Issue 10 News from the Architectural Association AARCHITECTURE Projects Review 2009 PG 16 Korea Visiting School PG 2 Isn’t a brief and a bibliography just for the faint-hearted? Adhering to the Rules PG 6 Nicholas Boas Travel Award PG 12 AA|FAB PG 8 First Works PG 10 VERSO AARCHITECTURE CONTRIBUTORS Architectural Association (Inc.) News from the Architectural Shumon Basar Registered Charity No. 311083 Association [email protected] Company limited by guarantee Issue 10 / Autumn 2009 Registered in England No. 171402 aaschool.ac.uk Alan Dempsey Registered office as above [email protected] ©2009 All rights reserved Braden Engel Published by the Architectural [email protected] Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES Peter Ferretto [email protected] Contact: [email protected] Eugene Han Nicola Quinn +44 (0)20 7887 4033 [email protected] Please send your news items for the next Francisco Gonzales de Canales issue to [email protected] francisco.gonzalezdecanales@ aaschool.ac.uk EDITORIAL BOARD Alex Lorente, Membership Olaf Kneer Brett Steele, AA School Director [email protected] Zak Kyes, AA Art Director Chris Matthews EDITORIAL TEAM [email protected] Nicola Quinn, Managing Editor Wayne Daly and Claire McManus, Marianne Mueller Graphic Designers [email protected] Scrap Marshall, Student Editor Nathalie Rozencwajg ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS [email protected] Ioseb Andrazashvili Valerie Bennett Christopher Pierce Luisa Miller [email protected] Lee Regan Charles Tashima Ali Seghatoleslami [email protected] Printed by Cassochrome, Belgium Deyan Sudjic Tom Verebes [email protected] Liam Young liamyoung@ tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com AARCHITECTURE ISSUE 10 2 AA Visiting School, Summer 2009 Courses 6 Adhering to the Rules 8 AA|FAB Designing Fabrication 10 First Works 12 Nicholas Boas Travel Award 14 David Chipperfield at the AA 16 Projects Review 2009 in Pictures 18 Interior Project Lawyer’s Office Extension by PSA 19 AA Publications 20 MA Histories & Theories Thesis Presentations 2009 22 Reading List 24 David Medd 26 Thrilling Wonder Stories 27 News 29 News Briefs 1 AA Visiting School, Summer 2009 AA Visiting School, Summer 2009 Courses The AA Visiting School features a wide variety of there was assumed to be none. Other students courses, programmes and workshops for visiting and produced cautionary tales about a city where all its international students, both in London and abroad. inhabitants have to forage for food. On the final The AA’s Summer Architecture School, held presentation day, a huge temporary monument created over three weeks every July, is aimed at those who by 100 people brought together some of the most wish to explore a possible career in architecture, famous images of the past in a participatory event. enhance their existing studies, or contemplate a There was a fashion show that derived the ideas for change in their current career by sampling the AA’s its dresses from the Barbican complex, films and sound way of teaching and learning. Now in its fifth year, the montages based on tiny patches of urban space and a Summer dLab is a well recognised two-week workshop diorama containing incidental observations from in early August that introduces and advances digital Elephant and Castle. and computational design and fabrication skills. In Critics at the final presentation noted that this June each year the AA Visiting Teachers’ Programme direction signalled a promising development: in times provides an opportunity for teachers from around the of economic difficulties, where resources and money world to experience at first hand the AA’s unique are harder to come by, we make use of what we already teaching and learning strategies. have: our bodies, our actions and the actions we can In 2007/08 the AA launched an exciting new elicit from others. initiative for a series of Global Schools. Attended by a mix of local students, architects and designers and By Shumon Basar, Head of AACP and co-director visiting overseas participants (including current or of the Summer School and Natasha Sandmeier, recent AA graduates), these intensive courses are based Unit Master, Diploma Unit 9 and co-director around a tightly focused design programme and of the Summer School. supported by a series of seminars and presentations by AA and eminent local experts on topics related to the setting. In the coming year, Santiago de Chile, dLab Beijing, Bangalore and Tokyo are among the new The AA Summer dLab has recently completed its destinations joining the ones featured here. fourth year, continuing a programme that stimulates To obtain further information and register for its participants with learning, experimentation and any of the programmes listed here