallen timber, and therefore, comprises the augmentation and distribution of assemblages of timber across an area of existing woodland floor.

I’ll Be There for You – The Home As an Act of Self-Governance, Lilian Pala. (left) A shared laundry is a parliament when you have a place to sit; sharing resources is about sustainability as much as self-governance. (right) The one who cooks does not have to do the dishes; equality is also about maintenance and care.

16, 17 Towards Non-Linear Time: Housing for Students, Binhan Wang. (16) Adaptability of the room: the private room with high adaptability is an objection to the pre-scripted room for students. (17) Typical Floor Plan: the communal nature of longitudinal spaces and varying rhythms of private spaces are emphasised in order to object to conventional ‘efficient’ student housing. 18

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, Martin Wecke. (left) The imposing scale of the block holds the power of a collective form of representation; (right) the

REJECT

threshold is just a matter of belief.

155

Diploma 6

FLUID TERRITORIES: THE NORTH SEA AND BEYOND DIP7 is organised as a research-by-design project that investigates the role of architecture in territorial and geopolitical disputes, aiming to problematise design, pedagogy and forms of architectural practice. Central to our attention is the sea and its associated social, physical, cultural and material geographies. Fluid, unstable and unresolved, this is the territory in which encounters between abstract and concrete spaces are most visible. The unit aims to challenge common misconceptions about the sea as a limitless spatial category, whose non-designed space of ‘wilderness’ and unpredictability resides outside the boundaries of architecture. In DIP7 we reclaim a role for architecture as a projective and propositional possibility, departing from conventional dichotomies such as ‘land/sea’, ‘natural/artificial’ and ‘human/ non-human’, or from purely analytical and diagnostic approaches. A key concern within our work throughout the year was the development of architectural devices that are capable of operating on multiple scales, and which have the capacity to make visible the conflicts between space, the territory and its subjects. Moreover, the unit places particular focus on the histories and practices of architectural and territorial investigations, developing visual languages that are plural, diverse and respondent to the various contexts, projects and identities at play. This year, in response to the realities of remote teaching and learning, DIP7 students developed projects in a multiplicity of localities. From Marseilles to Mauritius, from Dubai to the Aegean Sea, from the Alps to the wetlands of Kolkata and The Wash, and from the peri-urban indigenous land of Hong Kong to Denmark

– our focus remained on the intersection of architecture and art practice with questions of geography, culture, economics and society. Operating within multiple timelines and scales, these projects propose new spatial interventions that address the complex yet occasionally obscured juridical, environmental and geopolitical conditions of their chosen sites.

STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Hamed Khosravi, Platon Issaias

Nazgol Ansarinia, Aristide Antonas, Martina Barcelloni Corte, David Burns,

STUDENTS

Matilde Cassani, Javier Castañón, Pol

Alessia Clementine Broggini, Paulina

Esteve Castello, Bárbara Maçães Costa,

Burzynska, Amalia-Anastasia

Alessandra Covini, Miles Gertler, Clara

Gîscă-Chitac, Amy Glover, Alma Margot

Oloriz, Marina Otero Verzier, Rory

Sanne Hawker, Lito Karamitsou, Tanuj

Sherlock, Alfredo Ramirez Galindo,

Kohli, Yin Ning (Cheri) Lee, Atiyeh

Christina Varvia

Naghavi, Tamara Husam Rasoul, Malene Sofie Saetre Riise, Connie Lynn Tang, Maroussia Georgia Chiara Tasiaux

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Diploma 7

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Diploma 7

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Diploma 7

Decolonising Port Said, Atiyeh Naghavi. Plan of Saltmarsh Garden. Retracing the demolished Casino Palace Hotel onto the reclaimed saltmarsh.

Mediating the Voids, Connie Lynn Tang. Plan of the public path. Voids are areas that exist outside the common understanding of the law and are partly accessible to the public. By creating and connecting these voids, the path opens the site to humans and non-humans and allows events to happen to preserve the site and resist privatisation.

The Inaccessible Land, Malene Sofie Saetre Riise. Illuminated resting

Waste Boundaries, Tanuj Kohli. A collection of abandoned buildings within

grounds along the roaming paths in a Danish national park. East Kolkata Wetlands. These unfinished structures manifest historic conflicts between private development and environmental conservation policy. 5

Non-Frame, Amalia-Anastasia Gisca-Chitac. Intervention Point A1, plan. The jetty meanders along the topography of Little Diomede Island, culminating in a viewing platform.

Alpine Syntopia, Alessia Clementine Broggini. Axonometric drawing of the public hub. This new typology releases the structure from any specific use or programme, and embeds it into the territory and its movements.

The In-Between, Tamara Husam Rasoul. Street view. Extension of the private domestic space of the Emirati villas – known as Majlis – into alleyways.

Migrating Ground, Paulina Burzynska. Axonometric drawing of a viewing

Transhumance, Alma Margot Sanne Hawker. A temporary structure is placed

tower on the embankment of the new Danube-Oder-Elbe (D-O-E) canal. along the reindeer’s migratory route, providing a temporary congregation place for Sámi and non-Sámi people. 10

Fragmented Pieces, Yin Ning Lee. Models representing dispossessed and obsolete landscapes.

A Rock on a Hidden Line, Lito Karamitsou. A walk in the ruins. A continuous path bringing the multiple layers of the site together.

A Conversation between Traces, Maroussia Giorgia Chiara Tasiaux. Installation model. Fragments of Marseille’s built environment are juxtaposed in an inhabitable installation, revealing the clash of collective memories.

The Fens: Protocols of Care for a Decaying Landscape, Amy Glover. Fen landscape, a network of expanding boundary lines. Woven in wool, hemp linen, cotton and zinc-coated steel.

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Diploma 7

EUREKA! DIP8 spent the past year as a set of boxed portraits. In the ‘Eureka! Boutique’ – a nickname given to the small crew of inaugural pioneers within our unit – this evoked the need to re-portray the Architect as a Young Man or Woman. Kellin introduced the team to the Chinese goddess Nüwa, who patched a schism in the sky with her own form to spare her creations on the ground from falling celestial boulders. Kellin embarked on a quest to become a cloud and alighted upon a Fontana del Cielo. Eureka! In 1921, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, the art world was introduced to Dada. A century later, Farida revisited that moment while exploiting the virtual unit space to create a selfportrait of the young architect and translate it into an automata. Facilitating an obsessive fascination for this anarcho-art ethos, Farida shared personal insights surrounding transition, interpreted as a virtual gender spectrum, and produced a ‘Dadamaton’ – a carousel attached to an antique typewriter. Eureka! Zhiyin is a superhero: an agent dispatched by the ancient Chinese deities to arrest the proliferative architectural idioms of contemporary China. Zhiyin’s self-portrait became a comic, with poses inspired by Tintoretto and a narrative informed by architectural access for all. Eureka! Chenyang portrayed a memory-driven city in the form of a videogame which captures a series of personal derivés, mapping the empty space of the city by filling its voids with personal, momentary and minor memories. Eureka! Lynus conjured a portable self-portrait machine to assist

personal mindfulness in mid-20th-century modern spaces. His space-machine could produce a onesie comprised of his different moods within several self-portraits; a onesie that could have a conversation with itself. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka! STAFF David McAlmont, Hila Shemer STUDENTS Farida Aliyeva, Zhiyin Jia, Lynus Hui Ning Lau, Chenyang Liu, Kellin Wang

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Diploma 8

REVIVIFY

161

Diploma 8

14 13

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Diploma 8

17 16

1, 2

A Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man or Woman. The DIP8 totem mask.

3–5

People and Box, Chenyang Liu.

6–8

Abandoned Mask, Farida Aliyeva.

9, 10

Allegory of the Firmament and Allegory of the Sky, Kellin Wang.

Divorcing the A Carnival, DIP8 collective work.

12–14 Hong Kong City Night, Quiet Introspection and The House of Mind, Lynus Hui Ning Lau. 15

YOU: A Plan of the Carousel, Farida Aliyeva.

The Female Architect Superhero and The Women in Architecture Ceremony, Zhiyin Jai.

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The Sky Has Fallen, Kellin Wang.

Diploma 8

THIRD TERRITORIAL ATTRACTOR This year, DIP9 has continued to expose territorial and institutional crises through spatial diagnostics and multi-scaled architectural strategies, and has advocated for territorial transformations and institutional adjustments. As these spatial crises are numerous and complex, we focused our attention on those related to the ‘economies of life’. If our fossil-fuelled economies consume and exhaust common resources, our economies of life nurture and enhance them; these include economies of care, culture and resource management. Global trends indicate that humankind must live in ever-growing cities, supplied by an ever-intensifying countryside, yet this polar acceleration has produced an imbalance within which large swathes of our territories are overlooked, uncared for and abandoned. DIP9 posits that somewhere between robotic AI farming and ‘smart-ish’ cities lies another territorial paradigm, on which we can implement economies of life and reimagine forms of societal, economic and environmental occupation. This

paradigm, a third territorial attractor, must be reclaimed, designed and fiercely defended. Our ambition was two-fold: first, we studied the current architectural forms and territorial organisations of these economies of life, critically positioning ourselves vis-à-vis ongoing and future policies. Second, we designed architectural strategies that adapt, transform, relocate and create economies of life, establishing a network of units through mobility and connectivity in order to articulate the third territorial attractor. Our students have responded to urgent questions of collective responsibility towards our environment through projects that mediate between territories, institutions and citizens. Spatial crises have far-reaching consequences for how we live and occupy space that need to be urgently diagnosed, confronted and responded to. www.pantopia.xyz STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Stefan Laxness, Antoine Vaxelaire

Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin, Maria Bessarabova, Raphael Besson, Ryan

STUDENTS

Cook, Etienne Gilly, Chloe Hudson, Peer

Vasilis Appios, Luciana Bondio, Chui

Illner, Manuel R Lopez, Cristina

Lam Jasmine Chung, Romain Conti-

Gamboa Masdevall, Nick Masterton,

Granteral, Philip Nazih Gharios, Jia

Samaneh Moafi, Raul Avilla Royo,

Wei Huang, Sheng-ya Huang, Hing Chun

Matgorzata Stanistawek, Marion Waller

Lin, Romain Bernard Christian Rihouet, Andrew Robertson, Ezgi Terzioglu, Zi Min Ting, Mohamad Riad Yassine

REFUSE

164

Diploma 9

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165

Diploma 9

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166

Diploma 9

Beirut’s Roofscape: A Territory of Reclamation, Mohamad Riad Yassine.

In the Name of Resilience: Crises, Care and Civic Infrastructures in Beirut, Philip Nazih Gharios.

The Care Beyond Protection, Sheng-ya Huang.

End of Waste, Hing Chun Lin.

Healing Gardens: Collective Transformation of Coastal Britain, Luciana Bondio.

The Community House: A Rural Network of Community-Led Hotels, Chui Lam Jasmine Chung.

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Re-Set in Stone, Ezgi Terzioglu.

Sportscape Urbanism, Andrew Robertson.

Hyperterroir: A Plot Twist for Wine Territories, Romain Conti-Granteral.

Remote Urbanity, Romain Bernard Christian Rihouet.

BioCultural Heritage in the Making, Vasilis Appios.

The Public Room, Zi Min Ting.

Civic Infiltration Ground, Jia Wei Huang.

Diploma 9

DIRECT URBANISM: SPATIAL ASSOCIATION? Identification of the variables that make up the space of the city, whether physical or social, suggests an understanding of variables as finite entities which can be interpreted as factors, elements or conditions. But what is the relationship or interrelationship between them? By attempting to work with spatial associations, we have investigated the role played by these interrelationships in the making of space. During the last couple of years, DIP10 has sought to create new foci for London. The composite nature of the resultant projects suggested that a single focus might be composed of an active overlay of different foci. Working at the scale of a 1km × 1km scanned territory, a block and a borough we have now developed city blocks that have the potential to be heterogeneous; to contain conflicting situations, agents and spaces. A users’ cut, across York Way, challenges Argent’s privatised King’s Cross super-block, and a void block proposes a cultural and political transformation of Tepito in Mexico City. The complexity

of Beirut is mediated by the introduction of new nodes that generate engagement within existing blocks, political propaganda informs the transformation of key Viennese blocks and two reassembled blocks use specific groups and situations to question the developmental strategies of contemporary cities in China. In Whitechapel, an externalised mosque in the conflictive City Fringe challenges cultural mores; a contact point of internalised streets within a block creates a secular focus; the Granby Estate, with its divisive connotations, is opened up to become a city block; and a green block brings together cross-borough services. Smallscale interventions counteract Croydon’s master-planned blocks, and negotiated block configurations appease the existing conflicts between Hackney and Stamford Hill’s orthodox Jewish community. From China to Mexico, we have reassessed the block’s associative role within the multilayered space of the city. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Carlos Villanueva Brandt

Nichola Barrington Leach (Situation Workshop Tutor), Nick Green (Situation

STUDENTS

and Technical Workshop Tutor)

Milad Azarmi Bejand, Tamir Cohen

Aharoni, Sebastian Cheng Ge Cornwell, Roya Edde, Rashad Fakhouri, Maite Garcia Lascurain Fernandez, Lei Jiang, Tung Li, Yu Lian, Theo Janek Sykes, Anna Starchenko, Zhaoxi Tian

REASSOCIATE

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Diploma 10

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169

Diploma 10

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170

Diploma 10

W hich Orthodox Extension Are You Today?, Tamir Cohen Aharoni.

The King’s Cross Wall, Taking Down the Wall, Zhaoxi Tian.

Emphasising the Elderly, Muslims and Sex Workers, Yu Lian.

Cross Borough Membership, Anna Starchenko.

Life of Ordinary Chinese Cities, Between the Collective and the Market, Lei Jiang.

Propaganda, Please; of Lines and Islands, Theo Janek Sykes.

The King’s Cross Wall, Taking Down the Wall, Zhaoxi Tian.

The Open Block, Enter the Estate, Sebastian Cheng Ge Cornwell.

The Rituals of Chaos, Occupy / Identity / Autonomy, Maite Garcia Lascurain Fernandez.

Contact Points, Milad Azarmi Bejand.

More Than Just a Block, Externalising the Mosque, Rashad Fakhouri.

12, 13 Alternative Nodes for Beirut, Roya Edde. 14

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171

Small Moves Big Change, Croydon, Tung Li.

Diploma 10

LONDON UN-BUILT DIP11 began the year by taking a journey back in time through the unbuilt architecture and incomplete visions of London. While the city is a stitched-up patchwork of unfinished landscapes, encompassing the post-colonial, post-industrial, postinfrastructural and beyond, it is also currently dominated by the dichotomy between neoliberalism and historic conservation. Taking ‘the archaeology of the present’ as our theme, we researched countless imagined futures from small-scale un-patented inventions to catalogues of unbuilt projects. The erased, hidden, forgotten and cancelled content became the datum for our Meta-London. The mismatch of unfinished ideas and unplanned realities inspired us to search for a set of inherent rules that repeat over time, and yet, never create the same effect within London’s cultural fabric. This is a concealed city, which invites the exploration of ambiguously-fused spaces and objects left incomplete. Collective gathering, collaging and de-collaging formed methodologies for the production of new knowledge; ways of thinking about ‘playing’ with the city were then taken forward by individual students as starting points for their design process. Within 13 unique interpretations of the unit brief, the city is reversed, forecasted, misunderstood and flipped on its side in order to unpack entangled relationships and intertwined narratives. Broken promises and forgotten legacies were revisited and hidden narratives buried within architectural relics were unearthed. Undervalued monuments and the industrial heritage of contamination were brought back to the surface. Formal remains within a demolition site became the basis for a new proposal, and memory and perception became tools for space-making. These articulations of a parallel London range from the radical to the sensible, and from the beautiful to the humorous and the absurd. As we confront a space of coexistence and duality, our 13 shadow cities remap an alternative London for those who seek it. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Shin Egashira

Xristina Argyros, Joshua Bolchover, Valentin Bontjes van Beek, Peter Carl,

STUDENTS

Javier Castañón, Philip Christou,

Mia Aleksic, Shaeron Santosa Attan,

Kate Darby, Eleanor Dodman, Maria

Matis Barollier, Christian Body,

Fedorchenko, Amandine Kastler,

Neophytos Christou, Yuwei Cong, Ylam

Madeleine Kessler, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog,

Deme, Cesar Jucker, Nicholas Lin,

David Grahame Shane, Theodore

Daria Nepop, Natacha Palomeque Coll,

Spyropoulos, Peter Thomas

Camille Puech, Elina Zampetakis

REVERSE

172

Diploma 11

6 7

REVERSE

173

Diploma 11

21 19

REVERSE

174

Diploma 11

23 22

1, 5 28

To Isle of Dogs, Shaeron Santosa Attan. A message of resistance through the distribution of earth.

2, 17

To Retell, Christian James Body. A distorted retelling of the forgotten shadow of Notting Hill.

3, 12

Boundary Lifeline, Daria Nepop. Reutilising the capacity of urban fabric leftovers, often overlooked by large-scale redevelopment, for the benefit of various communities and services within.

4, 18

Walking the Ground, Along the Canal, Through the Basin, Up to the Tower, Yuwei Cong. A field for

6, 7

The Body as Another Material of the City, Elina Zampetakis. An alchemical tale of the city’s water hearts.

excavation, threading multi-layered habitations across the infrastructural landscape. 8

Revealing Madness, Mia Aleksic. Liverpool Street.

9, 11, 19

Urban Memorabilia, Ylam Deme. With the help of space-making tools such as pattern making and the idea of a journey, how does architecture translate in our memory and lead to new forms of self-generated spaces?

10, 16, 26

Montaging Shadows, Neophytos Christou. An anti-chronological dream of cultural expressions, urban layers and erased landscapes.

13, 14, 23

Traces, Echoes, Skins, Nicholas Lin. Who remembers and who orders the social space of memory?

15, 21, 24

Playtime, Natacha Palomeque Coll. A scheme to preserve the essence of a community by maintaining their informal links while allowing space to change.

20, 25

Language of a City-Telling, The Narrative Space, Camille Puech. How to recompose architectural narratives through their multiple readings?

REVERSE

Intersecting Projections, Cesar Jucker. A method to reveal a neglected heritage.

H E R I [ S ] T A G E , Matis Barollier. 3 Mills Island; Interactive Play Ground; Circular Economy; Unbuilt Heritage; 16.06.2021.

175

Diploma 11

HERCULINE’S TRUTH: REDESIGNING THE INSTITUTION IN RELATION TO THE ‘OTHER’ ‘My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity.’ — Michel Foucault Museums, planning and conservation departments, the census, mental health services – institutional voices like these not only shape the values that society holds as true, they also maintain them over time. Through visible and invisible barriers we access these institutions to determine who is included and who is considered to be ‘other’ through the data that they collect about us and how they use this to classify us. In our quest to rethink the often outdated and exclusionary institution, DIP12 has used the act of telling to question established narratives, to reject binary thinking and to invent new and more inclusive frameworks, through which we can better understand ourselves and the world around us.

