PhD Symposium

This event brings together the most recently completed PhDs from the AA, in conversation with other students and faculty. Apart from presenting the recently completed theses, the event aims to launch a dialogue about the process of research at the AA, the potential discoveries and surprises that this process entails and their effect in the final thesis.

Costandis Kizis
MODERN GREEK MYTHS
National Stereotypes and Modernity in Postwar Greece

The thesis examines the architectural discussion on modernity and national identity in post-war Greece. In particular it focuses on four cases that try to reconcile national stereotypes with modern ideas and reflect the problematic process of absorbing modernity. Each of four cases is examined in a separate chapter and each chapter is concerned with a distinct aspect of the myths of Greekness, which appear in the work and discourse of the four main architects - protagonists of the thesis: Aris Konstantinidis, Eero Saarinen, Alexandra Moreti and Konstantinos Doxiadis. The thesis seeks to contribute to the dissolution of myths and constructs in architectural historiography in Greece and add to recent international scholarship on critical issues of national identity and modernity.

Costandis Kizis (Athens, 1982) is a practicing architect and educator, a senior lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and is also currently teaching at the Architectural Association and Central Saint Martins. Costandis holds a PhD in History of Architecture (Architectural Association), a MSc degree in Advanced Architectural Design (Columbia University) and a Diploma in Architecture (NTUAthens, with honours). He is principal of Kizis Architects and has been repeatedly awarded, as an equal team member, in architectural competitions.

Gabriela Garcia de Cortazar
The chorography of the modern city

If chorography was the means with which cities were best represented in the Renaissance, the paradigmatic modern metropolis, London, escaped any attempt to be captured. Architectural drawing and its focus on building interiors proved too small and detailed; the scientific map, recording the territory, too general and static. Furthermore, they were insufficient because of their insistence on representing space. On the contrary, the harnessing of movement is fundamental for understanding the modern metropolis. The parallel rise of technologies of transport and technologies of representation in London in the nineteenth and twentieth century trigger the development of radically inventive modern chorographies. These, together with describing the modern metropolis, prescribe a new way of being.

Gabriela García de Cortázar completed her PhD at the AA in 2016. In 2010 she obtained an MA in Architectural History at the Bartlett, UCL, and in 2006 she finished her undergraduate studies at the architecture school of the University of Chile. She has worked as architect and academic in Chile and she teaches Histories and Theories at the AA since 2012. 

Alexandra Vougia
Estranging Devices: Architectural Modernism and Strategies of De-alienation

This thesis was concerned with the various ways that architectural modernism of the interwar era functioned against the dominant (bourgeois) ideology. This complex and historically specific function was explored through the agency of a conceptual pair: (social) alienation and (aesthetic) estrangement, the latter as the avant-garde artistic device of de-alienation. The thesis studied by what alienation means, after becoming closely interdependent on the ideological and cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, was perceived by the historical avant-garde and defied in practice by the conception of the homonymous device of alienation or estrangement, and, primarily, how interwar architectural modernism attempted to transform the 'negative' function of this device into a 'positive' project for a de-alinated restructuring of human production.

Alexandra Vougia studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece and holds an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from GSAPP, Columbia University. She was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the Architectural Association in 2016. Alexandra has worked as an architect in new York and Athens and is currently teaching at the Architectural Association.