History and Theory courses run over all five years of a student's study at the AA. Overall the courses have the function of introducing students to the nature of architecture, not solely through the issue of design but also in the larger context of architecture's relation to culture now, in the past, in the future and across different cultures. The courses are also linked to another and major function – writing. Architects are increasingly expected at a professional level to describe and analyse both designs and buildings in a written form. Writing is a central skill for the architect and the lack of it would stunt the individual professional development. As a consequence History and Theory Studies is renewing those aspects of the courses enabling students to develop their own point of view in seminars and through the course requirements to develop their writing skills.
In the first three years the intention of the courses is to provide a fundamental framework for the student's comprehension of architecture at several levels. Such is envisioned through a series of distinct stages in the student's development, moving from a broad background on the theories and concepts of architecture, to architecture's role in the materialisation of cultural ideas and then an understanding of contemporary buildings in detail. We think it is important that students are given the tools to understand the histories and theories behind architecture. It is for the student to decide what he or she thinks; it is for the course to enable the student to articulate their thoughts and choices; it is for the seminar to allow an open discussion of the choices.
In the first year the course presents a series of exemplary texts and projects addressing architectural form, space, tectonic, subject and context that will highlight fundamental instruments within the history of architecture and urbanism. In the second year the student is introduced both to the past of architecture and to the nature of architecture in different cultures. It considers the different ways in which architecture has been used as the material support of different religions, forms of political power and forms of family life. In the third year the students will study a variety of twentieth-century buildings, critical texts and other forms of representation providing the student with a more experienced way of analysing architectural devices.
Students in the Intermediate School follow the courses outlined in the course document while students in the Diploma School choose from a number of optional courses taken in the First Term only. These courses are designed to be much more focused and specific, covering a wide spectrum of contemporary topics that are continuously changing from year to year. Students, who wish, can choose to write either a thesis or two separate diploma essays. At the end of the Diploma School we would hope and expect that students would be able to independently research a topic and write about a problem clearly and with a definite argument.
First Year
Introduction to Design, Building and Writing
Course Lecturers: Chris Pierce/Brett Steele (Term 1) and Pier Vittorio Aureli (Term 2)Course Tutor: Mollie Claypool
Teaching Assistants: Emma Jones, Alison Moffett, TBC
These first lessons of the history and theory of architecture will address a series of fundamental aspects within the discipline of architecture. The purpose of this, apart from the obvious objective of enabling students to know exemplary projects and positions in architecture, is to understand the relationship between architecture and its past as a body of knowledge constituted by forms of writing, designing and buildings.
In the first term the course will present a series of exemplary texts and projects addressing architectural form, space, tectonic, subject and context. This will lead to the second term when the same conditions will be highlighted as fundamental instruments within the history of architecture and urbanism. Both terms will underline that knowledge of architecture's past is indispensable for an intelligent and critical point of view in the practise of architecture.
Second Year
Architecture and its Pasts
Course Lecturer: Mark CousinsCourse Tutor: Ryan Dillon
Teaching Assistants: Ross Adams, Daniel Ayat, Roberta Maraccio
This course introduces students to the historical and cross cultural range of built forms. It does so by looking at buildings that are related to the institutions of politics, of religion and of private life. But it also considers architecture from the point of view of modernisation in which architectural forms are increasingly both internationalised and globalised. It considers the bases upon which new organisations of variation can be thought about in architectural terms.
Third Year
Architectural Coupling + 1 Course Lecturers: Mollie Claypool and Ryan Dillon Course Tutor: Ivonne Santoyo Teaching Assistants: Shumi Bose, Orit Goldstein-Mayer, Emanouil StavrakakisThis course will couple architectural projects from the rise of modernism until the early 1990s exposing important architectural of the twentieth-century. By pitting a series of architectural projects, practices, educational models – and, occasionally, architects themselves – against one another, the course will take on a two-term project of comparative analysis. Pairings such as the Situationists versus Archigram, and the École des Beaux-Arts versus the Bauhaus will be discussed. Each coupling will be supplemented by a key device (the +1) such as theoretical writing, drawings, film publications, photography, etc. which link these projects to other contemporary disciplines outside of architecture. We will be entering worlds where Magritte's painting, La Condition Humane will fuse together Venturi's Guild House and Mies's Barcelona Pavilion.
