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
Aldo Urbinati
Architectural Effects: La Tour Eiffel BIS
Supervisor: Mark Cousins, Thomas Weaver
This thesis is designed as a contribution to architectural aesthetics. What it tries to do is to consider the major ways in which effects, especially in architecture, are to be understood. It starts from the types of effects in which architecture is involved. It tries to clarify their different nature and to establish them both in terms of the architecture itself and the reception of its effects. This is done from the point of view of how effects can still be registered and whose effects have already generated a considerable literature. The strategy of the thesis is to test these 'architectural effects' out against a number of case studies within the history and the literature on The Eiffel Tower.
Aldo Urbinati is an architect graduated from Mackenzie University - Brazil in 2000. Four years after receiving his degree Urbinati set his own practice under the name of Estudio Tupi, now based in Sao Paulo and London. On 2009 Urbinati started his PhD Research under the supervision of Mark Cousins and Thomas Weaver at the Architectural Association after concluding the MA in Histories and Theories at the same institution.