Discourse on Methods

The AA’s Taught Postgraduate programmes will hold three public debates on their collective and individual research methods in the Lecture Hall during Open Week, in lunchtime sessions on Tuesday 7, Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 February from 1–2pm GMT. The sessions are open for everyone within the school to attend.

Like Descartes, we live and conduct our research in a world undergoing a paradigm shift. The way in which we approach design within the AA invokes a chain of reasoning that brings together intuition, deduction and logic, and enumeration of the object of enquiry. Design research is integral to our academic community and is driven by a shared concern for the betterment of society and our relations to the natural world. This is a unique class of enquiry that includes integrated knowledge from the natural and cultural sciences and concludes with an expository design (conceptual, physical or computationally simulated) that requires evaluation.

The debates will focus on the intersection of each Taught Postgraduate programme’s methods, considering how these methods contribute to, construct or constrain generative processes of design; what they contribute to knowledge in architecture; and what impact they have on society.

Each session will begin with a short presentation reflecting on methods, made by the debating team of staff and students from each programme; following this, we will debate with and against each other. The debates will be moderated by Michael Weinstock, and will be recorded and made available to the school community to watch later.

Tuesday 7 February

Architecture and Urbanism (DRL)
Debate Team: Nerma Cridge, Theodore Spyropoulos
Architecture is a framework through which to explore, invent and respond to the challenges of today. Participation is at the heart of the DRL project, in which self-organised teams of international researchers collaborate on complex problems that necessitate progressive ideas to construct our collective future.

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Design and Make
Debate Team: Miguel Chavez-Cornejo, Kate Davies, James Dent, Maisie Hoile, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Nicholas Volpe
Collective making (and remaking) is a process of rehearsing ideas, practicing research together and embodying knowledge within the things we make. The resulting revelations of hand and eye, and material and tool, are wildly contagious.

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Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech)
Debate Team: Elif Erdine, Milad Showkatbakhsh
Emergent Technologies and Design investigates new synergies of architecture and ecology through the critical intersection of computational design and fabrication.

Wednesday 8 February

Landscape Urbanism
Debate Team: Elena Luciano,Reshma Susan Mathew, José Alfredo Ramírez, Eduardo Rico
Landscape Urbanism asks: are there any alternative design or research methods that are not complicit in the destruction of the planet, and instead contribute to environmental justice and an ecological approach to design and architectural knowledge?

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Sustainable Environmental Design
Debate Team: Mervin Afan, Nurul Ahmad Fauzi, Simos Yannas
Sustainable Environmental Design engages with real-life projects aiming to improve the environment in cities and develop environmentally sustainable architectures. Conceptual, analytical and empirical facets form the ‘triangle of knowledge’ that informs our practice.

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PhD Programme
Debate Team: Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Shiyu Jin, Ruby Lanesman, Mathilde Redouté
PhD candidates at the AA engage with design methods to question historical and theoretical research, and use history and theory to imagine new approaches to design, challenging the artificial distinction between thinking and doing.

Thursday 9 February

Spatial Performance and Design (AAIS)
Debate Team: Angyris Angeli, Theo Lorenz
Spatial performance is the sociopolitical effect of design and performance. AAIS explores alternative forms of collaboration between multiple creative professions through research, design, implementation and production, leading to genre-defying spatial performances and constructions.

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History and Critical Thinking
Debate Team: Marina Lathouri, William Orr, John Palmesino
Through seminars, debates, group readings and writings, HCT creates a framework to think critically about architecture as entangled within a set of situated practices, reflecting on the role of history and the accountability of research, and writing contemporary transformations of inhabited spaces.