Architectural Association Research Articles

Catalytic Moments, Friendships and Journeys

AbstractWhen an architectural argonaut whose creative life was spent on a quest to open more possibilities for architecture meets another, a special mutual respect is instilled. Peter Cook, Archigram co‐founder and doyen of the Architectural Association (AA) in the 1980s, recalls his initial encounter and some of the moments he has shared with Lebbeus Woods over the decades.

Design Perspectives from the Global South: The Case of Mexico

AbstractGuest‐Editor of this AD and Director of the Architectural Association (AA) Ground Lab in London, José Alfredo Ramírez recognises that the Green New Deal is predicated on the success of previous, historical economic stimulus packages in the Global North. Here he calls for the inclusion of Global South perspectives, using Mexico as a case study.

Just Transition: Rewiring Carbon‐Pollutant Landscapes and Labour into a Community Forestry Framework

AbstractElena Luciano Suastegui, Rafael Martinez Caldera and Yasmina Yehia introduce the Just Transition student project they developed as part of the Landscape Urbanism course at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. The scheme focuses on the coalfields of the South Wales Valleys – areas that were mostly abandoned in the 1980s due to the demise of the UK coal industry, proposing new relationships between community, leisure, work and production to sustainably regenerate these locales.

‘Raising the Stakes for Landscape’ in the Climate Crisis

AbstractIt can be argued that landscape gardening and painting have, for centuries, been complicit in the displacement of Indigenous communities, deforestation and creating a changing relationship between humanity and nature that has contributed to the current climate crisis. Clara Olóriz Sanjuán, a co‐director of the Architectural Association (AA) Ground Lab in London, shows us how landscape practices can be reimagined to address these historical injustices.

Dynamic Domains of Antarctica: A Design Model of Global Commons in Sync with Planetary Metabolism

AbstractAs part of a recent MArch Landscape Urbanism thesis project at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, Daniel Kiss and Swadheet Chaturvedi investigated the food chains that impinge on Antarctica, which are deeply intertwined with the health of our planet. The authors zero in, for example, on the fishing of krill, illustrating its domains and positing dynamic protections for sustainable modes of harvesting.

Project Documentaries: The Rise of the Cinematic Portfolio

AbstractThe recent pandemic has forced schools of architecture to re‐evaluate the ways they teach. The Architectural Association (AA) in London is no exception in this respect. Mark Morris, its Head of Teaching and Learning, discusses how film and animation have been the method of choice for students who are holed up in their homes across the world and subject to a myriad of time zones. Here he guides us through some of the institution's recent MArch/ AA Diploma graduates who received honours.

Simultaneously Space and Event: Bernard Tschumi’s Conception of Architecture

This essay examines the way in which Bernard Tschumi understood and discussed the concept of space during the 1970s, interpreting it in conjunction with his relationship with the so-called ‘London Conceptualists’ whose concern was to embrace spatial experience. Tschumi’s exchanges with the conceptual and performance art scene in London are pivotal for understanding his conception of space at the time. Special attention is hence paid to a number of exhibitions that epitomized the cross-fertilisation between architecture and art, such as ‘A Space: A Thousand Words’ held at the Royal College of Art in 1975 and co-curated by Bernard Tschumi and RoseLee Goldberg. The importance of this exhibition for comprehending the role of space in Tschumi’s thought lies in the fact that it aimed ‘[t]o reveal a change in attitudes towards the theories and the language of space’, and thus to reinforce the contact of architecture with the very reality of spatial experience. The essay examines the evolution of Tschumi’s concerns about spatial praxis, addressing core issues of his 1970s pedagogical and design practice. Particular emphasis is placed upon his teaching strategies at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, and on an ensemble of projects on which he worked during his first forays in the United States of America such as <em>The Manhattan Transcripts, The Screenplays</em> and <em>The 20^th Century Follies</em>. The main objective of this essay us to render explicit how Tschumi’s conception of urban experience as simultaneously space and event is closely related to his intention to challenge the cause-effect relationships dominating Modernist views of the city. Of great significance for his understanding of urban conditions is Tschumi’s claim that in architecture the materialisation of concepts coincides with their simultaneous visual and social expression.

