This conversation brings together Noemí Blager, curator of A Lot With Little on display in the AA Gallery, with AA Diploma 18 Tutor James Westcott and re-use design practice Rotor, whose exhibition Ad Hoc Baroque about radical re-user Marcel Raymaekers is on show in the Front Members Room. The conversation draws parallels between the two projects and how they celebrate contemporary architecture practices with a low environmental but high aesthetic impact. They will be joined by representatives from the AA Low Carbon Group to discuss how these ideas and approaches can be embodied by the school now and in the future.
The conversation will be chaired by Jane Hall.
NOEMÍ BLAGER is an architect and curator from Buenos Aires. After working in Barcelona for six years, she moved to London in 1994, initially as a consultant for the building and design industries, and then again as a practicing architect in 2006. During a project in Brazil, Noemí discovered the legacy of Italo-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914–92). Inspired by the social dimension of Lina’s work, Noemí mounted the exhibition Lina Bo Bardi: Together which opened at the British Council in London in 2012 and went on to tour internationally. In 2020 she published the book Lina Bo Bardi: Together. As a former acting director of The Architecture Foundation and member of the Design Museum’s curatorial board, Noemí became co-director of the 2014 London Festival of Architecture. She is a regular guest lecturer and critic at Harvard Graduate School of Design, IIT Chicago, the AA, the Royal College of Art and the CASS in London.
ARNE VANDE CAPELLE holds a master’s degree in Engineering: Architecture from Ghent University. He has been active at Rotor since 2018, joined Ghent University as a scientific collaborator in 2022, and has co-taught several design studios at the Architectural Association in London. With Rotor, Arne has worked on multiple design and consultancy projects and has been the main coordinator for Opalis.eu, an online directory of reclamation dealers, since 2019. He has written several articles for academic journals and industry publications on reuse and the reclamation sector.
DR JANE HALL is a founding member of the architecture collective Assemble and is the Director of Studies for Architecture at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, where she specialises in the intersection of gender and architecture. Jane is the author of two books, Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women (Phaidon Press, 2019) and Woman Made (Phaidon Press, 2021), both about the work of women architects and designers globally.
TOM RAYMONT is an architect and director of Arboreal Architecture; a practice that innovates ecological design principles in both technical performance and sensed experience of human habitats. He studied at the AA (AA Diploma 2003) and worked with Eric Owen Moss Architects in Los Angeles and Asymptote in New York before co-founding his own practice in London. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has also taught at Westminster University and Central Saint Martins.
JAMES WESTCOTT co-teaches Diploma 18 at the AA, focusing on material reuse. He also teaches a seminar on convivial conservation. He is editor of Ad Hoc Baroque (Rotor, 2023), Back to the Office (NAi, 2022), and worked at OMA/AMO in the Netherlands, where he edited the Rem Koolhaas/AMO books Countryside, A Report (Taschen, 2020), Elements of Architecture (Taschen, 2018), and Project Japan (Taschen, 2011). He is author of When Marina Abramovic Dies: A Biography (MIT Press, 2010).
