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
Kensuke Hotta
Programmable Architecture:
Towards Intelligent Architecture
Supervisors: George Jeronimidis, Michael Weinstock
This thesis proposes a new strategy for intelligent architecture, compares it to past architectural theories concerned with time-based design methods and discusses past computational and complex theories, highlighting their limitations. Each individual component within the system has the ability to compute data and as a result the component changes its physical behaviour. The greater the adaptability of the rule results in higher levels of computability. The outcome will be compared with computationally-static design outputs, such as a parametrically optimised shapes.
Kensuke Hotta is an architect, and researcher based on Tokyo / London, currently belongs to PhD in Architectural Design at the Architectural Association. He was born in Japan, received his degrees from Kyoto University, Tokyo University, and Bartlett School (UCL). He was honoured from Union Foundation, and got prizes on several international competitions, and he is teaching as a lecturer, and tutor in several associations and schools. His favourite food is a queen crab.
e-mail: info@kensukehotta.com
website: http://kensukehotta.com