History and Critical Thinking students engaging in seminar discussion Terragni at Asilo Sant’ Elia, while on the unit trip to Como, Italy
History and Critical Thinking provides a platform for critical enquiry into theoretical debates and forms of architectural and urban practice. The aim is threefold: to connect contemporary arguments and projects with a wider historical, cultural and political context; to produce a knowledge that relates to design and public cultures in architecture; and to inquire into new forms of knowledge, research and practice.
Central to the 12-month programme is an emphasis on writing as practice of thinking. Different forms of writing such as essays, reviews, short commentaries, publications and interviews allow students to engage with diverse forms of inquiry and articulate the various aspects of their study.
A common concern of the different courses is to relate theoretical debates to particular projects and practices in order to develop a critical view of the arguments put into the design and the knowledge produced through its mechanisms and effects. To this end, the programme is also involved with the design work produced in the school through joint events with Diploma units, HCT students sitting on reviews as jurors as well as providing commentaries in current AA publications.
The programme also provides research facilities and supervision to research degree candidates (MPhil and PhD) registered under the AA’s joint PhD programme, a cross-disciplinary initiative supported by all of the Graduate programmes.
Term 1 has three main objectives: to help students understand the history of the discipline of architecture and the role of writing in the process of its formation; to interrogate the writing of history; and to investigate the question of modernity.
Architecture Knowledge and Writing
Marina Lathouri / Mario Carpo / Tom WeaverThe two parts of this course – a lecture series and writing seminars, seek to show how a knowledge specific to architecture emerges and develops. The lectures discuss cultural technologies and the multiple formats within which this knowledge is produced and communicated. The aim of the writing seminars is to look more closely at a specific mode of architectural writing, namely the essay.
Narratives of Modernity
Marina Lathouri
Through a detailed examination of forms
of architectural writing, this seminar
series looks at the role that key texts played
in the construction and critical assessment
of a canonical history of architectural
modernity.
Aesthetics and History
Mark Cousins
Much architectural theory attempts to
avoid questions of aesthetics. This is
frequently based upon a misunderstanding
of the nature of aesthetics, which is the
attempt to provide a framework for the
analysis of the experience of art or
architecture. This course will consider the
question of beauty in philosophy and fine
arts in antiquity and the Renaissance. It
then considers the fundamental contribution
of Kant in founding and aesthetics for
modernity. The course will trace his
thought through the criticisms of Hegel
and of subsequent accounts of the subjective
experience of architecture up to the
contemporary writings of Rancière.
Architectural Photography
Erieta Attali
This one-week workshop focuses on the
use of the medium of architectural photography
as a critical tool. Through the
production of a series of images students
will explore the relationship between
building, image and text.
In Term 2, lectures, seminars and debates examine contemporary forms of architectural and urban practice enabling the students to reinterpret disciplinary knowledge in a broad cultural and political arena.
Contemporary Forms of Architecture and Agency
Douglas Spencer
Critically engaging with the different
modes of practice found in the field of
contemporary architecture, this lecture
and seminar series discusses the discipline’s
expansion into new operational
territories and analyses the implications
of this development in terms of
architecture’s specific critical agency.
Exhibitionism: Spatial Aesthetics as Contemporary Critical Praxis
Tina di Carlo
Architecture is here explored as part of
a broader aesthetic, social and political
discourse. The exhibition is invoked as
another reframing of architectural practice.
Emphasis is placed on thinking
through (in, outside and around) the
curatorial frame and moving from the
exhibition of architecture to considering
architecture as exhibitionism, as well as
the exhibition as a form of architecture.
Critical Fabrications
Pedro Ignacio Alonso
This one-week workshop investigates the
ways in which the contemporary notion
of ‘fabrication’ has come to acquire the
status that the notion of ‘construction’ had
in accounts of modern architecture.
The Post-Eurocentric City
John Palmesino
This seminar series seeks to articulate the
theoretical conjunctions of the contemporary
city. It analyses the links between the
transformations in international and
sub-state polities, processes of institutional
change and the material structures of
human environments. The course articulates
notions of postcolonialism, extraterritoriality
and world-systems away from
the traditional model of expansionism of
the European city.
HCT Debates: City, Politics and Spaces
Marina Lathouri with John Palmesino
Many of the emerging urban formations
and forms of urbanity are partially or
completely novel institutional orders or
systems of relations. What is it, then, that
we are trying to name with the term ‘city’?
Would that mean that the emerging spaces
are also spaces for a new politics? Is it
possible to proceed through a critical body
of architectural references, existing or to
be constituted, in order to rethink urban
space against a background of a recent
political philosophy that has questioned
the communal? These are some of the
questions that will be addressed in this
year’s debates with invited architects,
critics, scholars and historians.
Term 3: Thesis Research Seminar
Marina Lathouri with HCT Staff & external critics
The thesis is the most significant component
of the students’ work. The choice of
topic, the organisation of research and the
development of the central argument are
discussed within the Research Seminar,
which may be supplemented by individual
tutorials. Central to the development of
the thesis, however, is the collective
seminar where students learn about the
nature of a dissertation from the shared
experience of the group. The unit trip,
which takes place in the beginning of the
third term, includes intense sessions to
help students solidify their topic, field and
argument. At the end of term, the thesis
outline and argument is individually
presented to a jury of invited critics.
Director
Marina Lathouri studied architecture and philosophy of art and aesthetics. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and since 1999 she has been teaching architectural history, theory and design at the AA and Cambridge University. Most recently, she has co-authored and co-edited the Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Routledge, 2008).
Staff
Mark Cousins directs the AA’s History and Theory Studies at the undergraduate level. He has been Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and a founding member of the Graduate School at the London Consortium.
Tina di Carlo is a former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the author of Exhibitionism (forthcoming Sternberg Press), has taught at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam and writes and lectures internationally.
John Palmesino has been Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel and is currently Research Advisor at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and Diploma Unit Master at the AA. He also teaches at the Research Architecture Centre, Goldsmiths in London. He has established Territorial Agency with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog.
Thomas Weaver works at the Architectural Association as editor of AA Files. He has previously edited ANY magazine in New York and has taught architectural history and theory at Princeton University and the Cooper Union.
Douglas Spencer has studied architectural history, cultural studies and critical theory. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, film and critical theory has been published in journals including The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy, and AA Files.
Visiting Tutors
Pedro Ignacio Alonso studied architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile and completed his PhD on the rhetorical strategies of assemblage in modern architecture at the Architectural Association. Since 2005 he has taught architectural theory at the AA and worked for Arup’s Urban Design. He currently teaches at the Universidad Católica de Chile.
Erieta Attali is an architectural photographer working internationally and her work has been widely exhibited and published. Since 2003 she has been teaching architectural photography at Columbia University, New York. Mario Carpo is Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at Yale University. His research and publications focus on the relationship between architectural theory, cultural history and the history of media and information technology. His publications include The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press, 2011) and Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001)
Teaching Assistant
Emma Letizia Jones received her Master of Architecture with Honours from the University of Sydney in 2009 and has recently completed the MA in History and Critical Thinking at the AA. Having worked as an architect in her home country of Australia, she is interested in the relationship between professional practice, writing and teaching.
