The role of external examiners is to look at portfolios submitted by students
for RIBA Parts 1 and 2 and exemptions, and to agree to pass lists which are then forwarded to the RIBA.

Elizabeth Adams graduated from the AA in 1990 and taught throughout the School until 1998. She is a founding director of Adams & Sutherland,
a practice known for its work in the public realm, ranging from urban regeneration and landscape design to community and educational buildings. Current projects include children’s centres in north London, eco-housing
on the Isle of Wight and urban space projects in east London, including
a footbridge over the River Lea and a new public square in Beckton.

The practice won the Greenway project in open competition, a linear park through the 2012 London Olympic site. The practice won a London Mayor’s 2004 Planning Award and has had work exhibited at the V&A. Adams is a Design Advisor to the London Development Agency and teaches in various capacities at a number of UK schools.

Stan Allen is a registered architect and dean of the School of Architecture, Princeton University. His urban projects have been published in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) and Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (new edition, Routledge 2008).

Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of architectural and urbanistic strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalise the practices of urban architecture. In addition to design awards and competition prizes, he has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a Graham Foundation Grant, and a President’s Citation from the Cooper Union.

Frank Barkow was born in 1957 in Kansas City and studied architecture
at the universities of Montana State and Harvard, where he has been visiting professor several times at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). In 2008 he was visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning.

Since 1993 he has run Barkow Leibinger Architects with Regine Leibinger in Berlin. From 1995 to 1998 he was a unit master at the AA. He was a visiting professor at Cornell University in 2003, and also from 2005 to 2006 at State Academy of Art and Design, Stuttgart.

Ben van Berkel studied architecture at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and received the AA Diploma with Honours in 1987. In 1988 he and Caroline Bos set up practice in Amsterdam. The Van Berkel & Bos Architectuurbureau has realised, among other projects, the Karbouw office building, the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam, museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen, the Moebius house and the NMR facilities for the University of Utrecht.

In 1998 he and Caroline Bos established UN Studio (United Net), which presents itself as a network of specialists in architecture, urban development and infrastructure. Current projects include restructuring the station area of Arnhem, the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart, a music theatre for Graz and the design and restructuring of the Ponte Parodi harbour in Genoa. He has lectured and taught at architectural schools around the world. Currently he is professor in conceptual design at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Central to his teaching is an inclusive approach to architectural works, integrating virtual and material organisation and engineering constructions.

Bernard Cache, born in 1958, developed the concept of ‘non-standard architecture’ in his book Earth Moves (MIT Press, 1995), a concept that was given the name ‘objectile’ by Gilles Deleuze in his book on Leibniz, The Fold. In 1996 Cache founded the company Objectile together with his partner Patrick Beaucé, in order to conceive and manufacture non-standard architecture components. Since 2005 he has been investigating the possibility of constructing a contemporary tradition on the basis of Vitruvius’ De Architectura.

Mike Cook studied mechanical sciences at Cambridge University. His PhD, awarded at Bath University, is titled ‘Design of Air Supported Structures to resist Wind Loading’. Mike joined Buro Happold in 1982, and became a principal in 1994. He is a chartered engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers. He was resident engineer for the cable net roof of the Tsim Sha Shui Cultural Centre, Hong Kong. In September 2007 he became a visiting professor at Imperial College, London.

Dana Cuff is professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA. Since receiving her PhD from Berkeley, she has published and lectured widely about modern American urbanism, the architectural profession, contentious planning debates, affordable housing, and interactive design.

Dana Cuff is a teacher, scholar, activist and practitioner on the social issues of architecture and the city. She founded the thinktank cityLAB in 2006
to initiate design experimentation and research about architecture in the contemporary, postsuburban metropolis. Her books include Architects’ People (with W R Ellis, 1989) and Architecture: The Story of Practice (1989). The Provisional City (2000) investigates large-scale development in LA. She is editing Fast-Forward Urbanism (Princeton Architectural Press), a collection of
essays, The Handbook of Architectural Theory (Sage Publications), and
a series of articles on urban sensing.

Winka Dubbeldam founded Archi-Tectonics in New York in 1994. She graduated from the Academy of Architecture in Rotterdam (1990), and received an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, New York (1992). She worked previously in offices in Holland and in the New York offices of Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman. She has taught on Master’s programmes at the universities of Columbia and Harvard and is associate practice professor at UPenn, Philadelphia.

Archi-Tectonics has featured in many professional journals and in the monograph Winka Dubbeldam, Architect (010 publishers, 1996). Group exhibitions include MOCA’s ‘Skin and Bones’, (2006/07), the Venice Biennale (2002 & 2004), and Young Architects at MoMA (2001). Solo shows include ‘From Hardware to Softform’ (2002) and ‘Art and Idea’, Mexico City (2004). Dubbeldam curated the Progressive Architecture Network exhibit in New York’s Frederieke Taylor gallery in 2007, featuring five international architects. The practice received the 2006 IIDA/Metropolis ‘Smart Environment Award’.

