Diploma 6

VISIBILITY

Maria Fedorchenko

What if I asked you to imagine:

An infinite cultural space. It is shared, criss-crossed with

paths and journeys. You begin to make out the glimpses of

architecture - things, grounds, scenes. The images sharpen

and dissolve. A tangible multiplicity, they form a vast matrix.

It is operable. You can log in and out of contexts. Time

flattens, loops…

Can you almost see it? What did you just “build”?

An animated datascape or archive? A labyrinth or a theatre of

memories? A virtual or actual installation? All of the above?

You are not the only one.

For the gentle teaser, see our last year’s unit video:

https://youtu.be/SfJArpSWql8

Y. Kusama, Infinity Mirror Rooms.

Contemporary Crises and Cultural Symptoms

Our problematic this year is defined in direct response to the

contemporary culture.

While many works are positioned politically - in direct response to

various crises – the design patterns across various figures and

practices get much less attentions. However, common tendencies

do emerge.

Whether we look beyond environmental or production aspects

(pollution, extraction, re-cycling and waste) to consider recent

junk-yards and “ghost forests”. Or if we go beyond technological

awareness (data processing, artificial intelligence, automation, new

media), we see the rise of non-human, virtual platforms and viral

fictions.

And if look at works that deal with timless social concerns

(identity, justice, meaning, subjectivity), we find ourselves in

dispersed point clouds, kaleidoscopes and optical infinities.

Architecture in Expanded Field

Architects notice such pattern, and act on that awareness. They

actively contribute to these creative acts – exposing, machining

and agitating - through their own research, installations and

publications. We are eager to stage our own worlds of ghosts,

phantoms and rejects.

However, to better understand our place in this “expanded field” of

creative practices, we must ask:

what is the architecture’s unique contribution to our common

condition?

Liam Young, Renderlands.

Architectural Culture

If we look at specifically architectural responses, we will notice

another important shift. A number of experimental design practices

– from Nemestudio and Design Earth to WAI Think Tank and

Jimenez Lai – suggest that the best way to respond to various

ecological, economic and societal predicaments as architects - is

indirectly. That is, to escape the widespread “panic mode” via

architectural imagination and global speculation.

They show us that architecture is a very potent instrument. It can

be used to measure and quality the hidden forces and dynamics;

analyse and expose emerging logics and relationships. It can create

new versions of old problems, and project alternative meanings.

And while we earn for the new, we are also reminded to value

history and disciplinary knowledge.

For us, it points towards an agenda for an engaged yet deeply

informed project in architecture.

We can use the ongoing crisis as the true opportunity to reflect and

renew – as a discipline and a profession. We can respond (rather

than insecurely “react”) to external triggers. There is time to

develop a carefully considered, meaningful project. And we can

release architectural ideas into the world without opaque

communication, or obfuscation. And we can let architecture argue

on its own terms, without political justifications.

Design Earth, from Geostories.

Repetition

So that is good news. However, as we align ourselves with cultural

riddles, we often overlook problems with our own theories and

methods. That leads to unexamined repetitions.

For do we not still enjoy compiling systemic catalogues and

“floating” atlases, or stage dioramas in the new

“wunderkammers”? And seeking new affiliations, don’t we still

make collages and “exquisite corpses”? For form, don’t we fall-

back on ideal geometries or urban archetypes?

The “reuses” that we are ourselves most guilty of, in the unit’s

production!

Here, we see both the problem and the promise of contemporary

architectural culture. We can begin to wrestle our collective

imagination from familiar models. Making the most of historical

“renactments” and our quest for the new, we can look at our work

and that of others from outside position. We can alter the way our

cultural propositions become visible and tangible.

Nemestudio, Our Junk, Their Ruin.

Visibility

So this year, the unit will engage with some of the topical cultural

triggers in order to upgrade the tools of architectural imagination.

Architecture’s visibility will be our year’s theme (building upon

work on multiplicity, discontinuity and transience).

For in order to shake up the status quo, we must be willing to crack

open the notorious “Black Boxes” of architectural design. We can

engage with interplay between concepts and images, stories and

pictures, ideas and things. We can intercept habits, and inject

doubt. We must be willing to query our design methods, before we

design any new architecture.

The Questions

We will ask:

- Could architectural imagination offer alternative response to

urgent social issues, while catalysing new creative processes?

- How do we adjust the the lenses with which we see the realities

and project our ideas, in view of immaterial and digital worlds?

- How do we capture the “rain” of memories and experiences in

our imagination, reclaiming the power of human, intellectual

vision?

J. Pawson, Perspectives. Random International, Rain Room.

The Questions

While the individual design briefs will be formulated gradually

towards the end of Term, a few common challenges will prevail: C

Could we see culture as an invisible web of relations and

associations, implied behind single artefact or installation?

How could we actively refill and upgrade our “image” banks, and

use them to help us give shape to the emerging cultural realms?

