SPACE + STREETS

​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 penultimate session sets those who see the order (and division) of our cities and regions as legible from SPACE against those who are pressing for architecture to come from the STREETS.

The understanding of the world from space reveals vast territorial patterns of movement and change, and remote sensing and satellite technologies provide layers of socio-political context. However, this distant voyeurism is often too passive and fails to enact urgent change. For many, architecture must come from communities and neighbourhoods as a form of activism. This conversation is an opportunity to challenge these alternative positions – both equally political in nature but with radically different tools for the fight they are engaged in. We will explore how both collective agency and remote analysis contend with current crises and confront the pace of plausible change within the constraint of architectural education.

Speakers from different moments in the AA’s past and present, together with critical friends, will come together to discuss the role of activism in architectural education and practice and the agency of the architect to operate across these scales.

Speakers include:

Space Caviar is an architecture and research studio operating at the intersection of design, technology, politics and the public realm. Founded in 2013, the office uses built work, exhibitions, publishing, writing and film to investigate and document contemporary modes of habitation and the spatialisation of social and political practice. Space Caviar’s work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Biennale Interieur, Vitra Design Museum and Nilufar Gallery, among others.

Matthew Gandy is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge and an award-winning documentary film maker. His books include The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (MIT Press, 2014) and Natura urbana: ecological constellations in urban space (MIT Press, 2022).

Julika Gittner practices and teaches across art and architecture. She has exhibited her work in the UK and internationally and was recently shortlisted for the 2021 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award. Julika has been a design fellow at the University of Cambridge since 2010 and is currently undertaking an SWW DTP2 AHRC funded practice-based PhD in Art and Architecture at the Universities of Reading and Cardiff.

Rana Haddad, an AA graduate, acquired the title of ‘activist’ as she practiced architecture and design in the post war city of Beirut. From 1997, her research workshop was setup with her practice with the aim of questioning the ability of objects and places to become means of political expression. Soon after, these quests turned into installation works puncturing the city grabbing people’s attention locally and internationally. With her students and colleagues, Rana has produced several public installations/performances in Beirut and abroad. She is currently an assistant professor at the American University of Beirut. In 2013, she co-founded 200Grs. Recently the Victoria and Albert Museum, V&A in London, UK; acquired from 200Grs the ‘Stuck Stick’ series for their design collection and the Debris of texts & Eyeglasses for their art collection.

Muyiwa Oki is an architect in the Design and Digital team at construction consultancy, Mace Group. He was recently elected RIBA President (2023-25). Whilst at Grimshaw Architects, he was founder and Chair of the Multi-Ethnic Group and Allies network and drove cultural change for colleagues globally. Muyiwa is an external speaker and mentor for aspiring architects in programmes to encourage greater social mobility within the industry. He is also the co-founder of a design-tech venture called Modulor, focused on making Digital Twins of spaces affordable. He is interested in closed-loop systems and innovative circular economy schemes in the built environment.

David Grahame Shane is Adjunct Professor in the Urban Design program at Columbia GSAPP. Shane studied architecture at the Architectural Association, London, graduating in 1969 with his Dream City Thesis published in the AA125 Volume (1972).

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010 he founded the research agency Forensic Architecture and has directed it ever since. The work of the agency is documented in the exhibition and book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014), as well as in Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Zone/MIT, 2017) and in numerous exhibitions world wide. He graduated in architecture in 1998 from the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College in 2006.

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is cofounder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground.