While October of This Year Marks a Birthday for the AA, Aarchitecture

AArchitecture 20 Time

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Student Editorial Team: Eleanor Dodman Radu Remus Macovei Roland Shaw

Editorial Board: Zak Kyes, AA Art Director Alex Lorente, Membership Brett Steele, AA School Director

Graphic Design: Claire McManus

AA Photography: Valerie Bennett and Sue Barr

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Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

Cover: Exploded AA logo by Rosa Nussbaum AArchitecture 20 Time

While October of this year marks a birthday for the AA, AArchitecture commemorates its own 20th edition with a diachronic account of the school’s alumni and layered history using Time as its theme. As Brett Steele noted at June’s graduation ceremony, the architect’s universe is defined by an assortment of temporal modes: real time, machine time and dead time all contribute to a resolution. In this sense, the newsletter can be read in two ways – either following exchanges between students and alumni or exploring the relationship between time and architecture as a profession. The interview serves as this issue’s leitmotif, bringing together distinct generations and world views in a genealogy that traces the student–tutor relationship. Mike Davies, of News from News Architecturalthe Association Roger Stirk Harbour + Partners, and first year student Assaf Kimmel converse about the architect’s fashion and the role of technology in the architectural project. Educator and writer Dalibor Vesely and his former student, Iolanda Costide (AADipl 1980) reflect on the AA’s ‘Golden Age’. And Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and the editors commemorate the band’s stage designer Mark Fisher (AADipl 1971) as well as the essential role architecture played for the band. Head of Foundation, Saskia Lewis, writes about the qualitative advantage of not having enough time to produce architecture, whilst Arabella Maza (Diploma 8 student) reflects on one particular consequence of our lack of time – the all-nighter. Fourth Year student Marko Milovanovic recounts the number of times his models broke and were reshaped in the exhibited form. And AA photographer and tutor Sue Barr reflects on the varied First Year work produced in her course, The Violet Hour, proving that the adage – of being in the right place at the right time – still applies. Whether time is short, exhaustive or nostalgic, we seem always to exploit it as a productive, formative and projective tool.

Student Editors: Eleanor Dodman – Diploma 9 Radu Remus Macovei – Intermediate 1 Roland Shaw – Diploma 4 Contents

2 Form as a Predicate of Time 3 The Time (Table) of Your Life 4 The Tense of Modernity 7 An Unrestrained Belief in the Golden Ratio 8 The Question of Honours 11 A Rather Bad Building and a Rather Good Armadillo 12 Architecture hits The Wall 15 The All-Nighter 16 Adventures in Time 19 The Violet Hour 24 A Hole and Two Handrails 27 In Praise of the 1970s 30 Electric Purples and Magic Carpets

Smith Passage – Via Christina

33 A Fish out of Water 34 Meandering Through 36 Machine Time Territories 38 A Deck of Cards 40 Modelling Time 42 Shadow Cities, Contextualisers and Transformers 44 ‘Ching’ – A Short Etymological Exposé 46 Time and the Student Project 48 Look After Your Certificate 50 In Sleep 52 Letter from a Young Architect 55 Probable Worlds 56 AA Bookshop Recommends 57 Happy Birthday, Dom-ino! 58 AA Publications 60 Bedford Press

62 AA News

Next Issue’s Theme School Announcement Student Annoucement

1842: 1 September, The Association of Architectural Draughtsmen (AAD) was founded 2 Form as a Predicate of Time

Eugene Han, Diploma 8 tutor, addresses the relationship between form and time. DiplomaProjects8 Review installation at the AA Members’evening, Photo 2013. Valerie Bennett

No clearer artefact of time exists than environments. This is precisely where form. While spatial distance allows for Diploma 8 pursues its project of establishing simultaneity of form in presentia, time a common form through the reconciliation operates in absentia. This concept is seen of descriptive and prescriptive systems. most clearly through contemporary digital Due to the provision of time within such information management, or as analytics. systems, possibility becomes possible, and With descriptive and prescriptive means a discussion of simultaneity and polyvalence of identifying data, analytics engines look of form in architecture can be imagined. It for patterns in various sets of time in order is in this sense that the unit believes that an

to organise data structures. In turn, these agenda fundamentally set on form exceeds structures use information to summarise a practice of mere technique. Because tendencies, and more importantly, to project of the relationship between time and form possibilities. Thus, what originates as an such an agenda admits the signification accumulation of unstructured information of context, placing at its root the collective, becomes endowed with meaning. the uncertain, and the indeterminate in Such a treatment recalls the mid- architecture. The unit approaches form as century structuralist position that context a predicate of time itself – as a trace – of imbues form with meaning and motivation what we understand as time. in an otherwise value-free constellation of things. As form is invested with meaning, the presentation of an organised structure of information can affect how we come to terms with, and influence, our collective

1846: September 16, Charles Gray’s letter to Builder see Diploma work 8 please of the visit To http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/dip-8 3 The Time (Table) of Your Life

Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Diploma 10 tutor, reflects on time and everyday life.

Diploma 10 Projects Review installation installation Review Projects 10 Diploma atthe AA Members’ evening, 2013. Bennett Valerie Photo

In the upper deck of a double-decker bus, rolls past. Commanding two full rows, a time moves slowly enough for the mind large family, possibly visitors or immigrants, to stray, to eavesdrop, observe and imagine, chats happily in another language. to piece together the fragments that make Behind them, a man’s newspaper headlines up the space of life. the death of 120 protesters in Cairo: a time In the front row a man talks loudly, for revolution; now is a time for change after no mobile in sight, to an imaginary audience. the revolution. The eloquent sermon of this preacher or The bus transports a community madman will put the world to right; politics, timetabled for change. Talking of time

sex, football, crime, religion and gibberish beyond the bus, did you know that it all form part of his topical diatribe. takes only one minute for the Tube to travel Outside, our strictly predetermined, from Portland Place to Euston? ‘Just a loosely timetabled route enters the Minute’ without repetition, hesitation or Congestion Zone; no extra cost for the deviation. And, according to the Standard, bus as it enters Zone 1. Exclusive or if you take the Tube into town, house inclusive, it is hard to tell: is it a timely prices rise by £150,000 a minute, with an ASBO for the poor man’s car? increase of £770,000 between Vauxhall Back inside, a father and son in Chelsea and Green Park. blue, discuss the chances of glory in the Does time relate to numbers or does imminent London Derby: can the Gunners it relate to life? be brought to heel? A timeless territorial In front of us a Zebra crossing controls honour is at stake. Through the window, the different flows of time. the ever-changing language of architecture

1847: February 3, Robert Kerr invited to speak at the AAD and

To see the work of Diploma 10 please visit please visit see Diploma work 10 of the To http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/dip-10 proposed founding of a school for architecture 4 The Tense of Modernity

Costandis Kizis, a current PhD student questions modernity and its relationship to time.

When it comes to modernity, time is a ii. Le Goff: time-consciousness paradox. Despite being coined to express of modernity a present condition, we usually examine We already see that modernity is a tense- modernity as a thing of the past. This sensitive notion – it is paradoxical to say inability to find the righttense for modernity that ‘modernity was’. By entering historical is studied here through a brief review of time, modernity not only loses its ephemeral texts by Baudelaire, Le Goff, Ricoeur and value, but also one of its fundamental Touraine. Finally the article examines the features, that is, the definite break with possibility for a topological, rather than a the past. For the French historian Jacques chronological, understanding of modernity. Le Goff it is precisely from this break where the consciousness of modernity stems. i. Baudelaire: modernity as the As a critique of potential anachronistic fleeting moment and the possibility understandings of modernity, he wonders, to ‘become antiquity’ ‘Is it legitimate for the historian to see In The Painter of Modern Life Baudelaire modernity where the people of the past defines modernity as ‘the ephemeral, saw nothing of the sort?’ the fugitive, the contingent, the half of While Le Goff places the ambiguous art whose other half is the eternal and the relation of time and modernity into the immutable’. If we agree with Baudelaire, core of the problems of historiography, modernity and time are only concerned he also implies that the consciousness with the present moment, and therefore of the difference of present time and the one can easily assume that modernity has past, is a precondition for modernity. no past. Yet, Baudelaire continues by saying that ‘for any “modernity” to be worthy of iii. Ricœur: ‘our’ modernity one day taking its place as “antiquity,” it is Modernity, at least in the discipline of necessary for the mysterious beauty which architecture, is more easily understood by human life accidentally puts into it to be opposites. Although most of them refer to distilled from it.’ the distant past (the ancient, the antique, the With this statement Baudelaire classical), the rise of the postmodern opened announces the possibility for modernity to another field of oppositions. In architectural become antiquity; thus we may then think postmodernism, the tension to criticise that in the first half of art, when Baudelaire modern ideas was either aimed at redefining finds the ‘fugitive’, he also examines the modernity, or in the case of new historicism, possibility to find values that belong to the at rejecting modernity for the emergence ‘eternal’, or the other half of his proposed of a new model capable of encompassing scheme. Is a modernity that is worthy both modern and antique values. of becoming antiquity losing its fugitive There is perhaps nobody who better characteristics? How can we identify describes this paradox than Paul Ricœur: modernity in historical time after such a ‘Modernity has gone a long way in defining substantial loss? itself in opposition to itself.’ Ricœur helps us to recognise and identify the difference

1847: March 3, meeting between AAD and prospective AA founders 5 , Max, Ernst, 1906 TwoSisters

1847: May 5, lecture by J K Colling (under heading ‘Architectural Association’) appears in the Builder 6

between our discourse on modernity – ‘our the ‘Two Sisters’ in Max Ernst’s painting modernity’ – and the past uses of the term that illustrates the cover of Touraine’s ‘modern’. According to him, modernity Critique of Modernity. Just as siblings who does not need its opposites to be defined: fail to live in harmony, ‘sister reason’ and ‘...our discourse on modernity makes an ‘sister subject’, the two figures of modernity, abrupt change of register. Leaving aside will never find the balance that will make the history of the past uses of the term us ‘learn to live together’. ‘modern’, ... the discussion turns toward the meanings attaching to ‘our’ modernity, we who speak of it today. We are thus attempting to distinguish ‘our’ modernity from that of ‘others’, from those who, before us, declared themselves to be modern.’ ‘Our modernity’ proposes an alternative to the temporal paradox of modernity. Nonetheless, even as he underlines the necessity to distinguish modernities from ‘our modernity,’ Ricœur continues to associate modernity with historical time, and therefore offers a helpful clarification within the paradox.

iv. Touraine – suspension of time and the spatiality of the in-between function of modernity From another point of view, the French sociologist Alain Touraine does not address the discussion on time and modernity. Neither does he tackle the issue of the end of modernity and the rise of the postmodern. For him modernity is definitivelytimeless , and its strength is only based on its critical function.

If we perceive modernity as a timeless value, we may finally take a distance from the paradox of placing modernity in time. If a time for modernity can be avoided, we might then try to find aplace for it instead. Touraine describes modernity as not only a promise, but also an attempt for society to balance between reason and subject. It is in this marginal position of balance where the discourse between reason and subject may dwell. This liminal in-between area can be defined or even described. Nevertheless, it is a place that is impossible to conquer. For good or bad Touraine’s intended equilibrium can never be achieved. Visually, this impossibility dwells in the space between

1847: October 8, first session of AA opens

with Conversazione at Lyons Inn Hall programme PhD on the more information For visit http://phd.aaschool.ac.uk 7 An Unrestrained Belief in the Golden Ratio

Sandra Karolina Kołacz, recipient of the First Year Writing Prize, reflects on the origins of her award-winning essay ‘Perpetual Proportion’.

Participating in the AA Writing Prize ‘[Proportion] exists as declared perfection meant pushing personal boundaries and in an imperfect form – established only in widening a restricted understanding of what objects of unequal dimensions, as “a square architecture could be. Upon joining the building has no proportion between length, AA I was inspired by Brett Steele’s opening width and height”.1 This scientific term speech: ‘In this school, tutors will not tell paints and at once conceals a building with you what architecture is and what it is not.’ notions of apparent grandeur, a critical This encouraged the very beginnings of my untruth that it may perhaps be associated otherwise dormant writing. To an extent with the Greek and ancient wonders of the I felt that we often exist as passive dwellers past, a false declaration of self-importance, who circulate an architecture we think we a parody of its own existence. It steals, understand. A friend pointed out that he disfigures and violates the archaic beauty could tell Londoners apart from the crowds of temples, pyramids, mausoleums. It is because they never look up at the sky in ironic, if not entirely tragic, that these wonder. This passive acceptance is exactly universal patterns on the principle of layouts what I felt I should target, and I know my might render all architecture, at once, fellow prize nominees felt the same way. entirely common. Architecture too, true Seminars and discussions seemed to to invention and theory, must be exposed exahaust principles of ‘the form’, and before to and susceptible to evolution. How strange long I could not help but notice a pattern is it for an architect, or indeed a citizen of that had subconsciously emerged – a modern society, obsessed with observing basic rhetoric of architecture existed in the future, to rely almost entirely on former the unrestrained belief in the golden ratio glories and expired assumptions?’ and the narrow application to seemingly all architectural works. It was never a mystery 1 A J Bryan, Architectural Proportion why a person might want to decipher a (1880), page 6 common formula for beauty, but it began to feel as though it had been applied immediately as justification for wonders such as the Parthenon: this golden ratio, so obvious that one can universally agree where exactly it is supposed to have first occurred. Many of us explain architecture as a metaphor, by means of another device, and the golden ratio could attempt to stabilise all architecture, at risk of a dull and transient methodology:

To read the essays that were awarded the Writing Prize read Prize essays the were awarded that Writing the To www.aaschool.ac.uk/awards visit: please 1855: AA petitions RIBA Council to establish an examination 8 The Question of Honours

Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, AA Academic Coordinator, discusses the environment where great work is fostered, and the role and meaning of Honours at the AA.

Firstly, how do you think the AA buildings influence the quality of work? To be taught in a Georgian house, a home, in rooms with fireplaces and moulded ceilings, in the centre of London, is exceptional. To know that great thinkers and makers have walked the same stairs before us and that others will follow, is to understand a continuity of which we are part. The high-ceilinged drawing rooms overlooking the Square ,connected to the idiosyncratic mews at the back via the network of un-designed bridge-pieces allow, through juxtapositions and awkwardnesses, glimpses and serendipitous meetings between students, staff and visitors that might otherwise not occur. In this way the building influences, and causes influences: it is the very nature and imperfection of the architecture that creates the AA community. Rubbing up against each other, against difference, against history, is essential to the formation of ideas: impossible people and situations are essential to creativity. I dread visiting most ‘purpose built’ schools as they presuppose education. I am interested in usurping presupposition.

Can you explain your role as Academic Coordinator? I was thinking about this recently in relation to the new Smith Passage, ‘the longest Georgian corridor in the world’, which links all eight buildings, 32–39 Bedford Square. It creates the most extraordinary cross-section of levels and skylights under the eaves, joining the school together in an understated, peculiar and useful way. In some ways as Academic Coordinator I operate as a sort of cross-section of the AA myself, connecting different parts of the school together. I was a student at the AA, a member of the AA Council, an External Examiner, a Unit Master twice (Diplomas 1 and 14). Having studied, worked and taught in Europe and the States yet keeping a flat above Goodge Street station for more than thirty years, I have come to know many sides of the school. As an architect I query the profession; as a teacher I question the discipline. My personal preoccupation is with architectures that revolve around the nature of being, that think about ‘spatial prosodies’ and ‘non qualities’ of time. I generally take the back door, the back stairs, Frost’s ‘path less travelled’. I favour generosity, bravery and effort. I try always to listen and where possible, make things possible.

1861: AA Brown Book begins publication 9 MaxHacke at the Diploma Honours presentation, June Photo 2013. Valerie Bennett

How does the AA’s means of assessment influence the school? At the AA work is assessed collectively through dialogue. That it is argued about and passionately disputed seems to embody the essence of a civilised and democratic education. Debate between students, between student and tutor, and between tutors, establishes a common ground of difference across the discipline. Disagreement is essential – it lies at the heart of ideas: it is the very material we work with, that we must work with, at the AA. Conversations are the reason to be here: our work is the materialisation of conversation. At the AA we only offer Pass or Fail. This is a fundamental and crucial principle that dates back to the founding of the school in 1847 and distinguishes the AA from all other schools of architecture. It is for other schools to skirmish over percentage assessments – I simply don’t believe that subjective judgements can be categorised in this way. Work is either good enough or it’s not and this can be identified regardless of taste, style, subject, medium or mode. This ability to recognise quality is what we teach, across all units; how to ask the right questions, how to make judgements. As tutors and students, we are learning all the time: this is a dynamic condition that occurs between us and is, to a large extent, ineffable and unmeasurable in any conventional sense.

1862: AA Library forms 10

What criteria underpin an AA Honours project? ‘Honours’ is the democratic acknowledgement of merit. In my opinion the fundamental criteria for an AA Honours project have not changed over the years. The work must challenge preconceptions. It must exceed its unit, its tutors, its origins, its language and reach a brink of collapse. These projects are not seamless or slick, they have rough edges that reveal potential. The best projects are deeply personal and engage the unexpected. They cause us as tutors to recognise something never before seen. Intuition meets intellect, the verbal meets the nonverbal, the concrete coexists with the abstract, and the physical blurs with the metaphysical. This work gives more, dares more, risks more. It momentarily touches something sacred.

Can you comment on the design process leading to Honours? I do not believe that the greatest work is achieved without a struggle. Doubt, often extreme self-doubt, is part of the creative process, and it is important to realise that tutors doubt themselves and their work as much as students. Disappointment, mostly with oneself, is part of making things, making anything, and part of moving forward, though it often doesn’t feel like forward! I once heard a sermon preached on the subject of disaster. The etymology of the word ‘disaster’ comes from ‘dis-aster’, to be separated from the star that guides you. I sometimes think when all is seemingly lost, or disastrous, it is because we have lost our raison d’être, or we have lost sight of what really matters. Often this has to do with understanding different scales of time and how these interplay. Contrary to convention I think there is always enough time, it is just a matter of recalibrating values.

Is there such a thing as an Honours student? Honours at the AA represents a particular moment, a particular

afternoon in June when a particular project, a particular delivery, a particular nuance captures something that is shared and agreed upon by the tutors. But we all know it’s a point in time. There are many fine projects, many fine minds in other stages of development that will become remarkable, special, important, unusual, discovered and recognised in time. There are many right answers and it must be remembered that the condition of making things – ideas, objects, buildings, relationships – is forever unfolding. I think the greatest honour is to teach and to teach at the AA: to engage the minds, the trust, the generosity and the tolerance of our students in the collaborative effort to reach for something we don’t quite yet know. Like T S Eliot, I can only say ‘there we have been: but I cannot say where.’

1863: The AA’s Voluntary Examination Class commences

and the first RIBA voluntary exam takes place read Honours articles winners year’s written this by To http://conversations.aaschool.ac.uk visit please 11 A Rather Bad Building and a Rather Good Armadillo

Former AA student Michael Gold (AADipl 1964), revisits an essay he wrote in 1973 for the publication AA Projects 1946–71.

‘Long ago the Chinese town of Tsuen- In one example, by Kharegat, from Chen-Fu, the outlines of which are like the brief for an ocean terminus, the ‘parti’ those of a carp, frequently fell prey to the is a building in the shape of a boat. The depredations of the neighbouring city of Romeo and Juliet apartments by Scharoun, Yung-Chun, which is shaped like a fishing- and Saarinen’s TWA bird-terminal belong net, until the inhabitants of the former town to this period, and the sort of concrete conceived the plan of erecting two pagodas facets, then around the AA, infected in their midst. These pagodas, which tower the London South Bank complexes, the above the city of Tsuen-Cheu-Fu, have ever National Theatre, the Smithsons’ Robin since exercised the happiest influence over Hood Lane, and buildings by Howell, its destiny by intercepting the imaginary Killick, Partridge and Amis. net before it could descend and entangle in Sadly, the movement never pushed its meshes, the imaginary carp.’ towards inventing, much less articulating, – ‘Chinese Geomancy’ from communicative detail, embellishment, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer delicacy or any thematic device to match the somewhat crude ventures into imagery. A type of iconographic imagery sculpted It remained merely an interesting aberration

in concrete was a feature of Fourth Year within the limitations of the brutalism student projects of the late fifties, as of the period. There were moments at the encouraged by John Killick’s tutorship Killick juries that were long remembered: at the time. Its best exponents were ‘You seem to have produced at the same Khareghat and Reynolds. Abstract time a rather bad building and a rather good geometries as configurations by which armadillo,’ remarked the panel. space, enclosure, plans and circulation Oddly, a residual hankering for might be disciplined, were avoided in ‘meaning’ beyond abstract geometry would favour of explicit, literal, organic and seem to remain in a public consciousness, sculptural forms that potentially reopened evidenced in names given by architects, or a door to a fresh, romantic, storytelling in architect friends, but which have caught on, architecture (one that is now avoided under to some of the very largest and unavoidably the continuing influence of abstraction). prominent London buildings of today – a Crystalline enclosures acquired faceted shard, a gherkin, a cheesegrater – thus doors, windows, furniture, structure, floors. echoing the AA fifties, and icons bereft of any iconography besides their overall scale. www.aaschool.ac.uk/archives To look through student projects from the 1970s, look through projects student from 1970s, the To visit AA Archives Bedford basement Square the 32 in of 1870: First AA Annual Excursion, Peterborough 12 Architecture Hits The Wall

Mark Fisher (AADipl 1971 and Unit Master 1973–77), designed some of Pink Floyd’s most memorable sets. He recently passed away, and is remembered here in an interview with the band’s drummer, Nick Mason.

I remember playing at the AA in 1966 for The Wall stands out in particular, as it was the Christmas party, as it was one of the so groundbreaking and defined a completely first semi-professional gigs that we did new set of parameters. He was the first to through an agent. I never actually went do what many had only thought of doing. back to the AA after that. Roger, Richard We’d already done large projection screens and I were at the Regent Street Polytechnic, for example, but he produced the design for which is now Westminster University, and The Wall that could be erected in an hour, we had friends at the AA, but there wasn’t double as a projection surface, and then a huge amount of interaction between the collapse at the end of the show. schools. It happens that two of my part-time We had faith in Mark’s proposals tutors at the Poly were Richard Rogers because he made them work practically. and Norman Foster! We were signed quite Gerald Scarfe and his team would have soon afterwards, doing 200 shows a year, so been involved in the actual content of the I inevitably drifted away from architecture projections, whilst Mark dealt with the schools. I like to say that Pink Floyd was construction. In any given show there’d a government-funded initiative, as Roger, be around 20 ideas, of which two or three Richard and I were all on grants and used wouldn’t work. Sometimes the props were the student common room to practise. just too heavy to transport, and a large part One of the interesting things about all of Mark’s task was making as many light- the people we worked with was how many weight structures as possible. Like a theatre links there were to architecture. It is a really director, he’d come to oversee the first good training for rock and roll because it shows and then move on to his next project. mixes the practical with fine art, drawing, We generally had a clear idea of what three-dimensional thinking and structural the show would be, so we’d hand Mark engineering. Arthur Max, for example, the set list of the show and he’d design who took us from 35mm slide projectors to the production accordingly. We tended hydraulic ‘cherry picker’ lifts with racks of to follow the same format, playing new mounted lights, was an American student material in the first half, and then the ‘Best architect who helped introduce us to stage Of’ in the second half. We were always lighting. He is now an Oscar-nominated trying to break the audience into new production designer for Ridley Scott. material first, which was the toughest thing. But the great thing about Mark Fisher We also tried to modify the sets night by was that he got along so easily with people, night, partly because there were people and everybody thought he was the nicest coming to see all the shows in a particular guy. He also did beautiful drawings. location, and also so that we ourselves didn’t Of the sets he designed for us, his work for get stuck in too much of a rut.

1880: First architectural students’ satirical journal, British Builder and Architecting News, published 13 Invitationand flyer for 1966 the Carnival AA’s where PinkFloyd performed, just before being signed by EMI

1889–92: Leonard Stokes Presidency 14

The Wall was driven specifically by ours became more like theatrical events – a Roger feeling that there was an audience bit like Michael Jackson’s later shows. The out there that felt alienated. A rock festival Stones also got into it with huge platforms is as much about the audience being and moving elements. One time they together as it is about what’s happening asked how high our proscenium arch would on stage. But if it’s just one band playing be so they could make theirs a bit bigger! you feel there should be more engagement Mark really was the instigator of these

with the audience. When you’re playing production values, and ended up as the to 80,000 people, you need big things to master of the theatrical rock spectacular. grab the attention of the people at the back He was a brilliant visionary, sorely missed! playing Frisbee, and that’s why the towers that rise and fall, the giant inflatables and so many of Mark’s ideas made such an impact. Mark really helped establish the standard for today’s large-scale set design for rock shows. I went to see a Robbie Williams show with fantastic staging. The sets were as good as anything we ever did. At the time, we were quite peculiar in that we spent so much time on the staging while others concentrated on promoting themselves with just a stage, a few lights and large screens. As we worked with Mark,

1891: Two rooms at No 56 Great Marlborough Street rented whole interview the to please listen visit the To AA Archives Bedford basement Square the 32 in of www.aaschool.ac.uk/archives 15 The All-Nighter

Arabella Maza, Diploma 8 student, having undertaken many all-nighters describes her experience when there are just not enough hours in the day.

It is midnight, and the evening/morning It is seven in the morning already. is about to begin. You count down the hours What were you doing? You only have until the deadline. Eleven hours left until four hours left, and count the time to the presentation. That should be enough. get there. And make the print-outs too. The shining light of the screen is almost Okay just finish what you have; the other threatening. How are you going to get it drawings will have to be left behind. all finished? Can you do it all? First line of business: be in the right state of mind, and have the right Click, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap, fuck, ammunition to keep you going (a reheated fuck, fuck, fuck. You need to go. coffee from the morning will do).It’s crunch time now, no more doubts, no more breaks. Hurry. Go for it, and get the work done. Whether you are alone or have company, nothing seems to matter anymore. The piercing music of the musician you hear in the corner of your ear no longer bothers you. Your friends attempt to keep up with the all-nighter but fail miserably and go to bed. It’s just you and your machine now, and the massive drawing that you need to finish in eight hours. The light pierces through your eyes like tiny needles, and your hands seem to have a life of their own. It is almost robotic. Your brain is barely functioning, but your body maintains its rhythm, almost as if you are on autopilot. Music is optional. Sometimes it helps to keep the pace, but when it gets intense nothing is better than the sound of the keyboard and the mouse clicking. When you know you’re getting the work done and are engrossed with what is happening in front of you. Where was this feeling all day long? If only every day could be this productive. You could channel this energy into a normal schedule. Imagine the greatness. Stop. Don’t get distracted. The sun is rising.

1893: Ethel and Bessie Charles try to join AA; motion to allow female students defeated 16 Adventures in Time

Approaching time as a tool to challenge limits, Saskia Lewis, Head of AA Foundation, describes how the course operates through a constant pressure of time.

Opposite:Carolin Esclapez, existing– 2013 within the image memories of Chicago and London Left:Max Gitlen, 2001 bridge-hideout,– Hooke Park

1901: AA’s Day School opens with A T Bolton as Head 17

Time is a tool. During the Foundation know what you’ll be doing in four weeks you year each student has the opportunity have to concentrate on the now. Stripping to use time as a vehicle for developing, time bare creates a sense of immediacy, testing and organising their work. This urgency and experimentation that allows offers a rhythm of creative progression for roughness, frank conversation, creative that attempts to shape the time students observation and new ways of working. spend on their projects, rather than We can all achieve an amazing amount in predetermining their creative outcomes. an hour, day, week or several weeks if we’re We identify key areas of engagement in caught up in constructive momentum. order to allow students to build their work I often think it is a debatable luxury to seek in depth, take risks and discover the value more time to do something well, when of previously unfamiliar positions while instead you can re-think, re-consider and drawing on their own itineraries and re-adjust, fast. This agility and reliance on aesthetic impulses. They can then export raw survival techniques is what we aim for this rhythm to future creative endeavours. in Foundation. Immaculate detail emerges We purposefully do not upload the later as the post-script. course online and prefer to remain a touch When I first took over the direction evasive by providing a general description of Foundation, I sought to profit from our of the year that keeps any details previous experiments in time by dividing deliberately obscured. We want students the tempo of the course into one- and three- to approach Foundation as if they are on a week events. The reasons were twofold. creative, intellectually challenging, survival Firstly, I not only needed to describe the course – a boot camp for thinking and year to a new cohort of students, but also designing. This is our way of deconstructing to a totally new team of tutors who had any preconceptions and tendencies toward not taught Foundation. Secondly, and more working in a predictably rigid manner – this crucially, I wanted to explore how we could process with a more lateral, occasionally help students deliver engaging and well- perilous, creative journey, rich with risks, developed work at a remarkable rate without mistakes and surprises. becoming prescriptive. In part, we achieve this by allowing Over the years I have watched the students almost no time. If you don’t generations of students – myself included

1906: Students who complete the AA’s four-year course awarded exemption from sitting RIBA’s Intermediate Examination 18 LukasAkinkugbe, portraitA – 2013 of speed

– who have had the luxury of a six- or ward off disaster, it is important to remain eight-week design project, while away their open so that we do not become creatively time with cigarettes and coffee, deferred exhausted. This year we are further decisions and elongated conversations, experimenting with the structure of

procrastinations and diversions – pleasures Foundation, conflating projects, breaking we have all known. But my somewhat established rhythms and refreshing querulous question was what could students attitudes by bringing in a new cohort produce if they only had three weeks? of tutors – including recent graduates – to In order to help students respond teach what they are passionate about. Our to such a tight schedule, we play with ambition, as always, is to make time a friend, time in Foundation by using a working to try to use it productively and wisely glossary – Observation, Documentation while also learning to stretch it to allow for and Analysis, Speculation, Experimentation a little procrastination and reign it in when and Translation – to guide us through necessary. After all what would architecture the structure of the year. As Marcel Proust be without a little time wasted? taught us, language has the capacity to renegotiate time, and time the ability to reinvent language (we also employ an Anti-Glossary, but that’s a different matter). While we retain enough structure to

1911: Athletics ground at Elstree purchased explore AA work student in see: Foundation, To http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/foundation 19 The Violet Hour

Sue Barr, architectural photographer and First Year Media Studies tutor at the AA, presents a selection of students’ photographs made during the fleeting light of dusk. MariaOlmos, 2009

A few years ago, I ran a course called and fleeting beauty, and the point at The Violet Hour as part of the Media which hard facts become elusive. Studies programme. My intention was to Light is the essence of a photographer’s set a project brief that made time a crucial work, and one must be attuned to its factor in the making of the photographs. subtleties. At the violet hour, colour and The students’ responses varied greatly quality of light are in flux; photographing – from urban landscapes to more allegorical at this time is necessarily an outdoor activity photographs where the photographic frame where timing and observation are critical. was used as a space in which to construct The fleeting light presents the photographer ambiguous narratives. with technical challenges, but also with Throughout the history of art, the the opportunity to explore the notions of liminal state of twilight or the violet hour transience and the mysterious psychological (as T S Eliot called it in The Waste Land), has states that the violet hour suggests. inspired images that suggest an ambiguous

1912: Robert Atkinson appointed Design Master of Evening School 20 Top to bottom: 2009; Top Eleni Alexey Tzavelo, Marfin, Zheng, Yu 2010. 2010; Oppositetop to bottom: Lucy Moroney, 2009; Andreas Stylianou, (middle 2011 and bottom)

1913: Maule resigns and Atkinson becomes Head of School 21

1914: Howard Robertson becomes Head of Evening School. 22 Photos:Patricia Mato-Mora, 2009

1917/18: Women first admitted as students to the AA School 23

9 October 2009 18:42 – Underneath the pier, I take a series 54 minutes on Eastbourne Pier of overly saturated yellow pictures. Almost By Patricia Mato-Mora convinced that the white balance setting in my camera is either senile or just kaput, 18:05 – The sky has been leaden all day I fold my tripod and run all the way up long, but the sun is now starting to reappear to the pier proper, discovering the culprit – at the horizon. The white Victorian sodium vapour light – on the way. buildings are bathed in the same pink light that is reflected on the sea. I am reminded 18:51 – A sliver of pink light right above of wedding cakes and meringue pies. the horizon is what is left of the violet hour; but I am confident that I can still 18:09 – My attention is drawn to the stilts see it from the pier. That is, if the rundown the pier is built on, a spatial grid framing phantasmagoria of its props, carelessly the immensity of the sky that could well piled up to one side, doesn’t distract me have been inspired by Italo Calvino’s city from my twilight chores. of Thekla. I have hardly had time to set up my tripod on the beach before the violet 18:59 – The imperturbable authority of hour is all around me. one of the pier’s notices is the protagonist of my last photograph. Taken over what 18:23 – The violet sky and the movement seems an endless twelve seconds, it still has of the sea are captured in my long-exposure managed to capture the violet highlights photograph. It is framed to portray the reflected on the sea. fake fantasy of the pier above, and the crude stench of the algae colonies piling up beneath it.

18:30 – Plink! Thousands upon thousands of yellow light bulbs are the new constellations shining. Setting my shutter speed to ten seconds, I decide to shoot again. Click, I run into the frame, and, splish, splash, splosh; the tide has now risen. I only notice once my shoes and socks are soaked.

To see more work produced during the Violet Hour, see more work produced Violet during Hour, the To please visit: http://projectsreview2011.aaschool.ac.uk/ visit: please students/the_violet_hour 1917: The AA takes lease of 34 and 35 Bedford Square 24 A Hole and Two Handrails – Experience Against Effect

Joshua Penk explains the trials and tribulations of building the ‘+1’ , this year’s agenda in the AA’s Intermediate 10, led by Valentin Bontjes van Beek.

Blood blisters, bloody knuckles and that need to be addressed and committed dead arms. Dusty throats, irritated eyes to. Decisions have to be made regarding and strained backs. Headaches, hands delegation of tasks, money and design. peppered with steel splinters and wrists The results are very real and must be lived singed by sparks. Cracked skin, ruined with for more than just a few weeks at an cuticles and terrible, terrible hair. These exhibition. Our first foray into demolition are the common symptoms of a bad case and masonry construction wasn’t without of Intermediate 10. Still it’s a refreshing trepidation when we knocked a hole in a change from the bloodshot eyes and listed Georgian building. benign tremors of our sleep-deprived From the start of the year this task was contemporaries. considered to be a minor work that would To complain about these symptoms have enabled us to proceed with a larger is wrong because just as the sleep-deprived scheme: the erection of a new structure on student can triumphantly present another the rooftop of 10 Morwell Street. It was an ten drawings the following morning, the exciting prospect to break a hole in the AA, physically weary member of Unit 10 can rise but more exciting still was the prospect to scale the graded rubble of 100 London of creating a whole building. Over the year, bricks and slide headfirst through an however, the plan gradually diminished as irregular escape hole that emerges through the scope of work actually involved became half a metre of Victorian masonry. Slipping apparent. Some hope remained through onto a roof littered with skeletons, footballs Ter m 2 as we worked on our individual +1 and banana skins, we are the very first 1+ s. projects in London, and we still had not There is a sense of excitement and panic admitted defeat even at the start of the when the first brick-sized hole is made on Easter break, when no building work had the outer surface of the wall. No shard of even started. It wasn’t until the beginning light floods the room. The brick just falls of Term 3 that the realisation of the limply out to be the first chunk of many enormity of work required for a project to spew onto the asphalt of the roof below. like this set in. To even create the opening, Truth be told the whole construction construct a door, and secure the site with phase has been filled with mixed emotions. handrails would have taken all the time that Although what we have done is enormously we had left. It took weeks of preparation exciting and engaging, mixed with the before actual works could even begin. There straightforward manual work are layers were issues of health and safety that got in of planning, bureaucracy and logistics the way, and at times the absurdity of these

1917–20: Atkinson’s alterations to 34 and 35 Bedford Square are made, and the back studio block is built 25 Thebeginning of the hole to the new terrace. Photo Joshua Penk

1920: Women first admitted as AA Members 26

Thenew terrace designed by Intermediate Unit 10 taughtby Valentin Bontjes van Beek. Photo Sue Barr

factors became a demoralising burden popped up as guests walked onto the roof that caused temporary mutiny amongst to be the first to join us on our new frontier, the group. share a drink, some seafood and awkward Design work still had to be done and moments of vanity with the mirror wall. the difficulty of balancing and assigning And so it was that we reached a point work caused problems. In retrospect we we called finished. Despite being neglected were all probably too polite; meetings and temporarily while we hurriedly hashed discussion would go nowhere for days on together portfolios that attempted to tie end. And this was only for a temporary the year together, the single topic of the +1 handrail whose form had been heavily was imagined in every way and at every kind dictated by the engineer and the available of scale, across three terms and many modes materials. It’s small wonder that formulating of working. Were all equally important? a design between eleven students during Stood on this new terrace, on the Ter m 1 failed to reach any conclusions. opening night of Projects Review, amongst But decisions had to be made and the key crowds of people in a space that we had

for the handrail seemed to be printing it created, its felt that maybe the experience at 1:1.Technically this allowed for easy had been equally spread, but what of the fabrication (cut-outs became templates) and effect? Well, there is no competing with adjustments to fine-tune the design. Once the impact of a hole and two handrails. this was decided, fabrication progressed without any real difficulties alongside the We were Unit 10, and now there is other works. In fact the handrail was fitted no going back on-site in a single day, after being completed in the workshop, by some miracle, it actually fitted together. The door presented a different set of challenges. Determined not to compromise on their desires, the group manufacturing the door worked through all setbacks to finish just in time. Some last-minute ‘performance pieces’

1920: Evening School closed, Day School becomes five-year course please visit 10 on Inter more information For http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/inter-10 27 In Praise of the 1970s

Practising architect and AA graduate, Iolanda Costide (AADipl 1980), interviews her former tutor and prolific architectural educator, Dalibor Vesely, in an attempt to capture AA life at the end of the 1970s.

Under great political pressure to conform to the ‘state curriculum’, the AA School had become, almost, a department of Imperial College. The AA Council decided to wind down the school in March 1971. The school community resisted and set about appointing a new head, to secure its financial and academic independence.

Iolanda Costide: The AA in the 1970s… Dalibor Vesely: It all started in 1971 when Alvin (the ‘rainmaker’, as he described himself) was appointed Chairman. In 1973 he established the unit studio system. The school was, until then, based on a year structure, with Peter Cook in charge of the whole of the Diploma School. Alvin had this very interesting idea, right from the beginning, that he would like to have a school made up of studios representing different cultures, with different approaches to architecture. It was a complex vision. He brought people from Switzerland, Chile, America, central and eastern Europe and Britain, of course. The whole organisation of the units created an inspiring atmosphere. The proximity of the studios gave rise to impromptu meetings. There was a sense of competition, which induced a momentum of great enthusiasm. The studio system was very much stimulated by Alvin. He had an unbelievable gift to inspire people. He pushed you every minute, in a very diplomatic way. Then, there was the more brutal incentive of the one-year contracts. In the summer you never knew whether you would get a letter inviting you to continue your work at the AA or suggesting that you may prefer to have a sabbatical.

Some people talk about the 1970s representing the golden age of the AA. Do you think they are right, or is it only nostalgia? Was it special, the AA, in the 1970s? Yes. Retrospectively, you can easily understand this. Imagine the top floor of Bedford Square, with unit next to unit, led by Elia Zenghelis, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, myself, Daniel Libeskind, Leo Krier, Peter Cook, Peter Wilson, Rodrigo Pérez De Arce from Chile; Zaha Hadid, eventually. Then, too, were the very ‘sound’ voices of the external visitors: Cedric Price, Bob Maxwell, Alan Colquhoun, Colin Rowe. I remember Rykvert, Colquhoun and Rowe being present at a crit of the Urban Forum. We had to move to the Exhibition Hall to accommodate the crowd. Eric Parry was explaining his project, a ‘Political Building’, centred on the idea of the ‘balcony’, by Jean Genet. Rowe vented his

1920: Atkinson elevated to Director of Education and Howard Robertson becomes Principal of AA School

28 Dalibor Vesely at the Honorary Members’ Honorary Members’ the at Vesely Dalibor event,May Photo 2013. Valerie Bennett

outrage: ‘If this is what people do after reading my “Collage City”, I want no part of it.’ He stormed out when I assured him that his concern was unfounded, since few people in the room would have read his book! Alvin’s second significant contribution was starting a programme of AA publications. He eventually planned a series of exhibitions and catalogues illustrating the concepts developed by each studio – ‘Themes’.

The first to be published, in 1982, was ‘Architecture and Continuity’, with our unit’s work on the Urban Forum – Kentish Town (1978–81). The AA printed five or six catalogues, including Bernard Tschumi’s, Michael Gold’s and Peter Wilson’s units, from what I remember.

When I joined the unit, in 1978, Mohsen Mostafavi, now Dean of Harvard School of Design, was your assistant; Peter Carl too. When Libeskind left, I asked Mohsen to work with me – a very interesting collaboration. Peter Carl, from Princeton, resigned after one term with the unit. We both started teaching in Cambridge full time, in charge of the 5th Year. Not an easy task. I was working seven days a week, and Peter always very serious, decided ‘one madness was enough’.

From amongst your students in Unit 1, who stands out? We had a group of Greeks, very talented; then the ‘Persians’. Homa Farjadi joined the studio, from the postgraduate school, for a project. There was something in her drawings – wonderful, rendered just in biro – that sparked our imagination. I decided we would embark on creating spaces and visuals in a less orthodox manner. It was all about space defined by light and shadow, not design based on formal games or principles, moving away from traditional perspectivity, into a notional space.

1920: AA Incorporated set up as a Limited Charitable Company 29 Architects, December 2010. 2010. December Architects, PhotoRaul Stef IolandaCostide in her office, NTA16

You introduced to the AA the central European classical humanist tradition: the concept of historical continuity in architectural thinking. It is partly true. But more important to me was an aspect of the avant- garde tradition, an involvement with surrealism. The emphasis in our studio was on content, rather than form, but this was misunderstood. It was assumed to be too much based on aesthetics, on appearances, on beautiful drawings, rather than on important latent cultural themes, visual metaphors, shared by surrealist art and architecture.

Do you think that choosing the ‘free world’ was important for us, as architects? In my case, it was a matter of existential necessity when I decided to defect in 1972. In the dark ages of the old communist regime, the modus vivendi, the way out for us, was through modernity, and through long-term architectural and cultural traditions, as points of reference. The need to access a wider cultural horizon, through travel and experience abroad, could not be satisfied while living in Prague.

I benefited hugely, of course, from studying, first in Romania, later at the EPF-Lausanne, and then the AA. I remember, in the early 70s, the AA and the Cooper Union dominated as the two most progressive schools. The AA School, partly for very good reasons, partly for promotional

ends, was presenting itself as being in the avant-garde, progressive and experimental. It imparted vast knowledge, was inventive and provocative. There’s no doubt about this. This was its visiting card.

Dalibor Vesely, architect and educator, joined the AA in 1969, and led Unit 1 in the Diploma School from 1973–81. He also taught at the University of Essex, and since 1978, he has taught at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture as Diploma Studio Master, where he also started an M.Phil. programme in ‘History and Philosophy of Architecture’, with Peter Carl. He currently collaborates with Eric Parry Architects. Many of Dalibor Vesely’s students went on to establish successful practices: Daniel Libeskind, Eric Parry, Mohsen Mostafavi, Homa Farjadi, Alberto Perez-Gomez, David Leatherbarrow, Kalliope Kontozoglou and Athanasios Spanomarides.

If you would like to read to about AA the like would you If as stands, it and please direction heading, the is it visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/wherewearegoing 1921: The AA aquires the lease on 36 Bedford Square 30 Electric Purples and Magic Carpets

In a conversation on themes ranging from architectural education in the 1960s to choice of wardrobe, Assaf Kimmel (First Year) takes Mike Davies (AADipl 1969) back to his time as an AA Diploma student. Image: Mike Davies with his telescopes, 2009. © Valerie Bennett / National Portrait Gallery, London Gallery, Portrait National / Bennett Valerie © 2009. telescopes, his with Davies Mike Image:

1921: AA Year Book replaces AA Brown Book 31

Wearing only red from head to toe for about 40 years, Mike Davies is a founding partner at Richard Rogers & Partners, where he has been involved in virtually every project of the practice, including Heathrow Terminal 5, the Millennium Dome, of which he was project director, and the current Grand Paris.

Assaf Kimmel: What did you find most inspiring when you began your studies at the AA? Mike Davies: The thing that struck me most about the school was the incredible openness and the liberal thinking of the place, which was a real contrast to what one might loosely call a more orthodox education. Its greater strength was how wide-ranging, unconstrained and great its welcoming of creativity was. It is one of its powers of the past and its power now.

Will your AA classmates from the 1960s remember you as always wearing red? In those days I used to wear purple, believe it or not. I probably wasn’t absolutely monochrome at the time. There was a huge explosion of colour in the 1960s. Everybody enjoyed colours for the first time after the severely dressed architects of the 1950s. [While studying at UCLA in California] I bought a fantastic electric purple suit on Hollywood Boulevard, and I used to later wear it to the office in Paris after Richard [Rogers] won the Pompidou Centre. One day, my client, the musician Pierre Boulez, told me ‘Mike, you are very courageous to wear this colour.’ I said ‘Well, it’s a lovely colour,’ and he replied ‘You are very courageous to wear your homosexuality in public.’

When Davies realised purple was the colour code for gays in 1970s Paris, he went to a local shop and bought three pairs of red golf trousers. Since 1973, he has worn red, every single day.

In an interview just before the opening of the Millennium Dome in 1999, you mentioned going yellow in the future. I meant that the next colour I would go to would be yellow, but I might be dead before I get there. Wearing red is incredibly convenient, you don’t have to worry about wardrobe coordination, you can just grab something from the cupboard and you know it’ll be a match, even if you had too much to drink. Wherever you go it breaks the ice; one can easily start a conversation about colour, about people expressing themselves. It makes people talk to each other. Our buildings are also very brightly coloured. We enjoy colour.

I would like you to imagine that you are back in architecture school in 2013 and that you need to decide what unit you want to pursue. I would probably still explore technology and urbanism. It is technology that changed the language of architecture over the past decades, and I think philosophical positions have been shaped by technological opportunities rather than the other way around. So I would be

1932: Robertson moves from Principal to Director of Education 32

interested in technology as a student, not necessarily in the details, but the perspective of what it can do, how it can change things. At the same point in time I would try to engage with urban issues and scales. When you are dealing with an individual house you have one sort of problem. When you are dealing with a Chinese city where 15-20 million people are living or with an airport with millions of passengers a year, you have completely different problems. So I would explore emerging technologies with an overview of the large scale.

How much does architectural education in 2013 differ to that of the 1960s? The base process is no different. It is a conceptual and creative one, and the ideas are coming from the brain. Then, you are offered a whole series of tools. In the 1960s it was a drawing board and a T-square, and now the tool is essentially the computer and advanced graphics. Today the computer can be your assistant, and you can work at a faster time-scale than you could before. You can run through iterations, you can sketch something and then change it at will. The base process, however, is not a computer problem, it is still a human creativity issue and this is why people still talk to each other at the AA rather than work on their computers all the time.

That is why we have a bar at the AA. That’s right. The bar was the debating chamber at the AA. The biggest ideas of the day were developed there, whether they were technological details or debates about the Vietnam War. The school was obsessed with autonomy, with not doing monuments and buildings. It was all about adaptability, growth and change as major philosophical drivers. So there wasn’t a debate about whether something was Corbusian or Wrightian, or whether something was high tech. The debate was about lifestyle, about change, about young people living in squats or in the streets at the lower end, and at the other end living in container housing or in pop-up living spaces. It was all about non-architecture at the time.

How did you see the architectural profession as a First Year student, and is it different from the way you see it now? I don’t think it has changed that much. The perception of how you go about it has changed, but the notion of building buildings in an urban or rural environment hasn’t fundamentally changed. When you are in your early years at the AA I don’t think you have a clear perception of what an architect is. You are into exploring things, exploring materials and trying to understand how to tackle a problem. We didn’t have a mature view of what an architect was. We were winging it, travelling on magic carpets. Among my tutors were Peter Cook, Ron Herron, David Greene and Cedric Price, and they encouraged this. In many ways they were not traditional architects either. I wasn’t interested in what an architect was like, but in what he could do. Whether you were an architect doing it or not an architect doing it was not really relevant.

1933: May Rowse appointed as AA Assistant Director read more Davies about and Mike work, his please visit To www.richardrogers.co.uk/practice/team/mike_davies Caption text Boratem hiliquis volectur aturio. Nam quundam iundae ea volectem sita volut fuga. Et Brett Steele. Brett Director School AA or the Morgan Sadie President AA the contact please information For School. further AA the house that 250 the to improvements AA of the up part makes helps and school of the rest the to units Diploma AA all connects 2013 June in opened Christina’, or ‘Via Passage, Smith 2020 Plan – a ten-year programme of programme –aten-year Plan Smith Passage – . This third-floor corridor corridor third-floor . This Via Christina Via -year-old buildings buildings -year-old

VIA CHRISTINA

This 1984 print shows ‘Christina’s World’, looking southwest along a major thoroughfare at the intersection of Neal Street, Earlham Street and Shorts Gardens in London. The view captures the lively vitality of a historic neighbourhood, Covent Garden, which Christina Smith has played an essential role in protecting, improving and promoting for some fifty years. In the 1970s and 1980s Christina was central in saving Covent Garden from its planned destruction – the GLC wanted to knock down the fruit market to make way for commercial redevelopment. Thanks to Christina’s generosity and vision, for many years AA students enjoyed studio space in the Seven Dials Warehouse building, shown on the right-hand side of this picture. In 2013 Christina made another generous, historic donation to AA life: the Christina A Smith Bequest. This financial gift was made for the explicit purpose of improving our school, including our historic buildings here in Bedford Square. The first portion of this immensely generous donation has been used to complete new openings and a hallway connecting nos 36 & 37 Bedford Square. With this project now complete all unit spaces of the AA’s entire Diploma School, as well as its eight listed buildings facing Bedford Square, are joined together along a single, shared passage – commemorated here as ‘Smith’s Passage’. Already nicknamed ‘Via Christina’, this passageway brings together the Diploma School and enhances not only the educational but also the social life of the entire AA. We all thank Christina for this gift, in addition to her many years of support, guidance and inspiration.

Thank you Christina for making the AA world so much better, and for making our world part of yours.

Brett Steele, AA School Director, June 2013

39 38 37 36 34 33 32 Photos Valerie Bennett and Ema Hana Kacar Drawing: Eleanor Dodman

For more information on the masterplan please visit www.aaschool.ac.uk/aalife/bedfordsquare 33 A Fish out of Water

AA year-out student Vidhya Pushpanathan exposes the difference between her school life and the year she spent working in practice.

After spending three years at the AA Another major difference that I drawing plans and sections, writing essays experienced during my time out from the and always trying to construct an argument AA was working in a team. At the AA most for my projects, my first full-time job in of my time was spent having conversations an architecture practice was bound to be a with my tutors and working at home challenge. I was definitely a fish out of water. with a couple of friends, at most. I really In the first three months I participated did not work in a team while studying. in numerous competitions where diagrams This is not the case in an office. I was very were necessary, and none of these diagrams fortunate to work in teams where there would be considered acceptable at an was a clear hierarchy but my opinions were AA tutorial or during a pin-up. The director still always heard. Even though I was the I worked with had to keep reminding me newest member to the team, I was given that the diagrams we produced were the opportunity to ask questions, participate mostly for non-architects, and they had to in the design process and communicate with be very clear. In other words, no Photoshop clients, suppliers and subcontractors, and if brushes or captions added for aesthetic I did make a mistake, the team leader would purposes could be used. This is not to say always have my back and together as a team that we didn’t produce some stellar images, we would try and resolve the problem. but these were to show the visualisation I personally think that taking a year of the project, never to explain the project out from the AA is critical in deciding if one to the client. Those were all done with would rather be in the world of academia or the diagrams. constructing buildings. This is something In the months to follow, I considered that one can only decide after working at myself lucky because I worked on a project an office because I realised that I knew very that was in its construction phase. This little of the other side of architecture, which meant site visits and design team meetings. involves tenders and contracts. Obviously, being the ‘rookie’, I was in charge of the filing system, which meant that whenever a drawing or sketch was produced, updated or issued I had to file it. This might sound mundane, but I felt it helped organise my thoughts and kept me up-to-date with the project’s status. Another habit that I picked up at the office was naming files and creating archive folders. I seem to have broken my habit of labelling a drawing or animation as ‘thisisdefinitelythefinalone.pdf’, which I am sure many people have done during their time at the AA.

1935: August, Robertson resigns, E A W Rowse appointed Principal

To see Vidya’s work please visit work please visit see Vidya’s To http://pr2012.aaschool.ac.uk/students/pushpanathan and Goodhart-Rendal appointed Director of Education 34 Meandering Through

Tracing a walk through Projects Review 2013, James Mak, Intermediate 9 student, stumbles upon a place of arboresque reflections.

‘Whatever space and time mean, place and The myriad of line drawings overlap occasion mean more. For space in our image each other, neighbouring the framed is place, and time in our image is occasion.’ archived drawings and flowing seamlessly – Aldo van Eyck into the same language of architecture. They seem to be holding a conversation The first time you step into the AA is like between contemporaries and legacies entering a friend’s home. Your feet sink of the AA, as if reconciling different eras. slightly into the fluffy carpet and the doors Projects Review is an occasion open invitingly off the corridors. As you for students to contextualise the work proceed up the staircase, drawings from in place: the worlds that have inspired the AA Archives – from Peter Wilson their conception. Architecture is therefore to Peter Cook – hang in every corner, displayed in time and space, becoming displaying the very best work produced a culture of conversations whose indications, within this Georgian home. depictions, fictions and tensions project Drawings of works-in-progress also the old into the present and the present into hang on the walls, revealing imaginary the future. portraits of current students hard at work in their studios. In Intermediate 9, archive and current drawings intermingle in space and time. Inspired by the Finnish forest, models hang

from the ceiling, which are reflected by the Perspex mirror on the floor, allowing three-dimensional appreciation of the delicate laser-cut and ceramic pieces. Meandering through the hanging models, you find yourself at home and interacting with the creations, instead of viewing a display from a distance. In this ephemeral and forest-like maze, you can see the drawings, but only if you look through the experimental models that inspired their creation. The drawings by current students are displayed alongside framed drawings from AA Archives, including those by the renowned Ben Nicholson. This is the unit’s contribution to the AA’s legacy of drawing architecture, through making, modelling and experimenting.

1936: Rowse sets up the unit system link: the projects 9 student see Intermediate follow To http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/inter-09 35 InterProjects 9, Review Photo 2013. Sue Barr

1938: Student vote / crisis of modernism 36 Machine Time Territories

Tobias Jewson (AADipl 2013) describes a particular relationship between space and time found in the world of global finance.

Left:Optimum trading locations across the world Opposite:hub Trading chasing the optimum location

With the advent of high-frequency trading, made irrelevant. That was however only the speed of light has taken on a new true when the time it took for information spatial and material relevance. Throughout to travel was dwarfed by the time it took its history the stock market has been to decide on, and carry out, a trade by the centre of an informational arms race. a human. People, however, are no longer From Paul Reuter’s carrier pigeons, to making the decisions, and to a machine, the automatic stock ticker and the first the blink of an eye is an eternity. transatlantic telegraph cable, the increased This has physical implications on a speed of communication has brought with territorial and architectural scale. Brokers it a dissolution of space. Brokers no longer in Manhattan began migrating from need to be physically close to the stock Wall Street, clustering around carrier markets. In 1971, around the time the hotels on Hudson Street and 8th Avenue, NASDAQ opened as the world’s first fully in order to reduce the delay between their automated stock exchange, the relationship machines and the stock market matching to space began to reverse. Given that it engines (machines used to pair up buyers takes less time than the blink of an eye for and sellers). As the space demands grew light to travel from London to Tokyo, it and the property prices skyrocketed, would seem that location would have been several of the stock exchanges moved to

1939: Geoffrey Jellicoe is appointed Principal and Director of Education 37

New Jersey, offering brokers space in the the two. Where exactly, depends on the very same buildings as their matching state of the markets at any given time engines. There, extra lengths of cable were and this is always unpredictable and ever- added to make sure no one had an unfair changing. What you end up with is a advantage – light does, after all, travel a series of potentially profitable territories – foot each nanosecond. a theoretical optimum in constant motion. Between markets, network carriers These territories were the subject of

compete to provide the shortest, fastest my investigation with Kate Davies and path of communication. This leads to Liam Young, during my year in Diploma 6. more extreme measures. Having initially What would it be like if these drifting followed existing infrastructure and territories were to be exploited? What topography, carriers sought out straighter would happen if the data centres of New paths by buying up land and cutting Jersey were to chase the optimum trading through mountains. But even so, there location across the Mongolian desert, along is always a delay, and this becomes an the route connecting the major European issue when trying to exploit the minute and southeast Asian stock markets, all in differences between markets, or arbitrage. an attempt to follow certain market logics It becomes an issue of synchronisation. to their very limits in order to shed light To correctly identify moments of arbitrage on and reveal what is already under way? one must have an instantaneous and, at the same time, complete view of the state of the two markets of interest. It’s no longer enough to stay at one end: you need to be somewhere along the connection between

To see more work from Tobias Jewson please visit Jewson please visit see more work from Tobias To http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/dip-06/tobias-jewson 1945: 8 January, school reopens in Bedford Square 38 A Deck of Cards

A quick shuffle through 150 years of AA membership cards, courtesy of the AA Archives.

1947: AA Centenary celebrations: students invite Le Corbusier to lecture 39

The AA Archives are open to all members and students. They are an important resource for the study of architectural education over the last 160 years – shedding light on the significant role of architecture schools in the formation, propagation and transmission of architectural culture, theory and practice. www.aaschool.ac.uk/archives AA Archivist Edward Bottoms [email protected] at or visit For further history on the For information AA the of contact 1949–51: Robert Furneaux Jordan serves as Chairman 40 Modelling Time

Marko Milovanovic (Diploma 11) reconciles instantaneous disintegration and permanent production in a reflection on the notion of time. Modelof the south wing National Temperance Hospital, north wing, 1942, NHS Archive NHS 1942, north wing, Hospital, Temperance National

1961: Negotiations with Imperial College commence; Bill Allen is Principal. 41

A drop of sweat appeared on my face right and community centre – so that it would be above my eyebrow. I could feel its flow easier to carry. On her way out she damaged towards my nose while holding the south a few other buildings that were lying on the wing of my model against the wall. We floor. The never-ending transformation were trying to mark its footprint on the of the north wing continued in the skip steel plate in the top right corner. While in Morwell Street with hundreds of other taking the large and heavy part down abandoned models. to install the steel holders, my building We had been building the Diploma 11 accidently crashed into a few others on its installation for Projects Review for almost way. Four of Xia’s columns were knocked a week. Steel plates hanging from the wall down. An elegant corner of Summer’s and models hanging from the steel plates facade acquired minor cracks. Two of were quite an attraction. Many walked in Max’s I-beams simply fell off without, just to have a quick look at the composition. luckily, affecting the structural stability of They would applaud the installation and his building. My south wing also suffered urge us not to add anything. We didn’t stop some changes: the elevator shaft slid out adding until people started walking in with and broke into pieces, and the long concrete glasses of champagne at the Friday opening. floor slab of the community library fell off, Compositions we made began to revealing the storage areas below. change before anyone would ever call ‘What do I do with this?’ asked Raha, them finished. The models never sat in pointing at the north wing on the floor. glass boxes. In living cities, buildings are I looked at the part of the 1:50 model not insulated with glass domes. When we I made four months ago, 145 miles away, transported models from Dorset to London, in the countryside of southwest England. they sat on top of each other in the shaky One drop of sweat fell into the building van where they began their first retrofits. I was holding. The north wing had When they arrived in London, they drastically changed from when I had seen got fixed, modified or put on a shelf and it twenty minutes earlier. I knew the entire forgotten. From jury to preview they were public space on the fourth floor was missing; carried around, hitting walls and corners we had an accident carrying it down the of the AA. They were never finished and spiral staircase between the second and the never unfinished, never wrong and never third floors of No 36. The latest change, right. They were models of time. Every however, appeared following the clumsy model is like a desert stone in the Sahara, action of an anonymous student from Dip 1, shaped by the wind over millions of years.

with whom we shared the exhibition space. It is like an abandoned Temperance Hospital

The heavy screwdriver, awkwardly placed in Hampstead Road with a 200-year-long on the delicate and weak plaster floor of the history of adding and removing. north wing caused a dramatic damage much greater than the one the building suffered during the 1941 Blitz. The machine broke through the nursery school on the second floor and through the nursing home’s dining room on the first floor, all the way to the ground-level community market. I took a deep breath and raised my eyebrow. ‘Very nice void,’ I thought to myself. ‘Just throw it away,’ I replied to Raha. She picked up the massive model, almost the size of herself. Raha then put it back on the floor, and stepped on it crashing the school library

To find out more about the role of time in the out more the find in about time role of the To projective please processes visit Diploma 11 of http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/dip-11 1966: John (Michael) Lloyd replaces Bill Allen. 42 Shadow Cities, Contextualisers and Transformers

Approaching architecture as a mechanism for change, Maria Fedorchenko, Intermediate 7 unit master, exposes the unit’s concern with the life and death of the city.

Intermediate 7 focuses on diagrammatic frameworks for social machines in transitional urban contexts, directly engaging the issues of operation, process and performance. This year, we explored the ‘condenser club’ as a mixer and a catalyst within turbulent Moscow’s nightlife. We questioned how such a dynamic device could animate urban restructuring, operate over extended sequences and time cycles, and continuously transform spaces and events. First, alternating between nostalgic and futuristic approaches to dissident night-spots, we explored the juxtaposition of the city (as a flash-in-the-pan contemporary terrain of anxious overproduction, controlled emergence and systematic diversity) and the anti-city (as a live palimpsest and a ghost space, a-systematic archive and junkyard of utopias). Fortified paradises or buried ‘infernos’ offered an ecstatic escape or a deadly trap distinct from the city here and now. Negotiating the boundary between urban conditions, we first unfolded endless promenades in line with the Moscow transcripts of historical and fictional narratives, then interwove disjunctive urban fragments, stories and images and collapsed mega-structural frameworks to set up parallel worlds. These coincident scenarios for ‘shadow cities’ were set in-between projective excavations of Moscow’s layers and fantastic

superimpositions of ‘paper architecture’. Left:Heonwoo Park, Transformer, 2013 Opposite:Martin Brandsdal, Wall, 2013

1970: February breakdown of negotiations with Imperial College 43

Further, tackling life cycles of to produce surreal collisions and calculated buildings and functions we hybridised assemblages – from flying-zoos and infrastructures of flows and organisation carousel-lounges to quick-fix spas and (while challenging familiar conversions mood-tunnels. The literal translation of that overwrite formal ‘permanences’ diagrams into ‘transformers’ was not simply with contemporary programmes). We a return to the fun and flexibility of mega- interconnected elements and systems structural precedents, but an attempt to transplanted from dissimilar contexts to set diagrammatic machines in motion. suggest new propelling typologies. Social Escaping our control, they disrupted the

‘processors’ were based on production consumption of spectacles with switch- lines, material cycles, and flow patterns. intermissions, stage-exchanges and back-of- Transported by the knotted conveyors of house exposures. Mobile theatrical devices food-chains, fed through the curated lines prompted new relations between sources of art platforms, or transferred between and audiences. music attractors in the Metro-labyrinths, From before-and-after shadow the user was to experience the programme cities as kaleidoscopic centrifuges of urban as a functionalist-managed process similar histories and visions, to infrastructural to a factory (complete with detours and contextualisers as processors of live and accidents). Displacements of users and dead forms and programmes, and finally objects contributed to the overall effect to our social transformers that engendered of a ‘contextualiser’: changes in positions new audiences and performances, the time and settings also led to revisions of values, factor remained key for achieving desired associations, and reactions. density and intensity. Dynamic thinking Finally, we explored adaptable sets allowed us to test how condensers could and atmospheres to support our focus affect urban development, reprogramming on performance. We experimented with and transformation over longer time spans. flexible scaffolds and transient elements For more information on Intermediate Unit 7’s work, work, 7’s Unit on Intermediate more information For please see: http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/inter-07 see: please 1971: Alvin Boyarsky elected as Chair 44 ‘Ching’ – A Short Etymological Exposé

Christopher Pierce, Intermediate 9 unit master solving the riddle of that enduring enigma named ‘Ching’.

, October, 1923 Harlequinade 1989. Photo Valerie Bennett Valerie Photo 1989.

Opposite:Ching’s hosts Yard the strawberry table for ProjectsReview c Left:Ching, published in

1976/77: The AA’s Professional Practice Course begins 45

A few years ago amidst the petty furor a second thought? One day while recently over the installation of industrial-grade working in Ed’s archives I came across carpet tiles and bright white electrical this photo of its namesake in Harlequinade.

‘trunking’ in our, dare I say, frequently Owing much to my general cultural over-fetishised Georgian rooms, also ignorance, it turned out that the came the re-attribution of those hallowed highly coveted outdoor workshop space chambers with an equally industrial-grade owed nothing to what I imagined was provenance. An endless string of ‘Open a highly touted recent Asian graduate Rooms’ supplanted revered ‘Studios’ and or Taoist school tutor, but rather to a ‘Jury Rooms’. (Although thinking about bald-headed, bow-tie wearing, tea-sipping it, could ‘studio’ and ‘jury’ really be more Englishman of future radiator fame from coveted than ‘open’? I can think of a lot of the early twentieth century. Who would cases when I’d plump for the latter.) It was have known how apt the AA Principal’s at this time that I became fixated on the words were when exactly ninety years more quixotically coined void (Hail Miraj ago, Howard Robertson praised Ching and Martin!) in the centre of our universe, as ‘In modo suaviter’? Even today his universally known as Ching’s Yard. How presence is still ‘gentle in manner’, albeit many times has Shin sent you there for in a disembodied, dirty mesh-netted endless hours without you ever giving it kind of way.

For more information on Ching please visit the please on Ching more visit the information For AA Archives Bedford basement Square the 32 in of www.aaschool.ac.uk/archives 1977/78: Graduate Design Course opens 46 Time and the Student Project

Madeleine Kessler (AA Dipl 2013), Summer School Unit 3 tutor, explains Summer School as a condensed version of an AA year.

At the AA our projects are overwhelmingly it demands collaboration and group work, structured around the academic calendar. which in turn force students to work in the Though we never know where the year studio, thus creating a dialogue both within will take us, the murkiness of the design and between units, as students learn from process is moulded by a predetermined tutors and peers alike. scale of three terms. It is the pressure of Compressing the AA year into deadlines, centred around the school year, three weeks does not dilute it, but that forces decisions to be made and our instead emphasises the very diversity and ideas to develop. collaboration of the school. The final day We begin the academic year in full of Summer School continues to take time to knowledge of its length, yet it is never quite an extreme by compacting a jury, exhibition long enough. As students we become all and graduation ceremony into eight hours. too familiar with the mad rush before a The work on show is diverse in its process, deadline when suddenly we wish we had presentation and ideas; yet the most just one more day. So imagine that time is engaging discussions focus not on individual taken to an extreme, and the AA school year projects, but on the unit as a whole. In is condensed into three weeks. Ambitious? three weeks, explorative collages released Ridiculous? Impossible? Well for those our inner narcissist; detailed designs were in the AA Summer School this is reality. developed for a museum of rain; a futuristic Like the undergraduate school, the flooded roofscape of London was suggested AA Summer School is organised around through film; cultures were collected and the unit system. Its five units offer a diverse unfolded through a giant model Ark; and interpretation of the Summer School’s mapping techniques were combined with over-riding theme – this year, ‘Water- jewellery design to question a London in World’ – as the basis for agendas that are as which water and land are inverted. unique as the student body itself. The first It would be unnerving if a project did day of Summer School is made up of unit not provoke the continued exploration of presentations, workshop inductions, unit concepts and theories after the course is selections, and design studio tutorials. completed. Reassuringly, whilst the amount This day sets the precedent for the speed of work produced by the Summer School at which the three weeks will pass. was certainly impressive, no project was Tutorials are daily rather than weekly completely finished in three weeks. And and they are juggled with an evening no doubt that each individual, student lecture series, seminars, guest presentations, and tutor, will for many years continue film nights, an interim and final jury, to engage with ideas that began to emerge specialist workshops, and unit trips. This over an intense three weeks. concentration of time succeeds because For more information on Summer more School information For please visit 1977/78: Graduate History Studies programme begins http://summerschool.aaschool.ac.uk 47 SummerSchool final presentations, Photos 2013. Valerie Bennett

1984/85: AA Foundation Course commences 48 Look After Your Certificate

A transcription of the inspiring speech that Sadie Morgan, the AA’s President, delivered at the Graduation Ceremony this year. Graduation Ceremony 2013. Photo Valerie Bennett Valerie Photo 2013. Ceremony Graduation

It is a great honour to be standing here pictures of my brother, sister and me in front of you all – students, tutors, staff, had yet to graduate to the gold standard. parents, guardians, family members, I was confused as to why this piece of paper members of council, past presidents, and should have such significance for a quiet of course your director Brett. All of you and unassuming man. It took me many have made today possible through your years to fully understand the significance hard work, inspiration, support, money, of the AA and its impact not only on my humour, vision, advice and leadership. father’s life but on the profession as a whole. As such I congratulate and thank you all. Since then, it has been my privilege For me this is a very poignant moment to have been a unit tutor, member of council, as I spent most of my childhood life passing and now its president. As members of your by one of these (diploma certificate). council it is our duty to help shape the vision My father graduated from the AA in of the AA, uphold its values, help guide and 1959 and his AA diploma was one of only support you all, students and members alike. two items in our house that hung in a gold Many on the council this year, I am frame. The other item that merited such delighted to say, are current and recent gilding was his wedding day photograph. students. I hope that this will continue to I tried not to take it personally that help integrate council into the everyday life

1985/86: Graduate Design course starts 49

of the school, making it even more open and with the skills learnt. I for one know of accessible to you all. Our work at council is pop stars, fashion designers, psychiatrists, not always that easy, but it is shared among filmmakers and beach bums – all of whom a group of committed individuals with the have benefited from the AA’s unique AA’s best interests at heart. teaching programme. As such we are extremely proud to You are about to leave the AA be part of this day and share a significant enlightened, curious, audacious, milestone in your lives and careers. I for resourceful, able to solve problems, use a one, having sat through many end-of-year glue gun, speak publically, think laterally examinations here, know and understand and communicate with more than words. the exceptionally high standard that is You have the three I’s: Imagination, expected of all of you as architectural Invention and Innovation. It is incumbent graduates, and AA graduates at that. on you, as the next generation of architects I don’t underestimate the stress you and thinkers, to help us develop a landscape have all been under in the past few weeks. in which seven billion people can survive However I hope the outstanding work on and flourish without consuming itself in show makes it feel worthwhile. It certainly the process – no pressure! gives me hope for the future. Take a Don’t just be concerned about moment to look around at your friends the environment and the world we live in, and colleagues, hopefully most of whom but do something about protecting and you’ll be happy to see again! As a group sustaining it. Most importantly do it with of students and tutors, you represent more imagination and in a way that enriches and than 60 nationalities. The AA is lucky to delights. No need for metre-thick window have you, and the diversity and energy mullions and straw bales. The best thing you bring from all corners of the world. to do with advice, as Oscar Wilde said, is Unlike some of those in government, pass it on. we hope that those of you entering the With that in mind, I would encourage workplace can stay in the UK and continue you all to show respect for others and to enrich our culture with your ideas and learn to listen. Be generous to your peers; creativity. For those of you returning home what goes around comes around, as my you will become part of an increasingly mother would say. You have been given wide network of AA alumni who help shape gifts. Continue to develop and make use an ever-growing cultural landscape. of them. Carry on creating, collecting and A handful of you sitting here today have as many varied experiences as you will become the leading lights within can. Travel, listen, look with a critical eye, the industry over the next few decades, and read. Know your history to make your changing our ideas and preconceptions own. Every once in a while put something

of our built environment, inspiring the next positive back in to the world. Follow your generation as did Price and as do Hadid, heart with courage, honour, and ethics. Koolhaas and Rogers to name but a few. Love what you do. Many will work in the wings, outside And finally. Look after your certificate. the limelight, but with the same ability You may not feel like framing it now, but to light up the world around us. Don’t forget one day you might. It represents a huge that behind every great architect there is achievement of which you should be proud, a team of brilliant people – many of whom and a place within a wonderful family that will be AA graduates. is the AA. Some will choose to use their skills to write critically and shape our world through dialogue or research as opposed to the built form. Some will pursue alternative careers

To read more about council please visit To www.aaschool.ac.uk/governance 1990: Alvin Boyarsky dies and Alan Balfour is elected as Chair. 50 In Sleep

Manolis Stavrakakis, AA PhD student, reviews Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.

I have never been interested in political many other similar species – the department theory, have never been specifically occupied is aiming to produce the sleepless soldier by the political convictions of our time, who will be able to perform under high and have never read Karl Marx’s theory. levels of mental and physical strain for days Having now read Jonathan Crary’s newly on end without sleeping. published book, 24/7, I feel a burgeoning The second example comes from interest in all three for the first time. the late 1990s when a Russian/European 24/7 is the condition we are all currently space consortium stated its intention to experiencing, probably without knowing install orbit satellites at an altitude of 1700 it. What does that mean? It means that kilometres with the purpose of mirroring capitalism, especially the neoliberal the sunlight back to Earth. The outcome condition of capitalism, has managed to of this project would be the illumination make its way into our everyday lives without of specific locations on Earth during their us even realising, offering us continuous hours of darkness. Originally, this idea and undisrupted access to anything that is was intended for remote geographical areas, out there. A 24/7 world is a consequence such as Siberia, where long polar nights of the internet and the constant accessibility do not make working outdoors easy. It that it offers. As Crary puts it, ‘a 24/7 world was not long before the idea was considered produces an apparent equivalence between for metropolitan locations. The argument what is immediately available, accessible, was that the illumination of a metropolis or utilisable and what exists’. would benefit its energy costs in terms Crary’s argument rests on the basis of electricity consumption. The general that sleep is the most private, and the reception to this project was dubious, and most vulnerable state common to all for Crary it demonstrated ‘the institutional people. As such, it is the last of Marx’s intolerance of whatever obscures or ‘natural barriers’ that Neoliberal Capitalism prevents an instrumentalised and unending is trying to attack. The reason for this condition of visibility’. attack is obvious. When we are asleep we Crary explains this idea of visibility are neither producing nor consuming, and and the function of the eye further on in the two examples that the author offers the book when he refers to other utilitarian in the beginning of the book are enough practices from the nineteenth century, to convince us of this fact. one of which was the broad deployment In the past five years the US of urban streetlights whose consequences Department of Defense conducted a did not become evident until the 1880s. research programme whose aim is to study These consequences are twofold. First, the organic behaviour of the white-crowned streetlights guarantee security throughout sparrow, a bird that migrates from Alaska to the dark hours of the day. Second, northern Mexico. This bird has the capacity streetlights allow for the expansion to travel without any rest or sleep for seven of the time frame and consequently, the days. By studying this species of bird – and profitability of several economic activities.

1991: Landscape Urbanism launches 51

But it is not only visibility that Crary Modernity, visibility, attention, and the uses as an apparatus for his critique on spectacle have been constant parameters for the 24/7 model. Memory is one of the main Crary’s well-respected written work. 24/7 territories that has been manipulated by is characterised by the same DNA but serves neoliberal capitalism. According to the a different means. Crary does not want to author, ‘24/7 is a zone of insensibility, ‘educate’ us with this book. He wants to of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of awake us so that we continue our sleeping. experience’. The 24/7 world is characterised Although I am not sure whether I have as amnesiac because it kills the seriality been able to appreciate his argument fully, of our experience of the everyday. We are I feel more concerned about the hundreds constantly destructed by the ‘digital world’ of hours of sleep I have missed throughout that surrounds us. As an outcome it is my education as an architect. I am not certain impossible to reconstruct our experiences whether this was the effect of what he is as a sequence of events. Crary analyses so meticulously describing as neoliberal several films from the 1960s, in order to capitalism or, as he puts it, the metabolising show how, up to the early 1970s, memory effect. I would prefer to refer to it as the was constructed by the experience of the metabolising effect of the education of the everyday. Chris Marker’s film,La Jetée architect – an education that presents itself (1962) is indicative of how the eye and as an insomniac condition of 24/7 dreaming. visibility operate as mnemonic devices This is probably the price we all have to for the identification of the ‘real’. pay in order to be imaginative and creative Moreover, La Jetée gives Jetée the enough while fulfilling our wish to resist opportunity to introduce the dream and the system of neoliberal capitalism. Though its relation to the experience of the real. Jonathan Crary believes, or at least presents ‘An image is “real” affectively, in how it feels, in this book, the exact opposite: his analysis in how it verifies the intensity of a loved lacks this level of this type of sleeplessness. or remembered moment.’ In his analysis, he is mostly concerned with the relation – or distinction – between sleeping and dreaming. Setting off from Aristotle, going through the renaissance, the seventeenth

centuries, Freud and ending in the 1960s, Crary, argues that the dream has been severely treated as the irrational area in both space and time, of human life. Since the 1980s with the introduction of sci-fi movies, and more intensively now, dreaming has been treated as a media software that can be accessed, manipulated and experienced through the digital and social platforms to which one is exposed to daily. In a sense, Crary believes that the way we treat the dream zone in our everyday life please AA visit the Bookshop has been reversed since the 1980s. His belief is justified by the way we treat numerous digital platforms, such as Facebook and Google, which function in the same way as the dream has operated for centuries; they simulate a solitary, private, amnesiac, timeless experience.

To purchase Crarys 24/7To Bedford Square 32 at www.aabookshop.net at or online 1992/93: Mark Cousins appointed as Head of General Studies 52 Letter from a Young Architect

Buster Rönngren replies to tutor Fabrizio Ballabio, on his reference ‘what is the contemporary’, in a discussion over the First Year brief ‘Architecture and Time’.

Stockholm 20 July 2013

Dear Mentor,

Some time has passed since I received your last letter. Notwithstanding, time can be viewed a case in point (of a coordinate system, rather than as a dimension in itself). For example, I have not worn a watch since leaving school, and for this reason, I did not see the point, despite having the time to prove it to you. Post hoc, I have taken the assignment of writing an article for AArchitecture addressing the First Year brief that you co-wrote entitled ‘Ever, Never and Forever’. Located within the framework of the last term, I wish to seize this moment to recall our discussion over architecture and time, in order to advance the matter at hand, and to draw near the reference of contemporariness that you proposed. Acknowledging the speed of correspondence, this text will already be dated when passed on. Just as any building stands as an argument of the past, perhaps about the future, but recognised in the present, a reading of the untimely calls for a commonplace. Furthermore, I will make an attempt to part the established linearity of the above-mentioned title, to present three different axioms of space-time in this particular response. Along these lines, or against them, please advise me where to draw the line. For, I am working towards a deadline, and what is contemporary about that in any case?