The unit has investigated which myths and power structures these institutions maintain and, as an alternative, identified the new stories that need telling. From soundscapes and memory archives that challenge settler colonialism or rebuild places post-conflict, to mediated safe spaces that give us room to question our identity and wellbeing, we established strategies for the architect-teller to build alternative realities, and to speculate on the future architectures and social structures that could empower those without agency. The architectural strategies we have proposed this year disrupt and reject a singular way of viewing the world, advocating instead for a more plural, multiple and nuanced approach. This, in turn, generates alternative forms of architectural practice, each building an inspiring multiverse of possibilities. Architecture is instrumentalised within DIP12 as an agent to determine our own truths, without having to rely on the institution to be our truth-teller. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Inigo Minns, Manijeh Verghese

Pooja Agrawal, Miraj Ahmed, Merve Anil, Oliver Beer, Jos Boys, Elena

STUDENTS

Palacios Carral, Cream Projects,

Jasmine Abu Hamdan, Chan Kai Qing

Adriana Cobo Corey, Reem Charif, Iman

Audrey, Jumanah Bawazir, Camille

Datoo, Ryan Dillon, Eleanor Dodman,

Bongard, Cong Ding, Thomas Faulkner,

Carl Fraser, Tekla Gedeon, Joseph Zeal

Simon Glemser, Efe Gole, Sky Moore-

Henry, Jenny Jones, Kyriaki Kasabalis,

Clube, Haya Mrowa, Lana Nsouli,

Suhair Khan, Sean Lally, Andreas Lang,

Shutian Zhou

Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Lara Lesmes, Diana Damian Martin, Metahaven, Radha Mistry, Mark Morris, Patricia de Souza Leão Müller, J Paul Neely, Allison Newmeyer, John Ng, Ana Maria Nicolaescu, Michael Prokopow, Nirmal Puwar, Russell Royer, Natasha Sandmeier, Judith Seng, Akil Scafe-Smith, Andre Spicer, Sabine Storp, Lucy Styles, Dean Sully, Marloes Ten Bhomer, Sebastian Tiew, Noam Toran, Sumayya Vally, Frederik Weissenborn, Nicholas Zembashi

RETELL

176

Diploma 12

RETELL

177

Diploma 12

RETELL

178

Diploma 12

13 12 1

Syncretic Makers’ Club, Efe Gole. A project to manifest Latin American

The Promise of the Golden Arches, Chan Kai Qing Audrey. A study of corporate

culture through the production of community-made friezes. and civic responsibility within Hong Kong’s privatised public spaces. 3, 4

The Socialist Ballerina, Shutian Zhou. A figure extracted from the archives who dances between stories to discuss the role of women in Chinese society.

Project 73, Jumanah Bawazir. An alternative Palestinian narrative that reframes the identity of the diasporic community through their collective memories.

6, 7

Try Before You Buy, Cong Ding. Trying on different identities within reconstructed everyday scenarios.

The Hakawati Forum, Jasmine Abu Hamdan. The non-linear structure of soundscapes and narratives reveal Aleppo as a staccato urban experience.

Augmygdala Studio, Sky Moore Clube. A virtual therapy space where architecture constructs an exploratory psychotherapy journey.

Nation Ark, Thomas Faulkner. A spatialised conversation that critiques the unwritten limitations of the planning process for the traveller community.

The Home vs The Museum, Camille Bongard. Constructing parallels between vast museum collections and each person’s home as their own curated world.

The Shadow of Beirut, Haya Mrowa. Using paper as a material register to reconstruct the city post-explosion.

Modern Day Slavery, Lana Nsouli. Prosthetic devices reveal the daily restrictions on the body of the domestic worker within the Kafala system in Lebanon.

14 14

RETELL

New Forms of Embodied Knowledge, Simon Glemser. Creating a circular economy around the reuse of components within the boat industry.

179

Diploma 12

NATION STATION Nation Station is a year-long investigation into identity through the lens of the nation state and the nation-building project. Recognising that identities are historical constructs that centralise certain subjects at the expense of others, DIP13 asks what role space and architecture play within this, and how we can deploy our skills as architects to rethink existing power structures. Throughout the year we learnt from social theorists, artists and activists, and travelled across disciplines, borders and firewalls. Our projects offer counter-narratives to those put forward by the state; they become investigations, and take the form of manuals and toolkits to deconstruct the process of nation-building. Anne-Lise questions the relevance of national monuments in post-colonial West Africa by proposing a new studio of cultural narratives. Anna G’s theatre in Moscow’s Red Square invites the public to participate in the construction of state falsehoods. Matthew’s Memory Palace resists the state’s rewriting of history by providing a virtual archive of the Hong Kong protests for future generations. Elisa interrogates the Modernist belief in secularism through her Church of Laïcité, whilst Sherif queries how the Egyptian ahwa can become a more inclusive form of public space. Ziyad explores how predictive policing operates spatially across different scales, from the surveillance devices that scan our bodies to crime maps of the city. Khaled reveals the Zionist project through the material supply chain of Haifa’s modernist buildings, whilst Zaina’s project draws parallels between the Kafala system and the inequalities in Jeddah’s built environment. Anna D offers us eight ways to transgress the US-Mexico border, while Ee Von investigates how racial politics are embedded in the infrastructure of monoculture plantations. Isabel asks what an urban environment designed around reproductive health and care would look like, whilst Shreya proposes a new way for inhabitants to monitor the effects of climate change across the border landscapes of India. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Merve Anil, Georges Massoud

Lina Ashour, Danah Abdulla, Lara Belkind, Tobias Cai, Eray Cayli, Pol

STUDENTS

Esteve Castelló, Sophie Chamas, Andrew

Anne-Lise Agossa, Khaled Al-Bashir,

Delatolla, Hannah Elsisi Ashmawi,

Isabel Castro, Ee Von Cheah, Elisa

f-Architecture, Golchehr Hamidi-

Commanay, Anna Der, Anna Glik,

Manesh, Platon Issaias, Stefan Laxness,

Shreya Kochatta, Matthew (Ka Kiu) Lin,

Lara Lesmes, Nick Masterton, Momtaza

Ziyad Louis Mourad, Sherif Shehata,

Mehri, Marko Milovanovic, Bushra

Zaina Sweidan

Mohamed, Sally Moussawi, Anna Muzychak, Hikaru Nissanke, Elena Paca, Stavros Papavassiliou, Joao Prates Vital Ruivo, Rama Sabanekh, Mohamad Safa, Kishan San, Natasha Sandmeier, Reem Shadid, Anamika Singh, Manolis Stavrakakis, Silvana Taher, Jocelyn Tang, Christina Varvia, Manijeh Verghese

RESTATE

180

Diploma 13

RESTATE

181

Diploma 13

RESTATE

182

Diploma 13

RESTATE

183

The Disobedient Landscape, Shreya Kochatta.

Algorithmic Justice, Ziyad Louis Mourad.

Memory as a Democratic Landscape, Matthew (Ka Kiu) Lin.

A Re-Choreography of the Ahwa, Sherif Shehata.

Maison de la Laïcité, Elisa Commanay.

The Narrative Decoder, Anna Glik.

The Invisible Core, Zaina Sweidan.

Future History, Anne-Lise Agossa.

Cementing Zionism, Khaled Al-Bashir.

Re-Pro: A New Politics of Care, Isabel Castro.

Counter-Monoculture: Oil Palm Plantations in Malaysia, Ee Von Cheah.

Architectura Guajira, Anna Der.

Diploma 13

G I R L S J U S T WA N T T O H AV E F U N: LABOUR, HOME AND ARCHITECTURE The construction of the idea of ‘home’ as a haven of privacy, completely detached from the realms of work and public life, has been a long-term project of Western modernity which has been exported all over the world through colonisation and globalisation. The separation of working and living – production and reproduction – is not an innocent process, as it creates social, racial and gender asymmetries that are at the root of much contemporary violence. This year, DIP14 sought to rethink the relationship between home and labour in order to challenge the conventional roles attributed to spaces and subjects by the last three centuries of typological thinking. Modern domestic space has been scripted so as to choreograph individualisation, separating people and activities – indeed, ‘social distancing’ and ‘lockdown’ have been deployed on the scale of the household long before becoming strategies to control the urban environment. By contrast, the proposals we developed this

year represent an attempt to critically discuss the dialectic between life and work which is often assumed as a natural, default condition of human existence. From finding space in the home for creative work to socialising care, from rethinking the link between settlement and agriculture to allowing craft to mix with everyday reproduction, every project tackled a different aspect of the unit’s agenda. Ultimately, recognising the home as a fundamental locus of production also means rejecting its reduction to the role of mere commodity, and to destabilise the very dichotomy of public-private both from a financial, as well as from an experiential point of view. With these projects, we hope to open up new scenarios and possibilities. Through simple means, these spatial experiments question the very idea of domesticity, not in order to offer a new answer but rather to empower the inhabitants to reimagine their own daily lives beyond preconceived models and social expectations. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Pier Vittorio Aureli,

Emily Abruzzo, Fabrizio Ballabio,

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

Neeraj Bhatia, Felipe De Ferrari, Mariabruna Fabrizi, Luca Galofaro,

STUDENTS

Elisa Iturbe, Jeremy Lecomte, Fosco

Nena Aru, Alice Leonora Bates, Farah

Lucarelli, Olivia Neves Marra,

Bizrah, Esther Brizard, Niccolò Cesaris,

Michael Robinson Cohen

Clara Dahan, Renée Die Girbau, Hunter Doyle, Theodora Giovanazzi, Bryan Ho, Jun Wei Koh, Julian Morisset, Lior Ramon, Léo Xiangyu Sun

REFORM

184

Diploma 14

REFORM

185

Diploma 14

REFORM

186

Diploma 14

From Party to Party: A Retrofitting Scheme for British Post-War Social Housing, Theodora Giovanazzi.

Towers in the Brownfield: Public Housing for Individuals on Remediated Land,

Living Room: Cooperative Housing for Young Workers in Milan, Niccolò Cesaris.

La Salle Commune: Transforming the Parisian Cité Ouvrière Using In-built

The Gleaners and I: On Rituality, Labour and Care in Rural Sardinia, Nena Aru.

The New Pioneers: Laying a Path for Kibbutz Ha’on, Lior Ramon.

Bait Al Arabi: Mediating Thresholds, Farah Bizrah.

Terraced Sheds: Mending Fences Through Communal Care, Léo Xiangyu Sun.

A Pier for Queers, Bryan Ho.

Porches: De-Sealing Atlanta’s Social Housing, Hunter Doyle.

A Room of [No One’s] Own, Renée Die Girbau.

Reclaiming the Shophouse: An Alternative Housing Scheme for Non-Nuclear

Julian Morisset.

Furniture, Esther Brizard.

Family Types in Singapore, Jun Wei Koh. 14

REFORM

187

Work-Homes for Craft Manufacturers, Alice Leonora Bates.

La Maison du Peuple: Integrating a Collective Pantry in Brussels, Clara Dahan.

Diploma 14

O N E OR DI NA RY A N D A NO T H E R This year, DIP15 collided programmes in unexpected ways, disrupting what we take for granted to create new habits and alternative inflections on everyday life. By exploring compositions of object, threshold and horizon, we moved between the scale of the domestic moment and of the landscape, looking for loopholes in existing legislation, codifying the dualities and contradictions inherent in our habits and investigating the line between fantasy and real-world possibility. Each student chose their own crossprogrammatic agenda to evaluate, systematise and play out through a developing understanding of gradients and shifts. Each term had a particular focus – in Term 1, this was Moments; in Term 2, Buildings; and Term 3, Archipelagos – while the year was structured in ten chapters: 1. The Home 2. Big Picture, Little Picture 3. Dualities, Gradients and Codes 4. Policy Cracks, Legislative Loopholes 5. Settle Down 6. Iterations 7. Powers of Ten 8. Instability 9. The Specific and the Universal 10. Storytelling Our unit is an exploration of narratives, sequences and change over time, through a series of architectural experiments that look to

harness temporal, seasonal and social instability within both design and representation. This world of flux is distilled through negotiations, fluctuating boundaries and a symbiotic exchange between inhabitants and environmental conditions. We created architectural systems, played them out as prototypes and extended them into archipelagos of interventions. We looked to identify the line between universal and specific conditions, to imagine new behavioural patterns and to create unfamiliar landscapes of the everyday. Our approach examines the relationships between big-picture and little-picture scenarios, and explores how social change can be generated from within the home itself. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sam Chermayeff, Lucy Styles

Lawrence Barth

STUDENTS Sinan Asdar, Kai Fung Kelvin Chan, Sungvin Cho, Ellie Cullen, Ellen Hu, Joy Lai, Allister Low, Gabrielle Sian Eglen, Sofia Tabet, Yixia Xu

REHABITUATE

188

Diploma 15

REHABITUATE

189

Diploma 15

REHABITUATE

190

Diploma 15

Piece by Piece: Housing and Infrastructure, Ellen Hu. The big and the small.

2, 6

Everyday Land, Yixia Xu. (2) Thresholds for care; (6) a compositional landscape.

3, 13

Cultivating Neighbourliness, Joy Lai. (3) Blurring of boundary at landscape scale; (13) taxonomy of negotiated boundaries.

Form Follows Risk, Proposal for a Post-programmatic Quarter, Sofia Tabet. Pleasure in constraint.

A Cozy Home, Allister Low. An architecture of air: heating the home with personal data servers.

Plateaus and Platforms, Sinan Asdar. Home, fields and water.

A New Domestic Waterscape, Sungvin Cho. Soft boundary.

9, 10

Constructing Friction, Kai Fung Kelvin Chan. (9) Constant renegotiation of the domestic and the non-domestic; (10) a decentralised field of rooms.

REHABITUATE

One Big Room, Gabrielle Sian. Borrowed light.

Longevity is a Game that Must be Easier to Play, Ellie Cullen. 2000 years of instability.

191

Diploma 15

HOMO URBANUS: L A B OR AT ORY F OR S E NS I T I V E OB S E RV E R S The extraordinary circumstances experienced this year have provided DIP16 with the opportunity to explore the fragile and rapidly-evolving social condition of Homo Urbanus during the pandemic, from the immediate and familiar perspective of each student. To address the urgency of this crisis – which has so heavily informed our understanding of collectivity and urban life – we chose to focus on the theme of vulnerability, and the various forms through which it manifests in the contemporary city. Using sensitive observation as our methodology, students were encouraged to leave the confines of their homes and engage with the outside world at a time when such freedoms were limited. After transforming their sense of familiarity and gaining critical

distance in Term 1, students spent Term 2 rediscovering their hometowns, each undertaking an immersive in-depth study of a specific urban condition through fieldwork. In Term 3, this research was finalised by each student in the form of a film, which we see as the architectural project. These films are extremely personal, with topics ranging from labour conditions to urban loneliness, displacement, isolation and precarity. In reflection of our global outlook, the films present a broad panorama from North American cities to dissolving Chinese villages, and from megacities such as Hong Kong, Moscow and London to the nomadic settlements surrounding Almaty, Kazakhstan. Remote teaching also provided a platform through which to host the Sensitive Observation seminar series. By inviting a number of philosophers, filmmakers and designers to speak at these events, we were able to expand our perception of the ordinary and to reveal its poetic richness. Among our guests were Gilles Clément, Wang Bing, Emanuele Coccia, Ugo La Pietra, Francesco Careri, Camille Bui and Thomas Daniell. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ila Bêka, Louise Lemoine, Gili Merin

Wang Bing, Camille Bui, David Burns,

Francesco Careri, Gilles Clément, STUDENTS

Emanuele Coccia, Thomas Daniell,

Tomiris Batalova, Chun Yu Eric Chan,

Luca Galofaro, Stefano Graziani,

Dariya Cheremisina, Hao Du, Zhehao

Ugo La Pietra, Davide Sacconi

Hong, Nikola Miloradovic, Caterina Miralles Tagliabue, Taek Gyun Won, Aijie Xiong

REDISCOVER

192

Diploma 16

REDISCOVER

193

Diploma 16

REDISCOVER

194

Diploma 16

A Dissolving Rurality, Aijie Xiong. The film documents a disappearing rural commune during China’s modern urbanisation process through a close observation of the relationship between people and space. It contributes to the reconstruction of a collective memory that is fleeting due to the political, social and cultural imbalance within this transformation.

Common Privacy, Dariya Cheremisina. The project explores the notion of private space in a post-Soviet Moscow by observing and listening to dialogues between four generations. Crossing the walls of private spaces, it reveals the possibility of intimacy within mass housing projects and traces the boundaries of our unshared spaces.

The Demolition Monologues, Taek Gyun Won. Set in a demolition site, the film attempts to capture the subjective values of place – such as the emotional memories of the individuals who lived there – that are easily ignored and destroyed by the impersonal process of profit-led urban development.

Nongmingong, Hao Du. The project observes the life of rural-urban migrant workers in China, locally known as Nongmingong, by exploring the social and spatial limbo that this group experiences.

Homo Mobilis, Nikola Miloradovic. This film explores the social alienation created in a car-dominant city, where public space has been exchanged for car-convenient services and the relationships of city inhabitants are further separated by the automobile.

The City in a City, Chun Yu Eric Chan. This film focuses on Chungking Mansions in the heart of Hong Kong – a site known for its social injustice and physical danger – by observing its hidden humanity and connectivity.

Lon-don-Liness, Caterina Miralles Tagliabue. A sensorial exploration of the loneliness inside a megacity.

I’m Not Mad; I am Nomad, Tomiris Batalova. The project focuses on the active fabrication of national identity in Kazakhstan through the introduction of tech-nomadism and animal imagery into the fabric of the city. The film adopts an ethno-fiction approach to allow speculative reality to act as a commentary on real events.

Superblock, Zhehao Hong. This film explores China’s dominant typology from the perspective of an incarcerated dweller.

REDISCOVER

195

Diploma 16

LATENT TERRITORIES: FIELDS OF PRODUCTION Following a three-year investigation into the role of technique in architecture, DIP17 began new research on the implications of material extraction this year. Students each investigated a field of extraction within three hours of their location, in order to deepen their understanding of the entire supply chain of their chosen material. These sites where documented using a range of media including drone filming, photography, photogrammetry and interviews with workers. On the one hand, this research enabled us to identify relevant historical, socio-economical and environmental issues related to these sites and to understand their long-term geological transformation; on the other, it allowed us to engage with the architectural culture and precedents related to these specific materials. The purpose of this phase was to identify critical issues, set clear contextual limits and establish material constraints. We developed tectonic strategies at an elemental scale through design and material experimentation. These approaches were then deployed within a civic project, ambiguously situated at the intersection of landscape, architecture and performance, in order to critically address fields of production and sites of material extraction. Students’ projects developed along two main lines of enquiry. Firstly, we worked towards an understanding of the politics of construction, seeking to democratise non-standard design and manufacturing techniques. Secondly, we prioritised the behavioural attributes of architectural form for its capacity to activate the body and trigger participation, both through action and by engaging the senses. DIP17 opposes the polarisation between intellectual and manual work. Our practice is rooted in thorough research and intensive experimentation – combining physical and digital media as a means to assess and negotiate our ideas in relation to the real. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Dora Sweijd, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis

Simon Taylor (Workshop Tutor), Miraj Ahmed, Sebastián Andiá, Jocelyn

STUDENTS:

Arnold, Carlos Villanueva Brandt,

Aleksandar Aksentijevic, Wei-i Chen,

Edouard Cabay, Brendon Carlin, Yoav

Tiffany Cheung, Giulliana-Florela

Caspi, Javier Castañón, Jonathan

Giorgi, Georgia Kestekoglou, Woojin

Cheng, Jelle Feringa, Kostas Grigoriadis,

Kim, Shaha Maria Raphael, Masa

Antonin Hautefort, Alexis Kallegias,

Tatalovic, Daniel Peter Tayar-Watson,

Stefan Laxness, Paul Loh, Inigo Minns,

Maciej Jerzy Tomaka, Sheng-Chin

Angel Lara Moreira, John Ng, Martin

Jeffrey Wu, Jun Ho Yim, Dajeong Yoon

Ostermann, John Palmesino, Christopher Pierce, Ignacio Putra, Giles Retsin, Silvana Taher, Andrew Yau, Yuan Zhai

R E A C T I VAT E

196

Diploma 17

R E A C T I VAT E

197

Diploma 17

R E A C T I VAT E

198

Diploma 17

/Common Ground/, Shaha Raphael. Defining the tool paths.

