HISTORY + MATERIAL

AA Approaches is a week-long festival of ideas to mark the start of the new academic year, a celebration of the AA’s 175th birthday and the beginning of Ingrid Schroder’s tenure as AA Director. This is an excellent moment to question what and how we teach, and the impact of the work we produce, at a moment characterised by rapid change and urgent global challenges. Each talk pairs two related yet contrasting themes, which draw upon legacies and lineages present within the school and reassess the strategies and methods that they have produced. It is an exciting opportunity to reflect on how different approaches have evolved and come to frame the more critical concerns of the immediate and more distant future. The academic year begins within this critical moment to stop and consider where we have been - to engage, to take responsibility, to reflect on where we are going and to respond with delight and hope, as well as fear and trembling.

The second session explores the tradition of an architecture and urbanism derived from an understanding of architectural and social HISTORY and an approach that privileges the inherent logics of MATERIAL and fabrication. This conversation will ask how these different positions are bound by their own logics and areas of knowledge.

The AA is steeped in history – 175 years of it. It has also made its own history/histories, leaving a material legacy in its wake. At a moment when we need to consider why we need to build more, there is an added urgency to the consideration of what we already live with and the cultural, social or political meaning that it carries. From within education, we need to review the content of the canon and the persistent ideas that have evolved from pre-, to post- modern eras. However, for many, the world is found through fabrication. Making is often thought of as distinct from history or driven by its own internal logic and process, however the manipulation of material and form is intertwined with rhythms and rituals that shape our cities, and its architecture. This conversation will explore how we work within architectural history and the extent to which material innovation embeds us further in the past or liberates us from it.

Speakers from different moments in the AA’s past and present, together with critical friends, will come together to discuss the many readings of history that shape how we see the world and how materiality and making can complement rather than contrast expanding the architectural canon.

Speakers include:

Shumi Bose is an educator, curator and editor based in London. She teaches at Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association. She has worked as curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and at the Venice Biennale, and in 2020, founded Hold Space Architecture.

After 30 years teaching graduate design and history and philosophy of architecture at the University of Cambridge, Peter Carl established the PhD Programme in Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He has taught at both University of Kentucky, Lexington and Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Now retired, Peter has lectured and published on diverse topics and is presently researching the contribution of architectural and urban metabolism to practical wisdom. He holds an M.Arch from Princeton University and has studied at the American Academy in Rome.

Takeshi Hayatsu is a Japanese architect based in London. Takeshi studied architecture at Musashino Art University in Tokyo and Architectural Association in London. He worked for David Chipperfield Architects, Haworth Tompkins and 6a architects before establishing Hayatsu Architects in 2017. Alongside his practice he teaches M.Arch unit in Kingston School of Art. He also conducts annual building school in Japan and Lake District with Grizedale Arts.

David Kohn is director of David Kohn Architects and currently a lecturer at the AA. His practice is working on urban-scale projects that work within historic contexts including new campuses for New College Oxford and Hasselt University, Belgium.

Guan Lee is a practicing architect, lecturer, and director of Grymsdyke Farm. He carried out his architectural studies at McGill University in Montreal, the Architectural Association in London, and the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he completed his doctoral studies on the relationship between architectural craft, making and site. Grymsdyke Farm’s motivating concept is to establish and explore the value of living/working arrangements that involve intimate engagement with materials and processes of making.

Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP. He served as Dean from 2004 to 2014. Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture. In 2005 he co-founded Volume magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman as a collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO (Rotterdam), and C-lab (Columbia University). He received both his Bachelor of Architecture and his Ph.D. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.