Architectural Association School of Architecture

Edited by Jesko Fezer and Matthias Görlich

Published by Bedford Press

Bedford Press has published the first ebooks to be released by the AA. The Civic City Cahier series is now available, beginning with the out-of-print editions 1 and 2 by Margit Mayer and Gui Bonsiepe. The books are distributed worldwide, through Amazon for Kindle and on the iBookstore for Apple devices. A free Kindle reader app is also available for most smartphone and tablet platforms.

Please visit the Bedford Press website to purchase and for more information. 

Saturday 25 May, 9.00 – 6.00

What might the tools, tactics and poetics of the interventionist artist offer the insurgent imagination of activism and social movements? Do small acts of resistance and creative disruption, build muscle that encourages an appetite for real alternatives to neoliberal capitalism or do they end point and sate such an appetite? And what of ‘commissioned resistance’, is it implicitly flawed, sponsored by the system it seeks to critique, or can it, despite its origins, have impact?

Moving beyond contemporary art discourses to the concerns of city-living, the built environment and urban futures, Cultural Hijack foregrounds the practices and concerns of the interventionist and the artivist. This ‘CONTRAvention’ brings together leading voices of dissent from across the globe offering ways of advocating, analysing and agitating for alternative futures.

Speakers include Gregory Sholette, Voina (Yana Sarna) Ztohoven, John Jordan, Nina Edge, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Space Hijackers, David Pinder, Ben Parry, Peter McCaughey, Alana Jelinek Graham Jeffery, Gavin Grindon,  Barbara Steveni (APG), Tobias Klein.

Visit Cultural Hijack for the complete programme.

Find out more, and book a place. 

Amita Kulkarni (AA MArch 2005) and Anna Muzychak (AA part I 2012)  from Studio Amita Vikrant are invited to tutor in the Vertical Studio program at Cardiff University with a unit titled “Gardens of Fictions”, running over April and May. The studio asked 1st and 2nd year students to create an imaginative spatial narrative exploring gardens as spaces between the outside and inside worlds and translate their concepts into a layered drawing.

For more information on the unit please see:

http://gardensoffictions.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/archi/vs2013/studio.php

The following students have been awarded a high pass for Technical Studies.

• Inter 1 – Albane Duvillier
• Inter 2 – Carlotta Conte
• Inter 3 – Alvaro Fernandez
• Inter 4 – Hao Wen Lim , Dionysios Xynogiannakopoulos
• Inter 5 – Juliet Haysom
  *** Sho Ito *** High Pass with Distinction – best TS Project in the 3rd Year
• Inter 6 – Qin Zhao (Lexie)
• Inter 7 – Martin Brandsdal
• Inter 11 – Andreas Stylianou
• Inter 13 – Richard Kai Ching Leung , Federique Paraskevas , Xingyue Zhang
• Dip 1 – Kin Pong Ho , Soon il Kim
• Dip 2 – Olivia Crawford
• Dip 4 – Friedrich Grafling
• Dip 5 – Maud Sanciaume
• Dip 6 – William Gowland
  ***Mond Qu*** High Pass with Distinction – best TS Thesis in the 5th Year
• Dip 8 – Sanem Alper , Gary Dupont , Borja Muguiro
• Dip 9 – Georges Massoud , Antoine Vaxelaire
• Dip 10 – Peter Sagar
• Dip 11 – Karl Karam , Conrad Koslowsky
• Dip 14 – Hissah Al-Bader , Matthew Critchley , Octave Perrault , Jing Qiao
• Dip 16 – John Naylor , Ashkan Sadeghi
• Dip 17 – Pavanjeet Birdi

Read the interview, 'Unknown Fields Divison', in TiP.

