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
Translate The Intangible Conference
11/5/2012
Guest speakers: Branko Kolarevic (University of Calgary), Mark Sarkisian (Director of Structural Engineering, SOM San Francisco), Greg Lynn (Angewandte Wien & UCLA A+UD), Axel Kilian (Princeton University), Luca Dellatore (ARUP), Hod Lipson (Cornell University)
Translate the Intangible, a symposium organised by the AA PhD in Architectural Design students as part of the AA Public Programme, addresses the challenges of communicating dynamic aspects of contemporary design methodologies through static mediums such as text and images. As current design-oriented fields have amplified the implementation of computational and generative tools for various motives, the process of documentation and representation of the design process has become more difficult to express. As such, Translate the Intangible will bring together a multi-disciplinary group of leading practitioners from different fields to discuss the challenges involved in expressing the process involved in their work and propose new perspectives addressing this issue.
The symposium will also serve as a platform for the PhD in Architectural Design students to present and discuss their individual research with the invited speakers. The day is divided into three sessions. Each session will last for two hours, and will include a presentation by two PhD students and two invited speakers under a specific theme. During the final hour of each session, the moderators will open up a discussion that follows up on the session’s theme. The aim is to steer a discussion to develop a further understanding of how different disciplines transcribe the temporal aspects of their research to permanent static medium.
Organised by Merate Barakat, Elif Erdine and Ali Farzaneh