What Now? Agents of Care

In response to the unpredictable and unexpected spatial, social and political conditions now faced due to the pandemic the AA Summer programmes will become a creative think tank that explores the notion of Care and the agency of the creative and architecture sector in this respect, to launch the AA Summer school programme all Summer School unit tutors will come together to discuss their positions as agents of care.

The Summer School is a full-time, two-week course comprising a unique and intensive programme of design studios, seminars, lectures and parties. Based on the AA unit system, it offers participants the opportunity to experience a diverse selection of different learning environments, teaching agendas and design techniques.Funding is currently being sought to offer 50% of Summer Schools places on a fully funded scholarship. This roundtable will provide an insight into this year's units and will act as a taster for what will be explored in the two week programme.

This year’s summer school Tutors and Briefs are:

Reporting from Venice

The imperative of the Venice Biennale to engage tangibly, inclusively and meaningfully with a diverse audience of participants and observers is more compelling this year than ever before. Together, we will carefully unpack, distribute and deposit lasting pieces of the Biennale all around the world, and in doing so, afford it an impactful legacy that will stretch beyond the fences of the Giardini.

Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio is an architect, writer and educator. She currently teaches at the AA and the Royal College of Art, where she is concluding her PhD and is a Unit Master of ADS10.

Rory James Sherlock is an architectural designer, writer and editor. He has previously taught at the Royal College of Art, is a member of OMMX and F.O.A.M., and is cofounder of the online publishing platform DEschooling.

Sight is a Veil

Within the Sight is a Veil studio, we will aim to use the tools at our disposal as future architects and designers to identify spaces and realities hidden by images. With a specific focus on the image as a political construct, we will speculate on ways in which we can reorient perspectives and produce counter images, promoting the agency of the communities, individuals and beings that those images marginalise.

Khaled Al-Bashir is an alumnus of the AA. His research explores the use of architecture as a medium of information to uncover colonial and political violence. He has previously worked at Khammash Architects and has also been involved in a series of urban research projects in Amman, Jordan.

Jumanah Bawazir is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher and alumna of the AA. Her practice weaves together architecture and poetry in such a way as to confront systemic injustices. Her project Permanent Transience was recently exhibited at p21 Gallery in London and she has worked for Platform 5 Architects.

Edible, or The Architecture of Metabolism

The aim of this course is to reimagine planetary food systems and interrogate architecture’s expressive capacity both to metabolise, digest and generate resources, and to decompose itself. During the Covid-19 pandemic the fragility of our production processes and the mobility networks that transport commodities and food, have urged new forms of localisation and the design of circular economies. Food organises and establishes territorial sovereignty and political struggle, hidden behind power regimes to maintain the aesthetic of, for example, the yellow banana – a desire for consumption that in many ways changes the Earth.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics. She is an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York and the principal of the ANAcycle thinktank. Kallipoliti is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds (Lars Muller, 2018) and Head Co-Curator of the upcoming Tallinn Architecture Biennale. She holds an MSc from MIT and a PhD from Princeton University.

Beauty in the Beasts

We will introduce the architectural dreams of the ‘Wild Dwellers’ – those who have metamorphosed their homes and immediate surroundings to fit their individual obsessions or their wild attempts at togetherness. We will uncover the beauty hidden in the beasts, and study extreme notions of architectural expressions of wellbeing. We will embrace the personal aesthetics and unexpected architectures of the ‘Wild Dwellers’. Are they grotesque, unfinished, junk, boring, ugly? Is ugliness inspiring? What is beauty, and does beauty relate to wellbeing? We will embrace care as an action, by taking a naïve point of view and learning how to look again.

Elliot Rogosin is an architectural designer and maker who works to capture essential stories between place, manufacture and making, and the process of design. Previously, Rogosin held positions at PARTI and Tom Dixon Design Research Studio in London. Rogosin graduated with an MA in Architecture at the Royal College of Art and completed Part 1 at the AA, and also teaches first year architecture at Ravensbourne University.

