Making Home with the Students

Education starts at home. This has long been true for the early stages of a human being’s development, but higher education has also played an important role in the coupling of learning and domesticity. From the institutional forms of colleges and halls of residence to their private counterparts of boarding houses, housing in multiple occupation, and the more recent luxurious hotels for students, students have always experienced their education in a constant tension and movement from the bedroom to the classroom and vice versa.

Today, in an age when higher education hardly manages to survive its ultimate commodification, and when the public provision of student housing is declining, the student becomes a paradigmatic figure of a citizen trapped by the twofold crisis of education and housing. The student housing cooperatives that have been setup in the UK over the last ten years testify of a willingness to change direction by claiming direct agency. They are as much the mirrors of the current predicament as the embodiment of the fact that another pathway based on cooperative action is possible beyond both the public and the private models of housing.

Bringing together some of the student cooperative members, this workshop interrogates the spatial complexities of their stories so far, from finding a suitable building to lease to renovating the interior layouts for shared living, all the way to possibly more ambitious plans of self-build. In a continuous flow pivoting on a discussion about cooperative space and its discontents, the 2-day event will include reports on personal and collective experiences by the members, and reflections and provocations by invited guests and academics.

Schedule:

Friday 8 March: Symposium in the AA Lecture Hall

10:00 Welcome breakfast

Co-op reports 1: Students in Search of Home

11:00 Francesco Zuddas – A (not-too-fictional) Introduction
11:25 Amrou Motawa (Edinburgh Student Housing Cooperative) - Landlords Are Over
11:35 Lisa Hartley (Student Coop Homes) - 10 Years of Student Housing Co-ops in the UK
11:45 May Armstrong (Glasgow Student Housing Cooperative) - Let Glasgow (Cooperatives) Flourish
11:55 Nia Clarke (MaSH - Manchester Student Housing Cooperative) - Cultivating Community
12:05 Darren O’Connor (Cork Student Housing Cooperative) - Living on the Marsh
12:15 Hakim Hallal (SEASALT, Brighton) - What after getting a roof? We Are Going Slow Because We Are Going Far
12:25 Richard Hards and Herta Gatter (Sanford Housing Cooperative) - More Than a Place to Live
12:40 Roundtable discussion

13:10 Lunch in the South Jury Room

Co-op reports 2: Students in Search of Home

14:00 Introduction
14:05 Lily Von Geyer (St.Andrews University) - Coop Sweet Coop: Homemaking at ESHC
14:20 Thomas Green (SEASALT founding member and Brighton and Hove CLT) - Architecture for the Many: How Can the Commons Shape the Future of Design?
14:35 Celeste John-Wood (Edinburgh Student Housing Cooperative) - Declare Yourself Welcome: Co-Habiting in the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative
14:50 Anke Schwittay (University of Sussex and Brighton and Hove CLT) - Growing the Student Housing Cooperative Movement
15:05 Abhishek Wagle (AA) - The Tale of Rochdale: The Ephemeral Counterculture Experiment Continues
15:20 Paula Bendiek (The Marples) and Andrew Bailie (Roost Housing Cooperatives) - Co-ops Need Buildings + Buildings Need Co-ops
15:35 Roundtable discussion

16:05 Coffee break

Commons or the Neoliberal University

16:30 Introduction
16:40 Ioana Petkova (Royal College of Arts) – The Coalitional Architect: Towards Housing Commons in London
17:10 Igea Troiani (London South Bank University) – A Cinematic Survey of Sites of Hybrid work in Neoliberal Architectural Education
17:40 Roundtable discussion
18:30 Finish

Saturday 9 March: Workshop in the AA Restaurant
10:30 Breakfast
11:00-13:00 Workshop: Imagine a Co-Op Home - Group collage task
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-16:00 Group collage task
16:00-17:30 Closing discussion

Self-Organised: Models for Learning is a series organised by Leela Keshav, Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio, Rory Sherlock, Sharvaree Shirode, Abhishek Wagle and Francesco Zuddas.

If it is a truism that learning is hard work, this is not merely because of the complexity of certain topics or subjects to be learnt. More generally, learning is a difficult social practice, the hard to achieve balance in a dialogue between individual idiosyncrasies and collective aspirations. The image of the lone scholar in their studiolo necessarily depends on a counterpart of groups that are constantly forming and disbanding from within, but also often set against, the institutional set-ups of education. This events series explores the multi-faceted relations between institutional education and its many possible others that take the form of self-organised, collaborative models conceived and run by that vast, chaotic, and contradictory group that we call learners. Bridging between inside and outside of the AA and its institutional yet quasi-domestic spaces, the series makes use of different formats – from peer reviews to walks, dinners to co-design workshops – to trigger discussion, raise hope, but also accept frustration, on the current predicament of architectural education and what constitutes a learning environment that can set itself apart from the prospect of a bureaucratised and commodified model solely shaped from the top-down.

The Self-Organised: Models for Learning event series accompanies the exhibition on show in the AA Gallery titled Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive, open from 19 January to 7 March 2024.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.