Architectural Association School of Architecture

Architectural Doppelgängers

Sam Jacob and Ines Weizman
Monday 29 October, 6pm
Lecture Hall

Currently exhibiting at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, The Museum of Copying is the first public presentation by the Architectural Doppelgängers Research Cluster. The museum explores the idea of the copy in architecture as an important, active and often surreal phenomenon. At this event, Sam Jacob and Ines Weizman will discuss the projects commissioned for the museum, which include: FAT’s Villa Rotunda Redux, a 5m high re-make of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda that explores the villa as both a subject and object of architectural copying; Ines Weizman’s Repeat Yourself: Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy, which presents research into the significance of copyright on architecture using legal disputes around the ownership of Loos’ archive and work as a test case; The Book Of Copies, produced by San Rocco; and a series of stories that surround the creation of architectural doppelgängers.

Student Forum Social Event
Tuesday 30 October, 6pm
New Soft Room
This final meeting scheduled by the Student Forum explains the role of the organisation, current and future plans and the 2013 election system. Those who did not attend the 26 October meeting are encouraged to attend.

Design & Make: Agendas of Ruralism Seminar Series
Sources of Ruralism
Wednesday 31 October, 10am – 5pm
Hooke Park
This first of two open seminar sessions examines the cultural status of the ‘rural’ by exploring shifts from an urban-centric viewpoint – via the pastoral, picturesque and sublime – to a rural-centric one in the work of the ‘new’ nature writers and art practitioners. Hosted by Kate Darby, speakers include Dr Jos Smith, Lecturer in English Literature at Exeter University and artists Ivan and Heather Morison whose installation ‘Skirt of the Black Mouth’ has recently been opened on the south side of Tate Modern.

Open Roundtable Discussion
Bêka and Partners: Living Architectures – Takako Hasegawa with Ila Bêka and Louise Limoine
Wednesday 31 October, 6pm
Lecture Hall
The ‘Living Architectures’ film series questions themes of perfection, virtuosity and the infallibility of iconic architecture. By demonstrating the vitality, fragility and vulnerable beauty of architecture as recounted and witnessed by people who engage the spaces, Bêka and Partners enable architecture to ‘talk’ to us, from a personal and subjective perspective. Gehry’s Vertigo (55 min) and Xmas Meier (50 min) will be screened daily from Monday 29 October to Friday 2 November at 2.30 and 3.45, respectively. 
See website for future film times 
and bookings.

Open Lecture
Achim Menges: Coalescences of Machine and Material Computation
Thursday 1 November, 11.00
Lecture Hall
Both machinic processes, which operate in the binary realm of the digital, and material processes, which operate in the domain of the physical, can be considered computational. Although the bias of contemporary design drifts towards the former, the field of architecture has sporadically instigated investigations of the latter. This lecture introduces Achim Menges’ work in the largely unexplored territory of machine and material computation and proves that both can co-exist and intensely engage the design process. The research will accompany a series of prototype buildings constructed at his Institute for Computational Design in Stuttgart. Achim Menges is an architect and professor at Stuttgart University where he is the founding director of the Institute for Computational Design. He has also been a visiting professor in architecture at Harvard University’s GSD. Menges graduated from the AA with honours, subsequently teaching as Studio Master of EmTech from 2002–09 and as Unit Master of Diploma Unit 4 from 2003–06.

Paradise Lost
Mark Campbell
Thursday 1 November, 1:30pm
New Soft Room

Image: Chris Johnson, Abandoned North Shore Marina Yacht Club, Salton Sea, California (2011)

This introductory lecture outlines the work of the Paradise Lost research cluster, which is exploring a notion of architectural obsolescence in contemporary America. While the United States was the world’s most influential economic, scientific, and cultural force during the twentieth century, its influence is waning, and the country seems obsessed with its own decline. Following our fieldwork to such destinations as the Salton Sea, an abandoned pleasure garden in California, and the derelict Mississippi Delta, we are now sifting through the architectural residues of this decline in the hope of determining the words and images that truly speak of these paradises lost.

Saturated Space IV at the Venice Biennale
Colour & Theatricality – A collaboration with the Scuola di Dottorate IUAV
Sunday 4 November, 10.30am – 1.30pm
Venice Biennale, The Biennale Library, Giardini, Main Pavilion

Join Saturated Space at the Venice Biennale to explore relationships between the space of theatre, the performance of colour, and the notions of representation, adornment and authenticity that lie at their very heart. Cluster co-curated by Antoni Malinowski, Adam Nathaniel Furman and Fenella Collingridge. Find out more, here: www.saturatedspace.org