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
Alejandra Celedon Forster
The Plan
Supervisors: Marina Lathouri, Pier Vittorio Aureli
The extent to which the word ‘plan’ changes its sense in time to register and trigger disciplinary changes is the material object for this thesis – the relation between drawings and words, between objects and discourse. Such changes of sense correlate with a shift in the definition and scope of the discipline – from the building, to the drawing (disegno) of buildings as objects, to the building as a device to organise and manage the city – that see the building as an urban piece. Its final negation via the non-plan is the point of contrast – the plan’s antonym – that problematises this historical issue in contemporary terms. The thesis identifies and analyses the ways in which the plan, in its different uses, begins to indicate the transformations of the relationship between architecture and the city.
Alejandra is an architect from Universidad de Chile and holds a Masters from The Bartlett, University College London, where she worked as Research Assistant at UCL Space Group. She has worked in architectural design for Sabbagh Architects (Santiago) and as urban designer at Farrells & Partners (London). She has taught at Universidad de Chile, and the Architectural Association in London where currently she is pursuing her PhD on the rhetorical strategies that connect architecture and the city through the examination of the drawing of the Plan. She has exhibited her work and has contributed to several magazines and conferences in Chile and the UK.
e-mail: Alejandra.Celedon@aaschool.ac.uk