Monthly Archives: March 2014

AHRA Research Student Symposium

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.

Translate the Intangible

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

A Day on the Grid

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.

Jingming Wu

Jingming Wu studied Architecture at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and graduated in 2008. In 2012 she received a Masters in Architectural History and Theory Ex13-W_Jingming_1from the same university. She supervised undergraduate students in architectural history and theory up until she began her PhD at the Architectural Association in 2013. She has been awarded several design prizes, including the Shikenchikusha design competition in Japan, has published several papers, and has presented internationally at various conferences.

Kensuke Hotta

Kensuke Hotta studied architecture at Kyoto and Tokyo University, Japan and at the Bartlett School, London and is currently a Chief Executive Officer at Shari Design. He has received a scholarship from Union Foundation and has won numerous prizes at international competitions. He regularly lectures at various private and public events. His favourite food is a queen crab.

Alexandra Vougia

Alexandra Vougia (Thessaloniki, 1983) graduated in 2007 from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, with Honours. She holds an MS in Advanced Architectural Design from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation – GSAPP, Columbia University (2008). In June 2016, she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the Architectural Association – School of Architecture, London. Her research focused on the interwar architectural modernism in Germany conceived as a comprehensive project of the restructuring of human production set against the dominant (bourgeois) ideology. Alexandra has worked as an architect in New York and Athens. She is currently teaching at the Architectural Association and the University of Westminster.

Arturo Revilla

Ex13-A_Revilla_1

Arturo Revilla studied architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and at the AA where he completed the MArch DRL. His work experience includes projects in Mexico, Kuwait, United States and China. He was a Senior Architect with Zaha Hadid Architects and a design consultant. He has lectured at the University of Kent, ITESM Leon, UAA Aguascalientes Mexico, Chelsea College of Art, the AA, University of Palermo and Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. He co-directs the AA Houston Visiting School.

Ali Farzaneh

Ali Farzaneh is a PhD Candidate in Architectural Design, at the Architectural Association in London. He has worked at Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna and SOM in Washington DC and has taught architectural design at the University of Oklahoma. His current research is focused on computational morphogenesis: the implementation and simulation of biological processes in the field of design, focusing on the morphogenesis (process of formation and development) of digital objects and their organisation through dynamic models.