Each week students will develop the skill of analysing the key architectural device in relationship to the coupling through the act of writing, dissecting key terms and how to decipher their multiple meanings bringing theory, writing and the analysis of architectural projects into a succinct body of work.
Diploma Courses
The courses in the Diploma School take place in Term 1 only:
Architecture and the Construction of Subjectivity
Pier Vittorio AureliThe seminar investigates the relationship between architectural form and the construction of modern and contemporary forms of subjectivity. There is no direct link between form and subjectivity. Yet the history of architecture and its project has always implied a history of the human subject understood as the potential to act, to communicate, to desire and most importantly to produce. From discussions on proportions, to the invention of perspective, from theories about beauty, to the role of engineering in the construction process, architecture has always addressed a specific, historically situated subjectivity contended by forms of power control and instances of freedom. In light of this hypothesis the seminar will revisit the history of architecture from Greek-Roman antiquity to Modernity by analysing archetypical examples such as books, buildings and architectural projects. From Filippo Brunelleschi's modular architecture, to Leon Battista Alberti's theory of perspective, from Pope Sixtus V's streets network to Cedric Price's Life Conditioning, the seminar will analyse the ways in which architecture and more generally architectural culture has implied, addressed, defined the subject's way to live, to see, to act and to produce within urban space. The seminar will address the relationship between architecture and the city in light of political theory and political economy.
Domestic Ruination
Mark CampbellScratch beneath the surface of normality and you are likely to find the complete opposite – the perverse, paranoiac or maladjusted. This course will examine the architectural dynamics of normalcy and perversion in the domesticity of the post-war American suburb through a critical reading of a series of textural, cultural and filmic references. During this research we will confront such notions as architectural and social conformity, 'imageability,' sexual obsolescence, the meditative value of television and the misplaced trust in technology. The course evolves out of a formulation of the compensatory role architecture played in covering over the paranoiac space of the Cold War, effecting the possibility that – as JG Ballard once offered – 'nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again, the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.'
The History of Homecoming
Mark CousinsThe history and nature of 'home' causes a great deal of trouble for architectural analysis. At one level the category of 'home' is related to the 'house' and thus to the nature of domestic space and architectural form. On the other hand, the term 'home' has importantly migrated in historical terms to include such things as the region or the nation of one's origin. Clearly this has created important consequences for nationalism, and for political conflict. It also creates a condition of homelessness which refers not to just the lack of a house but to exile, migration and of inhabiting the planet without a visa. This course tackles these problems through the history of stories and aspirations to homecoming. It starts by considering the most famous homecoming of Homer's Odyssey and looks at a twentiethcentury version in the film of Jean Luc Godard, 'Le Mépris'.
The Theory 750
Paul DaviesThis course comprises a set of theoretical readings running from the present day to the beginning of the twentieth century, including writers Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Dave Hickey, Henri Lefebvre, William Burroughs, Evelyn Waugh, Ayn Rand and John Dos Passos. The selection of writings places an emphasis on good writing in relation to architecture and cultural theory. In doing so we provide a relatively accessible, but still dangerous analysis of our road to present calamity. The course submission will have the student launch a blog and write weekly updates in place of the traditional essay submission at the end of the course. This format makes the sessions lively and increases participation, making talking about difficult things both challenging and enjoyable.
Ornament: Decadence or Virtuosity?
