The AA’s Taught Postgraduate programmes will hold three public debates on their collective and individual research methods in the Lecture Hall during Open Week, in lunchtime sessions on Tuesday 7, Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 February from 1–2pm GMT. The sessions are open for everyone within the school to attend.
Like Descartes, we live and conduct our research in a world undergoing a paradigm shift. The way in which we approach design within the AA invokes a chain of reasoning that brings together intuition, deduction and logic, and enumeration of the object of enquiry. Design research is integral to our academic community and is driven by a shared concern for the betterment of society and our relations to the natural world. This is a unique class of enquiry that includes integrated knowledge from the natural and cultural sciences and concludes with an expository design (conceptual, physical or computationally simulated) that requires evaluation.
The debates will focus on the intersection of each Taught Postgraduate programme’s methods, considering how these methods contribute to, construct or constrain generative processes of design; what they contribute to knowledge in architecture; and what impact they have on society.
Each session will begin with a short presentation reflecting on methods, made by the debating team of staff and students from each programme; following this, we will debate with and against each other. The debates will be moderated by Michael Weinstock, and will be recorded and made available to the school community to watch later.
This session:
Architecture and Urbanism (DRL)
Debate Team: Nerma Cridge, Theodore Spyropoulos
Architecture is a framework through which to explore, invent and respond to the challenges of today. Participation is at the heart of the DRL project, in which self-organised teams of international researchers collaborate on complex problems that necessitate progressive ideas to construct our collective future.
Design and Make
Debate Team: Miguel Chavez-Cornejo, Kate Davies, James Dent, Maisie Hoile, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Nicholas Volpe
Collective making (and remaking) is a process of rehearsing ideas, practicing research together and embodying knowledge within the things we make. The resulting revelations of hand and eye, and material and tool, are wildly contagious.
Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech)
Debate Team: Elif Erdine, Milad Showkatbakhsh
Emergent Technologies and Design investigates new synergies of architecture and ecology through the critical intersection of computational design and fabrication.
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