Avant‐Garde in the Age of Identity: Alvin Boyarsky, the Architectural Association and the Impact of Pedagogy

AbstractUnder the stewardship of its iconic chairman Alvin Boyarsky, the Architectural Association (AA) presided over a burgeoning of architectural avant‐garde tendencies that encouraged tutors and students to expand their architectural vocabulary and outlook by embracing issues of sexuality and identity, as well as other art forms. St Louis‐based architect, historian and academic Igor Marjanovic explores this era.

Negotiating Modernities: Otto Koenigsberger’s Works and Network in Exile (1933–1951)

Otto Koenigsberger (1908-1999) is best known for his pioneering work on architecture, housing and planning issues in places that, during his lifetime, were variously referred to as the colonies, the tropics, the Third World and the developing world. These contributions were made in his capacities as director of the Tropical Department at the Architectural Association (AA) in London and of the Development Planning Unit at the University College London, as well as in his positions as advisor to...

The Deep Structure of the Picturesque

The late Paul Coates was one of the first students at the Architectural Association (AA) in London to submit an international computation‐based diploma, in 1969. Responsible for introducing a series of computational techniques, Coates was also the founder of the MSc in Computing and Design at the University of East London, and in 2002 the Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA). In this unpublished article from 2008, which has been prepared and rewritten for publication by Christian Derix, Coates recounts his pursuit of ‘the particle physics of architecture’ ‐ geometric rules that inform both unplanned and planned human occupation of space.

Architecture Between Politics And Aesthetics: Peter Wilson's “Ambivalent Criticality” at the Architectural Association in the 1970s

Through which registers does criticality operate in architecture and how can its political, social, and aesthetic concerns be reconciled? Such questions were at the centre of the post-1968 crisis of criticality and have resurfaced in recent debates under the banner of the “post-critical”. This paper contributes to the historicising of this debate through the unpacking of Peter Wilson's The Fire: 2, a 1974 student project he developed at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. The Fire: 2 is an imaginary scenario for a post-disaster London and comprises of a monumental, enclosed ensemble of seven 1 km × 1 km squares connected through the River Thames. Through Wilson's project, this article challenges an overly dismissive evaluation of (all) postmodern architectural drawings as mere stylistic reverie. Historically, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the convergences and tensions between politics and aesthetics, and between disciplinary critique and an engagement with the world “out there”, at the dawn of architectural postmodernism. The Fire: 2 is particularly instructive since it is not only a product of the AA, which played a pivotal role in the formation of the critical discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, it is also the product of a student who, immersed in a politically charged AA, set out to craft his own architectural voice in both political and aesthetic terms. In order to access the resultant ambivalent criticality, I will not explain the project through unproductive pairs such as opposition–appeasement, politics–aesthetics, or withdrawal–engagement. Instead, I unpack the different registers of critical engagement that are at work in the drawings. Because Wilson deploys the drawings as a vehicle for both personal, artistic expression and critical engagement, The Fire: 2 offers a unique resource for revisiting this recent history.

Intelligent Cities and the Taxonomy of Cognitive Scales

AbstractHere, Guest‐Editor Michael Weinstock with Mehran Gharleghi of the EmTech programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London shift the definition of the intelligent city away from one that is predicated on information and communication technologies towards a deeper and more profound characterisation. They explore the possibilities of cognitive complexity in urbanism emerging out of the interaction of sensory processing and behavioural responses to the world. Within the context of large infrastructural systems, what might, for instance, rapidly developing machine consciousness have in common with collective intelligence? What could the preliminary conceptual schema be for an intelligent city that is sufficiently self‐aware to synchronise its systems with climatic and ecological phenomena at regional and local scales?