Albane Duvillier is an architect pushing for an inclusive, socially and politically engaged mode of design, considering London’s architectural culture and its inhabitants as the ultimate creative battleground. Duvillier has worked for muf architecture/art and CZWG Architects, and is currently working with Burrell Foley Fischer Architects on cultural heritage projects. Duvillier studied architecture at the AA, and is also associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins since 2019.

The Ripple Effect

The Ripple Effect is a collective experiment focusing on the potentials and limitations of remote sensing. We will recreate the immersive experience of field exploration, populating the shores of Iowa’s Great Lakes by using a variety of digital tools, allowing us to gather for remote hikes and around virtual campfires. We aim to demystify layers of information about water, soil, geology, flora and fauna for global visitors to the region, while celebrating the diversity of our own home environments. At the end of the two weeks, we will collectively develop an immersive virtual reality space that reacts in real-time to environmental changes happening at the Okoboji lakes.

Space Saloon is a design laboratory on the move, led by Danny Wills, Gian Maria Socci and Rebecca van Beeck. Space Saloon is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Los Angeles. We explore the potentials of site by crafting collaborative hands-on experiences. Our pedagogical projects build communities, promote tolerance and foster engagement through the production of transdisciplinary forms of knowledge. We are a collective of architects, artists and researchers who work with and for the public. Our events provide a supporting platform for both professional architects as well as young developing designers to realise site-specific projects. We promote working environments in which each and every student and collaborator is validated and celebrated. In all we do, we prioritise accessibility, learning and lots of fun.

Unbroadcastable Houses

With the decisive move of productive labour into the home during the global pandemic, we have come to be perpetually ‘on air,’ and our work (or our performances of working) is being broadcasted live from our couches, dining room tables and beds. Rather than refuges from the relentless demands of hyper-capitalism, our homes are now content houses, and each of us have involuntarily become online influencers. Unbroadcastable Houses is premised on the hypothesis that in the discrepancy between physical spaces and the ways in which they appear online, there is space that has potential to resist the contemporary condition of labour.

Since studying History and Critical Thinking together at the Architectural Association, Federico Ortiz and Ushma Thakrar have collaborated on a number of projects addressing contemporary conditions of labour. Ortiz is an architect and curator, and he is currently a programme manager at New London Architecture and a visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. Thakrar is an independent writer and editor working in collaboration with several cultural institutions.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents will encompass two weeks of live performances from Anachoresis – the table designed by Urban Radicals for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2021. Led by Urban Radicals and Lemonot through a series of designed acts, students will question contemporary table-forms in relation to concepts of care and commonality. We will investigate what ‘table’ represents, re-imagining it as a hyperglobal canvas stretched across the internet of things – an expansive feast of scanned objects, recipes, conversations and exchanges. Ultimately, we will collectively assemble a hybrid performative table to intertwine spaces spanning students’ households, Venice and Bedford Square.

Cofounded by AA alumni Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri, Lemonot are educators and spatial practitioners based between London, Italy and Latin America. They operate at the intersection of architecture and the performative arts, using these disciplines as devices to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. Morreale and Perri have been Programme Heads of the AAVS El Alto since 2017, and in recent years they have taught in Cambridge, at the AA Summer School and at INDA in Bangkok. They currently teach on the AA Foundation Programme and at dieAngewandte (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna.

Urban Radicals began in 2019 as a partnership between Nasios Varnavas and Era Savvides. Grounded in collaboration with other practices, disciplines and individuals, the studio functions as a collective and seeks to examine the notion of community from a variety of perspectives including culture, politics, economy, geography, ecology, sociology and architecture. Savvides and Varnavas are visiting tutors at the Bartlett School of Architecture – UCL, the AA, the University of Greenwich and De Montfort University. As an emerging architectural talent, they were recently selected to design and curate the national participation of Cyprus in the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia 2021.