Oliver DomiesenIn response to changed public desires and alternate forms of cultural production that have long exorcised self-referential abstract monologues in favour of more complex and meaningful modes of expression, architectural practice once again embraces the language of ornament. It is precisely architectural ornament – as an inherently architectural form of communication – that is ideally suited to re-establish a meaningful dialogue between the built environment and its cultural and societal context. This course will equip you with the necessary knowledge and vocabulary to partake in what is a rapidly emerging discourse.
The discussion of architectural ornament has always been the battlefield, upon which the future of architecture was forged. We will read and scrutinise authors such as William Hogarth, Gottfried Semper, Owen Jones, Alois Riegl, John Ruskin, Louis Sullivan or Adolf Loos, who have all defined, celebrated and condemned ornament for their own purpose. We will discover the historical contexts, underlying pathologies and enduring legacies of these seminal texts, and we will determine their relevance in establishing a desperately needed contemporary theoretical framework. In the process you will encounter some of architecture's ugliest conspiracies and most beautiful theories. You will cover two and a half centuries, revel in ornament from around the world and discover the difference between decadence and virtuosity. You will also learn not to trust Le Corbusier, to think harder about David Chipperfield, to fall in love with Louis Sullivan and much more. Most importantly you will learn how to read contemporary ornament in light of its historic precedents.
Design Infrastructures
Maria FedorchenkoThis course focuses on gaps between theoretical conceptions of infrastructure and their application in design. As understanding of infrastructure has expanded beyond the urban system of connection and service, it has been favoured by contemporary practices as an advanced design system. Reliant on the diagram, infrastructure was to extend the way the project works (operation) into how it looks (appearance). However, open-ended diagrammatic infrastructures yielding set forms and patterns point to potential inconsistencies. How do theoretical advances relate to practical methods for organising, programming and directing the project on multiple levels? The course will be delivered in three thematic segments and will question core design tensions: how formal armatures control processes linked to networks and fields; how controlling elements that permit growth and change borrow from ecologies and megastructures; and finally, how loose fit between form and programme relies on conceptual and geometric frameworks. Symptomatic projects by OMA, Bernard Tschumi, SANAA, UN Studio et. al. will be reframed using theoretical arguments and design precedents. We will expose potentials and limitations of infrastructure, addressing consistency between operation and appearance. As a shared research platform for several units, the course prepares you to tackle persistent design conflicts in an informed way.
Outer space and Inner space: The computer outside itself
Francesca HughesNow that the family of software that became CAD is fifty years old and so ubiquitous that we forget it is there, it is time that we step out of the tracks of our collective digital hurtle and ask how it is that the computer, its use, idioms and developmental trajectory came to be the way it is? This course attempts a brief survey of the various spatial productions and effects that we now associate almost uniquely with the computer, most of which pre-existed it only to become extruded and colonised by the digital infancy of the 1960's. The course is a cultural forensics of early computing in two parts. The first half examines spatial traditions that the computer's invention and early use simply incorporated such as the window as interface between subject and object, the housing of memory and the organisation of its retrieval pathways, the spatiality of calculation and the very big piece of paper. This will entail close analysis of ancient Greek mnemonic architectures, Bush's 1945 Memex desk, Wittgenstein's crisis around counting and calculation, and Sutherland's seminal Sketchpad demonstration at MIT. The second half examines the cross fertilisation between analogue and digital space in the computer's formative years such as the analogue spatiality of BASIC, with reference to Perec's use of the literary algorithm, and the cinematic multiscalarity of the zoom function. Lastly, through analysis of NASA and Roscosmos footage, we will examine the shared cultural construction of outer space and digital space set out in the navigational strategies of the first space walks in which the astronaut is a proto-digital object that can only “pitch, yaw and translate” in that other, dark, gravity-free space.
Polity and Space
John PalmesinoCohabitation, with all its conveniences and accompanied by all its struggles, has for centuries been the main purpose of the construction of cities and of the infrastructures to protect and maintain them. The very act of construction yet implies separation with the set up of differences and demarcations, it implies making differences visible, not allowing others in. It implies generating a differentiated and striated society. Architecture is today undergoing a set of negotiations and re-alignments that direct it towards a constantly changing position. The relation between the form of the inhabited territories and the institutional framework has never been a static one: the shifts, expansions and modifications in the forms of contemporary polities are reflected in the material configuration of their spaces of operation.
The seminar analyses a series of architectures that have made the relation between polity and space a problematic one, where the challenges to preconceived and well-established forms of cohabitation has led to the rethinking and reshaping of power. The material basis of contemporary transformations of the operations of states, multinationals, international organisations and sub-state polities show up to traditional forms of intervention, where differences and confrontations are modulated and outplayed. The grim doubts that these constructions have cast on the established notions of sovereignty will be the departing point for a detailed theoretical analysis that sets architecture as both the object and method of analysis of transformations of contemporary life.
The Independent Group: Tracing the Parallels in Visual and Urban Culture
Victoria WalshThe Independent Group was a highly significant collection of writers, thinkers and creative practitioners, which met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 1952-56. Leading artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and William Turnbull; architects Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham all contributed to this group which embraced contemporary culture 'as found'. Using a range of sources including the pages of science-fiction magazines, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Hollywood film, helicopter design, the bombed streets of London's East End and modernist architecture, the Independent Group proposed radical new approaches to visual culture which continues to provoke artists, architects and academics. This course will consider the work and value of the Independent Group and its relation to contemporary cultural practice and thinking in today's increasingly post-disciplinary, digital age.
Architectural doppelgangers, fakes and déjà vue(s)
Ines WeizmanThis course deals with questions of authenticity, originality, fake, law and architecture. In the contemporary intensity of our media, culture flows, and the dematerialisation of the architectural process and product, issues of intellectual property, copyright or by extension patent are at the centre of a new vortex of creativity. Looking at examples in the history of art, architecture and photography, the course will couple more theoretical, or conceptual discussions of notions such as forgery,copy and original in relation to history with numerous bizarre and fascinating case studies in which architectural characters employing fakes, doppelgängers, replicas and re-enactments have in fact become heroes. In a sequence of lectures that go through a variety of intellectual products and properties, the course seeks to show how spiritual property works in respect to architecture. It will tackle the constant paradox of architecture: how both conservative notions of tradition and contemporary notions of multiplication entail a degree of repetition (almost every gesture in the construction of space would have to be protected). On the other hand, architecture's claim for innovation, expression and aesthetic value. As such, copyright in architecture seems to protect two completely incompatible sources.
Open Lecture Course:
The Poetics of Cliché
Mark CousinsFridays at 17:00 in the Lecture Hall. Mark Cousins' lecture course will examine the power of formulations in language or in images, which would normally be described as cliché. It asks why these formulations exercise such a continuing power over us and why we respond to them. Over the course of the lectures we will examine various concepts of the 'imaginary' and the use of 'imaginary' to explain certain mechanisms in that area called everyday life.
History and Theory Studies Tutors
Director
Mark Cousins has taught at the AA for many years in the Undergraduate programme, the Graduate programme and the PhD programme. He is a founding member of the Graduate School, the London Consortium, has been Visiting Professor at Columbia University and is currently Guest Professor at South Eastern University Nanjing China. Christopher Pierce studied at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His recent publications are essays on Jordi Bonet Armengol, 'Gaudi's Gatekeeper' (2011) and Cero 9, 'Bump and Grind' (2011). He formed Mis-Architecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Christopher Matthews in 2000.
Course Lecturers/ Course Tutors
Brett Steele is Director of the AA School. His research and writings can be found online at brettsteele.net
Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. He is the author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and Against Capitalism (2008), and other books. His writings and research focus on the relationship between architecture, the city and political theory. Together with Martino Tattara is the co-founder of Dogma.
