History and Critical Thinking students engaging in seminar discussion Terragni at Asilo Sant’ Elia, while on the unit trip to Como, Italy

The History and Critical Thinking MA 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 MA 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 Weaver
The 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.

In Term 4 the students further develop and complete their thesis to be submitted in September.

All taught graduate degrees at the AA are validated by the Open University.

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.