The AA’s Head of Teaching and Learning, Mark Morris, has had essays published in a trio of anthologies in recent weeks. Covering diverse topics – from architectural toys to edible models and cinematic portfolios – Mark credits the focus on the essay form to Covid-19. “These pieces of writing were undertaken last academic year when the AA School was delivering its teaching online. Writing essays became a way of creatively coping with the tedium and isolation of lockdown; a therapeutic activity that kept me feeling connected to colleagues and research. The length of an essay seemed to match my attention span and the range of topics kept it all fresh,” he explains.
Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (Reaktion Books, 2021) includes entries by a variety of architects, artists, critics, curators and academics including Barry Bergdall, Tacita Dean, Hal Foster, Deyan Sudjic, Richard Wentworth, Mario Carpo and Catherine Slessor. Mark’s contribution focused on the demise of Fisher-Price Little People toy sets, specifically the Play House series from the 1970s and 80s, owing to choking hazards associated with the peg figures that populated the toy buildings built of Ponderosa pine with decals illustrated by Margaret Evans Price.
An Alphabet of Architectural Models (Merrell, 2021) was launched at the Building Centre and coincided with an exhibition of scale models. Mark’s entry for the letter Y – ‘Yummy’ - returned to one of his favourite topics: the edible model. From the moulded ices of cathedrals beloved by Marcel Proust to gingerbread houses to cakes in the form of buildings, the essay concluded by looking at the work of artist Liz Hickock whose San Francisco in Jell-O project featured a wiggly gelatine model of the city on a vibrating table simulating earthquakes, as well as the creation (and subsequent ingestion) of Zaha Hadid’s design for the The Peak Leisure Club, intended for Kowloon, Hong Kong, presented as a chocolate cake model in the library of the Architectural Association.
Emerging Talents: Training Architects (AD Wiley, 2021) examines new developments in architectural education. Key programmes reviewed in the publication include those at Carleton University, the Cooper Union, SCI-Arc, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Mark’s chapter on the Architectural Association, ‘Project Documentaries: The Rise of the Cinematic Portfolio’, showcased the way students shifted some aspects of creative work for the purposes of online tutorials and assessment. Featuring the honours projects from the 2020–21 academic cycle, Mark looked at the impact of online presentations alongside the AA’s long engagement with film and video as a medium of architectural expression and, more and more, as tools of analysis and design.