Reviving the Dormant Land, Masha Tatalovic. A landscape of subterranean worlds.

Here and Elsewhere, Jeffrey Sheng-Chin Wu. The Wallasea Island Research Institute for the production of reparation zones as future construction should demand parallel reparations.

Let’s Inhabit Productively, Daniel Tayar-Watson. A re-integration of manufacturing space into London.

Uncovering a Quarry’s Treasury of Countless Offcuts, Georgia Kestekoglou. A meeting space made from the by-product of the wasteful marble industry.

The Fragile Edge, Woojin Kim. Redefining the precarious boundary of reclaimed land.

Concealed Stories of Grunewald, Giulliana-Florela Giorgi. The project deconstructs the ever-changing relationship German society has with the forest, particularly in Grunewald, to debate on an alternative future for the way we see and use the forest.

Paving Communities, Jun Ho Yim. Remediating public infrastructure in the city.

Conservation of Memory, Aleksandar Aksentijević. Material trace confronts constructed realities, destruction and memory to provide what might appear to be evidence of a truth.

Forming Collectives, Wei-I Chen. A continuous construction formed by making and colouring clay.

11 11

R E A C T I VAT E

Lying Fallow: Unveiling Urban Derelict Land, Tiffany Cheung. The gesture alters a human-centric perception across derelict land.

199

Diploma 17

BEFORE, DURING, AFTER, AGAIN Contemporary and historic practices of material reuse offer a lens through which to reveal our monetary, imaginative, contractual, cultural, visceral and intimate relationships to the building stock. A souk in Casablanca, a concrete waste management plant in Hong Kong, a state-of-the-art government-owned yard in Malmö or informal housing in an abandoned building in Rome – reuse takes many forms across the globe. Through observation of these sites, a comparative framework of specificities and common characteristics emerged, helping us to identify the forces that facilitate or hinder the flow of material. It became clear that some nations that invest in future promises can lack implementation ‘in the field’, whereas other contexts without such a formal framework have already developed a booming informal reuse economy. With an audience of curious and savvy classmates in their pockets, DIP18 students opened the doors to these worlds of reuse – sometimes literally – to live-stream their findings. These exchanges broadened the horizon of the unit beyond established fields and beyond Europe. Creating an agreeable lunch-break corner for construction workers is as central to our work as scaling up processes in response to the growing demand for salvaged bricks. DIP18 joyfully engaged with research topics including inventory, machinery, logistics and labour markets while grounding our projects in impactful and realistic outcomes, liaising with professionals and strengthening relationships with allies. These peripheral efforts aim to expand both the definition of design and material culture and the role of

the architect, and also to reconsider how best to represent them within the AA and to communicate them to decision-makers in the professional field. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Aude-Line Duliere, James Westcott

Tristan Boniver, Arne Vande Capelle (Rotor), Simon Barker, Lea Bottani-

STUDENTS

Dechaud, Giles Bruce, Javier Castañón,

Igor Bartlomiej Gola, Frida Østby

Peter Christensen, Amica Dall, Lionel

Hansen, Amaya Hernandez, Jianghai

Devlieger, Maarten Gielen, Juliet

Hu, Sorana Stefana Mazilu, Iris Qing

Haysom, Marieke van den Heuvel, Adam

Nan Meng, Alexandru Octavian Mitea,

Hills, Peter Jurschitzka, Lasse Kilvær,

Shubaib Mohamed, Ele How Yan Mun,

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Louise

Alice Nobel, Nikitas Papadopoulos,

Lemoine, Samuel Little, Sara Morel,

Jihane-May Slaoui, Phillip Zhao

Mark Morris, Rik Nijs, Stephan

Jie Tsang

Petermann, Katia Truijen, Valerie Vermandel, Alejandro Zaera-Polo

REUSE

200

Diploma 18

REUSE

201

Diploma 18

REUSE

202

Diploma 18

9 10

Jihane-May Slaoui live-streaming her field research from the Ould Mina souk in Casablanca.

Casablanca’s Informal Market System: An Accelerator of Material Reuse, Jihane-May Slaoui. Appropriation of the souk and its public space by the

neighbourhood and its inhabitants. 3

London Unbuilding: A Push for Subsidiarity in the London Plan, Ele Mun. In the face of the Green New Deal, London Unbuilding introduces a new type of civil worker – the unbuilder – to offer services in unbuilding, material evacuation from site and a consignment scheme for salvaged materials.

Reuse Grade 1, Alice Nobel. Can approximate size specifications allow optimum reuse instead of optimum weight?

Door-to-Door, Amaya Hernandez. Still from a residential project in Brazil which aims to destigmatise reuse through the integration of a series of reclaimed doors.

Trash Into Treasure, Jianghai Hu. Manual published by a training centre to salvage bricks.

Paving Slab Reclamation in Xiaoli Town, Iris Qing Nan Meng. Villages undergoing demolition due to rural upgrading plan.

Street Value, Frida Østby Hansen. Using communication tools like public marketing campaigns to normalise and encourage the practice of reuse systematically based on individual participation.

Abandoned Rome, Alexandru Mitea. Six months after the first interventions on site, more and more people talk about the reappropriation of the station as it slowly becomes a hotspot for the neighbourhood.

Proposed Plan for Large-Scale Material Distribution Centre on the East India Dock Basin: Weekend View from Inside the Material Distribution Centre Outwards, Sorana Mazilu. The proposal is presented through future eyes, when it has already accumulated years of love, and the basin is integrated during the weekend as a paddleboard launchpad.

Hackney Wick and Fish Island – A Case for In-Situ Reuse: Inventory of 80–84 Wallis Road Warehouse, Igor Gola. Existing building stock is understood as a material bank at the doorstep of new developments, during an urban regeneration.

Debris, Scrap and Leftovers, Phillip Tsang. Footage of two months’ demolition of a 25-unit housing block in Hong Kong.

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Diploma 18

P L AY F O R T O D AY: THE PERFORMANCE OF ARCHITECTURE When the UK Government lifted restrictions following the Covid-19 lockdown in May 2020, outdoor markets were amongst the first public venues to reopen. Scenes of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, visiting a street market in Pimlico were widely broadcast to announce ‘lives returning to normal’. In doing so, the government was reminding audiences of the symbolic importance of markets that have been central to the growth of cities for the past 5,000 years. However, underlying the reassuring images is a wider ecosystem in crisis: markets encapsulate many of the challenges affecting contemporary society, from the role of public space to the degradation of the environment and the carbon footprint of logistics. This year, DIP19 has studied the market both conventionally as a spatial type, and anthropologically through sound, transcriptions, photography and video recordings – capturing the atmosphere of

the place and identifying the particular characteristics of its use. Building on the unit’s research into the relationship between theatre and architecture, we have focused on small-scale and human aspects of everyday life, on exchange and performance, and on the spaces of interaction between bodies. Through tools such as scripts, storyboards, sets, props, puppets and storytelling, we have condensed these moments and designed speculative markets of the future, which reflect contemporary ethical concerns alongside functional requirements. Central to each of these architectural proposals are first-hand observations of markets and miniature performances. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

David Kohn, Bushra Mohamed

Toby Anstruther, Olivia Arthur, Yohannes Berekt, John Burton, Laurie

STUDENTS

Chetwood, Ruth Claxton, Mark

Alexander Balgarnie, Charlotte Chan,

El-khatib, Forced Entertainment,

Napat Chayochaichana, Xiao Fang, Rolly

Juliet Rufford, Simon Starling, Carolyn

Hsiao, Wonyoung Jeong, Chanel Kuo,

Steel, Benedetta Tagliabue, Chris

Denise Lam, Sensy Mania, Mira Oktay,

Vincza, Gavin Wade

JinGyeong Ryu, Jiaqi Sun, Dana Wazni

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16 17

18 19

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23 22

R E P L AY

Păunești Market Puppet Show, Sensy Mania.

Grand Bazaar Puppet Show, Mira Oktay.

Greenwich Market Puppet Show, Wonyoung Jeong.

Taki Sarrafon, Jiaqi Sun.

Zhenhai Ximen Market, Xiao Fang.

Borough Market, Alexander Balgarnie.

Covent Garden Market, Charlotte Chan.

Marché Central de Royan, Wonyoung Jeong.

Smithfield Market, Denise Lam.

Palazzo de Raggione, Chanel Kuo.

Markthal, Xiao Fang.

Tsukiji Fish Market, Rolly Hsiang.

Santa Caterina Market, Mira Oktay.

Santa Maria da Feira Market, Jingyeong Ryu.

Grand Bazaar (Kapali Carsi), Dana Wazni.

Elevated Walkways, Denise Lam.

Amphawa Talat Nam, Napat Chayochaichana.

Birmingham Smithfield Markets, Alexander Balgarnie.

Choreographies on Stone, Sensy Mania.

Zhenhai Ximen Market Puppet Theatre, Xiao Fang.

New Cumberland Market, Chanel Kuo.

Birmingham Rag Market, Jingyeong Ryu.

The Peripatetic Flower Market, Charlotte Chan.

Volunteer Planting a Lemon Tree, Dana Wazni.

Tsukiji Sea Market, Rolly Hsiang.

26 Taki Sarrafon Foam Box Model, Jiaqi Sun.

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THE CIVIC ENTREPENEUR Civic | noun | Relating to a citizen’s agency and sense of belonging in the places we call home. Civic Entrepreneur | noun | A person who works to animate and transform a place. A civic entrepreneur brings people together from many walks of life, builds common purpose, unlocks latent talents and works to seed enterprising, imaginative and system-changing initiatives both inside and outside the mainstream – achieving more together than is possible alone. Why the world needs Civic Entrepreneurs | rationale | There is no silver bullet – single initiatives cannot solve problems on their own. We live in an increasingly complex world, requiring not just deep technical expertise but the ability to work across disciplines and with diverse groups of people. We need to think globally and act locally; action needs to be rooted in place to be effective and enduring. We are facing huge resource pressures, and need new skills and capabilities to do more with less. We are seeing a major shift in behaviours – people want to participate, not just to consume. From climate change to mental health, migration to youth unemployment, we have been facing a crisis of activation. We need a new profession to unlock the awe-inspiring potential of everything we already have: welcome, the ‘civic entrepreneur’. Thank you Custom House | practice | Conducted online amid lockdown restrictions during this extraordinary academic year, DIP20 would not have been possible without the support of the Custom House community. We are grateful to have learned alongside them – trading skills, designing toolkits, reopening derelict shops, taking risks, attracting investment and above all being curious and brave together to reimagine a neighbourhood for the world. Here’s to your courage and leaps of faith, Amber, Angela, Christine, Danny, Kaysey, Piarve, Scarlett, Simon, Terry and Tony. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Selva Gürdoğan, Jonathan Robinson,

Melis Abacıoğlu, Simon Battisti,

Gregers Tang Thomsen

Alfredo Brillembourg, Stuart Duncan,

Julia Fishkin, Steve Hamm, Gabu STUDENTS

Heindl, Yelta Köm, Stefan Laxness,

Halima Khamis Ali, See Hoi Hosea Lau,

Alexis Şanal, Azadeh Tajdar, Olivia

Sooyeon Lim, Tanya Paula Sui Sien

Horsfall Turner, Rikke Ullersted,

Lee-Monteiro, Yasemin Yesilipek, Zeena

Nikita Vervelde, Xuecheng Wang

Jamil, Zhuo Chen

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1, 7

For a Greener Tomorrow, Yasemin Yesilipek. (1) A character diving into Custom House, aiming to influence children for a greener tomorrow; (2) simplifying complex information on carbon emissions and green energy opportunities for today’s children and tomorrow’s adults.

The Van Next Door Fundraiser, DIP20 Team. A crowdfunding campaign to realise an extended community centre on wheels.

The Box Next Door, Halima Khamis Ali, Zeena Jamil, SH Hosea Lau. Engaging with members of the community by rethinking branding through collaborative workshops.

4, 5

New Freemasons Road Section, Sooyeon Lim. (4) A street designed for pedestrian comfort, safety and joy; (5) placemaking for gathering and meeting neighbours.

6, 9

commUNITY, Halima Khamis Ali. (6) Community centres currently don’t represent huge aspirations for people, no matter what space is provided. This sketch emphasises the importance of focusing on the unity of the people and their actions that enable them to unite for true impact. (9) FlawFetish, Halima Khamis Ali. This conceptual drawing highlights our profession’s obsession with hunting down problems and later making these their only lens.

8, 14

A Childcare Network by Night, Tanya Paula Sui Sien Lee-Monteiro. (8) Creating safer moments of recreation and interaction between neighbours; (14) sensory and physical play can take place with the supervision and maintenance of local vendors.

10, 11 Toy Library, Zhuo Chen. (10) A smiling face, a drawing done by children while they play together at the toy library; (11) testing toy-sharing infrastructure in Custom House. 12

The Van Next Door, Zeena Jamil. Through the deployment of a public programme that enables community members to prosper in Custom House,

the project proposes the van next door, an operational tool on wheels that enhances the programme’s impact and reach, and to nurture individual and collective growth. 13

The Van Next Door, SH Hosea Lau. As we reground community centres facing closure and funding cuts, residents participate in the design process of an alternative typology. The van is adapted to different day-to-day users, enabling changemakers to meet others, build trust and inspire further change.

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Diploma 20

UNDOMESTICATED CORPUS The history of architecture is one of obsessions, the first of which was, of course, to construct divisions. In an attempt to organise spaces, architecture divides them, as well as the bodies that move through them. Thus, one of man’s primordial needs – protection – is defined by opposition: it involves an external element, an ‘other’ from which we seek to protect ourselves. The refuge is structured by this fundamental division between interior and exterior – the in and the ex. But if the in is inclusive, it also points to its opposite, signaling an absence, a lack of something, anticipating the separation that the ex inexorably defines. Paradoxically, the in includes and excludes at the same time. Architecture is, to a great extent, obsessed with our identity and its preservation. If architecture embodies the founding values of a civilisation, it also expresses our fear of extinction; of the nothingness that opposes existence. Architecture opposes the fragmentation of personal identity: the splintering of the unity of the individual. Therefore, refuge – a place of protection – preserves this unity in the face of destructive external forces. But what happens when these forces cannot be contained? Such a destabilisation requires us to imagine new forms of refuge that are transversal and adaptable; places where the interior and the exterior meet; where, between the in and the ex, newly stripped of their negative polarities, the trans might slip in, suggesting a possible state of in-betweenness. In the era of the hybridisation of bodies and forms, where gender is understood as fluid rather than binary, DIP21 questioned the norms that construct space, conceiving of an architecture on new terms. Desire for change, or obsession with transformation? In tomorrow’s refuge we will be, as we are today, torn between the two. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Didier Fiúza Faustino, Anna Muzychak

Argyris Angeli, Tobias Cai, Matilde Cassani, Pol Esteve Castelló, Tatjana

STUDENTS

Crossley, Eleanor Dodman, Kostas

Beduro Bae, Luke Decker, Georges

Grigoriadis, Antonin Hautefort,

Gedeon, Tara Malek Gilani, Kin Yat

Alexandros Kallegias, Lara Lesmes,

Uno Lam, Le Pham Duc Minh, Shobha

Martial Marquet, Patricia Mato-Mora,

Narendran, Nuragiyanti Dewi

Joaquim Moreno, Sabrina Morreale,

Permatasari, Vito Benjamin Sugianto,

Dejan Mrdja, Frédérique Paraskevas,

Kechao Xiang, Peixuan Zhang,

Brent Patterson, Simon Rowe, Pelin Tan,

Emily Zinselmeier

Ignatio Tenggara, Troy Conrad Therrien, Marco Vanucci, Manijeh Verghese, Guillaume Viaud

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Dirty Dancing: Choreographies of the Oblique, Shobha Narendran.

Diploma 21

WHAT MAKES THE AA THE AA?

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Its democratic and associative nature. Small-scale, selfdiscovery, selfconfident, flexible, personal. The AA gives you the opportunity to think, not the duty to obey.

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Honouring our history and designing the future. The tension between tradition and the contemporary. The resilience of the ever-possible.

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No one knows, and best that it mysteriously stays that way. Its people.

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WHAT NEXT?

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Coming home to Bedford Square and Hooke Park. A proliferation of senses of history and forms of connecting. Whatever we decide now! The struggle to remain unique and relevant. REVIEW

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The AA will exist by virtue of its myths. Tomorrow might mean that the AA as a building may have been erased, devoured by the Internet.

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The AA’s clock is perpetually stuck at midnight on the threshold between today and tomorrow.

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CORE

STUDIES

Core Studies comprises a suite of courses that are central to the

spatial and material production, and ways of thinking in

study of architecture and the way it manifests physically and

architecture. Elective courses extend the range of Core Studies

intellectually in the world. Through lectures, participatory

into broader creative and radical practices in the arts and

seminars and workshops, these courses are designed to develop

sciences, as well as social politics, philosophy and new technology.

expertise and experimental methods in four key areas:

Offering participants a means of engaging with the cultural and

Communication and Media Studies (CMS); Environmental and

scientific discourse in new ways, these courses deepen students’

Technical Studies (ETS); History and Theory Studies (HTS);

understanding of interdisciplinary processes and provide a

and Professional Practice (PP) or Architectural Professional

mechanism for integrating self-selected knowledge into their

Practice (APP).

individual development in architecture. Diploma students can

These courses focus on how the interactions of culture, technology, climate, ecology and forms of practice impact upon

access courses hosted by the Taught Postgraduate programmes, and vice versa.

COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA STUDIES Communication and Media Studies is an experimental testing ground for exploring and interrogating the tools of architecture – tools with which we speculate, manipulate and play; compute, control and test; communicate, seduce and provoke. As our techniques and tools evolve and expand rapidly, the programme creates the space for students to critically evaluate the way they work and the tools they choose. Students are granted the opportunity to develop their individual practice, hone their dexterity with established and progressive media, and to actively test modes of production through focused acts of doing and making. It is a diverse, multidisciplinary programme, in which unexpected collisions and obsessive attention to detail expose a rich seam of creative potential, with the aim of both reinforcing and reinventing the methods in which students approach the design, communication and production of architecture. The programme operates throughout Term 1 and Term 2, and is composed of three primary forms of study: Studios, Workshops and Labs. Taught by AA tutors alongside specialists from outside the school, Studios address a particular aspect of architectural production within the scope of a single course topic, providing students with the knowledge and skills associated with a wide range of contemporary design, communication and fabrication media. This year’s courses addressed differing media including

film, photography, analogue and digital drawing, animation, narrative, physical assemblage, material exploration, digital fabrication, 3D scanning, game design and Virtual Reality. Workshops are optional one-off events, short introductions, tasters or demonstrations open to curious minds from across the school. Labs are composed of a series of optional skills-based one-day courses that introduce students to fundamental techniques in major digital applications for architecture. Working with the AA Computer Lab, Lab courses cover many common computer applications, from 3D modelling and drafting to imaging, publication, digital computation and scripting, various physicsbased analyses and other relevant software. STAFF Kate Davies (Head of Communications and Media Studies), Oliviu LugojanGhenciu (Lab Coordinator), Miraj Ahmed, Sebastián Andía, Charles Arsène-Henry, Sue Barr, Yoni Bentovim, Henry Cleaver, Liam Cobb, Eleanor Dodman, Shin Egashira, Raluca Grada-Emandi, Juliet Haysom, Matej Hosek, Anderson Inge, Oskar Johanson, Harry Kay, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu, Antoni Malinowski, Patricia MatoMora, Anna Mill, Inigo Minns, Alison Moffett, Joel Newman, Ana Maria Nicolaescu, Thomas Parker, Thomas Randall-Page, Buster Rönngren, Mattia Santi, Francesca Silvi, Paula Strunden, Sebastian Tiew, Jelena Viskovic (Department Staff )

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CMS

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CMS

17 15

23 21

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CMS

29 1

The Viral Kidnapper, Esperanza Nelson, First Year.

