Architectural Association School of Architecture

Beom Kwan Kim The Perpetual Evolution of Production in the City

The project is about the coexistence of production within the dense parameters of Shenzhen and the question of how multiple scales of production can coexist and reorganize themselves. It is obvious that China now produces most of the world products and Shenzhen became the first Special Economy Zone.  The city has been suffering from a new urban plan and has been transformed by different zoning plans; therefore the project suggests the identification of manufacturing hubs through the juxtaposition and overlaying of a new systematic grid for the city.

My argument is that the city is no longer a single system concentrated in one area. The city today operates has a series of supply chains that can be understood as the intercultural property of the city. My proposal is therefore ultimately to be reflected in the architecture of the whole city; not as one of the massive factory plans in Shenzhen but as a master scheme which integrates with and interacts with the city. My project focuses on how the representation of a city can be manifested through its existing systems, and catalysed through a diffused centrality of buildings. In conclusion, my project asks how cities of an emerging nature can represent themselves at the global level through architecture.


Sam Nelson Towards Edufactory. Architecture & the Production of Subjectivity

Today knowledge and information are bought and sold as commodities, and universities are at the centre of the productive system. The vehicles for this exchange, however, are not simply the various academic departments, but rather the students themselves – subjects controlled through the manipulation of their desires, feelings, affections and perspectives. Unlike material production (for example, manufacturing), which results in objects that can be detached from the subject who produced them, it is not possible for knowledge production to detach from the commodity of life itself. Bios and experience become both means and product. Rather than absorbing specific forms of knowledge, university students learn how to live, how to network and how to compete. In this way the university becomes an Edufactory empowered with the mass production not of objects, but of subjects ready to adapt to flexible conditions of work based on social interaction.

'Edufactory Docklands', a combination of housing, learning spaces and infrastructure, addresses the issue of how architecture can give representation to the collective subjectivity defined by the university of today. This subjectivity is based on a way of life that is up-rooted, mobile and which relies on constant communication in order to produce new forms of knowledge. In order to confront this issue, the project exposes the productive potential of the university by linking it with the economic capacity of the airport. In doing so a dialectic is established between the increasing intensity of social interaction in today's global cities, and the generic architecture which is required to support it. Today the airport is integral to the project of the university, not only because it has become one of the most strategic pieces of a city’s infrastructure, but also because it can be understood as paradigmatic of this existential condition. Located amongst the post industrial landscape of London's Docklands this form of subjectivity is reinforced by the impossibility of establishing a conventional sense of place.

'Edufactory Docklands' finds potential in the overwhelming and disorientating scale of this scenario by providing a generic infrastructural framework within which daily life can unfold.


Ben Reynolds New Value

Nestled between fairway-condos and swimming pools as kidneys is a data centre that stores the massive and shapeless stuff of digital production. For the leisure-suit-laden retired bankers of Palm Springs CA., it is a country club of two worlds: above, are spaces that exploit their tired bodies through games where play is a celebrated social act and the production of illusions temporarily dislocates their realities. Games employ their commodified minds, language and emotions within membranes upon membranes of inflatables.

Below is made of excreted material from the data centre: it is the domain of physical superabundance--errors and excess--across time, and through strata of materiality. A glutinous mass, leftover 0’s and 1’s. Information’s Ivory Towers as silicon’s shit.

The building is a codified territory; a reified .csv file blurring the details of a body and something completely artificial, alien. It’s likeness to a body--with wrinkles of inflatables, pits as thermal pools and as hair ethernet cables--is no coincidence as the exchange of data and total creation of information is the sum of human effort. The building becomes where information came from. The bankers are again libidinous college kids; splendour is restored and is floating as a desert oasis of information.


Manijeh Verghese The Case of the Elusive Room

The Case of the Elusive Room is the mystery that has plagued the city over the crime committed by architects in believing that the room and the city are mutually exclusive. Architects categorise space according to scale. To challenge this segregation of scales, we journey in search of the elusive room that collapses the city into an interior. Inspired by Dennis Wheatley’s 1930s murder mysteries, the project is documented as a case file that collects spatial clues to resolve how the city fleetingly collapses into an interior, to help solve the crime of why the room and city have since been separated again.

Beginning with the prototypical city within the room, Studio 54, the spaces of the iconic nightclub are reconstructed to understand how, in translating its exclusivity to the city scale, buildings turned into uninhabitable icons. To reverse this crime, we search for that elusive room - a momentary collapse of form and experience where the room expands to encompass the city; to render it as whole once again.