Alvaro Velasco Perez is a PhD candidate at the Architectural Association School of Architecture where he previously studied a masters on History and Critical Thinking on Architecture. In 2012, he obtained his degree on Architecture by the University of Navarre, Spain. He has collaborated in teaching positions with First Year Design Studio at the AA School as well as participated in crits throughout the school. He has also formed part of research projects with the Design Department of the School of Architecture of the University of Navarre and associated with 4th Year design course in the same school. Alvaro has collaborated through design and theory in offices in London, Spain and New York. His current research inquires into the relevance of the iconological meaning of the desert in the political involvement of architecture during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Exile on Main St.: The desert as internalising territory
Supervisors: Dr Marina Lathouri, Fabrizio Gallanti
Throughout the twentieth-century seemingly barren deserts were saturated of narratives, fictions and representations of the foreign. The thesis explores these narratives to argue that the desert has become a territory for internalising exteriors. Here, ‘grand narratives’ such as western culture, modernity, or global economy have appropriated or absorbed what had been excluded or defined as being “outside” -the exotic or Oriental, the irrational, the foreign.
