SYSTEM + LAND

​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 first session pairs those who see architecture as a SYSTEM and those who understand it as coming from an understanding of the LAND, nature or biological processes. It looks at architecture both in terms of complexity and the cloud; landscapes and ecological systems.

There is a clear relationship between this reading of the world as found, and an architecture derived from less visible processes. The environment we operate within is underpinned by the creative economies of virtual and online communities, while the study of the use of land and the physical and psychological role of nature shares certain methodologies with virtual and systemic thinking. Both engage with patterns of the everyday at a range of scales and with varying degrees of abstraction. Both need to have their silos eroded for biological, economic and digital systems thinking to gain the evocative hold on the imagination that nature and landscape access so easily. This conversation will challenge the divisions between readings of the world as organic, climatic and possibly romantic and an architecture derived from economic, social, political, environmental, or technological organisation.

Speakers from different moments in the AA’s past and present together with critical friends will come together to discuss the shaping of digital and physical lands as well as the systems that underpin them.

Speakers include:

Shumon Basar is the author of the books The Extreme Self: Age of You and The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, both with Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Shumon studied at Cambridge University, The Architectural Association and Goldsmiths, University of London. He is Commissioner of the Global Art Forum in Dubai; a member of Fondazione Prada’s “Thought Council;” Chief Narrative Officer and co-founder at the contemporary art start-up Zien; and has editorial roles at the magazines TANK, Bidoun, 032c and Flash Art. Shumon has been affiliated with the AA since 2000, teaching, curating and contributing to the public programme, notably in the Format series.

Fredrik Hellberg (Stockholm 1982) is an architect, artist, designer and educator. Together with Lara Lesmes he is the director of Space Popular Ltd which they founded in Bangkok in 2013. Space Popular has exhibited at MAXXI Rome, ArkDes Stockholm, MMCA Seoul, MEET Milano, Magazine Vienna, Sto Werkstatt London and Sir John Soane Museum London.

Farshid Moussavi, OBE, RA, is an internationally acclaimed architect and Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she trained. Prior to founding FMA, her London-based practice, she was co-founder of Foreign Office Architects (FOA). She has taught in many schools of architecture internationally, including at The AA between 1993-2000.

Sam Jacoby is Professor of Architectural and Urban Design Research and the Research Lead of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, where he also leads the Laboratory for Design and Machine Learning. Jacoby co-founded and directed the AA Projective Cities programme from 2009 to 2019.

Lucia Pietroiusti is a curator working at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, usually outside of the gallery space. Pietroiusti is the founder of the General Ecology project at Serpentine, London, where she is currently Strategic Advisor for Ecology. Current projects include the research and festival series, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos, since 2018); the opera-performance Sun & Sea by Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte (2019 Venice Biennale and 2020-2024 international tour); Persones Persons, the 8th Biennale Gherdeïna (May-September 2022, with Filipa Ramos) and the non-profit organisation, Radical Ecology (with Ashish Ghadiali, since 2022). Recent and forthcoming publications include More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier, 2020); Microhabitable (with Fernando García-Dory, 2020-22) and PLANTSEX (2019).

Philippe Rahm is a Swiss architect, principal in the office of “Philippe Rahm architectes”, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. He has taught architecture design at the GSD, Harvard University, USA, from 2014 to 2016. In 2002, he was chosen to represent Switzerland at the 8th Architecture Biennale in Venice, and was one of the 25 Manifesto's Architects of Aaron Betsky's 2008 Architectural Venice Biennale. He taught at the AA between 2005 and 2006.