1992/93: Graduate Design relaunches under Jeffrey Kipnis 53 Opposite:Canto right:; X Dilation.

1995/96: Mohsen Mostafavi elected as Chair 54

Ever Time remembers one time once. Whenever an architectural type is found, it seems to be accepted as another truth. Because it was there all along? The portal to the future, named in the verse of Dante I sent before, can shift between open and closed. Inherent to the type is a moment. Making a distinction between two literal rooms, one of anticipation (not yet), and one of remembrance (no more), the portal is a figurative room – one of the present (a point). Still, a portal has definite dimension; it is briefer than the rooms apart. Near real-time, types take place: the portal is a room in itself, but through its intermediary function, the truth, a critical action seldom defaults an operative one. An architectural practice negotiates the threshold. What if it would be confined to the limits of such a room, to exercise an ideal? A disjunction and an anachronism tell why waiting by the gate of an airport seems ever so contemporary.

Forever And all at the same time, the typology pointed out by the portal in ‘Dilation’ is an aircraft factory. A celestial map of the AA, this specific response to your brief depicts an entrance into the realm of architecture. The adjacent typologies: a cemetery, a library, a city, an amphitheatre, a bath and a garden, form a field of thearchaic , what was and could still be, but moreover, a diagram of an avant-garde institution which has lost itself over time. However, underlining the text of Giorgio Agamben I received from you, the origin does not cease to operate while situated within the past. The transformative device of ‘Dilation’, the portal to the AA, leads to a rediscovery of itself. And to be contemporary means in this sense to return to a present where we have never been. As a novice at the school, one is distant from the cemetery path, but the theatre typology shows an approximate way under the subject. Being the constituent of the prism submerging the horizontal plane, it not only leads down to Dante’s inferno, but also against the direction of the portal: towards the dark behind man.

Never One could leave the future behind, not as a form of passivity, but to question whether time is really moving forward. If only we see, the things that are distant from us, then the contemporary is unattainable, or even irrelevant, embodied in a shadow. This is the point, Agamben argues, to perceive in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to us but cannot. Picture that standing outside the AA, an architect is burning the midnight oil. A light that, while directed towards us, indefinitely distances itself from us. A contemporary is well aware of the shadow cast on Bedford Square. For it belongs to and detaches from the moment. The fault line is a point. And even at night, the school acts as a sundial.

Too soon to write farewell. Too late,

Buster

1997: DRL launches as the first full-time graduate course work please see visit more First Year To http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/first-year 55 Probable Worlds

Projects, events and initiatives from 1980–90, by John Andrews, First Year unit 1 unit master and Intermediate 11 unit master.

EL DORADO, the study of Utopias beginning with the North (Valhalla), leading to Middle Earth (Albion) and ending in the South with the lost city of El Dorado, was the main project of the year and stemmed from a brief to design an interior walled city in the south that also played host to the embassies of Valhalla and Albion. MQL, Ministry for the Quality of Life, was dedicated to the Ministry for the Quality of Life in Lisbon.The design of the ministry was to reflect the title. The Isle of Grain on the mudflats of the Thames Estuary was the site and it consisted of marshland, a power station, oil refinery, container depot, a Martello tower, bird sanctuary and a pub called Posterfor BORDER Exhibition 1985 from (Unit engraving, 11) TheConfusion of Tongues 1865 by Gustave Doré The Cat and Cracker. These places are situated in a landscape of mist, shifting

shores, half light and a blurred horizon. The CARGO quartet. The BORDER, EXOTIC REALISM, GLOBAL HYBRID and CARGO Design by Desire, Harmony of Opposites and Knowledge through This submission for the aptly named theme Travel (with Charles Mann) was planned ‘Time’ is a short summary of the chronicle as a three-year project to embrace world of our unit activities over the best part travel, experience, experiment and design. of the 1980s. With the benefit of hindsight, CARGO was treated as a mobile laboratory. I can now appreciate how much was achieved In contemplating the potential of travel during this decade, and how much was taken as a precursor to enchantment, the staff for granted whilst immersed in the moment. and students immersed themselves in live BUREAU International (with research that expressed itself in the design Keith James) was the invention of a fictional of objects, buildings, towns and landscapes. global enterprise based on the poetics of Four additional events were organised, ‘Organised Aesthetics’. Working subtitles and three initiatives were achieved. included: Heroic Presentation, the Grid I also considered these to be part of and of Purpose, The Appropriate Gesture, extensions to our pedagogical aims. Continuing Self Project and the search for a Perfect Suit.

For more information on John more Andrews’ information For work please visit AAthe Library www.aaschool.ac.uk/library at or go online 2001: Emergent Technologies and Design programme launches 56 Recommended Reading

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep Architecture Re-assembled: Jonathan Crary The Use (and Abuse) of History 144pp, 195 x 130mm, hardback Trevor Garnham London, 2013 240pp, 245 x 175 mm, illustrated, paperback £9.99 Oxon, 2013 £29.99 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

explores some of the ruinous consequences Beginning from the rise of modern of the expanding nonstop processes of history in the eighteenth century, this twenty-first-century capitalism. The book examines how changing ideas in marketplace now operates through every the discipline of history itself have affected hour of the clock, pushing us into constant architecture, from the beginning of activity and eroding forms of community modernity to the present. This is not and political expression, damaging the simply another history of architecture, fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary nor a ‘history of histories’. It shows how examines how this interminable non-time Soane, Schinkel and Stirling, amongst blurs any separation between an intensified, others, made a meaningful use of history ubiquitous consumerism and emerging and contrasts this with how a misreading strategies of control and surveillance. of Hegel has led to an abuse of history and an uncritical flight to the future. This is not an armchair history but a lively discussion of our place between past and future that promotes thinking for making. backlist titles are available titles backlist a selection of new books,a selection new special of offers and some 2002: The AA acquires Hooke Park aabookshop.net where at online Order these titles 57 Happy Birthday, Dom-ino!

A centenary celebration of the Maison Dom-ino by Le Corbusier

2005/06: Brett Steele is elected as Director 58 AA Publications

Architecture Words 11 AA Diploma Honours 2013 The House of Light and Entropy 100 pages, 230 x 150 mm, softcover Alessandra Ponte October 2013 c 200 pages, 180 x 110 mm, paperback 978-1-907896-40-8 December 2013 £18 978-1-907896-17-0 £15 Since the founding of the AA Diploma degree almost a century ago, the AA Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, has awarded a special prize each year to this collection of essays written by the student or students whose graduating landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, project offers work of an exceptionally high begins with an investigation of the standard. The resulting Diploma Honours American obsession with lawns and projects are then traditionally exhibited continues to collectively map the aesthetic, at the AA at the start of the following scientific and technological production academic year. To commemorate this ritual, of past and present North American this new annual series will be published landscapes. These include the American in tandem with the AA exhibition, and desert as a privileged site of scientific and in addition to the design projects themselves artistic testing; the faraway projects of (this year by four students: Friedrich electrification of the Canadian North; the Gräfling, Ja Kyung Kim, Mond Qu and photographic medium and its encounters Antoine Vaxelaire), the book contains a with Native Americans and an introductory short commentary by each of the students’ essay, ‘The Map and the Territory’, AA tutors. written specifically for this volume.

2005/06: Research Clusters begins 59

Projects Review 2013 AA Files Conversations Available on the iBookstore Edited and with an introduction September 2013 by Thomas Weaver 978-1-907896-42-2 c 416 pages, 176 x 108 mm, paperback £4.99 November 2013 978-1-907896-41-5 Initiating the first iPad version of the AA’s c £15 long-established end-of-year anthology, the digital AA Book: Projects Review will offer Compiled by AA Files editor Thomas an overview of the AA’s 2012/13 academic Weaver, this volume – the first in an year. Extending the physical book, this anticipated series of similar anthologies – anthology features hundreds of drawings, collates conversations from the past models, installations, photographs and ten issues of AA Files, the AA’s long- other materials documenting the world’s running and award-winning journal of most international and experimental school record. The format of these conversations of architecture. was established with the relaunch of the journal with issue 57, and includes extended interviews with architects including Léon Krier, John Winter and Mario Botta; artists Richard Wentworth and François Dallegret; the historian Robin Middleton; photographer Hilla Becher; filmmaker Sally Potter and numerous others.

For further information on AA Publications or to order, visit visit further on AAFor information order, or to Publications www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications 2008: Visiting School launches 60 Bedford Press

Civic City Cahier 6: In Any Part of Any Form Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality Radim Peško Jesko Fezer 40 pages, 220 x 165 mm, color ills, softcover 56 pages, 190 x 115 mm, ills, softcover November 2013 September 2013 978-1-907414-34-3 978-1-907414-28-2 £ TBC £8 Follow-up to London-based graphic Global cities (and their designs in designer Radim Peško’s Informal Meetings particular) have rested on the paradigm of (2010), this publication features a new market driven development, and have been collection of photographs made during interpreted as strategic spaces of neoliberal travels and wanderings to different restructuring. Whilst they are now hit by cities. The photographs show glimpses the crisis of this ideology, the situation also of seemingly unremarkable encounters offers the opportunity and necessity to between space and architecture that imagine another, more social city. It is time suggest their own stories. to redefine the role of design for a social city and take action. What is the role of design in the production of urban space? Is it merely an element in the commodified colonisation of social spaces? Or are design and the visual and physical representations of urban issues themselves the key means by which a Civic City may be created from the ideological ruins of existing urban spaces?

2009: AA Bookshop launched 61

Bedford Press and AA Publications New York Art Book Fair 2013 at POST, Tokyo 19–22 September 2013 Yoyogi Village, 1-28-9 Yoyogi MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Ave, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151-0053 Long Island City, NY 11101 Open daily 11am – 8pm, September 2013 Thursday 19 September 6–9pm www.post-books.jp Friday 20 September, 12–7pm Saturday 21 September, 11am – 9pm POST is a bookshop which showcases Sunday 22 September, 11am – 7pm only one publisher’s publications at a time. www.nyartbookfair.com

It focuses on each publisher’s uniqueness and provides an exclusive opportunity Bedford Press will once again participate to get to know the activities of publishing in the world’s premier event for artists’ houses from all over the world, which books, catalogues, monographs, periodicals customers usually would not experience and zines. In 2012, the fair hosted 283 in conventional bookshops. booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and Throughout September, POST independent publishers from twenty-six is featuring the work of Bedford Press countries, and was attended by more than and AA Publications at their shop in 25,000 visitors. Bedford Press will launch the Yoyogi district of Tokyo, as well as new titles including Contestations: Learning a small selection at a curated bookshelf From Critical Experiments in Art Education in Dover Street Market, Ginza. edited by Tim Ivison and Tom Vandeputte; Ahali by artist Can Altay; Civic City Cahier 6 by Jesko Fezer; as well as the Civic City Cahier ebook series, alongside a selection of back catalogue titles.

Bedford Press AA of an is imprint Publications. further visit www.bedfordpress.orgFor information 2010: 32 and 33 Bedford Square acquired 62