Photo: Johnathan Gales

http://www.architectseye.co.uk/

The competition, organised by International Art Consultants, is being held for the fourth time since its launch in 2007 and has had Keith Priest, AA President, on the Judging Panel in the last two series (2011- 2013)

Entries are still open until the 30 April 2013 at http://www.architectseye.co.uk/

The collaboration between Bilgi University and Vertical Studio at Cardiff University runs from 20 – 24 April.

Hosted by Bilgi University, the Vernal workshops aim to bring together a multidisciplinary team to foster an atmosphere of exchange and collaboration within an international platform. This is integrated with ‘Articulating Istanbul’, this year’s vertical studio unit at Cardiff University, which focuses on students making an architectural artefact/intervention in Istanbul while creating the opportunity to work with students from the two different cities.

More information on the unit can be found on the Bigli University and Cardif University websites, and by visiting the programme's homepage. 

Stationed in front of the AA, Ascending and Descending converts the everyday vernacular of a building site and its implicit expenditure of human labour power, into a sisyphian duration performance, as a worker loads earth onto conveyor belts, relentlessly moving earth back to the hole from where it came.  

Tatzu Nishi (Japan) creates out-of- scale and out-of-place encounters in public spaces around the world, transforming street lights, parked cars and monuments.

The installation is part of Cultural Hijack, which opens at the AA on Thursday 25 April. Cultural Hijack occurs in three parts: a survey exhibition of documented artworks from across the globe, supported by a programme of artists’ talks; a programme of live-interventions, in which artists arrive in London to agitate and infiltrate the urban territory, starting in Bedford Square and moving out across the city; and CON(tra)VENTION, in which the programme culminates in a carnival weekend of lectures, symposia, screenings, participatory actions, interventions, dinners and debate.

AA graduate and former President Adrian Gale, who worked with Mies van der Rohe from 1958, will be giving a lecture on several of the architect's projects, particularly Mies’ use of brick in Chicago. 

ABA Gallery 70 Cowcross Street, EC1M 6EJ

Doors at 6.30, lecture at 7.00

Tickets: £8.00, £6.00 for students

To book, reach Phillip Boyle on 020 7253 6624, or email phillip.sboyle@btinternet.

Ricardo de Ostos (NaJa & deOstos/AA Inter 3 tutor) to speak at Columbia University The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation annual symposium on April 20th. For more information please click on link below:

http://events.gsapp.org/event/interpretations-discerning-fictions

18–25 August

Led by AA graduate Tomas Pohnetal, the workshop will introduce key techniques of creating architectural space. Through direct, hands-on engagement with materials, participants will explore two distinct working methodologies – linear and non-linear, planned and spontaneous, ordered and chaotic – in order to recognise their distinct influence on architectural proposition.

Application Deadline: Friday, 31 May 

Find out more about the workshop.

Leading Israeli Architect Ram Karmi has died on 11 April 2013 aged 82. Karmi, who won the Israel Prize for Architecture in 2002, was both celebrated and controversial for his work designing such Brutalist buildings as the Supreme Court building in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv's new Central Bus Station, the renewed Ben Gurion Airport and the Holyland project.
 
Born in Jerusalem in 1931, Karmi studied at the Technion in Haifa, Israel before coming to the AA in 1951, graduating with a AA Diploma in 1954. He returned to the Technion to teach from 1964-1994 and was later appointed Full Professor of the Ariel University Center of Samaria, he also lectured at MIT, Columbia University and the University of Houston.
 
He is survived by his wife and six children.

The theme of this year's Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe conference is 'Future Traditions' – Rethinking traditions and envisioning the future of Architecture through the use of Digital Technologies; 4–5 April, at FAUP in Porto, Portugal

Verma and Devadass will also present their project with CAADRIA 2013 at NUS, Singapore, which will be held from 14–18 May 2013.

Both London-based graduates now work at RoboFold Ltd and are pursuing independent research.

Find out more about their thesis project.

Friday 15 March, 2013

The conference is organised by Zelena Akcija / Friends of the Earth Croatia, with Transparency International Croatia.

Photo, Valerie Bennett