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
Emmanouil Stavrakakis
The Architecture of Linear B
Supervisor: Mark Cousins, Spyros Papapetros
Most would agree that Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B is one of the twentieth century’s great moments of identification. It is widely acknowledged that his discovery was the more remarkable because he was not a professional scholar. He was an architect. His reading was accompanied by a curiosity as to how he had been able to make this achievement. At his death some obituaries suggested that perhaps it was something to do with his training as an architect. There the matter has rested. The hypothesis of this thesis argues that while Ventris lacked others’ experience in the field, his advantage came not only from the conventional category of his ‘brilliance’; it was also indebted to the forms of analysis, which he had acquired as part of an architectural training.
Emmanouil Stavrakakis was born in Heraclion (Crete) in 1981. He has studied architecture at the National and Technical University of Athens, at Columbia University in the City of New York, and at the AA, where he is currently pursuing his PhD. He has been working as an architect since 2005.