Monthly Archives: February 2015

AA-CCA Research Grant

This research grant provides the opportunity for summer residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. It is awarded annually to AA PhD students in their second or later years of study. The grant provides a stipend toward travel, accommodation and subsistence. Previous recipients of the AA-CCA Research Grant were Eva Eylers (2009), Emanuel de Sousa (2010), Alejandra Celedon and Ivonne Santoyo (2011), Niloofar Kakhi (2012), Costandis Kizis and Arturo Revilla (2013), Alexandra Vougia and Gabriela Garcia de Cortazar Galleguillos (2014). Applications are now open for 2015; there will be only one award this year for a residency starting in mid-June 2015. Submit application to simos@aaschool.ac.uk providing a brief CV, proposal for the work to be undertaken at CCA and a recommendation letter from your first supervisor.
Deadline for applications Friday 27 February 2015. For information on the CCA see: www.cca.qc.ca/en

PLEA 2014

Sustainable Habitat for Developing Societies, 16-18 December 2014, Ahmedabad, India Some twenty AA Sustainable Environmental Design graduates attended and presented work at this three-day conference including several current PhD students Patricia Martin and Gabriel Felmer.

Algorithms & Actualisation

PhD Symposium 12 December 2014, AA Lecture Hall
A one-day international event organised by PhD in Architectural Design students Elif Erdine and Ali Farzaneh to explore the implications of computation in PhD design research at various scales. In recent decades, computation has had a profound effect in empowering designers to breach into other fields including various scientific domains, infusing innovative ideas into design. As a result, algorithmic design has developed towards an interdisciplinary domain that integrates different mathematical and biological algorithms into architectural cultures. Computational design has established itself as a fundamental aspect of critical design thinking, including the simulation of physical and mathematical phenomena as basis for information-based design approaches.
Speakers included Greig Paterson, Sina Mostafavi, Xavier De Kestelier, Kostas Grigoriadis, Sarat Babu, Mark Burry, Ali Farzaneh, Elif Erdine, John Frazer.

International Events & Publications

On any given year AA PhD candidates contribute to conferences, teaching and publications in the AA school as well as elsewhere in the UK and abroad. Over the last and current academic years these have included presentations of current work at the University of Thessaly, Greece; the Architectural Humanities Research Association AHRA Symposium, University College Dublin, Ireland; the Urban Lab UCL; the Architectas Symposium on Architecture and Gender, Seville, Spain; the Pontificia Universidad Catolica and the University of Chile, Santiago; the Architects Meet in Istanbul ARKIMEET 2013; the Education & Research in Computer Aided Design in Europe eCAADe 2013 & 2014 Conferences in Delft, the Netherlands and Newcastle upon Tyne; the Congress of Architectural History, AthensEuropean Architectural History Network’s EAHN 2014, Torino, Italy; the University of San Jose, Costa Rica; the University of Diego Portales, Chile; the Hellenic Centre, London; the UPenn Summer School, Herakleion, Greece; the Passive and Low Energy Architecture PLEA 2013 and PLEA 2014 Conferences in Munich, Germany and Ahmedabad, India; the Olympic Legacies event in Rio de Janeiro; the Literary Criticism Conference 2013 at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey. Student papers in 2013-14 have appeared in AArchitecture, Materia Arquitectura, Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism, ArchiDOCT e journal of doctoral research in architecture and Scapegoat Journal among others.

Visiting Scholars

Doctoral candidates registered with another institution who wish to spend a period of their PhD research at the AA School must follow the normal postgraduate application procedure described in the AA Prospectus and online. The maximum period of study as visiting doctoral student is of one academic year for which the School’s research student tuition fees will apply pro-rata. Applications by scholars with post-doctoral or equivalent qualifications wishing to undertake research related to any of the AA School’s postgraduate programmes will be considered by the PhD Committee subject to their relevance to current research interests within the School. Tuition fees may apply pro rata depending on the Visiting Scholar’s period of stay and participation in the School’s activities.

Alvaro Arancibia Tagle

Alvaro Arancibia Tagle is a graduate of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2008) and holds an MPhil in Projective Cities from the AA (2013). Since 2007 he has been undertaking research on the problem of social housing and urban design in Santiago, for which he received the Becas Chile Scholarship twice (2011-2013 and 2013-2017). He has his own practice in Chile, mainly focused on commissioned residential projects and housing competitions.

Alejandra Celedon Forster

Alejandra Celedon studied architecture at the Universidad de Chile and holds a Master in Advanced Architectural Studies from the Bartlett, UCL. Her work experience ranges from the scale of the building (Sabbagh Architects, Santiago) to that of the city (Farrell&Partners, London). She has taught at several Chilean universities and at the AA and presented and exhibited her work internationally.

Ivonne Santoyo Orozco

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco obtained her masters degree from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam having gradu-ated magna-cum-laude from the UDLA in Puebla, Mexico. She has worked with Arup Integrated Urbanism, Foster&Partners, Wiel Arets, and Fernando Romero. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the Center of Contemporary Architecture in Moscow, among others. She has been a recipient of sponsorships from the Mexican government and a Collection Re-search Grant from the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. She has taught at the AA, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and more recently at the University of Creative Arts.

Thiago Tavares Abranches De Soveral

Thiago Tavares Abranches de Soveral graduated from the Architecture and Art Centre of Universidade Snt Ursula, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2003. He subsequently studied at the Bauhaus in Germany at the Transnational Spaces Kolleg Programme. He worked as an architect in Rio de Janeiro before joining the MPhil in Projective Cities at the Architectural Association. In 2013 he earned a scholarship from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) to develop his PhD research at the AA.

Ricardo Ruivo Pereira

Ricardo Ruivo Pereira studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) graduating in 2009. He was a researcher at the Research Centre of the Faculty of Architecture (CEFA) between 2009 and 2010, and an assistant in Urbanistics II. He is a registered architect in Portugal and has co-authored a number of projects. He completed Masters studies in Architectural History in 2011 with a thesis on “Architecture and Revolution – Boullée, the Great Ideology – Brief Political History of 300 Years of Bourgeois Architecture”.