Seeing Your Way to Draw, Sungmin Song, Second Year.

3–5

Charlotte Birrell, Communication and Media Prize for exceptional work in First Year. For Productive Drawing with Juliet Haysom and Politics of Colour with Antoni Malinowski.

6–8

Emma Coates, Communication and Media Prize for exceptional work in Foundation. For Fluids Fabrics Forces Forms with Thomas Randall-Page and Consequential Spaces with Anna Mill and Liam Cobb.

9–11

Ningwei Liu, Communication and Media Prize for exceptional work in Second Year. For Projection and Speculation with Miraj Ahmed and Future Craft with Patricia Mato-Mora and Gary Edwards.

Foundation: First Year:

Paola Murguia, Special Mention. For Cellar Door with Inigo Minns.

13, 14 Iseult Campbell-Lange, Special Mention. For Shapes of Fiction: Shore Fade with Charles Arsène-Henry and Buster Rönngren and Politics of Colour with Antoni Malinowski. 15, 16 Laure Segur, Special Mention. For Seeing Slowly with Sue Barr and Suspense

on a Green Screen with Jelena Visckovic. 17, 18 Lisa Jiaming Xiao, Special Mention. For Consequential Spaces with Anna Mill and Liam Cobb and Production and Speculation with Miraj Ahmed. 19, 20 Luca Luporini, Special Mention. For Productive Drawing with Juliet Haysom and Politics of Colour with Antoni Malinowski. 21, 22 Michal Chudner, Special Mention. For Fluids Fabrics Forces Forms with Thomas Randall-Page and Translation Through Drawing with Shin Egashira. 23

Tim Formgren, Special Mention. For Consequential Spaces with Anna Mill and Liam Cobb.

Second Year:

24, 25 Tatiana Watrelot, Special Mention. For Cellar Door with Inigo Minns. 26, 27 Chengxuan Li, Special Mention. For +Point Reality with Ana Maria Nicolaescu and Sebastian Tiew and Datascape with Francesca Silvi and Mattia Santi. 28

Lee Chung, Special Mention. For Translation Through Drawing with Shin Egashira and +Experimental Film with Yoni Bentovim.

Magdalene Tan, Special Mention. For Fixing Stars with Oskar Johanson and Datascape with Francesca Silvi and Mattia Santi.

30, 31 Quentin Dauvergne, Special Mention. For Seeing Slowly with Sue Barr and 31

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Shapes of Fiction: Shore Fade with Charles Arsène-Henry and Buster Rönngren.

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CMS

ENVIRONMENTAL AND TECHNICAL STUDIES Environmental and Technical Studies accompanies each participating student on a five-year journey of discovery, through which they become better equipped to make well-informed design decisions. Every issue that students encounter within the programme provides an opportunity for background research, consolidation and evaluation of their approach within the context of the intentions of the project in question; the work shown on these pages provides direct documentation of those processes. During this exceptional year, the programme has striven to consider our shared circumstances as an opportunity to excel, rather than simply a situation to adapt to. In response, within the first-year studio, the Miro board became a vital resource and a shared canvas on which the entire 100-strong cohort of tutors

and students could work together. The quantity of work by third- and fifth-year students represented on these pages reflects the programme’s approach to teaching, wherein first-, second- and third-year courses intend to prepare students for their ETS3 Technical Design Project, and fourth- and fifth-year courses aim to build towards their ETS5 Technical Design Thesis. One of the more impactful consequences of online teaching and learning has been that the majority of ETS students have not had access to workshops and laboratories, and this is reflected in the comparatively small number of physical models created this year. The quality of the work has, however, been remarkable, as students turned instead to digital tools, simulations and cyberphysics. As we reflect on this year, we must acknowledge the extraordinary – sometimes truly heroic – level of commitment and hard work undertaken within the programme by tutors and students alike. The projects displayed on these pages are a tribute to their tenacity and dedication. STAFF Javier Castañón (Head of Environmental and Technical Studies), Xavier Aguilo, Francesco Anselmo, Simon Beames, Nicolo Bencini, Delfina Bocca, Giles Bruce, Sinead Conneely, Chris Davies, Laura De Azcárate, Simon Dickens, Aude-Line Duliere, Ian Duncombe, Lena Emanuelsen, Kenneth Fraser, Wolfgang Frese, Anna Font, Joana Carla Gonçalves, Kostas Grigoriadis, Evan Green, Pablo Gugel, Alan Harries, Jonny Hawkshaw, David Illingworth, Sho Ito, Omid Kamvari, Alistair Lenczner, Alistair LowMacrae, Zabih Majidi, Ciaran Malik, Nacho Martí, Patricia Mato-Mora, Nina McCallion, Anna Mestre, Antonio Moll, Anna Muzychak, Anna Plà Català, Danae Polyviou, Thomas Raymont, Ioannis Rizos, Camila Rock De Lugi, Giancarlo Torpiano, Chiara Tuffanelli, Anna Wai, Sal Wilson, Pablo Zamorano

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The Miner’s Lung: Protecting the Existing Buildings in the Old Mine Settlement in Katowice, Poland, Malgorzata Tchorzewska. An air-cleaning façade addition using natural materials, which evolves over time to respond to pollutants in a coal mining community in Poland. Awarded ETS3 High Pass with Distinction, Best Third Year Technical Thesis.

Towards Sedimentary Cities: A Handbook for Accumulated Architecture, Boji Hu. Considering our city as part of the geology, the project proposes an alternative paradigm for urban regeneration by sourcing materials from the city while densifying the existing urban fragments as sedimentations. Awarded ETS5 High Pass with Distinction, Best Technical Thesis 2021.

Hotel Plus: A Network of Community-led Hotels in Rural Spain, Jasmine Chung. The project reinvents the hotel as a social infrastructure that is

managed and used by local communities. The hotel network mobilises rural communities against the territorial divide between the overdeveloped and the underserviced, by distributing undefined spaces of coproduction, and by restoring abandoned buildings, social cohesion, services and populations in rural Spain. Awarded ETS5 High Pass. 4

Reuse Grade 1, Alice Nobel. The thesis aims for a change in the Swedish structural steel scrap market. While advocating for the use of reclaimed steel, it proposes a shift in the design process wherein steel integration coming from stock availability is at the core of the design language. Awarded ETS5 High Pass.

Street Sweeper, Yoav Carmon. Extracting and moving an entire city building to create situations and moments of play in the spectacle of the procession and the urban juxtapositions along the route. Awarded ETS3 High Pass.

‘La Salle Commune’: The Common Room, Esther Brizard. The project investigates a system of peripheral inbuilt furniture as a means of retrofitting the Parisian ‘Cité Ouvrière’. Awarded ETS5 High Pass.

Moscow Synthesizer, Xiaoya He. A series of electromechanical transport infrastructure elements to connect the absurdity of the theme park to the everyday commute in Moscow. Awarded ETS3 High Pass with Commendation.

Montaging Shadows: The Deep Urban Space, Neophytos Christou. Collage extraction model, speculating on boundary negotiations and hybrid aggregations of programmes – present, past and future. Awarded ETS5 High Pass with Commendation.

Agar Bioscaffold, James Emery. A composite material based on agar bioplastic that allows plant cell attachment and growth. The roots of the growing plants reinforce the agar base, allowing the material to cover hard urban

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surfaces. Awarded ETS4 High Pass.

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ETS

H I S T ORY A N D T H E ORY S T U DI E S First Year Writing Prize Winner

If ever a programme was equipped to confront the challenges of online learning during this academic year, it was History and

THE LANGUAGE OF THE SQUARE:

Theory Studies (HTS). This year, our cohort came together to define

TWICE INVENTED PLACE VENDÔME

the questions that our discipline needs to ask itself within the current conditions of everyday life.

Michal Chudner

In the Experimental Programme, the Second and Third Year were merged into a single lecture series, providing students with

‘Architecture is a system of writing’1 writes

a new voice each week. Focusing on six different topics –

Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris. Since the

character, home, building, land, city, and physics and metaphysics – the lectures addressed a seemingly simple question: what is

earliest times, people grounded their memories

architecture, and how is it produced? Our responses pushed at the

in what was most visible and durable to not risk

seams of our discipline, as conversations traditionally considered

losing them. And when you observe people

beyond our scope were gently nudged to the centre of the discourse.

existentially hold on to a place, and when it

In the Diploma Programme, new voices were introduced this year, with Nana Oforiatta-Ayim and Kathy Battista joining us to

becomes the apex of revolt, when people return

deliver the Polymodernism and From Biennal to Bed courses

to it to build and destroy, to terrestrially write

respectively. The existing cohort continued to develop their own

and erase, then you perhaps see clearly the

fields of enquiry, often rereading their original topics in light of the social and political injustices which shook the world during

human need to stamp an immortal message in

the summer of 2020 and, of course, in response to the ever-

a granite book.

changing sphere of private and public life wrought by Covid-19.

The second half of the 17th century marked

Despite the challenges that we faced this year – from the

the end of medieval France’s era of glory. It is in

logistical troubles of faulty internet connections and incongruous

this time when Place Vendôme was built, initially

time zones, to the devastating loss of our beloved friend and

to praise King Henry IV. France went through

Programme Head, Mark Cousins – HTS has continued to push at the disciplinary boundaries of architecture. This can perhaps be seen

a series of revolutions, wrapped around questions

most clearly within the exemplary work presented at the 2021

of national value and identity, as a great political

Writing Prize, a true testament to the scope of what History and

and social awakening. Paris, just as the French

Theory can encompass at the AA.

people, was torn and inflamed and the Place became gradually a refined space of conflict.

STAFF Pier Vittorio Aureli, Eleni Axioti, Andrea Bagnato, Kathy Battista, Doreen Bernath, Edward Bottoms, Mark

Campbell, Susan Chai, Nerma Cridge,

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, ‘This Will Kill That’, p 193.

Francesca Dell’Aglio, Ryan Dillon, Costandis Kizis, Sofia Krimizi, Denis Macshane, Roberta Marcaccio, Gili Merin, Melissa Moore, Mark Morris, Joaquim Moreno, Ana Maria Nicolaescu, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, Will Orr, Dorette Panagiotopoulou, Claire Potter, Merce Rodrigo Garcia, Ricardo Ruivo Pereira, Teresa Stoppani, Silvana Taher, Manolis Stravakakis, Álvaro Velasco Perez, Alexandra Vougia, Katerina Zacharopoulo, Zaynab Dena Ziari

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HTS

Second Year Writing Prize Winner

Third Year Prize Winner

THE WHITE, THE DEER AND THE PLAIN

CARTOGRAPHIC PERMANENCE –

Qi Zhu

A TIME-BASED READING OF THE NILE AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS Ferial Massoud

The scene of digging out the border stone comes from the novel The W hite Deer Plain by Zhongshi Chen (1942–2016). The novel depicted lives

“Si je devais gouverner ce pays, pas une goutte

of people and the land on Loess Plateau in north-

d’eau ne se perdrait dans la mer.”*

west China during the first half of the 20th

— Napoleon Bonaparte, Egyptian Campaign,

century. The core story was around three

1798–1801

generations of people from the Bai (White) family and the Lu (Deer) family who shared

*If I were to govern this country, not a drop

their ancestral blood and lived in the same

would be lost at sea.

village called White Deer Village on the White Deer Plain.

If anything, Napoleon’s words are a testament to an enduring concern with hydropolitics. The 1798

As the representatives of the Whites and the Deers respectively, Jiaxuan Bai and Zilin Lu are

occupation of Egypt which accompanied his

the protagonists of the novel. In the opening

words, places water at the core of his imperialist

quote, Zilin Lu was changing the ownership of

ambitions. Water was then, as it is today, a

the land that Jiaxuan Bai passed to him. It is the

colonised subject, one deemed crucial to fully

consequence of the most important event which

grasp, analyse, map out and control. The Nile

drew the beginning of the novel – land exchange.

contains the history of its subjugation in its representations; it is a subjugation begun on paper, in the map. Napoleon embarked on his Egyptian Campaign along with myriad cartographers, capturing the Nile in a frenzy. However, the maps produced during the expedition are but one instance of the Nile’s extensive mapping effort. National archives attest to the Nile’s captivity, as maps abound from Roman times to today, in Italian, German and French, Arabic, Turkish or English. In each language, the Nile is imagined and produced in ink.

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HTS

Dennis Sharp Award Co-Winner

A CULTURE OF CRAFT:

THE HOME AS A MACHINE:

WEST AFRICA UNOBJECTIFIED

WOMEN’S ADVICE LITERATURE AS

Richard Aina

A GENEAOLOGY OF MODERN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE Esther Brizard

This thesis aims to progress towards a novel offering regarding a subject matter that has grown to become deceptively familiar. One can recognise

The rapid pace at which industrialisation

antiques as marginal objects, anomalous amongst

happened in the 19th century accelerated the

the conventional in how they forgo contemporary

separation of spheres by gender. Where

functional tropes. Even though such objects of

industrialisation and commerce prevailed,

antiquity serve no pertinent present purpose,

society of the time described a decline in

beyond worldly superficialities, they are symbolic

morality. However, the home, sheltered from the

– embodying a mythological character. They have

materialism of the public arena, could preserve

the capacity to evoke bygone times, imbuing

virtue; and women would remain in the private

atmospheres of seemingly fading practices of the

sphere and protect it. Gradually, housewives

past that existed in the antithesis of conventional

began to voice the oppressive state they found

contemporary notions. Operating as a surviving

themselves in. Blaming capitalism and

remnant, nostalgically referring to notions of

patriarchy, female activists proposed collective

craftsmanship and quality that are representative

options of childcare, housework, cooking and

of particular historical periods in time.1

other traditionally female domestic jobs, relieving them from this burden and releasing

‘The material world confronts us only to serve

them from the traditional private sphere.

as a mirror for social relations.’²

However, for most members of the middle class,

— Bruno Latour

this radical vision of a restructured family and

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996).

Bruno Latour, ‘The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things’, in

society was too threatening. Indeed, although the radicals’ arguments about decreasing the drudgery of housework had great appeal, too

Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. (London: Routledge, 2000). pp 12–21.

often they were combined with ideas about disassembling the traditional family home; and this was for so many women, the core of their identity; something they could not let go of.

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Dennis Sharp Prize Commendation

CLOSET DOOR, UNDERGROUND

THE SEARCH FOR UNREALISED

CARRIAGE, PRIDE BARRICADE

BALANCE: THE CONVENIENCE STORE

Bryan Ho

A N D A C R I T I Q U E O F E V E RY D AY L I F E Yixia Xu

Passing through a discreet red door, I was greeted with a narrow corridor clad in metal panels and

A sign

a receptionist who, dubious of my age, requested to see my ID. After explaining the rules of the

bath house, he charged me £1 and handed me a towel. A set of stairs led down to a changing

The moment sits deep into the night between

room, which was part of a much larger double-

moonset and sunrise. A few people shuffle along

height space.

the pavement, drifting between objects or

Changed into nothing but just a towel

thresholds in the urban landscape. Looking for

wrapped around my waist, I proceeded down

something or settling for anything. At this hour,

into the hall, where over 50 men sat chattering,

the skeletal sea of tired windows sag in the dim

bathing in the hot tub, all the while gazing at

streetlight like a worn-out smile propped up by

whoever enters the space, like predators

a fluorescent boxed beacon. A small opening where

watching their prey enter into the arena. Beyond

people can indulge in ordinary desires with the

this hall, another set of stairs led down into a

same anonymity of ease and ugliness of the home.

maze, here, the light was dim and the corridors

Some shopfronts are populated with

were narrow. It was a maze, but one full of sweat

colourful posters that almost cover the entire

and literal steam.

window like a collaged screen. Best doughnuts. ATM here. Corona Extra. Neatly stacked boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables welcoming in anticipation by the entrance. Others are defined by transparent glass and neon signage. The interior lit up like some sort of retail aquarium in the day and night, white light dancing off the linoleum floors and wall of drink coolers in the back. No retail display necessary in the shop front. What you see is what you get.

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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE (PART 3) Professional practice is open to many interpretations and definitions. Throughout the year, we have asked what it means to be ‘professional’ and what it means to ‘practice’. Working from home during lockdown has offered the chance to reflect and challenge our priorities, prompting us to question how and why we design in a world of overconsumption. For too long, the focus within our discipline has been on buildings, but the future of architecture will emphasise process and participation. Architects need to realign and find a social role to become essential participants in improving our environment. The Part 3 seminar programme emphasised the need to uphold the highest ethical standards and to become more knowledgeable on a range of subjects including the regulatory framework, planning, building regulations and health and safety. ‘Radical practice’ is an overworked, hackneyed expression inferring that designing and constructing buildings is straightforward. It is not. Over the past two decades, architects have been sidelined and we have abdicated our responsibility to society and the environment, allowing others to take the lead. Contemporary practice has to engage with real and immediate issues such as the unimaginable loss of life in the Grenfell Tower disaster, the global climate emergency and social inequality. Professional and ethical practice has become a central tenet of the programme. Within the seminar programme, Simon Foxell traced the history of the profession, while Carys Rowlands and Alasdair Ben Dixon encouraged debate on a number of ethical practice scenarios. Elsie Owusu and Sumita Singha conveyed lessons learned during their careers, emphasising the need to be resolute, to learn how to listen, to develop an opinion and to show leadership, and Flora Samuel closed the series by discussing the value of research in practice. We encourage everyone on the Part 3 programme to participate, and being based online did not disrupt the debate. In confidence and often with candour, candidates shared their experiences of practice, much of which have been less than positive. As a result of the pandemic many students have been on furlough, working excessive unpaid hours from their homes. The challenge faced by our young architects is enormous, and if the profession is to become more relevant they will need the support, encouragement and engagement of the profession and of practice in particular. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Paul Crosby (Head of Part 3/Professional

Richard Brindley, Nigel Calvert,

Studies Advisor), Jennifer Anderson

Laurence Cobb, Peter Garnet Cox,

(Professional Studies Coordinator)

Alasdair Ben Dixon, Simon Foxell, Michael Holmes, Laura Iloniemi, Anthony Lavers, Sarah Lupton, Kate Marks, Nigel Ostime, Elsie Owusu, Carys Rowlands, Flora Samuel, Roger Shrimplin, Sumita Singha, Manos Stellakis, David Watkins

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Professional Practice

TAUGHT POSTGRADUATE

PROGRAMME

The AA offers nine full-time Taught Postgraduate programmes:

May of the second year respectively. The MFA course in Spatial

advanced courses of study within a dynamic and progressive

Performance and Design (AAIS) takes place over 18 months, as

learning environment which welcomes students with prior

students collectively realise projects between architecture, art

academic and professional experience.

and performance; the Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban

All students join the school in September at the beginning of each academic year, however the duration of these programmes

Design (Projective Cities) takes place over 20 months. The PhD programme at the AA is a full-time, three-year course

varies: MA/MSc programmes take place over 12 months,

that aims to train scholars and researchers in the fields of

culminating in the submission of a final dissertation which

architectural history and theory, urban studies and technology.

incorporates design research with case study work. MArch

The ambition of the programme is to learn from architectural

programmes include two phases of study, undertaken over 16

knowledge and its history in order to understand the built

months: three terms of studio-based design and taught coursework

environment at large. The programme thus encourages risky,

for Phase 1, followed by a further term-long Thesis Design project

rigorous and speculative dissertations that ultimately question

in Phase 2. MFA and MPhil courses are similarly divided into two

architecture itself and its history, as well as its professional

phases of study, with a longer Phase 2 that concludes in March and

and disciplinary mandate.

ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (AADRL) Nahmad and Bhooshan Studio Gamification / Robotic Fabrication / Mass-Customised Design The studio explores the creation of architecture and urbanism via participatory mechanisms. The design-research of the studio builds on its prior experience in computer-aided geometric design, robotic fabrication and industrialised construction. These technologies of physical realisation provide the substrate for a gamified, stakeholder participation framework to operate upon. Together, they create spaces and governance mechanisms to host online communities, in anticipation of their physical realisation. Schumacher Studio Parametric Semiology / High Density / Multi-Authored Urbanism The studio extrapolates from recent urban concentration processes towards further intensification. Ecological challenges such as climate

change point to the wisdom of urban densification, which is mandated by the transformation of industrial centres into knowledge and innovation hubs, where the collaborative integration of self-directed, creative labour processes demands hyper-dense, permeable urban fabrics. The proposal envisions a new high-rise district between the City of London and Canary Wharf, straddling both sides of the river, assuming the hegemony of tectonism as a precondition for achieving the required density of differentiation and correlation. Spyropoulos Studio Disaster Complexity / Autonomous / Anticipatory / Agent-Based The studio challenges the fixed and finite orthodoxies of building design for a latent and unknown world. Our research examines scenario-based design through autonomous, selfstructuring constructs. We propose high-population-based deployable systems that examine post-disaster complexities. Issues of mass migration, post-earthquake housing and ‘hospitals on demand’ are some of the challenges undertaken towards the development of an instantaneous response infrastructure.

drl.aaschool.ac.uk STUDENTS

Liu, Akash Clive, Dilara Yurttas, Mauricio

Coordinator), Megan Greig, Danae

Phase 1: Jamil Al Bardawil, Oula

Villagra Dill’ Erva, Ceren Tekin, Suthinee

Polyviou, Edoardo Tibuzzi, Albert

Al-eryani, Daniela Maria Bedoya, Gaojia

Charoensawasd, Hamze Machmouchi,

William Son-Taylor (AKT II Technical

Chen, Yunpeng Chen, Gizem Dogan, Daphne

Sultan Almutairi, Hazel Simay Ozrenk,

Tutors), Federico Borello, Torsten Broeder,

Drayiou, Dingyu Hu, Yuji Huang, Yunyu

Pavlos Symianakis, Zhenyu Fan, Jiangyong

Mariana Custodio Dos Santos, Octavian

Huang, Ziyuan Huang, Gaurav Janendra,

Chen, Eda Esen, Yan Chen, Yushan Chen,

Mihai Gheorghiu, Konstantina Stella

Hao Jiang, Yu Jiang, Samaneh Karimelahi,

Meysam Ehsanian Mofrad, Yanran Lu, Luca

Tsagkaratou (Software Tutors)

Tianyun Li, Jiadong Liang, Sitong Liang,

Bacilieri, Devansh Daisaria, Du Huang,

Jiahui Ma, Yara Manla, Stefan Tzon

Jingwen Su, Liyuan Gao, Shanshan Li,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Manousof, Ling Mao, Chhavi Mehta, Bowen

Meng Wang, Yuling Ma, Pengcheng Gu, Hao

Andy Watts (Consultant), Stephen Gage

Miao, Cheolyoung Park, Wei Peng, Yuxiao

Wen, Yuchao Zhang, Shuai Zou

(External Examiner) and our guest critics Melike Altinisik, Matias Del Campo,

Ren, Ziyu Song, Panagiota Tsaparikou, Andong Wang, Pin-ju Wang, Siyuan Wang,

STAFF

Konstantinos Dimopoulos, Ulrich Götz,

Yaobin Wang, Yutong Xia, Huiying Xiao,

Theodore Spyropoulos (Programme Head),

Behnaz Farahi, Jelle Feringa, Paulo

Yufan Xiao, Yingrui Xu, Qi Yang, Amin

Patrik Schumacher (Founder), Shajay

Flores, Nassia Inglessis, Hina Jamelle,

Yassin, Yang Yu, Lekai Zhang, Xiaomeng

Bhooshan, David Greene (Course Masters),

Suhair Khan, Neil Leach, Ross Lovegrove,

Zhang, Xirong Zheng, Yiyang Zheng,

Pierandrea Angius, Aleksandar Bursac,

Marta Malé-Alemany, Sandra Manninger,

Jieping Zhuang, Jonatan Zisser

Apostolos Despotidis, Ryan Dillon,

Alessandro Melis, Sameep Padora, Wolf D

Phase 2: Angelina Kozhevnikova, Konuralp

Mostafa El-Sayed, Evangelia Magnisali,

Prix, Ali Rahim, Jorge Sainz, Robert

Senol, Kyungha Kwon, Ghida Khayat,

Alicia Nahmad Vazquez, Ariadna Lopez

Stuart-Smith, Peter Testa, Veronika

Haoyang Shi, Zhengze Yu, Yi Han, Razvan

Rodriguez, Klaus Platzgummer (Course

Valk-Siska, Jenny Wu, Philip Yuan

Voda, Jaeho Park, Huizhong Li, Xiaonan

Tutors), Alexandra Vougia (Programme

RESEARCH

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3 4

1, 2

Team Radical Gravity. (1) System sectional diagram; (2) context-driven agency.

3, 7

Team Bring Hospital to You. (3) AI-driven user health evaluation; (8) symbiosis in the urban context.

4, 5

Team Seismos. (4) 1:1 scale prototype of the system unit; (5) environmentresponsive reconfigurable space.

RESEARCH

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Team ESC. Cluster configuration.

DRL

14 13

RESEARCH

246

DRL

9, 13, 16, 17

Team Interwoven. (9) Personalised avatar creation; (13) generative structural typologies; (16) architecture as a public incubator; (17) prototypical robotic fabrication.

10, 18

Team Industrialis3D. (10) Mass-customisation fabrication; (18) unit module elemental breakdown.

11, 12, 14, 15, 19

Team Polis. (11) Agent-based dynamic equilibrium; (12) site functionaity analysis; (14) production lines; (15) prototypical building section; (19) 1:1 timber assembly mock-up.

RESEARCH

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RESEARCH

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22, 25 Team Morphield. (22) Topology optimisation and façade study; (25) tower research structural variations. 23, 30 Team Skyscape. (23) Tower research prototypical interiors; (30) river

Thames riparian landscape. 24, 26 Team [Symbios]city. (24) Cityscape; (26) tower research structural topologies. 27–29 Team Vertporo. (27) Tower research sample floor, (28) ‘sponge city’; (29) tower research structural types.

RESEARCH

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DESIGN + MAKE Away from the city, students of Design + Make explore design at the point of physical production. Surrounded by a diverse team including foresters, engineers, artists and roboticists amongst others, students are tasked with developing alternative ways of making buildings – primarily from trees. Throughout 2020–21 we have been grateful for our woodland premises in Hooke Park, which have enabled students to continue their work in person; to stay on the tools. Living on-site, their work demonstrates an exceptional engagement that went beyond the studio or workshop. As MArch student Farid notes: “We were sharing meals, learning how to cook, playing sports, taking walks in the woods, hand-carving spoons, foraging fruits and learning to plant and grow in the kitchen garden.” MSc students took on individual research projects. Seb developed a new kind of timber product designed to enable more 1

sustainable forest ecologies. Carolina worked on a bound joining system that minimises the material processing of timber elements, providing a functional and ornamental solution. Jeremy dusted off a sewing machine in the workshop to craft a lightweight hybrid timber-membrane structure. Zooming into grain patterns, Paing Su sought to apply the growth logic of the tree on a larger scale. MArch students Amina, Farid and Thanatcha developed a series of objects within the kitchen garden, expanding its function with a new greenhouse, water tower and boundary. Alongside wooden elements, the students used rammed earth construction, attentive to thermal performance and environmental conditions. Having researched the history of Hooke Park, the garden became a microcosm for the broader site within which the students could test methodologies of continual building. In October we were joined by some fresh faces; after an intensive first term, our new cohort of MSc students has been busy working on their ‘Augmented Branches’ brief, while MArch students have questioned ‘How We Make Houses with Trees’. designandmake.aaschool.ac.uk

2 STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Martin Self (Programme Head, MSc

Francis Archer, Carlos Villanueva

Lead), Zachary Mollica (MArch Lead,

Brandt, Charley Brentnall, Jack Cardno,

Hooke Park Warden), Jean-Nicolas

Finbar Charleson, Matthew Davis,

Dackiw, Amica Dall, Jack Draper, Will

Alice Edgerley, Stephen Hales, Richard

Gowland, Giles Smith, Simon Withers

Harris, Takeshi Hayatsu, Anderson

(Programme Tutors) Edward Coe,

Inge, John Makepeace, Anthony

Charlie Corry Wright, Georgie Corry

Meacock, Mark Morris, Daniel

Wright, Tia Corry Wright, Jean-Nicolas

Ridley-Ellis, Alex de Rijke, Kenton

Dackiw, Laura Kaddey, Christopher

Rogers, Fabian Scheurer, Toby

Sadd, Lucas Wilson (Hooke Park Team)

Sherwood, James Solly, Neil Spiller, Tom Svilans, Silvana Taher, Manja

STUDENTS

van de Worp, Ed Wall

Phase 2: Thanatcha Cholpradit, Farid Younesi, Amina Yusupova (MArch), Sebastian Birch, Jeremy Hollister, Paing Su Ko, Carolina MRS Menezes (MSc) Phase 1: Georgina Bowman, Dmitrii Fedorov, Sirisha Munnangi, Jacopo Niccolò Silvestri, Weikun Xu (MArch), Daniel Swarovski, Noah Thaddeus, Jacobo Mendoza Zendejas, Youcheng Zeng (MSc)

RETREAT

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Design + Make

5 4

6 7

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13 14

1–6

Hooke Garden, Thanatcha Cholpradit, Farid Younesi and Amina Yusupova. (1) Testing the scale of the greenhouse’s spanning truss; (2) light timber and polycarbonate structure resting on a rammed-earth wall; (3) pattern and layering on the greenhouse’s southern wall; (4) groundworks and rammedearth construction underway; (5) annotated drawing of the garden’s new water tower; (6) a plan surveying the diversity of plants in the Hooke Park kitchen garden.

7–9

Soft Connections, Carolina MRS Menezes. (8) Developing joints which are both functional and ornamental; (9) a bound timber structure which sets off from a larch tree hidden away in Hooke Park; (10) well-prepared kit of parts ready for assembly.

10–12 Densely packed Timber Blocks, Sebastian Birch. (10) Prototype wall demonstrating alternatives to engineered timber components; (11) an imagined assembly line for the production of Densely-packed Timber Blocks (DTBs); (12) DTB kits-of-parts at various levels of completion. 13–15 Equilibrium through Timberity, Jeremy Hollister. (13) The ‘Timberity’ shelter exploits active bending in timber elements to enable its span; (14) carefully sewing patterned sheets together in the studio; (15) model

scale testing of lightweight hybrid timber-membrane structures. 16, 17 Learning from a Branch, Paing Su Ko. (16) Lightweight laminated prototypes inspired by the grain patterns of trees; (17) investigations into the grain which results from conifer branching.

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Design + Make

EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES AND DESIGN Inaugurated in 2001, the Emergent Technologies and Design Programme (EmTech) is open to graduates in architecture and engineering who wish to develop skills and pursue knowledge in architectural design science situated within new production paradigms. We investigate new synergies of architecture and ecology through the critical intersection of computational design and fabrication. Our focus is on exploring the experiential and social potentials of new material and spatial configurations for architectural and ecological urban designs that are situated in the dynamic contexts of emerging biomes. The programme is designed to stimulate critical thinking through the experience of research-driven design projects, developed in an intellectually rigorous and creative studio environment. Our projects are pursued by multiple iterations through hypothesis, material and computational experimentation, robotic fabrication and evaluation. These processes are reflected upon in verbal presentations and group discussions, and are documented in analytical and scientifically-structured papers. Over the past year, as we all learned new ways to collaborate and communicate, our graduating students have continued to develop novel solutions for some of the most pressing architectural problems faced by society today. These have ranged from integrated urban and water network systems that are resilient to marine disasters and flooding, to rural communities capable of harvesting and managing rain and atmospheric water, and the production of alternative concrete composites using locally-resourced sand. The

thesis projects have created design solutions that operate across multiple scales including material intelligence, architectural resolution and ecological context. Our Phase 1 students have developed skills in computation, simulation and digital and robotic fabrication through the experience of research-driven design projects. We continue to actively engage in design research and design science with projects that are developed through iterative computational processes of experimentation and analysis, advanced fabrication and generative propositions. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Elif Erdine (Programme Head), Michael

Zeynep Aksoz, Nicolo Bencini, Irene

Weinstock (Founding Director), Milad

Gallou, Jose Luis García del Castillo y

Showkatbakhsh (Studio Master), Abhinav

López, Andrew Heumann, Axel Körner,

Chaudhary, Eleana Polychronaki,

Enriqueta Llabres Valls, David Andres

Lorenzo Santelli, Alican Sungur (Studio

Leon, Nacho Martí, Andrei Martin, Jens

Tutors), George Jeronimidis

Pedersen, Babak Soleimani, Jordi Truco, Barbara Vasilatou, Andy Watts, Buro

STUDENTS

Happold Engineering

Yousra Elshafeei, Weiting Kong, John Elliot Ouchterlony, Maximo Tettamanzi (MSc students 2019–20), Alyina Ahmed, Dhwani Ramnarayan Bisani, Jong In Choi, Maria Luiza Gomes Torres, Berin Nur Kocabas, Felipe Oeyen, Paravee Pokawatthananurak, Devaiah Ponnimada Ashok, Debolina Ray, Yi Zhang (MArch students 2019–21), Amal Alshamsi, Jefry Babu, Nupur Gandhi, Cheng He, Amanpreet Kaur, Eleftherios Kourkopoulos, Yi Ju Lin, Clinton Glen Mendonca, Georges Junior Merheb, Pouyan Mohammadi, Ashwin Abraham Mukkaranath, Anna Sapountzaki, Hongyu Si, Naoki Tachikawa, Ori Ushpiz, Yiteng Wang (current students 2020–22)

REEMERGE

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EmTech

REEMERGE

255

EmTech

REEMERGE

256

EmTech

Design I – Digital and Material Fabrication, Cheng He, Clinton Glen Mendonca, Jefry Babu, Yiteng Wang.

Design I – Digital and Material Fabrication, Amal Taryam, George Junior Merheb, Naoki Tachikawa, Pouyan Mohammadi.

Rural WaterScapes: Construction, Agriculture and Water Management Strategies for a Resilient Settlement in Ethiopia, Devaiah Ponnimada Ashok (MArch), Felipe Oeyen (MArch Distinction), JongIn Choi (MArch), Yousra Elshafeei (MSc).

High-Tectonic City, Berin Nur Kocabas (MArch), Debolina Ray (MArch), Zhang Yi (MArch).

Natural Systems and Biomimetics, Amanpreet Kaur, Clinton Mendoca, Cheng He, Hongyu Si.

Design II – Ecological Settlement Design in the Arctic, Amanpreet Kaur, Yi Ju Lin.

Design and Technology, Amanpreet Kaur, Ashwin Abraham Mukkaranath, Clinton Glen Mendoca, Nupur Gandhi.

Design and Technology, Anna Sapountzaki, Eleftherios Kourkopoulos, George Junior Merheb, Naoki Tachikawa.

RIVERtalise, Dhwani Bisani (MArch), Paravee Pokawatthananurak (MArch), Weiting Kong (MSc).

10 10

REEMERGE

Ramel, Alyina Ahmed (MArch), Maria Luiz Gomes Torres (MArch), John Elliot Ouchterlony (MSc), Maximo Tettamanzi (MSc).

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EmTech

M A H I S T ORY A N D C R I T ICA L T H I N K I NG The History and Critical Thinking (HCT) programme is a unique postgraduate platform to investigate and reflect on contemporary issues through systematic historic enquiry. The ambition of the programme is to connect current debates and projects with a wider milieu, and to interpret the contemporary from a historical, critical and cross-disciplinary point of view. The concern with history involves a reconfiguration of the way the architectural and the complex politics of time interconnect. At stake within the actual writing of history is a political engagement with the philosophical, social and environmental exigencies of the present. While theoretical reflection on the historical is central in providing resources for the analysis of contemporary architectural thinking, specific histories remain valid sites of investigation – considering the ways they negotiate sources and perspectives; appropriate, augment and exclude voices; and shape our conceptions and practices of the built environment. This year, courses reproblematised the history of architecture, institutional and professional protocols, conventions of representation and norms of use. Turning toward the interior of the discipline, the programme aims to reflect on the current state and challenges of architectural historiography, and to recount the links between the practices of architecture and history writing. Students engaged with philosophical thought to explore questions which are historically and semantically precise. They analysed recent debates on structures and procedures of inclusion and exclusion to rethink cohabitation and address current urgencies. With the participation of historians, critics, philosophers, architects and curators, the HCT and PhD Open Debates on Histories, Perspectives and Pedagogies brought a diversity of voices and expertise into the course and the school. The HCT Critical Writing Workshop: Observations, conceived as an intensive succession of short writing exercises, allowed students to translate what is intercepted by the senses into words with concision and directness. A common concern within all of the courses is writing as a practice of thinking. Different modes of writing – thesis, essays, short experimental pieces, critical reviews, commentaries, book proposals and interviews – are explored to articulate the multiple aspects of study. Drawings, photographs, film and literature are introduced and considered for an analysis of the connections between the textual, the visual and the graphic. The aim is to be able to explore, adopt and adapt elements of disciplines and practices in one’s own writing, while preserving one’s own voice. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Marina Lathouri (Programme Head),

Mark Dorrian, Amy Kulper, Nashin

Tim Benton, Fabrizio Gallanti, John

Mahtani, Samaneh Moafi, Clara Oloriz,

Palmesino, Georgios Tsagdis

William Orr, Phoebus Panigyrakis, Alfredo Ramirez, Peg Rawes, Etienne

STUDENTS

Turpin (Guest Speakers) Nerma Cridge,

Maria Anna Kaprara, Gonzalo Mendoza

Claudia Nitsche, William Orr, Dorette

Morfin, Macarena Poppe, Jiaqi Wang,

Panagiotopoulou, Phoebus Panigyrakis,

Xiaoyu (Angela) Yang, Carlos Andres

Álvaro Velasco Perez (Guest Critics)

Lora Yunen

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History and Critical Thinking

Jiaqi Wang

Macarena Poppe

A spectre was haunting architecture – the

The current research relates to the ‘implicit

spectre of autonomy. Not anymore. Architecture

knowledge’, in particular, the implicit

as a discipline nowadays oscillates between a

knowledge that artisanal or anonymous objects

sense of inability and nostalgia for a heroic time

may carry. Similar to language, objects mirror

when avant-gardes once owned their unique

their cultures. Through a particular Inka object,

socio-political agency. In both cases, architecture

the khipu – an entangled device of threads,

lives in a bubble – whether it is a flimsy shell at

knots, colours and mostly information – the

risk or an illusory space capsule in vacuum. That

project reflects on the medium in which histories

bubble shall be replaced by an ecology of bubbles,

are written. Although the numerical system

in which architects can strive towards ‘a new

behind the khipu’s structure was solved in the

difficult whole’ – not composition of ideal forms,

1920s, current studies continue to explore

but coalition of real agents.

possible ways of reading their narratives. Spanish chronicles ascertain the narrative

Therefore, the current research lies in architectural and political practices outside

capacity of the khipus and their agency as

this tradition of autonomy by investigating

storytellers of myths, tributes and even songs.

the construction sites in the Great Leap Forward

By attempting to decode the khipu, one gains

in Mao’s China. As a kind of ‘total war’ in the

access to a pre-Colombian culture. In this sense,

geo-political context of the Cold War, it

the research also enables the recognition of the

assembled various professions including

multi-layered process of translation, akin not

scientists, engineers, architects and builders

only to word tradition but also to treason.

in the fascination for materials, logistics, and eventually, a fantasy of socialist techno-utopia. Instead of regarding political domination as the only active force in the Great Leap Forward, the research will focus on the transformation of materials – an event that connected geological time and the future promise of socialism together. In the ruins of its failure lie possibilities and contradictions.

