STORIES + PAGE

​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 final session brings together contributors for whom architecture emerges as STORIES and those for whom the medium, the image, the drawing on the PAGE contains the complexity of a condition and its potential.

The counterfactual, or the projected future scenario is an important strand of architectural education and practice due for reappraisal. The interaction of fact and fiction can champion architecture as a form of cultural production whilst retaining its critical framework. Yet in addition to the story, the media through which we communicate architectural ideas and the value of this representation – the film, the drawing, the image, mixed reality and more, can confront, dissolve, and restructure standard drawing practices. The imaginative exploration of possibility, conducted with rigour and care might be exactly what architecture needs to be right now.

Speakers from different moments in the AA’s past and present, together with critical friends, will come together to discuss the many ways to communicate architecture through what we draw and describe.

Speakers include:

Fenella Collingridge studied fine art at Camberwell School of Art and architecture at the AA. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Bartlett and AA. Her work and teaching has focused on intimate urbanism: how people use and experience architecture through sensory and social adjustments of material form. Fenella worked for 12 years with Peter Salter on the design of Walmer Yard.

Adam Nathaniel Furman is a British artist & designer of Argentine & Japanese heritage based in London. Trained in architecture, Adam's atelier works in spatial design and art of all scales from video and prints to large public artworks, architecturally integrated ornament, as well as products, furniture, interiors, publishing and academia.

Julia Koerner is an award-winning Austrian designer working at the convergence of architecture, product and fashion design, specialised in 3D-printing. She is founder of JK Design GmbH and JK3D and faculty at UCLA AUD since 2012. Her recent collaborations include 3D-Printed Haute Couture and costume designs for Oscar awarded Hollywood blockbusters.

Perry Kulper is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. He taught at SCI-Arc for 17 years. He has worked with Eisenman/ Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown. His interests include: the generative potential of drawing; the affordances of design methods; broadening the conceptual range of architecture. He published Pamphlet Architecture 34, ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable’ with Nat Chard, 2013. He was the Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor at the Bartlett/ UCL in 2018- 19.

Madelon Vriesendorp is a Dutch artist and one of the founding members of Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Her art embraces anthropomorphic architectural paintings, ‘bad taste’, pop and the touching beauty of culture’s failed objects. Vriesendorp was the winner of the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for 2018. She is currently working on clocks, built objects, paintings, short stories and sculpting from trash and prose.

MAciej Woroniecki is a UK registered architect who has worked at the entertainment architecture practice Stufish since 2010. MAciej completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Architectural Association and his postgraduate studies at Westminster University. Some of MAciej’s key projects include the world’s largest indoor movie theme park, The Wuhan Movie Park and Dai Show Theatre; an exemplar project in which context, architecture and show were designed by the team at Stufish. MAciej has taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and has been a guest critic at Westminster University and The ESAG Penninghen in Paris.