First Year at the Architectural Association is the initial exposure to the five-year course leading to an AA Diploma
The essential basis of First Year is the learning of foundational subjects inherent to the discipline of architecture and the understanding of their substantial implications. Architecture is seen as a form of knowledge and it is taught throughout the year as a way of thinking and designing that not only absorbs external inputs and influences but also engages and generates particular consequences and cultural implications.
First Year seeks to expose students to an extensive intellectual foundation with a series of principal lessons, discussions and works of architecture within the design studio and the complementary courses. The course is not a light or compressed version of what architecture could be, but is the essential, initial exposure that constantly moves between an understanding of the disciplinary and the speculative.
During the year students are introduced to the responsibility of taking a position within a framework that helps them to understand contemporary conditions in which we operate; they learn how to construct relations between architecture and a wider context, while taking innovative positions that are constantly discussed in the studio and represented in a year-long portfolio.
The First Year Studio
First Year Studio is constructed around a dynamic and experimental environment in which students work both in groups and individually with an intensive interaction with tutors and collaborators in the form of daily tutorials, seminars and workshops. During the year, each student will address fundamental architectural topics such as form, space, context, subject and aesthetics from the point of view of theory, design and construction with crossover lessons between the First Year Studio, Histories & Theories, Media Studies and Technical Studies.
We will question how an architectural project can be significant and novel but still echo with past thoughts and works. During the year students are continuously encouraged to rethink conditions and make connections between the different realms through a series of projects that question both the relevance of an idea and the implication of a design.The Portfolio
The focus for the student is to acquire theoretical and practical knowledge that help to relate design, theory and discourse. The entire body of work is visualised not purely in a portfolio, as a form of design that draws out ideas, but as a combination of writing, designing and arguing. The awareness of the necessity of these forms is the educational core for the First Year student.
As much as drawing and making, writing is explored as an active tool that helps to clarify a design intention. Students learn to address different modes of writing from the definition of a short argument to the elaboration of a manifesto.
Designing is seen through different methods as the essential instrument for developing a project. Students experience both the focused investigation of an architectural attribute and the openness of an intuitive discovery, with the use of different media and the exposure to several creative disciplines.
The skill of arguing is addressed as a form of discussion and of presentation. Students learn how to present to different audiences and in different formats, from proposing questions to a roundtable, to engaging in counter-positions during a seminar or presenting a project to a large audience.
The end result is a year-long portfolio that expresses the individuality of the student in a comprehensive body of work including text, projects and visual speculations.
The Projects
In the First Year Studio, students work on a series of projects while acquiring theoretical and practical knowledge through intensive, hands-on collaborations with tutors and external consultants. In this way students make relevant connections between theory and design.
The first term has an open and intuitive structure allowing students to learn how to formulate and represent an idea. Specific ideas and positions are challenged at multiple scales by question-ing issues of form, space and context. These issues are then visualised in an overall project for a reconstructed London that addresses new conditions at the scales of a room, a boundary and the city itself. During the second term students learn how to design different attributes of architectural forms and spaces, using drawings, digital modelling, fabrication processes and constructed representation within a rigorous but still exploratory framework. The object of the term is the development of formal, spatial and tectonic attributes within a series of integrated collaborations between the studio and the complementary courses, by urging the active role of theory and technical education into projects developed in the studio.
In the third term, students learn how to speculate and make judgements on the possible consequences of their projects. The ambition of the term is not simply the conclusive visualisation of a proposal and the making of a coherent portfolio, but the acknowledgment of individual obsessions and strengths that push towards wider alternative conditions and open the portfolio to unexpected encounters and positions.
Exposure
During the year, students and tutors will constantly engage with other parts of the AA School and with external thinkers on specific and relevant subjects through a series of tailored seminars and collaborations.
The year will also be punctuated with lectures on teaching, learning and practising – at the beginning of the year we will look at different forms of teaching and learning at the AA and during the second term we will address the role of the architect within different types of practices. At the same time students will be encouraged to experience works of architectural significance first-hand with visits to various buildings, cities, and exhibitions.
Studio Staff
Head of First Year
Monia De Marchi is an architect who studied at the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia. She has taught at the AA since 2005, as a Unit Master at both Intermediate and Diploma levels, in Media Studies and she directed the AA Semester Programme. She runs her own practice on architecture and planning.
Valentin Bontjes van Beek lives and works in London and trained as a carpenter in Germany before graduating from the AA in 1998. He subsequently worked as an architect in New York with Bernard Tschumi, in Berlin and London, and has taught at the AA since 2001. He is currently First Year Studio Master and runs the Pending Structures Media Studies course.
Sarah Entwistle is an architect and artist. Recent projects include a showcase installation for artists' books in collaboration with Self Publish Be Happy presented at Krakow Photomonth. She is currently curating an exhibition for the AA, scheduled for January 2012, titled Famous Architect Playboy etc... Work by Sarah and Clive Entwistle (1916–).
Max Kahlen works as an architect in London and Germany. He is founding director of Dyvik & Kahlen Architecture and worked as associate at IJP Corporation after studying at the Stuttgart Academy of Art & Design and the AA where he graduated with Honours. He has been teaching courses in Diploma and Media Studies at the AA since 2008.
Alex Kaiser studied at the Oxford Brookes School of Architecture and the AA. He has worked at the London architecture offices of Richard Rogers and Moxon Architects. In his recently co-founded studio he is experimenting with line and paint in realms beyond bio- mimetics, perception and narrative, from the technical to the bizarre.
Ingrid Schröder has taught in First Year at the AA since 2010. She has also taught at the University of Cambridge since 2001 where she is a Third Year Studio Master, a Sir Isaac Newton Design Fellow, the creator/director of the University's Sutton Trust architecture summer school and the coordinator of the Diploma Programme. She has run her own practice since 2004 and worked in London and in Cambridge for 5th Studio. She teaches at Cambridge and is in the final year of her PhD at the LSE Cities Programme.