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History and Critical Thinking

Maria Anna Kaprara

Angela Xiaoyu Yang

Being self-evident means no reasoning. However,

‘I put a picture on a wall.

the constant interrogation of ostensibly self-

Then I forget there is a wall.’

evident concepts is the main area of interest for

— Georges Perec, ‘The Apartment:

this research. Considering social, economic and

Walls’ in Species of Spaces, 1974.

political agencies as crucial factors for the deployment of a potential narration, the process

Departing from Georges Perec’s musing on the

of writing transforms in a moment of reflection,

walls, this thesis reconsiders the relationship

a moment of reading between the lines that

between things and domesticity. Things, a term

might bring light to the most silent aspects of

thrown around to signify undefinable concepts,

the discipline of architecture. The purpose is

came to illuminate an implicit relationship

not to write another history, but to contribute

between subject and object (Heidegger 1951) and

to a deeper understanding of how the discipline

attained social value through human use and

was shaped.

circulation (Appadurai 1986).

Unravelling the concept of public space in

Working in the field of domesticity, this

the discipline of architecture through precise

writing starts from within the home, using

moments in which power structures reset the

things to challenge established presumption

meaning of public is a focal point of this

that equates the interior space for the home space.

research. Considering the history of the

Pondering on the notion that we live through

discipline, the narrative thread permeates

things instead of architectural boundaries, this

through processes of institutionalisation,

essay rethinks the domestic through the spatial

examining the ways in which the study of public

arrangement of things. From Sylvia Lavin’s

space was included – as a demarcation of the

concept of the domestic curator whose

arrangement of architectural objects or defined

‘architecture became temporary’ as ‘the collection

as an architectural object itself. In other words,

became permanent’, the spatial limits that

the aim is to frame a discussion on the

demarcate domesticity is in flux. In this way,

transformations of architecture – as discipline

the production of domesticity is re-examined

and practice – around the transformations of

through the scale of things.

public space.

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260

History and Critical Thinking

Gonzalo Mendoza Morfin

Carlos Andres Lora Yunen

It is often within architectural practice that

CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik in 1956 was a fascinating

theory and history are fields of knowledge

intersecting moment of architectural thinkers

relegated to a secondary role. As result,

from different generations with a multiplicity of

reflective thinking and contemporary criticism

interests. Important figures such as Le Corbusier

are considered as alien to design practice. As an

and Walter Gropius were only present through

architect myself, to relate research, history and

texts, and the activities of those who were there

criticism is, I believe, fundamental for an

(such as Sigfried Gideon, Josep Sert, Jaap Bakema,

architectural praxis which encourages critical

Alison and Peter Smithson and Jaqueline

thinking, doubt, and experimentation.

Tyrwhitt) were captured in a written report that

In these terms, the research explores

remains unpublished but is nevertheless held in

architecture as a complex and hybrid field, the

the AA Archive. This event, with ‘Habitat’ as its

latter as developed within the historical context

central theme, is often reduced to a simplistic

of the modern Western knowledge. The focus of

description of a structural organisational

the thesis lies in the ways in which the

collapse. Yet, studying its written architectures

disciplinary limits of architecture were set and

reveals the complexity and contradictions

described, through the historical process of its

inherent to the discipline and the very question

institutionalisation starting with the early

of habitat, their rhizomatic nature, ie the

Renaissance treatises and concluding with the

impossibility of ostensibly delineating

establishment of the first architecture schools

architectural agency, and at the same time, the

in the 19th century. The common ground within

importance of continuing the debate for the sake

this historical journey is the architect’s

of our damaged planetary habitat.

education, which varied from on-site training as a craftsperson to the academic-universitylearning as an intellectual. The aim is to understand the construction of the discipline and the body of knowledge established as specific to architecture, and how, as architects, we should rethink architecture’s agency in the present and the future.

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History and Critical Thinking

HOUSING AND URBANISM The Modification of Cities The transformation of cities is always partial and provisional; it proceeds through modifications of the existing. Design is always redesign. Nevertheless, when we change the form of the city we open new pathways and often initiate powerful processes of collaborative action. The dynamism of the urban process is felt across multiple scales and settings, from the home to the district and territory, and the artefacts we collectively transform are always situated in a multi-layered reality. The detail that most matters to the work of design might just as easily be found in the reorganisation of an industrial yard, or the orientation of a research centre toward a canal, as in the integration of home life into a maker space. But across these scales and themes, it is always the artefact that becomes the focus of study. Design becomes a mode of research into urban change. The urban experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed us to participate in a moment of great experimentation – exploring rapid adjustments to everyday life – and to speculate on the direction of change in our cities. While the coronavirus has seemed to be the main protagonist in a wider series of global uncertainties, it may only be serving to focus our attention on a broader set of accelerating changes: a growing emphasis upon health, wellbeing and human biology; evolving habits of shopping and consumption; rapidly-developing logistics capacity; shifting patterns of mobility; and the expanding role of knowledge and creativity in our economies. These developing concerns lead us towards fundamental re-evaluations of our natural and built environments. The post-Covid city is not simply the name given to a future after the pandemic, but also points to an emerging reconceptualisation of urban ways of life and good city form. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lawrence Barth, Jorge Fiori

Katharina Borsi, Keith Bradley, Sam

(Programme Co-Heads), Dominic Papa,

Chermayeff, Nathalie de Vries, Elad

Elena Pascolo, Irénée Scalbert, Anna

Eisenstein, Adam Khan, Julian Lewis,

Shapiro, Giorgio Talocci, Francesco

Lucy Styles, Els Verbakl

Zuddas (Programme Staff ) STUDENTS Phase 1: Aviv Amiel, Puyu Chen, Sannie Chung, Rachel Cusack, Aditi Dora, Li Duan, Harshvee Jatin Gandhi, Pratibha Christy George Joseph, Jia Hu, Sean Robert Hussey, Ralf Kattar, Chun-Chen Kuo, Yeon-Kyu Lee, Yin-Mei Lee, Hang Lu, Mahum Riaz, Julia Spirig, Carlos Valenzuela, Mingwei Wang, Zhiwei Xie, Yiwen Xiong, Hongkai Yao, Shengyuan Zhang Phase 2: Nella Abi Khalil, Yu Guo, Maitrey Kute, Karam Lee, Seray Nergiz, Jiawen Qiao, Aayushi Rathi, Tao Wang, Qiaoyi Wu, Jingyi Xu, Xi Yang, Shuya Zeng, Lingxi Zhou

REDESIGN

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Housing and Urbanism

REDESIGN

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Housing and Urbanism

REDESIGN

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Housing and Urbanism

At Home and The Situated Artefact, Sean Robert Hussey, Phase I. Term 1 Sketchbook Studies.

Poplar Yards, Jingyi Xu, Phase II. Five typological starting points for an adaptive morphology.

Revaluing Poplar, Nella Abi Khalil, Phase II. Architecture and the management of intensive mix.

Big Things for Forgotten Places, Julia Spirig, Phase I. Understanding dimension in urban requalification.

5 (L) Integrated Camden, Qiaoyi Wu, Phase II, Urban Diagrams. (R) Redefining Neighbourhoods in Seoul, Karam Lee, Phase II. 6

Social Learning, Qiaoyi Wu, Phase II. Rich mix and the redesign of armatures and enclaves.

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Housing and Urbanism

LANDSCAPE URBANISM Landscape Urbanism is designing a Green New Deal (GND) for the UK. The aim of the programme is to link the design profession with the existing GND movement: we believe that designers – whether landscape architects or architects – can use their skills in visualisation, mapping, spatial understanding of socioecological systems, landscape design and data visualisation, among others, to aid the development of spatial strategies to tackle the climate crisis. Many of these strategies coalesce into the GND, the largest and more coherent such project to date; thus, we have selected various policies as proposed by the Common Wealth think-tank and envisioned their implementation across the landscapes of the UK. Each Landscape Urbanism project researches a policy framework in order to convert them into resolved material and design proposals, wherein designers can support and imagine alternative futures that avert climate breakdown. Land Reformation is a policy that aims to transform the current concentration of land ownership in the hands of the few, making it accessible for younger generations through the support of agro-ecological practices and incentives. Rewilding UK aims to ensure that 40% of land is dedicated to nature, including productive activities that are respectful of human-nature reciprocal relations. Four Day Work Week seeks to reduce the working week so that everyone can increase their leisure and entertainment activities whilst reducing mental health issues and stress. This approach will improve leisure facilities, which could lead to a more hedonistic urban landscape. Community Wealth Building is a policy that aims to centre the local scale in the construction industry by banning landfills and the extraction of new materials. It focuses on retrofitting buildings, supported by the establishment of a deconstruction industry that disassembles, catalogues, stores and reuses materials. The Away With the Cars policy imagines the design of cities without private cars, through the re-connection of the social fabric that has been fragmented by automobile infrastructure. Public Ownership uses Community Land Trust models to allow communities to take over public spaces across London, reducing the proliferation of privately-owned public spaces (POPS). Finally, Just Transition takes as its starting point the creation of a bird sanctuary and the production of aquaculture, to offer alternative jobs and employment for the city of Newcastle. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jose Alfredo Ramirez, Eduardo Rico

Joe Beswick, Miriam Brett, Adrienne

(Programme Heads), Clara Oloriz

Buller, Steve Chambers, Max Farrell,

Sanjuan (Studio Master), Claudio

Amelia Horgan, Gabrielle Jeliazkov,

Campanile, Daniel Kiss, Liam Mouritz,

Mathew Lawrence, Sherilyn MacGregor,

Teresa Stoppani (Tutors)

Raine Mantysalo, Andrew Reeve,

Eleanor Salter, Sakina Sheikh, Julian STUDENTS

Siravo, Gaya Sriskanthan, Isaac Stanley,

Zhendong Chen, Ziyang Guo, Chuyi

Beth Stratford, Will Stronge, Mark

Huang, Yuanyuan Huang, Junxuan Li,

Tewdwr-Jones, Lidewij Tummers, Chris

Zhuqing Li, Yifan Li, Jiangtao Liu, Wen

Williams, Common-Wealth, Hexagram

Liu, Jianheng Luo, Haimu Nie, Carlotta Olivari, Yutong Qiu, Zhiyuan Tang, Minzheng Wang, Nelly Wat, Kerui Yang, Yufan Ye, Mariam Zelimger, Cheng Zhang, Haoyang Zhang

REVOLUTION

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Landscape Urbanism

REVOLUTION

267

Landscape Urbanism

REVOLUTION

268

Landscape Urbanism

Public Ownership: Green Gentrification Score in England, Chuyi Huang,

Enrico Luo, Nelly Wat. A survey of 16 farms across the UK serves as the anchor

of how important good-quality outdoor space is for our physical and mental

for a comprehensive land reformation proposal. Each of the selected farms

health and wellbeing. In spite of these benefits, almost 10 million people

represents potential ways in which the farming industry could collectively

in England live in areas with very limited access to green space. The absence

implement agroecology, and could spread their benefits ethically based on a new governmental scheme that gives public money for public goods.

of these spaces has become a problem that cannot be ignored. 2

Away With The Cars, Cheng Zhang, Zhiyuan Tang, Yufan Ye. Street space

Rewilding UK: Deforestation and Flooding Processes, Carlotta Olivari,

plan for London. Through research into local street space plan policies, we

Zhuqing Li, Yuanyuan Huang. Today, only about 13% of the UK is woodland,

can see that in all such plans in London, the government has created ‘low

and the reason for this can be attributed to current land management

emission neighborhoods’ (LEN) to eliminate air pollution. They have

approaches. Arable land and space for grazing livestock constitutes 70% of

gradually developed cycle lanes and pavements, increased greenery and

total current UK land use. These landscapes are more vulnerable to episodes

restricted lanes to drive in densely-populated areas and in the vicinity

of extreme flooding and the increasing frequency of these events is creati

of schools. The sovereignty of roads is partially handed over to residents,

ng an environmental crisis.

replacing the previous so-called ‘car urbanism’. 3

Land Re_Form: UK Sampling of Farms for Land Reformation, Mariam Zelimger,

Ziyang Guo, Zhendong Chen. The Covid-19 pandemic has made people aware

Four Day Work Week: Panoramic Map of Infrastructure in Blackpool, Minzheng

Waste to Wealth: Panoramic View of Existing Buildings with Retrofitting

Wang, Jiangtao Liu, Haoyang Zhang. Blackpool is famous as a tourist town

and Dismantling Targets in Preston UK, Junxuan Li, Yutong Qiu, Wen Liu.

in the UK. This is a panoramic map of the city, showing the current state

To improve Preston’s energy performance and eliminate waste and the

of leisure infrastructure in the town; the yellow buildings are leisure and

extraction of materials within its construction industry, this cartography

recreational infrastructures.

identifies those buildings that will require intervention or can be part of a deconstruction scheme to reuse and repurpose remaining materials. 4

Just Transition: World Birds Condition, Yifan Lin, Kerui Yang, Haimu Nie. Due to the impact of environmental destruction, bird habitats have been threatened worldwide. In order to better study the habits of birds, we have conducted surveys of these areas on a global scale. To investigate the impact of human activity in this context, we have also identified vulnerable areas around the world. We discovered that bird habitats overlap with these threatened areas, and as a result, we are able to conduct more in-depth research on these intersections.

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Landscape Urbanism

SPATIAL PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN W herefore art thou…? This was truly the year of the global applied network, and the value of collaboration across different disciplines, locations and initiatives has never been more apparent. In times of crisis, knowing how and where to activate alliances becomes vital to continue innovation and creative development. Through our Origin events series, the AA Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) developed a series of interactive and immersive projects inspired by the notion of larger-than-life childhood aspirations and animated memories of reconciliation. With events in Beijing at the renowned Enjoy Art Museum and online through an interactive game platform, our teams created a truly global event bridging the virtual and the real, creating new hybrid performances. With interdisciplinary practice at our core, concepts have been translated through multiple physical and digital media that each complement one other. Memory Loop is a videogame in which characters explore the

deepest oceans of the unconscious mind, wherein we can embrace the beauty of regrets and forgotten memories, and reconcile with ourselves. The audience controls the storyline within this space: they are in charge. Reverberance was a multisensory live performance hosted by the Enjoy Art Museum, which explored the nuances of experiencing a creative void. The installation was generated from memory patterns that crystallised during childhood. Dancers activated the space by treating it as an instrument, realising personal naiveties and negotiating dualities within creative space. The MFA students’ final thesis projects developed a series of unique, innovative performances that created new formats by moving between locations, installations, recordings and activities, all of which connected international audiences and formed new alliances. STAFF

Willi Dorner, Pascal Emmeran, William

Theo Lorenz (Programme Head), Tanja

Fausset, Mohamed Fezazi, Belinda

Siems (Programme Research and

Flaherty, Xi Gao, Yiwen Guo, Ceinwen

Development), David McAlmont (Studio

Hall, Andie Hu, Greta Isufaj, Eunsoo

Master), Argyris Angeli, Mona Camille,

Jang, Solveig Lola Audrey Jappy,

Andrew Dean, Malgorzata Dzierzon,

Jennifer Jiao, Jessie Jing, Kanyaphorn

Andreia Garcia, Heiko Kalmbach,

Kaewprasert, Kornkamon Kaewprasert,

Kyriaki Nasioula, Joel Newman,

Puttikorn Kaityuttachart, Kanjanawan

Patricia Okenwa, Noa Segev, Hila

Kongsawat, Pachara Kongsupon, Tanapol

Shemer, Renaud Wiser (Studio Tutors)

Kositsurung, Chay Lee, Phark

Lertchanyakul, Ge Li, Yang Li, Gaspar STUDENTS

Libedinsky, Janejira Limawiratchaphong,

Phase 1: Can Aksan, Yuyang Cheng, Zoya

Tuo Lin, Lumia Shurong Liu, Quanxi

Currimbhoy, Yuxin Dong, Tong Gao,

Long, Saran Maiprasert, Sarocha

Yufeng Hou, Jiayue YuQiang Haung,

Manaanantakul, Jeeranuch Maneekul,

Yunheng Huang, Shirine Lee, Lingling Li,

Sarah J McDonald, Mark Morris, Jom

Yishan Liu, Chen Ma, Yangyang Ni, Wei

Nanakorn, Hathaiphat Panjad,

Wang, Changyu Yang, Yi Yang, Yue Zhong

Pimchanok Na Patalung, Kanokporn

Phase 2: Yian Bai, Elyssa Sykes-Smith,

Puansiri, Xiu Ran, Yoav Ronel, Haowen

Patarita Tassanarapan, Jie Wang, Yuan

Shi, Omfun Sirikhatitham, Sorat

Xiang, Seoyoun Yun, Kexin Zhang

Sitthidamrong, Panachai Songarsa, Pashnut Sricharoenphong, Satyo

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sullivan, Watanya Sureechainirun, Ruth

Jiwon Ahn, Sara Aly, Rozhana Azra,

Sykes, Kiat Tassanarapan, Jaidwarin

Cholatorn Anuntasate, Artur van Balen,

Thanakitcharu, Tony Thatcher, Pakasem

Nattayada Bunphokaew, Felix Buxton,

Tongchai, Olivier Vandenhende,

Flocel Camille, Nithirath Chaemchuen,

Hongshan Wan, Ting-Ning Wen, Wenqian

Weihan Chang, Hui Chen, Xi Cheng, Ying

Weng, Soengkit Wong, Chuhan Xiao, Aijin

Chi, Teejutha Chomparn, Nicha

Ying, Catherine Zanardi, Tuitui Zhang,

Chongkriangkrai, Nigel Christensen,

Yuhan Zhang, 516 Studio, China Academy

Klaudia Chrzastek, Georgie Corry

of Art, Centre for the Study of

Wright, Tia Corry Wright, Paul Crosby,

Substructured Loss, Enjoy Art Museum

Daniela Delerci, Thanisorn Devapalin,

R E AWA K E N

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AAIS

R E AWA K E N

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AAIS

AAIS Phase 1 Project: A scene from the interactive videogame Memory Loop, part of the AAIS 2021 Origin event series.

AAIS Phase 1 Project: Reverberance performance at the Enjoy Art Museum in Beijing, part of the AAIS 2021 Origin event series.

Room With A View Exhibition/event in April 2021 in Hangzhou, China.

AAIS Phase 1 Project: Reverberance performance at the Enjoy Art Museum in Beijing, part of the AAIS 2021 Origin event series.

AAIS Phase 1 Project: A scene from the interactive videogame Memory Loop, part of the AAIS 2021 Origin event series.

Suddenly Got an Exit, MFA thesis project by Yuan Xiang, April 2021, London, UK. Live performance.

Canopy of Thoughts, MFA thesis project by Elyssa Sykes-Smith. Video performance and installation.

DOWN HERE, MFA thesis project by Kexin Zhang, 21 March 2021, Chongqin, China. Andy Hu performing in a local tea house.

‘Au Revoir’: A Scene from ‘Dream in the Fog’. MFA thesis project by Jie Wang, April 2021, London, UK. Photo by Seoyoun Yun.

Cuisine from Sonic Land, MFA thesis project by Patarita Tassanarapan, 23 April 2021, London, UK. Finale event including online dining and film streaming programme.

The Boundary of Space and Emption, MFA thesis project by Seoyoun Yun, April 2021, London, UK. Live performance.

