The AA School’s PhD programme combines advanced research with a broader educational agenda, preparing graduates for practice in global academic and professional environments. Current doctoral research encompasses the topics of the school’s postgraduate programmes in architectural theory and history, architectural urbanism, emergent technologies and design, and sustainable environmental design. Within each of these strands candidates can engage in design-led research (PhD in Architectural Design) or follow the traditional route of the text-based dissertation. Across the programme’s streams, shared research issues are explored through specialist groups, seminars and other events in and outside of the school. This year, several of the programme’s PhD candidates contributed to conferences and publications in the UK and abroad. ‘A Day on the Grid’ was a public event organised by Alexandra Vougia, Costandis Kizis and Gabriela García de Cortázar Galleguillos, held in early May. The programme’s current PhD candidates and recent graduates participated, as well as teaching staff and students from across the school. The day tackled the issue of the grid from nine angles, each examined by two papers: ‘prologue’, Aldo Urbinati; ‘urban’, Alexandra Vougia and Ross Adams; ‘maps’, Gabriela García de Cortázar Galleguillos and Emmanouil Stavrakakis; ‘drawing’, Alison Moffett and Nerma Cridge; ‘plan’, Alejandra Celedon and Costandis Kizis; ‘intermission’, Merve Anil and Eleanor Dodman; ‘coordinates’, Ryan Dillon and Arturo Revilla; ‘graph’, Valeria Guzman and Jingming Wu; ‘epilogue’, Doreen Bernath; ‘discussion’, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mark Campbell and Marina Lathouri.
Director
Simos Yannas
Supervisors
Pier Vittorio Aureli
Lawrence Barth
Paula Cadima
Mark Cousins
Jorge Fiori
Hugo Hinsley
George Jeronimidis
Marina Lathouri
Patrik Schumacher
Brett Steele
Thomas Weaver
Michael Weinstock
Simos Yannas
External Supervisors
Doreen Bernath
Vida Norouz Borazjani
David Cunningham
Socratis Georgiadis
Spyros Papapetros
Edward Soja
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Alexandra Vougia
Estrangement and the Metropolis: An Enquiry into the Urban Form and Matter
Supervisors: Marina Lathouri, David Cunningham
This research project makes an enquiry into the nature of the concept of estrangement – how it was initially used by political and social sciences to characterise an inherent condition of modernity where one experiences community as something external to oneself, and the ways in which it later migrated into art practices and the urban discourse of the early twentieth century. The thesis investigates how this concept enforced certain types of architectural form presenting the narrative of the modern metropolis and the ‘estranged’ human collective that inhabits it through an integral conception of city and architecture.
Alexandra Vougia graduated in 2007 from the Faculty of Architecture of the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki – Greece, with Honours. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design (MS AAD) from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation-GSAPP, Columbia University (2008). She worked as an architect in New York and Athens, before beginning her PhD dissertation at the AA School of Architecture in 2011.
alexandra.vougia@aaschool.ac.uk
alexvoug@gmail.com