Robert Taylor’s (AADipl 2013) final ‘Moscow Metro’, a project by year drawing entitled ‘The Ragpickers’ Atira Ariffin (AA Inter 7 student) AA News Kite Festival’ was the front cover of has been featured in Super Architects the August issue of Blueprint magazine. Issue 72. ‘A hybrid underground Taken from his Diploma Unit 5 project mix of music and entertainment ‘Ahmedabad’s Golden Temple of Trash’ spaces hijacks Moscow’s most the issue looked at a selection of 2013 prominent public transportation Published & Exhibited graduate shows. system and becomes the ultimate http://pr2013.aaschool.ac.uk/dip-05/ social condenser in the Russian capital Brett Steele has published a preface to robert-taylor city. Strategically located in the heart Building Inside: Studio Gang Architects of Moscow within four Metro station (Chicago Art Institute/Yale University Asif Khan (AADipl 2007) was featured interchanges, the Labyrinth will feed Press), and a foreword to Inside Smart as the cover story of Design Bureau on travelling commuters while sucking Geometry: Expanding the Architectural Magazine’s July Issue. in pedestrians from the city surface, Possibilities of Computational Design www.wearedesignbureau.com/projects/ deep into the whirling pool of endless (Wiley). Recent interviews with asif-khan-on-the-rise euphoria that snakes hundreds of Brett include ‘Conversation 6’ in metres below ground level.’ Masterplanning the Adaptive City, and Adam Nathaniel Furman http://super-architects.com/?p=2937 an extended interview and discussion (AADipl(Hons) 2008, AAIS GradDipl on contemporary architectural 2009 and co-director of the AA education with Anthony Vidler, in Research Cluster Saturated Space) Careers & Prizes COG, No 28 (Anyone Corp) has been selected as one of the Design Museum’s Designers In Residence Awards for the Academic Year 2013 Karl Wai (former AA DPL for 2013. An exhibition running from AA Honours graduates Tech n icia n), Wiktor Kidziak (AA 4 September 2013 to 12 January 2014 Friedrich Gräfling (AA Dip 4 student) Year Out student) and Omid Kamvari will showcase his work, along with Ja Kyung Kim (AA Dip 5 student) (AADipl 2006, AA EmTech MSc 2007 three other residents at the Design Mond Qu (AA Dip 6 student) and Visiting School Tehran director), Museum. Adam’s work will explore Antoine Vaxelaire (AA Dip 9 student) of 3D printing company 3DPEasy, the concept of identity in our recently collaborated with the British globalised mass culture. Henry Florence Studentship Council to print all of the models http://identity-parade.blogspot.co.uk Matthew Critchley for the exhibition ‘Atlas of the Unbuilt (AA Dip 14 student) World’ for the London Festival of Night School director (and Architecture (1–30 June 2013). former AA Inter 12 unit master) Alex Stanhope Forbes Prize http://backoftheenvelope.britishcouncil.org/ Sam Jacob joins a small team selected Liam Denhamer 2013/mar/19/atlas-unbuilt-world to curate the British Pavilion at 14th (AA First Year student) International Architecture Exhibition, Nathalie Rozencwajg (AA Dipl 2001) La Biennale di Venezia. His practice AA Travel Studentship and Michel da Costa Goncalves FAT Architecture, will be joined Albane Duvillier, Jonathan Cheng and (AA EmTech MA 2005), both AA by Crimson Architectural Historians Lorenzo Luzzi (all AA Inter 1 students) Intermediate 4 unit masters and and architecture critic and author AA Visiting School Singapore Owen Hatherley. Howard Colls Studentship Co-Directors, have recently www.britishcouncil.org/backoftheenvelope Sergej Maier (AA Dip 1 student) published Compagnon 1:1. The text investigates the use of the 1:1 Design & Make’s inhabitable and Alexander Memorial Travel Fund scale in contemporary architectural suspended Cocoon located at Helen Solvay (AA Inter 10 student) practice and was a contribution Hooke Park, designed by Hugo Garcia to the International Prototyping Urrutia, Abdullah Omar Ashgar Khan William Glover Bequest Architecture Symposium held at the and Karjvit Rirermvanich (all AA Lili Carr (AA Inter 2 student) Building Centre, London, in 2013. D&M MArch 2013), has been profiled online at Dezeen. Henry Saxon Snell Scholarship Liam Young and Kate Davies www.dezeen.com/2013/06/25/the-cocoon- Eleonore Audi (AA Inter 3 student) (AA Dip 6 unit masters) were profiled hooke-park-big-shed-by-aa-design-make in the current issue of Thinking in Ralph Knott Memorial Fund Practice. They discuss their design Gunjan Rustagi (AA LU MA student) Joy Matashi (AA Inter 8 student) studio, Unknown Fields, and the role was selected to present her research of the architect in the time of austerity. on ‘opportunistic landscapes’ at Holloway Trust http://thinking-in-practice.com/ the ‘Thinking the Contemporary John Naylor (AA Dip 16 student) unknown-fields-division Landscape’ conference in Hannover, Germany (20–22 June 2013); organised Julia Wood Foundation Prize by ETH and Volkswagen Foundation. Rosie Nicolson http://girot.arch.ethz.ch/welcome-posts/ (AA Foundation student) thinking-the-contemporary-landscape

2010/11: Design & Make launches at Hooke Park. 63

AA Prize Luca Peralta (AA DRL 2000) has won Obituaries Georges Massoud (AA Dip 9 student) the international design competition for the sustainable renewal of an World-renowned stage designer Beverly Bernstein Prize 18-storey social residential housing and architect Mark Fisher obe mvo Carlos Andres Nuñez Davila complex in Brescia, Italy. The (AADipl 1971) died on 25 June. (AA H&U student) purpose of the proposal is to transform An AA Diploma graduate (1971) the social housing project of Tintoretto and AA unit master from 1973–77, Foster + Partners Prize Tower, San Polo, Brescia, into a his practice StuFish released this John Naylor (AA Dip 16 student) sociable, friendly and convivial statement on 26 June 2013: architecture. The design, inspired ‘We are sad to announce that the stage Nicholas Boas Travel Award by the futurist painting of Giacomo designer and architect Mark Fisher Joshua Penk (AA Inter 10 student) Balla, also introduces a new parking obe mvo rdi died yesterday in London Manolis Stavrakakis podium and generous balconies to shift aged 66. He passed away peacefully (AA PhD candidate) the tone of the existing introverted in his sleep at the Marie Curie Hospice architecture into an extroverted one. in Hampstead with his wife Cristina Nicolas Pozner Prize www.lucaperalta.com at his side, after a long and difficult Frederik Bo Bojesen www.quibrescia.it/cms/2013/07/23/ illness, which he suffered with stoicism (AA Dip 10 student) tintoretto-vince-un-progetto-made- and courage and his customary good in-roma humor. Mark’s work as a set designer Dennis Sharp Prize for and artistic director has transformed Excellence in Writing Benjamin Reynolds (AADipl(Hons) the landscape of rock concerts and Chris C Bisset (AA Dip 16 student) 2012) has been awarded the Patricia large scale events over the last 25 years. Honourable Mention Tindale Legacy Award by the Royal Together with his practice Stufish, Hessa Albader (AA Dip 14 student) Society of the Arts. Reynolds designed Mark created the groundbreaking a prototype for data centres as social designs for all the Rolling Stones, History & Theory Studies Writing spaces, involving the use of a data Pink Floyd, and U2 tours for two Awards 2013 centre in Palm Springs as a testing decades as well as scores of other artists Sandra Kolacz (AA First Year student) ground for linking social functions all over the world. As well as his work Radu R Macovei (AA Inter 1 student) and technological requirements. in live music performance he also Rory Sherlock (AA Inter 10 student) The Award is given out by the RSA in created designs for theatre productions Honourable Mention honour of Patricia Tindale 1926–2011 and musical theatre including We Will Lili Carr (AA Inter 2 student) (AADipl 1948) who left the RSA a Rock You, and Ka and Viva Elvis for generous legacy in her will. Cirque du Soleil. He was the senior Technical Studies Awards 2012/13 www.thersa.org/sda/showcase/2013/ designer for the Beijing Olympics Sho Ito (AA Inter 5 student) circular-city/benjamin-reynolds Opening and Closing Ceremonies Mond Qu (AA Dip 5 student) and was one of the three executive producers at the London 2012 Games A team of recent AA MSc and MArch ceremonies. His work influenced not graduates won the first real-time only the colleagues and crews with OpenSource International Design whom he worked but also surprised Competition over 72 hours on location and delighted the many millions of in Milan, 8-10 May. The team people who experienced his designs consisted of Alexandra Andone, all over the world.’ Filippo Weber, Valli Chidambaram, stufish.com Pilar Perez del Real, Ignacio Medina (all AA SED MArch 2013), Isabel Early pioneer of computational design Silvestre Aimilios, Kourafas, Meital Paul Stephen Coates (AADipl 1969) Ben Dayan, Katia Iliopoulou (all AA died on Friday 14 June 2013. His SED MSc 2012), with Rosa Schiano- major contribution was to the early Phan (AA SED Course Master) and development of computer systems Federico Montella (AA TS Tutor). for architects and his introduction of computing into architectural education Christopher Bisset (AA Dip 14 student) first at Liverpool Polytechnic and later has won this year’s Michael Ventris at the University of East London. He Award. He proposes to undertake a joined the AA in 1963 in a cohort that study of the Otsuka Museum of Art in included Robin Evans, John Frazer, Naruto, Tokushima Prefecture, the John Young, Marco Goldschmied, largest exhibition space in Japan which Michael Brown, Peter Colomb, Jane houses more than one thousand full- Lamb, Stuart Passey, Richard Bunt, size ceramic reproductions of major Katherine Macdonald and Henry works of art. Christopher will explore Hertzberg. Paul Coates immediately the notion and implications of copying made an impact with his original art in Japan, and by extension for us all. ideas and unconventional approach. www.icls.sas.ac.uk/awards/awards-prizes In his fourth year he discovered the

2011: The AA acquires 38 Bedford Square 64

architectural potential of the scientific in Stratton Park, Hampshire. government buildings of London, discipline of cellular automata, The modernist house forms a striking including the refurbishments of a technique underlying much of juxtaposition on the site, and it is the Cabinet War Rooms, the Clore generative design, which can be seen situated adjacent to an eighteenth- extension to the Tate Gallery and in many recent projects at the AA. century Tuscan portico left over the Sainsbury Wing of the National As one of the founders of Autographics from the demolition of the original Gallery. Pain will be remembered (with John and Julia Frazer), he created, Parl house, designed by George Dance. for his great contributions to wrote and marketed the world’s first Christopher contributed articles to Hampton Wick, Richmond, where micro-drafting system several years many architectural magazines and he was a resident for almost 60 years. before AutoCad. A series of highly held strong views on developments There he founded the Hampton Wick innovative, friendly yet technically and issues in modern architecture. Association in 1962, recreated the brilliant products were developed He has generously bequeathed many Victorian Festival in 1977, and formed over nearly 20 years. These won major of his presentation drawings to the (with his wife Mu) the Thameswick awards and prizes for innovation and AA Archives. Players Amateur Dramatic Group. A interface design including a British local historian and passionate volunteer Design Award 1988 presented by hrh AA Member and Civil Engineer following his retirement in 1988, Pain the Duke of Edinburgh. Paul went on Robert James Mackay Sutherland was awarded the 2007 Community to lead the Masters course at UEL in died on 18 May. An outstanding Award by Richmond Council for Architecture: Computing and Design civil engineer and prominent member Voluntary Service for his outstanding and inspired generations of students, of the Institution of Structural work in Richmond Borough. many of who now have formidable Engineers, James had been a partner reputations of their own. He further with Alan Harris at Harris and developed generative design techniques Sutherland since 1964 and worked during this period and wrote a book on projects such as the University of explaining his methods. He enjoyed Bath and Essex, the Commonwealth a global reputation for his significant Institute in Kensington, Warrington contribution to the development of New Town Plan and the refurbishment microcomputer-based graphics and the of the Sir John Soane Museum. use of computers in design education A Member of the AA since 1958, he and for his major contribution to the was granted life membership in 1999. whole field of generative systems. A funeral service was held in Clevedon, Somerset on 4 June, and the annual Architect Warren Chung, who studied Sutherland History Lecture, organised at the AA between 1995 and 2000, by the Institution of Structural died in June. Warren completed his Engineers, will continue as a tribute to architectural training at the Royal his accomplishments and contributions College of Art. After graduating he to the field of engineering. had a successful career working as a theme park designer, and later for Lego We regret to announce the passing theme parks across the world. He had away of AA Life Member Clyde in recent years set up his own practice. Charles Malby. A Chartered Quantity Warren was always a playful designer, Surveyor who fostered links between and he made a career out of his love the AA and the University of North of fun. He was a very social and active Carolina, bringing in students member of the school community from their nearby European campus during his time at the AA, and he will at Winston House (3 Bedford be greatly missed by all who had the Square). Malby also worked with pleasure of knowing him. the recently deceased Rick Mather on the refurbishment of the AA bar, Architect Christopher Shirley Knight restaurant and toilets in 1980. An (AADipl 1949) passed away earlier AA Member since 1969, Malby was this year on January 29, aged 87. awarded Life Membership in 2008. After graduating from the AA in 1949, Knight travelled to Chicago AA Alumnus, Life Member, architect and worked for world-renowned and outstanding member of his local practice Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Richmond community, Colin Anthony He returned to the UK to work with Kirby Pain sadly passed away on former AA President Dame Jane Drew 24 January 2013, aged 84. A respected on the Festival of Britain. During architect who graduated from the the 1960s he formed the practice of AA in 1952, Pain worked as Director Knight & Gardiner with fellow AA of New Works for the Department of graduate Stephen Gardiner, their most the Environment’s Property Services prominent building being a private Agency. There he oversaw works residence for Sir John Baring on all of the palaces, museums and

2012: Night School launches Next Issue’s Theme

Paper

Contributions to [email protected] School Announcement

AA Agendas

The AA Agendas series will soon begin accepting proposals from individual students, teams and recent graduates.

The Director’s Office is pleased to announce that in 2013 the AA Agendas series will begin accepting proposals from individual students, teams and recent graduates alongside the units and programmes of the school. Agendas seeks to expand as a platform for selected research and ideas from across the More details on how to apply will be portfolios of the school, thus increasing available at www.aaschool.ac.uk in early the breadth and variety of publications Autumn. We seek proposals for a first featuring the work undertaken at the AA. selection of books to be released in 2014. Student Announcement We Fight Our Battles with the Drawings on the Wall

A pack of troublesome students founded the AA to challenge the status quo of architectural education and practice of the time and to strive new ways of thinking and learning.

Inspired by this act, the AA will celebrate the date of its founding with a 12-hour extravaganza directed by Theo Lorenz and Tanja Siems of AAIS.

Continuing on the tradition of the AA’s renowned soirées events will include competitions organised by the AA Council, an afternoon salon with the poet Murray Lachlan Young, a contemporary dance performance with New Movement Collective and a party headed by DJ Andy Boilerhouse, the visual artist of Metamind and the singers David McAlmont October 8, 4pm – 4am and Sam Obernik. 36 Bedford Square