please go to the discussion of progressive workflows for contemporary Visiting School section of the AA website or contact architecture. Developing prototypical studies for the Visiting School Co-ordinator, Sandra Sanna, at complex geometric systems, this year the programme [email protected] was driven by two units, headed by Toni Kotnik with Lorenz Lachauer, and Chikara Inamura with Shajay Bhooshan. Among the resources at the school used Mini City by the dLab, the AA Digital Prototyping Lab was Summer Architecture School integrated in close relation to the programme work, After years of what seemed like incessant growth allowing for rapid development of computational the world over, the radical slowdown seems to have hit processes that stressed fabrication with informed the construction sector the hardest. MINICITY, digital studies. New to this year and true to the goal the 2009 Summer Architecture School, turned its of the programme, beyond the standard enrolment attention to a reinvigorated examination of the micro of students the dLab included selected students from and the modest. It explored the idea that a city the AA’s graduate programmes, allowing for the like London might be understood as the aggregation development of related architectural concepts to take of miniature moments instead of heroic accounts place in an accelerated and mutually beneficial and iconic projects. manner. By combining students and practitioners One unit took this to a rationalist extreme from a range of international backgrounds in close by exploiting the legislative loopholes in the London working proximity with those already accustomed to Borough of Croydon’s planning documents, the practices of the AA, knowledge and the application discovering an unexpected design freedom where of computational systems was rapidly shared and its 2 AA Summer dLab work by AA Summer dLab. Elora Brahmachari, Pierluigi Photo Eugene Han Summer Architecture School. Photo Valerie Bennett D’Acunto and Edward Pearce Tel Aviv Workshop. Photo Christopher Pierce Singapore Workshop. Photo Michel da Costa Goncalves Korea Workshop. Photo Peter Ferretto Shanghai Workshop. Photo Tom Verebes Berlin Workshop. Photo Marianne Mueller Beijing Workshop. Photo Brett Steele. 3 conclusions were tested to full effect within the Each unit was assigned nine sites, together concentrated time range of the programme, resulting with nine geographical elements, which were brought in an exciting and truly landmark year for the AA to life though a series of mappings, analyses and Summer dLab. proposed scenarios and strategies. For the vast majority of the time the class became a creative – By Eugene Han, Head of Media Studies, Unit airconditioned – haven in the humid atmosphere Master, Intermediate Unit 8 and dLab co-ordinator of Singapore. Over the ten days each student began to express their own personality, and each group’s approach to work gave us a lot to learn from. AA CSI 2009: Overseeing the rapid prototyping equipment gave Connections, Surfaces, Infrastructures us a new insight into the sheer amount of models that From 8–17 July 2009 in the David Azrieli School could be produced over such a short period of time, of Architecture at Tel Aviv University 40 international and how these could rapidly advance the project. students, architects and designers worked in an It was also enlightening and challenging to be helping intensive studio setting, many for the first time students establish coherent lines of thought. The with Rhino, Maya and Solid Works, to produce an workshop concluded on a high note where the extraordinary atlas of unusual objects using Objet immense amount of work and the enthusiasm of the Geometries state-of-the-art ‘Connex 500’ liquid 3D students caught everyone by surprise. printer. This was the first of three annual summer workshops exploring the architectural applications of By AA students assisting the workshop Objet’s technology by blurring the boundary between (Calvin Vhua, Kai Ong, John Naylor) drawing and 3D printing. Participants worked in four separate design units to a two-stage programme geared to achieving Korea a daily 3D print. Fortunately, the printing schedule In August 2009 the Architectural Association joined also afforded opportunities for a few trips to the city’s forces with SAKIA (School of Architecture, Korean endlessly sunny and sandy beaches. What for the first Institute of Architects), to hold a collaborative four days became an almost unbearable lesson in workshop at Daejeon University entitled ‘The Rebirth overcoming Rhino’s ‘bad mesh’ and ‘naked edges’ of the River’. The event was hosted in the acclaimed without Magics, by the tenth day developed into Hyewha Cultural Centre and spanned a period of a complex exploration