National and International Appropriations of Architectural Archetypes

AA PhD candidate Costandis Kizis at the The 10th Annual Research Student Symposium, May 2013 in Lund, Sweden.

Guest speakers: Branko Kolarevic (University of Calgary), Mark Sarkisian (Director of Structural Engineering, SOM San Francisco), Greg Lynn (Angewandte Wien & UCLA A+UD), Axel Kilian (Princeton University), Luca Dellatore (ARUP), Hod Lipson (Cornell University)

Translate the Intangible, a symposium organised by the AA PhD in Architectural Design students as part of the AA Public Programme, addresses the challenges of communicating dynamic aspects of contemporary design methodologies through static mediums such as text and images. As current design-oriented fields have amplified the implementation of computational and generative tools for various motives, the process of documentation and representation of the design process has become more difficult to express. As such, Translate the Intangible will bring together a multi-disciplinary group of leading practitioners from different fields to discuss the challenges involved in expressing the process involved in their work and propose new perspectives addressing this issue.

The symposium will also serve as a platform for the PhD in Architectural Design students to present and discuss their individual research with the invited speakers. The day is divided into three sessions. Each session will last for two hours, and will include a presentation by two PhD students and two invited speakers under a specific theme. During the final hour of each session, the moderators will open up a discussion that follows up on the session’s theme. The aim is to steer a discussion to develop a further understanding of how different disciplines transcribe the temporal aspects of their research to permanent static medium.

Organised by Merate Barakat, Elif Erdine and Ali Farzaneh

http://thegrid.aaschool.ac.uk

The grid has had a long and prolific history within the architectural discipline and the fields of spatial production. As a seemingly indispensable device for the existence of space, it has been both a model of rationality and a sign of artificiality.

This one-day event will address the manifold character of the grid, examining its existence as object, instrument or representation. The event is expected to act as a platform for the discussion of disciplinary problems, thus extending the grid’s historical manifestations into contemporary debates.

The event will look at the grid from various angles: the urban, cartography, drawing, the plan, coordinates, the graph and art.

The day will be divided into nine sessions, each of which will present two positions, followed by discussion. The event will conclude with a roundtable discussion with Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mark Campbell and Marina Lathouri.

Prologue:

This ‘Day on the Grid’ tackles architecture’s most obvious and yet elusive narratives. Structured around a series of paired thematic propositions, it will unfold as an exercise in reading and interpreting the objects of knowledge that have attempted to describe the nature of the grid, from the building of antiquity to the destruction of modernity. Taken together, these descriptions will act as a challenge to the much-quoted argument that one can no longer ignore the fact that, after modernity, the grid has come to stand for the ultimate signifier of anti-narrative. In our reading, by contrast, the grid is not understood as an object but as something that will always be there, at the very core of the language of architecture.