R E AWA K E N

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AAIS

SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN Sustainable Environmental Design (SED) delves into real-life projects spanning a broad range of climates, building types and urban morphologies, targeting the creation of carbon-neutral futures and promoting inhabitant comfort, health and wellbeing as its key outcomes. The pedagogy of the programme is researchled, evidence-based and practice-oriented. Beginning work on this year’s research agenda, Refurbishing the City, from homes located in different countries, time zones and climatic regions around the world posed an unusual challenge. This was soon transformed into a welcome opportunity, by making those scattered sites our laboratories for environmental studies that offered uniquely rich and potent insights on global, seasonal and circadian cycles and patterns. Continuing online in Term 2, the learning we acquired was put to use through collaborative design as part of proposals for affordable housing and communal facilities on a local authority site in South London. Dissertation research begun or completed by MSc and MArch students this academic year includes projects for Beijing, Beirut, Dubai, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Levittown NY, Lima, Wuhan and Xiamen in China, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, New Delhi and Pune in India, as well as sites in Mexico, Sicily and Thailand. sed.aaschool.ac.uk STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Simos Yannas, Paula Cadima, Herman

Ron Bakker, Bálint Bakos, Klaus Bode,

Calleja, Jorge Rodriguez Alvarez, Nick

Jason Cornish, Christian Dimbleby,

Baker, Gustavo Brunelli, Mariam

Anne Feenstra, Brian Ford, Eleanor

Kapsali, Byron Mardas

Gawne, Joana Gonçalves, Alan Harries,

Mina Hasman, Richard Hawkes, STUDENTS

Shashank Jain, Allen Lai, Tom Raymont,

Karen Abou-Nasr, Smiti Agarwal, Apurv

Craig Robertson, Gunveer Singh (Guest

Aggarwal, Alejandro Alarcon Zubiaurr,

Speakers and Reviewers), Alexandra

Dila Batmaz, Aliana Beatriz Bautista,

Andone, Chanasit Cholasuek, Joao Cotta,

Anushree Bhattad, Ponshankar

Anneloes de Koff, Sara Cansin Güngör,

Bhuvanasundar, Tamara Boldireff, Dev

Maria Chiara Multari, Jonathan

Chawla, Vanshica Chugh, Gabriella

Natanian, Shravan Pradeep, Rawan

Dona, Lucie Duchamp, Anna Dwyer,

Qubrosi, Manit Rastogi, Matthew

Petek Esme, Yara Gamal, Sudnapha

Richardson, Melissa Romo Serrano,

Jaratjarungkiat, Yue-ching Leung,

Julia Torrubia, Pierluigi Turco (Future

Ming Li Liu, Aditi Bipin Katira,

Practice Symposia Speakers)

Shatanik Mandal, Susan Mascarenhas, Vasheena Mittal, Lizette Ochoa Loza, Yumu Peng, Jesse Pringle, Sahil Srivastava, Madhurya Surabhi, Lamia Wali Upama, Ilia Varvarousi, Liying Yang, Chenwei Zhang, Jiaqi Zhang

REFURBISH

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SED

REFURBISH

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REFURBISH

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SED

1, 3, 4 High-Rise Affordable Housing and Communal Facilities in South London, Dev Chawla, Gabriella Dona, Lucie Duchamp. Daylight simulations show high degree of autonomy from artificial lighting throughout the building. Term 2 Refurbishing the City Project. 2, 7, 8 Growing Shophouses in Southern Thailand 2020-2080, Sudnapha Jaratjarungkiat. A traditional building typology projected into the future. MArch Dissertation Project. 5, 6

Home Sweet Home, Ilia Varvarousi. London-based flexible housing siting options and southern elevation treatments, following variations in floor area and household size. MArch Dissertation Project.

REFURBISH

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SED

TAUGHT MPHIL IN ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN (PROJECTIVE CITIES) The Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) is a 20-month interdisciplinary research and design programme that examines multi-scalar questions arising at the intersection of architecture, urban design and planning. The programme is dedicated to systematic analysis, design experimentation, theoretical speculation and critical writing, all focusing on the contemporary city. Student projects combine new design and traditional forms of research, while challenging existing disciplinary boundaries and contributing to emerging spatial design practice and knowledge. The programme recognises the need for multidisciplinary knowledge and new, practice-led research training to meet the demands of contemporary architectural and urban practice. Each cohort addresses a common theme as the starting point for individual research agendas; the current theme is The Architecture of Collective Living. The ambition is to investigate

and to rethink, by comparative analysis and new design proposals, the different organisational, formal, programmatic and material particularities of how we live together. The spatial organisation of The Architecture of Collective Living is reflected in a series of formal and informal relations between subjects, spaces, structural and non-structural elements, objects and protocols of use and occupation. The ambition is to understand specific architectures and the larger political and social discourses that define them. The Projective Cities programme has initiated a series of external partnerships that aim into introduce students to relevant contemporary case studies, to foster design experimentation and to encourage their research ambitions. For the 2020–21 academic year, Phase 2 students developed their dissertations in sites such as Shanghai, Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin-Brandenburg, Jakarta, Leipzig and London, among others. Phase 1 students have undertaken design exercises and workshops in Barcelona, Athens and London, wherein the programme has established institutional collaborations with local municipalities, universities, activist groups and architects’ cooperatives. Fragments of these projects

are presented over the following pages. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Platon Issaias (Programme Head),

Lucia Alonso, Tilemachos

Doreen Bernath, Cristina Gamboa,

Andrianopoulos, Aristide Antonas,

Hamed Khosravi (Studio Masters), Raül

Alvaro Arancibia, Nuria Álvarez

Avilla (Studio Tutor), Mark Campbell

Lombardero, Xristina Argyros,

(Thesis Advisor), Roozbeh Elias-Azar,

Konstantinos Avramidis, Olga Balaoura,

Ioanna Piniara (Consultants)

Manuel Bailo Esteve, Lawrence Barth, Nikos Belavilas, Marta Benedicto, Peter

STUDENTS

Bishop, Josep Maria Borrell, Shumi

Clara Asperilla-Arias, Maximilian

Bose, David Bravo Bordas, Matilde

Bentler, Kevin Cendejas, Daryan

Cassani, Alejandra Celedón, Katerina

Knoblauch, Tanapol Kositsurungkakul,

Christoforaki, Ivet Gasol, Carlota de

Luyao Luo, Qiyu Qin, Fanyu Song, Clinton

Gispert, Elisavet Hasa, Fani Kostourou,

Thedyardi, Yijie Zhang, Chuxi Zhou

Myrto Kiourti, Lila Leontidou, Iris Lykourioti, Thomas Maloutas, Elba Mansilla, Maria Marlanti, Alice Meyer, Ryan Neiheiser, Sara Ortiz Escalante, Dafne Saldaña, Thanos Pagonis, Elena Pascolo, Christopher Pierce, Julian Siravo, Socrates Stratis, Saijel Taank, Mikela De Tchaves, Panagiotis Tournikiotis, Clara Triviño, Roger Tudó Galí, Christina Varvia, Christos Voskopoulos, Elia Zenghelis

RETHINK

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Projective Cities

RETHINK

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Projective Cities

12 13

RETHINK

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Projective Cities

1–3

Site as a Battleground, Qiyu Qin. Collective Equipments: Alternative ways to live on the construction site; functional space for on-site construction workers; bridging the construction site with the city.

4, 5

From Commodification to Cooperation, Architecture of Trading and Form of Social Solidarity Network in Bangkok, Tanapol Kositsurungkakul. Isometric section; case studies of a vegetable vendor’s everyday life in Tewarach Market, Bangkok.

6, 7

Care Devolution and Inter-household Cooperation, Clinton Thedyardi. Forms of collective care in co-housing for the elderly.

8, 9

The City as a Playground, Clara Asperilla Arias. Blurring the limit between park and city; forms of temporal appropriation.

10–12 Inclusive and Incremental Renovation, Yijie Zhang. Communal corridor from extension; communal space; design experiment. 13

From Commodification to Cooperation, Architecture of Trading and Form of Social Solidarity Network in Bangkok, Tanapol Kositsurungkakul. Market hall area.

14, 15 Breather, Luyao Luo. Water tank as machine shrine; media-defined space. 16, 17 Kristall 1, Daryan Knoblauch. Drinking fountain – communal bath; dwelling Type 1 – Living Unit Floor 7. 18 18

RETHINK

Kristall 4, Daryan Knoblauch. Janitor’s bathroom – water treatment plant; janitor’s chamber – water treatment plant.

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Projective Cities

PHD PROGRAMME The PhD Programme at the AA is a platform for radical, risk-taking investigations into architecture and its multiple domains of application. It encourages diverse approaches to the articulation of a dissertation, from traditional written theses to PhDs by design. The programme is organised around two forms of educational exchange: the day-to-day relationship between doctoral candidates and supervisors, and the collective discussions that bring together the PhD community and invited guests. Every month, we invite scholars to present their current research and to engage candidates in discussion, both on the content of their talk and also on issues of methodology and research processes. At the end of every term, PhD candidates have the opportunity to present their in-progress dissertation for discussion with supervisors, peers and invited guests. The programme also organises an annual symposium on a topic whose relevance is derived from discussions and presentations within the PhD community. A strong conviction at the core of the programme is that architecture – defined as the discourse that concerns the built environment – offers a privileged point of view on larger social issues. Rather than just learning about architecture, the programme invites candidates to learn through architecture about the world. The theses defended this year demonstrate and confirm this ambition. Although they focus on specific themes that range from computation to contemporary theory, they all do so through a close reading of specific instances of architecture and design, interpreted as paradigmatic of wider social and political circumstances. STAFF

THESES SUBMITTED

Pier Vittorio Aureli (Head of PhD),

DURING THE ACADEMIC

Doreen Bernath, Mark Campbell, George

YEAR 2020–2021

Jeronimidis, Marina Lathouri, Mark

Brendon Carlin, Andrea Goh, Naina

Morris, Michael Weinstock (Directors of

Gupta, Hyun-Jae Nam, Lukas Pauer,

Studies), Paula Cadima, Chittawadi

Ioanna Piniara, David Hutama Setiadi,

Chitrabongs, Tao DuFour, Fabrizio

Milad Showkatbakhsh, Damnoen

Gallanti, Hamed Khosravi, Maria

Techamai

Shéhérazade Giudici, Theodore Spyropoulos, Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Alexandra Vougia (Supervisors) CURRENT CANDIDATES Elena Palacios Carral, Anna Font Vacas, Takako Hasegawa, George Jepson, Gabriela Jimenez, Kanyaphorn Kaewprasert, Kornkamon Kaewprasert, Yujin Kim, Lola Lozano Lara, Qing Liu, Han Lo, Enrica Maria Mannelli, Gili Merin, Duong Nguyen, Claudia Nitsche, Mathilde Redoute, Tian Pan, Theodosia Panagiotopoulou, Aylin Ayse Tarlan, Chiara Toscani, KB Izac Tsai, Dewei Zhai

RERELATE

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PhD

THE INTELLIGENT MACHINE IN URBAN OPEN SPACE: S E N S I N G U R B A N D ATA A N D P E R F O R M I N G A R C H I T E C T U R A L B E H AV I O U R Hyun-Jae Nam The ambition of this thesis is to produce an

and act upon changes in users’ activities. The

intelligent machine that can capture real-time

research further develops such experiments

data pertaining to social events and environmental

through an open-source computational platform

conditions in an urban open space. The aim is to

and tests how active devices can be furnished with

use that data to optimise the use of space and to

specific context awareness to produce intelligent

manipulate the environmental phenomena for

actions. Through the advancement of information

specific events by controlling kinetic structures.

technologies, various means of sharing real-time information have enabled citizens to rapidly come

Through a literature review, the thesis identifies and classifies how intelligent systems

together and create temporary events in an

have been discussed for architectural spaces, cities

impromptu way.

and machines, and examines how intelligence has

The design of an intelligent machine for urban

been developed within three domains:

open space offers the capacity to optimise the

architectural, urban and artificial. It identifies

organisation of such events in relation to spatial

cohesive interpretations that are commonly

requirements, with appropriate intelligent

associated with the term ‘intelligent’, focusing

responses to environmental phenomena including

on those that have led to the development of

light and shade, temperature and acoustics. An

computational techniques, with consideration

algorithm was designed to regulate the physical body

given to their actual applications.

of the machine by means of logic-based rulesets.

The primary concept of the intelligent

Simulations were carried out to monitor and

machine originated in cybernetic applications in

evaluate the machine’s responsiveness to real-time

the field of architectural design during the 1960s,

circumstances in an urban open space, and its

through proposals for socially engaging

consequent behaviours.

architectural machines, and through the later

Image Architectural behaviours controlling the light/shade, temperature,

development of architectural devices that sense

RERELATE

access and acoustic condition in Bryant Park.

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PhD

W E H AV E N E V E R B E E N P R I VAT E : THE HOUSING PROJECT IN NEOLIBERAL EUROPE Ioanna Piniara The thesis suggests an approach to the management

lifestyle; the proprietary and symbolic function

of domestic space through a transformation of the

of the urban form; and the colonisation of housing

concept of the private within the neoliberalist

by financial capitalism through home-ownership,

socio-economic regime. It proposes a critical

household debt and dispossession. The failure

reassessment of housing privatisation as not only

of the neoliberal housing model to secure domestic

a policy introduced in the 1980s to promote new

privacy as essential autonomy corresponds with

contractual relationships, but also a post-war

the deprivation that neoliberalism has

urban strategy to establish a change of ethos,

traditionally inferred. In response, the thesis

culture and organisation of housing. Against the

proposes a shift from the economy towards an

neoliberal idea of the institutional autonomy of

ecology of the private, which acts as an

the private, the thesis argues that the state has

operational principle for an institutional and

constantly partnered with the market (the ‘private

typological transformation in urban housing.

sector’) in the promotion of a certain pedagogy of

The simultaneous and reciprocal fashioning of

domestic privacy and, therefore, the private has

private and collective subjectivity defines the

hardly existed as such during the neoliberal era.

social relations upon which the ‘right to privacy’ is to be reclaimed.

Methodologically, the thesis deploys a

Against private property: through a model

typological study to demystify this pedagogy through selected urban housing schemes in London,

for securing communally-owned urban land for

Berlin and Athens, describing a geographical and

housing. Against individualism: the possibility

chronological neoliberal vector from anticipation

to ensure a quality of privacy through a practice

to crisis. This investigation of typology highlights

of ‘commoning’.

the links between the private narrative and the construction of the middle-class subjectivity and

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Image Towards an Ecology of the Private.

284

PhD

HOMEOSTATIC URBAN MORPHOLOGIES: A N E VOLU T IO NA RY M ODE L T O G E N E R AT E U R BA N M OR PHOL O G I E S W I T H E M B E D D E D H O M E O S TAT I C B E H AV I O U R S Milad Showkatbakhsh The ambition of this research is to abstract the

tissues, with a focus on the environmental

key principles of homeostasis, in order to produce

behaviours of their interstitial spaces across a

a computational design engine that generates

range of temporal and spatial domains. These

testable mathematical models with a specified

tissues are in turn complemented by a selection of

degree of adaptation to differing circumstances

conceptual and computationally-simulated designs,

or environments.

evaluations and principles of implementation.

Homeostasis is the term for the biological

Although biomimicry has been established

processes through which individual beings and

for many decades, and has made significant

collectives maintain a steady state in their

contributions to engineering and architecture,

environment, and a wide range of morphological

homeostasis has rarely been part of this field

and behavioural traits across multiple species

of research. Critical and theoretical examination

are rooted in homeostatic behaviours. These

of these natural systems and processes has

morphological characteristics are governed

accelerated over the past two decades due to

by homeostasis and evolutionary developmental

environmental emergencies. There is growing

processes. To examine and reflect on the

confidence that the application of principles of

interrelations of forms, these processes and

natural systems and processes in architectural

behaviours can yield useful strategies for

design can facilitate better conformity between

computational urban design methodologies that

architecture and nature.

require significant environmental performance enhancements. Within this research, abstracted homeostatic

Image Urban morphologies evolved based on the behavioural and morphological

principles are utilised to evolve a set of urban

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principles of homeostasis.

285

PhD

NO N-T Y P OL O G ICA L A RC H I T E C T U R E :

FA K E C A K E : T H A I W E D D I N G S

DE -T E R R I T OR I A L I S I NG I N T E R IOR S I N JA PA N

Damnoen Techamai

Brendon Carlin Fake Cake investigates contemporary weddings in Thailand, The thesis defines typology in architecture as a system of

categorising them as an expression of hybrid culture,

knowledge and a set of ‘deep structures’ for the composition

combining Western and traditional Thai customs. By using

of space and construction of types. Through new divisions of

hybridity as a key concept to investigate the weddings and

labour, housing became a ‘professional’ architectural and

their elements, the thesis examines them on three levels:

typological project when the strategically-managed

forms and spaces, processes, and significations.

reproduction of labour emerged as a cultural project and the

The research is based on anthropological interpretation and

focus of political strategies in mid-19th-century England, and

cultural analysis of data relating to weddings and marriage,

in late 19th- to early 20th-century Japan. The term ‘non-

which has been derived from a range of both historic and

typological architecture’ is put forward in this thesis to read,

contemporary cultural sources provided by wedding experts:

consider and theorise examples of architecture and housing

wedding magazines, wedding photography, pre-wedding

which tend – in a way that is plainly self-evident – towards a

photography and so on. The final analysis is focused on the

lack of spatial division, differentiation and composition, and

various wedding elements and their processes, as exemplified

which therefore tend towards the absence of history, lineage

in contemporary Thai wedding ceremonies.

and indeed even any ‘plan’ for or idea of future. This is housing

The thesis argues that these weddings can no longer be

which has been reduced to a simple container of blank space.

assigned to the category of ritual, as such, but rather belong to

Examples of architecture and housing that tend towards

the category of the image. All aspects of the contemporary

the non-typological can be said to have emerged in Europe and

Thai wedding can be thought of as having been reduced to the

the Soviet Union in the 1910s and 20s, and more widely in

role of components of images, as captured by the processes of

Japan and the US in the 1940s and 50s. Clear examples include

photography and videography. The thesis argues that all

Phillip Johnson’s 1947 Glass House and Kiyonori Kikutake’s

elements are made to pursue ‘the image’, which is established

1958 Sky House. In late-20th-century examples such as

in both actual and photographic spaces.

Shigeru Baan’s 1997 Nine Square Grid House and Kazuyo

The elements have thus become ‘the image-object’, rather

Sejima’s early 1990s Platform Houses, we even see the

than ‘the ritual-object’. At a functional level, each element has

tendency of architecture to push towards rejecting the

to address different needs and conditions. At a structural

container (or at least its visibility); rejecting walls and façade.

level, the signification system within contemporary Thai

These examples are simply composed of planes: floor and roof.

weddings is not designed to fulfil personal needs, but rather

This thesis seeks to build a genealogy of famous examples of

to fulfil the needs of the authority. The authority in this

late 20th- and 21st-century Japanese architecture and housing

context is a system created by the intersection of the two

and, along with an Atlas of Shameless Interiors, theorises this

structures that govern Thai society: the structure of seniority

subject for future architectural practice. Together, the thesis

and the structure of celebrity.

and atlas set these famous architect-designed examples against the increasing occurrence of banal, mainstream examples of architecture that we could say tend towards the non-typological.

