History as Narrative of the Present (PhD seminar with Marina Lathouri and guest speaker Joan Ockman) Following on the seminar ‘What is Historical?’ in Term 1, discussions with guest speakers will take place this term. Continuing and expanding on the previous sessions, the theme is ‘What is Contemporary?’. For the first session on Thursday at 4:30pm […]

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 […]

The 2019 AHRA PhD Student Symposium will take place this year 24-25 April at the University of Manchester, UK. According to the event’s website, the ‘AHRA Research Student Symposium 2019 takes as its starting point a broad and prolonged transition occurring in architectural research during the past decade. New and interdisciplinary approaches emerge as a […]

The Ecological Superblock Design Science for the Architecture of the City

The design research uses evolutionary computation to create novel morphologies and topologies of city tissues, and to develop a generative computation model applicable to different climates and ecological systems by modifying the operative and critical parameters. The project seeks to establish a methodology based on principles extracted from design science and new developments in the biological sciences, advances in material sciences and new modes of production, including digital fabrication.

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?

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

Territorializing Interiors: Non-Typological Housing in Japan

EVENT 3 FRIDAY 1st of JUNE     10.00-10.15 Introduction to the event by Alvaro 10.15 – 11.50  Dissolving Boundaries Tatjana Crossley, Elena Palacios, Sofia Krimizi   The overarching theme of this panel is ‘boundaries’, looking at this through the lens of the psychological, the physical and the representational. Tatjana Crossley will be discussing the […]