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
Gabriela Garcia De Cortazar Galleguillos
City Detours
Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Pier Vittorio Aureli
As the city expanded in the nineteenth century, walking (and other forms of direct experience) could no longer be the only source of its knowledge. Representations of the city on the other hand, because of their dependency to subjective vision and their insufficient ability to record, pro¬vided a partial and incomplete version of it. Knowledge of the city, therefore need¬ed devices that could make up for these insufficiencies. These devices, functioning as a sort of prosthesis, propose a detour from the absolute perfection of maps and the fickleness of experience. This research examines ten hybrid devices for orientat¬ing oneself in London. They use different media (diagrams, description, drawing) and deal with different aspects of the city (measures, movement, moments). By doing so, the thesis explores issues of transcription, of remembering and forgetting, and of being lost and finding things out.
Gabriela is an architect (Hons., Universidad de Chile, 2006) and MA in Architectural History (Distinction, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, 2010), for which she received both a Becas Chile and Abbey-Santander scholarship. She has worked as an architect and academic, and started her doctoral research at the AA in 2011 with a scholarship from the Chilean government. In 2013 she received a grant from the Sasakawa Foundation for a trip to Japan.
e-mail: gabrielagdec@gmail.com