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:
Landscape Urbanism
Debate Team: Elena Luciano,Reshma Susan Mathew, José Alfredo RamÃrez, Eduardo Rico
Landscape Urbanism asks: are there any alternative design or research methods that are not complicit in the destruction of the planet, and instead contribute to environmental justice and an ecological approach to design and architectural knowledge?
Sustainable Environmental Design
Debate Team: Mervin Afan, Nurul Ahmad Fauzi, Simos Yannas
Sustainable Environmental Design engages with real-life projects aiming to improve the environment in cities and develop environmentally sustainable architectures. Conceptual, analytical and empirical facets form the ‘triangle of knowledge’ that informs our practice.
PhD Programme
Debate Team: Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Shiyu Jin, Ruby Lanesman, Mathilde Redouté
PhD candidates at the AA engage with design methods to question historical and theoretical research, and use history and theory to imagine new approaches to design, challenging the artificial distinction between thinking and doing.
