In Dec 2018, AA PhD Alumni Dr. Jingru (Cyan) Cheng received a commendation from the RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2018 with her work titled ‘Care and Rebellion: The Dissolved Household in Contemporary Rural China’. This work is part of her PhD by Design thesis ’Territory, Settlement, Household: A Project of Rural China’ supervised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Sam […]

Architectural Effects

The Eiffel Tower has long been regarded as an achievement of engineering and not as an architectural object. Yet, at the same time, it has also come to signify a de facto architectural symbol of the modern era. This thesis aims to clarify this debate while unpicking its associated allegiances by locating the idea of architecture within a much larger cultural field.

Rhetorics of the Plan: Architecture and the City

Why did the plan dominate architectural discourse and practice for the last two centuries, and how did this affect the discipline?

Estranging Devices: Architectural Modernism and Strategies of De-alienation

This research project makes an enquiry into the nature of the concept of estrangement.

Computational Morphogenesis of City Tissues

Bottom-up models derived from biology are used to study how principles of biological morphogenesis can inform organisational models for spatial formation. The structuring of information as data-structures can generate city morphologies. By breeding data, digital objects are manifested, differentiated and speciated. Their collection follows principles of evolutionary development and analysis for performance – computational morphogenesis and applied at the urban scale. PhD completed this year.

The Social Re-Signification of Housing: A Design Guide for Santiago de Chile

This newly started PhD project challenges the current state of Santiago de Chile’s social housing policy and its extreme dependence on the private market.

Exile on Main St.: The desert as internalising territory

In a series of lectures delivered between 1953 and 1955, Hannah Arendt argued for understanding the origin of the political realm in the separation between polis and desert that took place in the Ancient Greek democracy, a dichotomy that demarcates the politeía and the apolitia. My interest lies in the edge between politeía and apolitia established in the political landscape through the metaphor of the desert. By researching projects that engaged with the idea of the desert (in iconological and/or physical form) in the late-60s and early-70s I want to question what separates the categories of political and apolitical. My thesis is that the dichotomy polis/desert was challenged through these practices, reshaping the political dimension in architecture.

The Diagrams of Workspace Neighbourhood - Hidden Patterns and New Relationships of Innovation Environments

ProcessCity: Architecture and the Border Condition

The border as a conceptual, spatial and material condition from which Architecture can articulate local parameters

Transitional Spaces: the role of sheltered semi-outdoor spaces as microclimatic modifiers on school buildings in the UK climate

Architectural lack of space requires more area in order to meet pedagogical need and at the same time environmental improvement are demanded to reduce energy in the most existing school buildings.