Knowledge networks and postcolonial careering: David Oakley (1927-2003)

Though largely forgotten now, David Oakley (1927–2003) was a prominent player in his time within the milieu of British architects and planners that operated as “global experts” during the post-war era. Oakley’s career illustrates the evolution of professional expertise and institutional af1filiations within global networks of knowledge such as those of the United Nations, and the role in disseminating this knowledge played by educational institutions such as the Architectural Association (AA) and the Development Planning Unit (DPU) in London or the Liverpool University Architectural School. Over a fifty-year career, Oakley started as a specialist adviser in Britain and the colonies, became an academic on three continents, and finally became a consultant on issues of housing and planning in developing countries. His expertise evolved from the areas of construction and low-cost housing into education and training, urban planning, and ultimately disaster preparedness. Drawing on the architect’s private archive, this paper provides an outline of Oakley’s career which spanned changes in architectural and development thinking from the 1950s to the 1990s, and demonstrates how he participated in the disciplinary debate on architecture’s social responsibilities, in the development of a specifically “tropical” architecture, and in the design of the academic syllabus for new generations of architects in newly independent nations.

A History of Territories, Movements and Borders: Politics of Inhabitation

AbstractIf the city is as much about culture as nature, then a cultural understanding of the shaping of the urban is as essential as a scientific one. Here, architect and critic Marina Lathouri, who directs the graduate programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, describes how the concept of planning in the 19th century became intrinsically linked to notions of territory, borders and spatial organisation. She questions whether this might now be tested, and new design technologies used, to expose underlying emerging patterns of disruptive flows beckoning the possibility of the logic of a new social disposition.

A Distributed Ground: The Unknown Fields Division

AbstractAs leaders of the Unknown Fields Division at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, Liam Young and Kate Davies take their students on trips to the end of the earth. Cataloguing extreme territories, they investigate the role of design in developing new cultural relationships. Fictional speculation is used as an instrument for understanding emerging environmental and technological futures, in a process of experiencing, chronicling and, ultimately, reimagining the urban and the remote, and charting global flows and trajectories. Here they describe a speculative supply chain that begins below the surface of the Western Desert in outback Australia, and continues to the Arctic ‘Northwest Passage’ and on to London.

Variation and Distribution: Forest Patterns as a Model for Urban Morphologies

AbstractWhat can we learn from the spatial logic of collections of trees in the rainforest? Evan Greenberg of the EmTech programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London and George Jeronimidis of the Centre for Biomimetics at the University of Reading combine forces to analyse the rainforest's morphology and its potential as an urban model. They suggest how the sectional height differentiation of trees could present a new way of thinking about urban organisation, accommodating varied microclimates, programmes and the city's infrastructural flows.

Networking and strategic deal-making in the Caribbean: Using archives to examine Max Lock’s 1950s planning adventures in the West Indies

Max Lock, a networking “global” professional Max Lock’s obituary notice in 1988 suggested the death of a traditional British establishment figure who happened to have had a varied architectural and planning past. This did not tell the full story. In his just under 80 years, Lock had lived and worked through a near century of change, from his non-conformist background as a Quaker, to attending the Architectural Association (AA), his conscientious objection to army conscription in World War II...

Importing the City into Architecture: An Interview with Bernard Tschumi

AbstractThe influential group of individuals that taught at the Architectural Association (AA) in London in the 1970s changed forever the way that we think about the city. The group included among its number Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Nigel Coates, and perhaps most significantly Bernard Tschumi, who was to become one of the most influential designers and educators of the next few decades. Guest‐editor Alexander Eisenschmidt interviews Tschumi to give him the final word on the question of architecture and the city.

From the “Well-Laid Table” to the “Market Place:” The Architectural Association Unit System

As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1971 to 1990, Alvin Boyarsky presided over a seminal moment in the history of the school. Launching a critical departure from the AA's postwar modernist professional training, during the early 1970s Boyarsky developed the “unit system” as the foundation of the school's educational program. A framework of vertical studio teaching, the unit system invited tutors to seize pedagogy as a medium for architectural experiment and critical inquiry.

Material, Form and Force

AbstractConventionally, material in architecture has been treated as the ‘servant’ of form. An iterative design process, though, that continuously integrates material, form and force has the potential to unfold a new generative logic of form‐finding. This offers ways of processing the flow of forces through a material object and balancing variations of form with the organisation and behaviour of material. Toni Kotnik and Michael Weinstock present a series of experimental construction projects, developed within the Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech) programme at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, that explore the intricate relationship between material, form and force. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.