Vicente Guallart opened his studio in Barcelona in 1992 after working with Jose Luís Mateo. His work explores the confluence of architecture, nature and new technologies. Projects include the Denia Mountain reconstruction of an old quarry, selected for the Venice Biennale (2004); three ports in the north of Taiwan to improve tourist access inthe island (winner of international competitions); and the Sharing Tower in La Torre, Valencia, shown at MoMA in
‘On site: New architecture in Spain’.

He is director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, in Barcelona. In 2000 he directed with MIT’s Media Lab the Media house project, the prototype of an informational house. He is author of the masterplan of Sociópolis, an innovative housing project in Valencia (2007). He is co-author of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture (Actar). His forthcoming book is titled Media, Mountains and Architecture (Actar). See guallart.com

Paul Wesley Nakazawa is an advisor and strategist to practices in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism. He established his practice in 1993. He is a founding member of firms including AMO and e/Prime, and is a member of the board of directors for the New York office of Snøhetta.

Nakazawa served as chairman of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’
Designer Selection Board, advising selection committees on major institutional projects in the US and UK, and sits on the board of directors of the
Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (masstech.org), an economic development agency. He is a faculty member of the Harvard GSD and a management advisor to the College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

Nakazawa received his BA and MBA degrees from the University of Chicago, and a Master’s in architecture from Harvard University. He is a member of the American Institute of Architects, Boston Society of Architects, Urban Land Institute, American Physical Society (American Institute of Physics), and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Robert Somol is a professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University and visiting professor at Princeton School of Architecture. He has previously taught design and theory at UCLA, Harvard’s GSD, and the universities of Illinois at Chicago, Rice and Columbia. He is the editor of Autonomy and Ideology; his writings, which have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired, focus on modernism and its modes of repetition, the emergence of the diagram in postwar architecture, landscape and interior urbanism and the criticism of contemporary architectural practices and pedagogy.

Somol is co-designer of ‘off-use,’ an award-winning studio and residence in LA (2002). As guest editor of Log 5, he continued efforts to displace architecture’s institutionalised modes of criticality by a renewed engagement with the projective possibilities of the discipline. His forthcoming collection of essays is titled Nothing to Declare (ANY Books/MIT Press).

Hugh Whitehead graduated from Liverpool University with First Class Honours. His thesis on the application of optimisation in an architectural context explored the potential for using mathematical techniques as an aid to design, and also researched the problem of how to educate designers
to construct a solution space, which can then be explored programmatically.

In 1998 he joined Foster & Partners to set up the Specialist Modelling Group, which brought the original thesis a new significance. The group focuses on the research, development and evaluation of new technologies to support the design process and to date has worked on more than 100 projects, including the SwissRe tower, the Sage Gateshead, Albion Wharf and the new Beijing Airport terminal. The group also conducts collaborative research with universities and software companies.

Whitehead co-founded the SmartGeometry Group in 2002, which aims to bring together practice, education and research through international and multi-disciplinary events and workshops.

Proto-Design 1.0, the new three-year DRL research agenda, explores the design of site-less systemic deployment scenarios through the development of non-linear fabrication processes. The aim is to develop adaptive models through proto-versioning that affords generative, transformative and parametric controlled systems that can be deployed on multiple sites. Systems will be developed to seek and construct context specificity, developing models of spatial practice that are hyper specific rather than generic. The ambition is to design open systems that are have the capacity to rethink standard conventions of practice through the design and fabrication of architectural prototypes and processes. Contemporary fabrication protocols will be explored in an attempt to create correlations of nonstandard elemental distributions through an active engagement between digital and material interaction.

The studio is organised as five parallel researches:

Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Digital Materialism is exploring new forms of prototypical housing through evolutionary innovation and morphological novelty.
Yusuke Obuchi's studio, Proto Tectonics, investigates material systems and multi-scalar fractal logic for large span structures.
Patrik Schumacher and Christos Passas' studio, Interiority is developing complex, layered and highly differentiated tectonic systems that can start to compete with the best historical examples in terms of their richness, coherency and precision of formal organisation.
Alisa Andrasek's studio, Wetware pursues computation through the development of polyscalar coastal infrastructures within high-pressure flooding zones through agency.
Marta Malé-Alemany's studio with Jeroen van Ameijde, Machinic Control examines architectural design processes incorporating novel digital fabrication methods that are not optimised as in the current, industrial, repetitive modes of production but instead can be itinerant, adaptive and highly specific.

Invited critics include Dana Cuff (Director of cityLAB, and professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA), Winka Dubbeldam (principal of Archi-Tectonics in New York, and Associate Professor of Practice at UPenn), Francois Roche (director of R&Sie, Paris and teaches at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University), David Ruy (director of Ruy Klein, NY and teaches at UPenn), Peter Testa (TESTA established in partnership with Devyn Weiser in 1997, LA) and Brett Steele (Director, AA School).

Calendar for the Academic Year 2009/10
Introduction Week Monday 21 September to Friday 25 September
Autumn Term (12 weeks) Monday 28 September to Friday 18 December
AA Premises closed, Saturday 19 December to Sunday 3 January (incl)
Spring Term (10 weeks) Monday 11 January to Friday 19 March
AA Premises closed, Saturday 27 March to Sunday 11 April (incl)
Summer Term (10 weeks) Monday 19 April to Friday 25 June