AA Visiting School: The Latest Architecture and News

Noemí Blager and Tapio Snellman are presenting a new video installation at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. The exhibition titled “A Lot with Little” set out to explore and showcase how architects can employ a more economical use of resources to create architectural works that are both sensible and sustainable. Previously shown in Germany, Switzerland, China, Czechia, the US, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, this London debut aims to highlight the global relevance of resource-efficient architectural practices. The exhibition is now on view at the AA School in London from April 26, until May 30, 2024.

+ 13

Never before have there been such fundamental uncertainties about our future. Obvious signs of climate change, a political landscape in flux, rapid advances in technology and their consequential societal changes are making us anxious about our personal life in the next decades.

Budapest-based Visiting School, is part of the world most prestigious and renowned architectural school - Architectural Association (AA). It will take place from the 31st of August to 9th of September this year. In collaboration with prominent art and architectural institutions, such as FUGA, BVA, KÉK, Ivanka Concrete and Hello Wood, all work will be exhibited during Budapest Design Week.

Videos

The 2017 Visiting School to Chile aims at studying from architectural, urban, and territorial perspectives, a series of infrastructures that since the 1960s have been installed in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) because of its extraordinary strategic location in the South Pacific Ocean. These include satellite tracking equipment, seismology and GPS tools, and radio-nuclear detection instruments that came to define global technological projects in the island. In particular, the workshop will focus its attention in the Mataveri Airport which – being the remotest runway in the world – was paved in the 1960s by the United States for the installation of a (currently abandoned) strategic base and extended again by NASA in the 1980s to become emergency landing for space shuttles. The island, in opposition to usual associations to isolation, was instead expedient for the setting of larger technological networks.

In AAVS Brussels you will experiment with film with the cutting edge film director Luis Cerveró. Film will be addressed as a critical instrument to inquire on the role of architecture in providing a space of representation for contemporary political bodies. Brussels, home of Benelux, EU and NATO, will be taken as a paradigmatic example, and the European Parliament as a concrete case study. The output of the workshop will be short films directed by the students and produced with the support of a specialized team from the HELB.

This summer the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) will be hosting a 10-day workshop in Aarhus, Denmark. The programme, which is a part of the AA's Visiting School Programme focuses on the role of digital fabrication in design by exploring patterns in complex geometries as a response to lighting conditions. The event is scheduled to take place between August 21-30, 2015.

In a fast-paced and ever expanding city, looking at time as measure and inspiration will be this year's challenge. The workshop will investigate novel techniques of design for a crucial architectural and urban condition: time.

From its adventurous departure to today's worldwide architectural stardom, we will investigate the transformation and prospects of the city-state's curated architectural image. Defining methods and artefacts to represent the past and future of a city that never stops changing, the workshop will immerse itself into the existing condition of Singapore.

Videos

This year the Architectural Association (AA) Visiting School programme will extend its reach to the Dutch city of Rotterdam – a place which, "by some strange twist of geographical and historical fate, has the highest concentration of architects and architectural thinkers in the world." The workshop, which will run for two weeks in July, will explore issues of inhabitance, perception, and intensity through analysis and creative interpretation of Rotterdam’s 'core' "or, more likely, its multiple cores, invisible to the untrained eye." Based in the Shell Tower on Hofplein, students will be afforded the opportunity to observe and analyse the city from on-high.

AA Istanbul Visiting School is beginning an exciting collaboration with Istanbul Bilgi University in 2015. Continuing its expertise on generative design methodologies and large-scale prototyping techniques, the programme will investigate patterns of emergence, differentiation and complexity in natural formation processes, which will then be transformed into digital simulation platforms for design purposes. In contemporary architectural processes, a significant diversion from linear parametric tools towards generative design simulations is taking place. The design and analysis processes will reflect this shift by focusing on simulations, whereby attention will be focused on the process of design generation as opposed to the final form itself. The design agenda of the programme will revolve around the design and fabrication of a one-to-one scale pavilion.

This year the AA Athens Visiting School aims to challenge the phenomenon of perceptual constancy through the design of architectural prototypical families. In line with the basic Gestalt principles, a variety of models of different shapes and sizes will be designed through means of digital computation. Various morphologies will be derived through a bottom-up approach via various coding techniques. To bridge the gap between the digital and physical aspect of the design iterations, AA Athens will make use of digital fabricating machines to produce architectural prototypes and add mechanics to amplify their communicative characteristics. A complete 1:1 scale structure will be constructed, enabling interaction via sight, hearing and touch as a result of a series of initial testing models. These proposals will be formulated through the combination of different design software.

AA Greece Visiting School is a mobile workshop series which travels and reaches cities outside the country’s capital. It functions as a ‘satellite’ of education that promotes the Architectural Association’s exclusive, intensive form of teaching and learning around the country. AA Greece VS aims on visiting a different city each year and construct a single large-scale model which will act as an active nod of communication among the various locations. In 2014, the School will initiate its design agenda with an architectural approach that is focused on the aspect of connection. The city of Patras which is the starting node of AA Greece VS was chosen by the European Commission to be the European Capital of Culture for the year 2006. The concept of the event revolved around the main theme of "Bridges" and "Dialogues", drawing benefit from the city's rich history and its position as a "Gate to the West", to underline the essence of the productive interaction of culture and civilizations in Europe. The AA Greece Visiting School will investigate how well existing buildings with various sightlines and variant spatial grammars perform according to human perception. In sync with the flexible and adaptive concept of parasitical structures, the research focuses on the making of transformable large-scale creations that accentuate prominent architectural features of existing buildings. The research looks at how cultural factors, personal preferences, experiences, and expectations can lead to the transformation of architectural parasitical structures.

A few weeks ago, the AA Visiting School academic program was held in Istanbul and Athens. The program combines theory and practice, in an intensive workshop using computational tools as well as digital fabrication machines in a fully contextualised architectural problematic.

In a period of 20 days, the program bring together people of different levels of architectural experience –from 2nds year students to PhD candidates from various places of the globe. Every workshop runs as a highly-focused unit-based educational system with shared agendas which promotes collaborative design, research and performance. They are run by a tutoring team of full-time professionals who have experience working in internationally renowned architectural firms.

Among other challenges, both the participants and the tutors faced the challenge of short-timed project proposal using computational tools as well as with the use of digital fabrication machines in a fully contextualised architectural problematic. The objective is to achieve interesting design solutions through the use of the latest technological developments and on its’ consecutive year this was accomplished in a very successful way. The final results were presented not as merely attractive images on the screen but as digital prototypes filled with elaborate information that made the digital fabrication possible.