Mollie Claypool is a designer, writer and editor with experience working with NY-based and international architectural practices as well as major arts, architecture and design publishing houses. She studied architecture at Pratt Institute and received her Masters with Distinction from the AA in 2009.
Ryan Dillon is currently working for EGG Office. He is a tutor in the AADRL graduate programme and has previously taught at the University of Brighton. He is a graduate of the AA and Syracuse University School of Architecture. He has previously worked at Safdie Architects.
Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco graduated from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and from the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. She is currently a PhD candidate at the AA funded by the Mexican government. She has practiced in offices, such as LAR/Fernando Romero, Wiel Arets, Foster + Partners and Arup.
Mark Campbell has taught at the AA since 2004. He has taught previously at the Cooper Union,Princeton University and Auckland University and received post-graduate degrees as a Fulbright Scholar from Princeton University (MA, PhD) and undergraduate degrees from Auckland University (BA, Arch Hons). He has practised internationally and served as the Managing Editor of Grey Room and the Cooper Union Archive. He is the Director of the 'Paradise Lost' AA Research Cluster.
Paul Davies has lectured at the AA since 1997, always on a populist agenda. He has contributed to many magazines and books, and is well known for his work on Las Vegas.
Oliver Domeisen studied at ETH Zurich and the AA. From 1997-2000 he worked as project Architect for Zaha Hadid; since 2000 as director of dlm ltd; from 2001-07 as Unit Master for Intermediate 9; and from 2005-07 as a Studio Master for AAVSP. Since 2007 he has been the Unit Master for Diploma 13. He regularly lectures and has curated an exhibition on the topic of ornament, and is now writing the Four Elements of Ornament.
Maria Fedorchenko studied at UCLA, Princeton University and Moscow Institute of Architecture. She practised in Russia, Greece, and the US (including Michael Graves & Associates) and directs a design consultancy. She has taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA and CCA since 2003 and has been involved in HTS and Housing & Urbanism Programme at the AA.
Francesca Hughes joined the AA in 2003 and has been unit master of Diploma 15. She has lectured internationally and served as external examiner in schools, both in the U.K. and abroad. Author/editor of The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press: 1996), she is currently completing a book entitled Error: The False Economy of Precision in Architecture. Her practice Hughes Meyer Studio has been published by AA Files, AR, ANY, Art Forum, Merrel, Routledge and Wiley.
John Palmesino has established Territorial Agency. He is Diploma Unit Master at the AA, where he also teaches at the HCT Masters programme. He is Research Advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. He teaches at the Research Architecture Centre, Goldsmiths in London where he is pursuing his Doctoral Research. Previously he has been Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel – Contemporary City Institute.
Victoria Walsh is a curator, project manager and research consultant in the fields of visual arts, architecture, arts education and post-critical museology, and has worked for the Tate, London Mayor's Cultural Office, LSE Cities, Architecture Foundation, Foster + Partners, and the Royal College of Art. She has published on postwar British artists Nigel Henderson, Francis Bacon and Gilbert & George and architects Alison and Peter Smithson.
Ines Weizman was trained at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Ecole d'Architecture de Belleville in Paris. She studied at Cambridge University and completed her PhD at the AA in 2004. She taught at the AA, Goldsmiths College London, the Berlage Institute of Architecture and London Metropolitan University. Research and exhibition projects include 'Celltexts. Books and other works produced in prison' and an architectural reenactment of Adolf Loos' 1927 'House for Josephine Baker'.
- William Firebrace
Programme Staff
- Ross Adams
- Daniel Ayat
- Shumi Bose
- Orit Goldstein-Mayer
- Emma Jones
- Roberta Maraccio
- Alison Moffett
- Emmanouil Stavrakakis
Teaching Assistants
- Mark Campbell
- Paul Davies
- Oliver Domeisen
- Maria Fedorchenko
- Francesca Hughes
- John Palmesino
- Victoria Walsh
- Ines Weizman