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286

PhD

EPISTEMIC IMPOSITION: PROBLEMATISING THE CROSS-APPROPRIATION O F B U I L D I N G P R A C T I C E I N JAVA , I N D O N E S I A ( 1 9 0 1 – 1 9 4 2 ) David Hutama Setiadi The enactment of the Ethical Policy in 1901 changed

knowledge and practice within the colony. The

the nature of the relationship between the

thesis defines these disseminatory acts as an

Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies (now

epistemic imposition – an instrument of Dutch

Indonesia). One notable shift that occurred at this

colonial power. The thesis begins by elaborating a particular

time was the growing demand for technology and technical skills throughout the archipelago. The

situation both in the Netherlands and Java that

proliferation of plantations and other industries

was effectively an agency for the dissemination

increased the need for technicians who were able

of Dutch architectural knowledge and practice in

to comply with Dutch regulations and standards.

the colony. Its subsequent chapters discuss three

Consequently, this new gap in the workforce

agencies of Javanese building practice as part of

initiated an unprecedented migration of skills and

the endeavour to establish a new model of

practices to the Netherlands Indies.

architectural practice in the colony. Throughout, the thesis argues that the aforementioned Dutch

This thesis intends to investigate the scope of interventions realised by the Dutch colonial

epistemic imposition was not entirely successful.

agenda in relation to existing Javanese building

A lack of understanding of the local building

practices. Two main lines of investigation

culture, and the climatic constraints of the

underpin this research: the first examines the

archipelago, created a cross-appropriation of

methods of dissemination of Dutch technical

building practices between both parties.

knowledge and skill across the archipelago; the second goal scrutinises the effects of this

Image Local laymen and a supervisor in a government building project in Bandoeng in 1920s. Source: Special Collection Library, University of Leiden.

dissemination upon the formation of architectural

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287

PhD

S TAG I N G FAC T S O N T H E G R OU N D : O N T H E H I S T O R I C A L R O L E OF BUILT OBJECTS AS MARKERS OF IMPERIAL-COLONIAL EXPANSION Lukas Pauer This research investigates built objects as evidence

legitimise expansion. The thesis is structured

for the projection of power, authority and

around an examination of various types of built

influence. Specifically, this thesis examines the

object and their corresponding rhetorics of

architectural resolution of imperial-colonial

expansion, encompassing analysis of the ways

expansion throughout history.

in which contemporary and historic examples correspond with the assertion and legitimisation

The assumption that governance is an

of geopolitical authority, power and influence.

invisible and immaterial force ignores the

More broadly, this research seeks to untangle

physical manifestations of power. As facts on the ground, built objects can link a polity to its

how material conditions embody social

claimed domain, asserting governance spatially

imaginaries and relations in space. These can

through structure, appearance, function, siting

become apparent through seemingly minor or banal

and scale. Still, architectural techniques have

architectural techniques with significant wider

rarely been subjected to theorising throughout

implications. The research seeks to interrogate

the history of imperial-colonial expansion. The

the ability of design to manifest power in spaces

question is: how have built objects been employed

where stable and extensive means of control are

to legitimise governance, through which bodies

challenged. This will ultimately allow the

and spaces were made subjects?

audience to reconcile with a condition that has always been inherent but never fully untangled.

This question guides the research, which hypothesises the possibility of identifying the historical origins of architectural techniques

Image Jacobo Blanco, Vistas de los Monumentos a lo Largo de la Línea Divisoria entre México y los Estados Unidos de El Paso al Pacífico, 1901.

that have shaped how built objects are used to

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288

PhD

A CURIOUS CONSTELLATION: MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND AN INTERNATIONAL SENSIBILITY Naina Gupta ‘Project for Perpetual Peace’, written by Immanuel

through the lens of the individual and the body,

Kant in 1795, was seminal in the relationship it

both as initiator and subject, it is repositioned

constructed between the individual, national

as an integral part of the everyday life, rather

governance and international relations. Peace

than simply understood to be concerned with

became a rallying cry after the Napoleonic wars,

geopolitical relations between nations and their

and for a century, societies for peace sprouted

institutions. The thesis questions the artificial

across the Anglo-American and European

dichotomy proposed between the national and

landscape. During the 19th century, peace was

the international.

equated with social justice. This thesis begins at

Additionally, the thesis contends that the

the tail end of the peace movements – at the turn

Modern Architecture: International Exhibition held

of the 20th century – at which juncture many

at MoMA, New York, in 1932 (which can be said

individuals, enthused by visions of peace, used

to have defined the International Style within

architecture and other spatial practices to change

architecture), either misunderstood or deliberately

relations between people to work towards an equal,

obfuscated the relevance of social reform,

modern and global society. The thesis describes

international movements, individual eccentricities

this attitude as an ‘international sensibility’, and

and the role of the body in determining the

the research highlights its contribution to modern

internationality of the projects it chose. Thereby,

society and its institutions.

this thesis suggests that the International Style

The thesis narrates an alternative history of

was, to some extent, predicated on the existence

internationalism that focuses on the part played

of an international sensibility.

by individual agency, social reform and architecture in moulding a working everyday definition of what it meant to be international at

Image A woman exercising on the terrace of Richard Döcker house in the Werkbundsiedlung, Stuttgart, c 1926.

the time in question. By viewing internationalism

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289

PhD

AA RESIDENCE

The AA Residence is a cultural platform for researching and

These initatives are a series of independent research groups

developing new ideas and forms of practice at the intersection

within an incubator for professional development. The AA

of architecture, art, technology, policy and design. It provides

Residence aims to support visionary individuals, projects and

a physical and intellectual space for innovative ideas that can

practices, and enable the emergence of new and experimental

radically change the ways we think, build and shape the future.

forms of research.

GROUND LAB Part of the AA Residence programme, Ground Lab is a research design initiative working on projects that aim to tackle the climate crisis through a number of international partnerships. In the UK, Ground Lab has partnered with the Common Wealth think-tank to imagine the implementation of Green New Deal policies within Glasgow in a scenario for 2030, ahead of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference which will be held in the city in November 2021. The project envisions a future for Glasgow on three scales: at the city-scale, new networks of green and blue infrastructure are proposed to build flood resilience, bring people closer to nature and transition to alternative energies; at the street-scale, ‘Away with the Cars’ policies increase the space for pedestrians, public transport, green infrastructure and green community business; and at the tenement-scale, retrofitting ensures that social housing has proper insulation and energysaving mechanisms to improve inhabitants’ health and address climate change, and introduces shared communal facilities for maintenance, food production and community leisure. In Mexico, thanks to a British Council grant, Ground Lab is developing a digital tool for policy-makers to assess the vulnerability of water in Mexico City. Developed with the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London (UCL) and the British Geological Survey, the tool creates future scenarios in order to understand how the implementation of ecotechnologies, such as constructed wetlands and rain harvesting,

can help mitigate the impact of climate change and improve water security in this context. In South America, Ground Lab has been commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) to develop an atlas of climate risk for informal settlements. The atlas is a tool to help policy-makers in the region to make decisions and set priorities according to how conditions such as drought, flooding, landscape fragmentation, soil erosion and pollution, deforestation and changes in land use affect the continent’s most vulnerable communities. STAFF Clara Oloriz, Jose Alfredo Ramirez RESEARCH FELLOWS Daniel Kiss, Elena Luciano, Rafael Martínez, Iulia Stefan

Warming Planet, AA Ground Lab. Part of the IADB publication Inmigrando. A planetary look at global temperature increase or global warming reveals it as one of the driving forces behind human migration. If these trends continue, 200 million people will be forced to migrate by 2050 due to the climate disaster.

Green New Deal: Glasgow, Sectional View, AA Ground Lab in collaboration with Common Wealth: 2020. Glasgow’s iconic tenement buildings are a central pillar of the city’s landscape. A retrofitting revolution to create decent net-zero homes for all is an opportunity to create good local jobs in rooted supply chains, tackle fuel poverty and create shared spaces for communities to use.

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Ground Lab

WOOD LAB Most carpenters have never felled a tree, most engineers have never excavated foundations and most architects have never had a hand in a building’s physical construction. With these activities so often compartmentalised, our understanding of the whole construction life-cycle becomes abstract. The AA’s Hooke Park campus offers a unique educational space to address this concern; its inhabitants are embedded within 350 acres of mixed forest which functions both as our home and our material library. Over the past 35 years, Hooke Park has been host to a close, continued collaboration between architects, engineers, foresters and craftspeople, among others. The functioning buildings that result from the work of both professionals and students at Hooke Park provide built demonstrations of substantial and innovative research that suggest alternative ways of building with trees. Each celebrates their astonishing capabilities – simultaneously reminding us of how little we fully understand trees, and how much more ambitious our work with them might be. In its inaugural year, the Wood Lab has been writing a book to unpack the story of Hooke Park: its people, its projects, the ambitions that set everything in motion and some suggestion of its future. Approaching this task hands-on, Wood Lab Research Fellows Jack Cardno and Finbar Charleson have moved into the forest. Experiencing the site as a living archive, they have conducted as-built analysis through LiDAR scanning, energy calculations, site surveys, workshops with students and interviews with far too many people to thank on this page. Avoiding the temptation to propose a single answer, the book lays a breadcrumb trail of design approaches to be followed towards a better relationship between technology, building, people and living resources. STAFF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Zachary Mollica (Lab Director),

Wyatt Armstrong, Tabitha Binding,

John Makepeace (Founding Donor),

John Bunford, Micheal Burnard, Bim

Jack Cardno, Finbar Charleson

Burton, the Corry Wrights, Seb Cox,

(Research Fellows)

Jean-Nicolas Dackiw, Ryan Dillon, Design + Make students, Dougal Driver, Shin Egashira, Formafantasma, Joanna Gibbons, Kevin Gaston, Tim Ingold, Katie Macdonald, William Moorwood, Dan Ridley-Ellis, Kenton Rogers, Christopher Sadd, Martin Self, Maria Smith, Manja van de Worp, Lucas Wilson

Working into 3D scan data of trees and wood buildings. Evaluating deviation and irregularity within a large oak and in Design + Make’s Tree Fork Truss.

RESPOND

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Wood Lab

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

The AA Public Programme is a diverse and ever-evolving collection

bring together thousands of members, visitors, critics and

of lectures, conversation, open juries, exhibitions, publications,

provocateurs from around the world. By taking ideas explored

workshops, symposia, open seminars, gallery talks, building visits,

within the AA’s full-time curriculum and testing them in

performances and special projects dedicated to advancing global

conversation with a wide range of audiences, the Public Programme

architectural culture. Events are free and open to the public, and

is an important form of free and accessible architectural education.

For 2020–21, the AA Public Programme was held entirely online and designed with global accessibility as a fundamental principle. The Public Programme provides a platform for those trying to effect change both within our discipline and in society as a whole, and moving online has meant that a far more diverse audience has been able to participate in these events, enabling them to see themselves reflected and represented within contemporary architectural culture. Highlights from this year include the New Models lecture series, which invites architects and experts from other disciplines to suggest new strategies that disrupt existing systems and promote a more equitable society. Through this series, new models have been proposed for ecology by Natsai Audrey Chieza; for community-led practice by Resolve Collective; for listening by Sumayya Vally; and for education by Sepake Angiama, to name a few; the series will continue in autumn 2021. New Models sat alongside a broad range of lecture series addressing intersectional issues of artificial intelligence, ethics, land, climate and race; interdisciplinary conversations between

designers and makers; and discussions exploring connections between the accelerating crises of climate and capital. Symposia across the three terms focused on labour and the politics of construction, the role of representation as an investigative tool, human and machinic entanglements and the process of reconstructing the city of Beirut post-explosion. Reconstructing Beirut was organised by AA students, and achieved a record international audience of 2,233 people over the course of the day-long event. Through the ongoing Architecture in Translation series, we continued to explore the richness and nuance that different languages can contribute to the architectural discourse. The Hindi Jury in Translation, held in February 2021 with live simultaneous translation, attracted 280 participants from around the world. This international approach was further emphasised by the launch of AA Global Forums – a series of events held to connect our community of students, staff, alumni, members and international partners around the world. The first AA Global Forum was held in Melbourne in May 2021, and further events will take place worldwide as the series continues.

Amid a year of intermittent lockdowns, one installation was able to open during 2020 on the corner of Bedford Square. A Playground for Non-Humans was developed in collaboration with the Architecture for Dogs exhibition at Japan House London, and featured replica models from the exhibition alongside entries created in response to an AA open call to the wider architecture community, imagining new habitats for city fauna. This was restaged in June 2021 for the London Festival of Architecture alongside a retrospective of the works of artist Zoe Zenghelis, titled Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? Held in the AA Gallery and Front Members’ Room, the exhibtion surveys the breadth of Zenghelis’ practice, encompassing early paintings from the 1960s, her years at Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and recent works made in 2020. The year culminated with Projects Review 2021, which took the form of a series of unit and programme films screened online and on the corner of Bedford Square. The films are presented alongside an interactive augmented reality experience presenting a collection of geo-located totems, which can be explored by both local and international audiences.

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Public Programme

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Public Programme

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10 9

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Public Programme

Architecture for Long-Bodied Short-Legged Dog by Atelier Bow-Wow at A Playground for Non Humans, November 2020.

The Playground in the Sewer by Daniel Hambly at A Playground for Non Humans, November 2020.

Beagle House Interactive Dog House by MVRDV at A Playground for Non Humans, November 2020.

Honours 2020 Exhibition – an interactive augmented reality experience via an Instagram filter designed by Jane Ching Yee Ling, AA Dipl(Hons) 2020.

The Honours 2020 augmented reality experience designed by Jane Ching Yee Ling, AA Dipl(Hons) 2020 overlaid on Bedford Square.

A New Model for Recognition by Sound Advice for the New Models lecture series in February 2021.

Sound Advice in conversations with SaLADs and Siufan Adey at the New Model for Recognition lecture in February 2021.

Reva Kushwa presents her project Sitayana at the Hindi Jury in Translation in February 2021.

Reconstructing Beirut Symposium, March 2021.

God is in the Detail: Labour, Architecture and the Politics of Construction, PhD Symposium, November 2020.

Exterior View, Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? On the work of Zoe Zenghelis, 21 May–30 June 2021.

12, 13 Interior View, Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? On the work 13

RECOGNISE

of Zoe Zenghelis, 21 May–30 June 2021.

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Public Programme

L AW U N

L AW U N Wan Xuan Cheah, Simon Taylor, Efe Gole, Luisa Pires, Sally Stott, Simone Piccoli, Mariusz Stawiarski, Gregory Korcel, Syed Waji, Daniel Koruma, Ebere Nwosu, Leslaw Skrzypiec, Selina Zhang, Gianfrancesco Brivio Sforza, Martynas Vinksna, Urzula Paszuk, Lizzie Greene, Golshid Varasteh Kia, Alice Baseain, Daria Nepop, Tamir Cohen Aharoni, Simone Piccoli, Nicoletta Norman, Sean Gwee, Dariya Cheremisina, Arya Arabshahi, Maite Garcia Lascurain, Cong Ding, Ryan Darius, Byron Blakeley, Sandra Simmonds, Rozhana Azra, Xiaoya He, Leo Sun, Damnoen Techamai, Tango Rhums, Sabrina Blakstad, Colin Prendergast, Kacper Stawiarski, Hiroe Shigemitsu, Spike Chen, Mykola Turyanskyy Barbara Studzinska-Baronowska, Omar Zahid, Nicholas Day, Anita Pfauntsch, Nicole Studzinska, Photios Demetriou, Elisa Commanay, Maciej Korak, Sinan Asdar, Ilia Var, Noisydog, Yoav Carmon, Takako Hasegawa, Leticia Dadalto, Nour Hamade, Philip Gharios, Rashad Fakhouri, Shatanik Mandal, Anya Glick, Quentin Martin, Chonk, Yijun Huang, Roberta Jenkins, Samy Hedin, Danya Gittler, Gary Woodley, Natalia Charogianni and Aretousa, Ziyi Yaun, Charles Dib, Roman 1, Roman2, Ting, Daphna, Shin Egashira, Ernest Jenkins, Hiroaki Yamone, Riad Yassine, Hannah from SED, Mu, Aibee, George from PHD, Aditi, Toby Chai and Dinosaur, Michael Wedgwood, Matilda Wedgewood, Anna Chantarasak, Max Blakstad, Ivor Cutler/Uncle Ivor, Camille Bongard, Matis Barollier, César Jucker, Leszek Leszczynski, Jumana Bawazir, Andreea Vasilcin, Vivian Olawepo, Isabel Hardingham, Ryan Dillon, and Oliver Long. aalawun.blogspot.uk

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APPENDIX

DEVELOPMENT To provide accessible, relevant and progressive

art, technology, policy and design. AA Ground Lab

architectural education to students from around the

partnered with the Common Wealth think-tank

world requires the support of generous individuals

on a mapping project in Glasgow ahead of COP26, and

and groups that value the AA’s educational and

secured a British Council grant as well as support

cultural contribution.

from the Inter-American Development Bank to develop digital tools in relation to climate risk

Fundraising is integral to the work of many staff and students. The establishment of a

in Mexico and South America. AA Wood Lab received

Sponsorship, Grants and Opportunities Panel this

further support this year from furniture designer

year, and the creation of a Fundraising Team of staff

John Makepeace who, as director of the Parnham

representatives from across the AA, has helped to

Trust (1982–2001), founded the Hooke Park campus.

better integrate day-to-day fundraising activity

Wood Lab’s research focuses on the inherent

with the work of the school. As a result,

properties of trees and wood as a building resource,

opportunities have been promoted more widely,

by integrating science, design and fabrication

grant applications have increasingly resulted in

technologies in order to address urgent environmental

collaborations between departments, and

concerns.

fundraising workshops for students and staff have

Numerous partnerships and forms of sponsorship

brought people together and provided a positive

have allowed Visiting Schools to continue to expand

focus during lockdown.

the AA’s global audiences, and Global Forums

The Student Hardship Fund, established in 2020

launched as a new initiative in 2021 to activate our

in aid of students who have found themselves in

worldwide community through local events and

financial difficulties due to complications caused by

discussions, both in an online context and with

Covid-19, has this year helped more than 60 AA

on-site meetings.

students with £150k of funding.

All donations made to the AA school are received

During 2020-21, generous support has also

and safeguarded by the AA Foundation, an

allowed two Research Labs based in the AA Residence

independent charitable trust set up in 1989, whose

to continue to research and develop new ideas and

Trustees ensure that 100% of donated funds are

forms of practice at the intersection of architecture,

designated to their intended purpose.

PARTNERSHIPS AND SPONSORS Current supporters: Alu König Stahl, ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan

William Firebrace, Cristina Garcia, Robert Garratt,

Laboratory, George H Andraos, Arcadia Lightwear,

Graham Foundation, Inter-American Development

ARCH+, ArchitectureAU, Arup, Jake Berry, Branch

Bank, Tessa Katz, Lisette Khalastchi, Kengo Kuma,

Technology, British Council, Budapest University of

Maeda Corporation, John Makepeace, Laura Mazzeo,

Technology and Economics, The Building Society,

Melbourne School of Design, Österreich Werbung,

Casa Luis Barragán, Sandra Cavlov, Chora Conscious

Paul Mellon Centre, Christina Smith, Sperger

City TU Berlin, Peter Collymore, Common Wealth,

Spedition Gesellschaft, Jean Symons, Universitá

Michael Davies, Catharina de Haas, Nick Evans,

Iuav di Venezia, University of Applied Arts Vienna,

James Fairorth (Tait Towers), Federal Ministry for

David S M Usborne, Vienna Business Agency, Walter

International and European Affairs (Austria),

P Moore, Michael H Wilbur, Sandy Wilson, John Wilson

APPENDIX

309

Development + Partnerships and Sponsors

ACADEMIC RESOURCES

Digital Prototyping Laboratory

ADMINISTRATIVE

MEMBERSHIP

ADMISSIONS

Head of Membership

Technician Head of Academic Resources

Henry Cleaver

Paul Crosby

Alex Lorente Robotic Fabrication Technician