Beom Kwan Kim, Diploma 8, (AA Diploma Honours, 2011/12) – an irregular distribution of tower
and podium types throughout the city of Shenzhen, producing striated armatures using variable
inclusion and exclusion of architecture and context
Corporate Domain
Eugene HanCorporate Domain
The role of the corporation in the city originated as an agent of urban form, yet has evolved to become the primary problematic for a contemporary understanding of the various formats of polis. Throughout this evolution, the relationship of architecture and building has become confused, dormant and marginalised as an esoteric praxis. As such, Diploma Unit 8 is concerned with how architecture can reclaim relevance in the dialectic between form and the complexity of the city.
Corporate Campus
The brief for yearlong proposals will be for a revival and redefinition of the corporate campus within a fragmented urban condition. Beginning our research with the history of the corporation and the city, we will first examine urban precedents of the early twentieth century. We will then proceed to more global contemporary trends ranging from a general desire to reintroduce production within urban agglomerations, and the more recent compromise of trends that seek to encapsulate particular urban phenomena in peripheral and polycentric cores. Students will formulate and demonstrate their positions through architectural speculations, founded on a site and context of their own determination.
Common Form
The focus on this year’s approach to the architectural ‘object’ will address fissures inherent in the historical distinction between building and architecture. For students to both demonstrate and extrapolate their developing proposals, the methodology of form development will be integral in the elaboration of associated technical and theoretical concepts. Inherent in this process is the development of an architectural syntax focusing on the model of reductive elements, presupposing an urban concept of paradigm and syntagma, or classes and the links between them. Students will engage with both the development of a general order of architectural elements, its structure of possibilities, and the implementation of types critical to their propositions.
Unit Staff
Eugene Han runs AVAStudio, developing systems in industrial design, architecture and computation. He is the Head of Media Studies and a Diploma Unit Master at the AA.
