Architectural Association School of Architecture

Eastern Promises: Incubator Galleries shows AA Intermediate Unit 7’s work in progress and engages with its evolving agenda, methods, processes and products. The exhibition reveals the unit’s general interest in design infrastructures as transfers between urban systems as well as its current focus on new hybrid typologies that exploit the clashes between culture and commerce in post-Soviet Moscow. Experimenting with pragmatic research and conceptual design, projects explore the convergence of markets and museums, shops and archives, expo-cities and pop-ups into catalytic ‘incubator galleries’. 

Diagrammatic diagnostics and graphic condensations are presented in the ‘Moscow Catalogue’, which suggests mediations for the city’s paradoxes, such as deconstruction/reconstruction, dispersal/concentration and concealment/revelation. Selected urban strategies and design prototypes include layered generic frameworks that organise specific cultural and commercial fragments; compressed megastructures that deploy as filing and display mechanisms; and thickened façade interfaces that collect surfaces, images and atmospheres. 

In line with the unit’s approach, Eastern Promises spans several methodological platforms – from research-driven provocations and diagrammatic models, to synthetic elements and infrastructures, to ‘plastic’ form-program prototypes, and finally to social and spatial effects. The logic of ‘loose control’ underlies curatorial operations at the levels of the city, building and content. The display includes interactive archives, expansive matrices and controlled highlights to juxtapose concepts and artefacts, narratives and drawings, diagrams and images.