How to actualise the works of imagination – beyond portfolios,

institutions or urban sites – and allow them to engage multiple

contexts?

Unit Archive: A. Garifyanova.

Approach

Paying attention to various alarms and responses, we work across

projects, texts and practices to reframe dominant themes. We will

deliberately toggle between conceptual and visual, in order to

anticipate the new forms of ‘visibility’ for your project and

enhance is ripple-effects.

The unit’s work would slowly mature upon inclusive conceptual

planes – with easy to access real and imagined, “ancient wisdom

and modern knowhow”. We will flip the order of things, creating

cultural context first, and then reaching out for our target settings

or sites.

Unit Archive: O. Simopoulou, Anachronic Artefact Collider.

The Unit: Before and After

Importantly, this is NOT a “new unit”.

It has been active since 2010 - as an Intermediate 7, Diploma 8 and

Experimental 9, in its previous incarnations.

You may already knows us – for intense research, bold

speculations, and strong drawings. Some may critique us as urban,

wordy or “too-diagrammatic” unit. Whereas other may recall our

elaborate meta-drawings and tableaus. Or more recently, our

forays into “mythical” animations.

From the Unit Archive: Diploma 8 exhibition (2016).

The Unit: Before and After

While many of these stereotypes are not far from the truth, our

coming back to Diploma is an opportunity to build on our unique

strengths, but also to chart new directions.

Beyond research and design, we will question the cultural role of

architectural reasoning.

Rather than blending methologies, we will consider the ways of

designing the subject of the project.

In place of diagnostics of cities and cultural exchanges, we will

create problems and make contexts.

Our core values remain: to experiment with the way we think and

make architecture, to keep the visionary spirit alive, and to

empower ambitious students.

From the Unit Archive: Ron-Fu Yeh, The Garden of Houses.

Term 1:

CULTURAL PROBES, VISIONS AND

STORIES

In term 1, we will learn from multiple cultural

samples and “probes”, giving you access to many

geographic and historical contexts. Using case-

studies as springboards, you will begin to amass

your speculative images and test their associations -

through design provocations, story-telling and film-

making.

The term will be structured through several shorter

design exercises. These will allow you express entry-

points into the most relevant debates in

contemporary architectural culture.

TERM 1

Exercise 1 (2 weeks)

Cultural Probes

The first exercise will involve a set of discrete “cultural probes” –

drawn three main interrelated strands of contemporary practices:

1. Beyond the dissolution of architecture, we will consult projects

on damages and byproducts – such as the entropic fields of debri

and rejects, framed as new “collections” (S. Boeri, M. Lin,

Ishigami; K. Nemestudio and Design Earth)

2. We then see them displayed in “world theaters”, museums and

“archives of affinities”. These new platforms change our ideas of

history, fiction, and context, and affect the way we see Time (P.

Eisenman and Studio Kovacs; Liam Young; FleaFolly Architects

and Space Popular)

3. We will also track the lives of architectural images and forms in

the digital media vs in the physical installations – especially

interiorised “corridors” and “dark caves” that trigger themes of

amnesia and loss (O. Eliasson and OMA; SANAA and J. Pawson)

Starting with a single “probe” (your chosen case-study), you will

work in small teams of two to critique, situate and revise it.

TERM 1

Exercise 2 (2 weeks)

Archives and Associations

Over time, not only the projects themselves will shift. You will

also begin to see them as only singular takes on long-term projects

and explorations by many others. And while you will reckon with

these convoluted genealogical “bushes”, you will also begin to pull

our individual research threads – or “lines of questioning” that are

becoming of particular interest to you.

And so the second exercise – now working individually - will

allow to not only enlarge the scope of your first revision, but also

to make the most of the connections between the figures, projects

and ideas that make its expanded context – both spatial and

disciplinary. You will go on to make a second revision of the

project – as a part of an “animated archive”.

TERM 1

Exercise 3

Conundrums and Filmic Narratives

At this stage, you will be ready to start grappling not only with

your core design interest, but also with more general problems. So

coming back to today’s culture, you will reframe the key project

dilemmas.

For example, you could invest in issues of permanence and

transience of architecture, including the longevity and decay of

data, matter, achitectural teachings and urban models?

Or you could choose focus on emerging media platforms, and

unacknowledged transfers between built and virtual architecture.

Or you may prefer to foreground the difficulties with how to

reconnect emergent spatial conditions with real cities, beyond

urban manifestoes and artistic installations.

TERM 1

Exercise 3 (4 weeks)

Conundrums and Filmic Narratives

Whatever your key interests you will begin to explore and deepen

your “cultural conundrum”. You will start compiling your first

visual expression – collages, renders, diagrams, maps. Then, you

will begin to experiment with their relations and sequences.

By consulting a bespoke selection of texts and projects, we will

help you ground your intuition. You will learn how to build up a

longer narrative, and to learn to tell a great story. The final

outcome of the exercise will be a cinematic narrative, assembled

from all the discrete flash-backs, glimses and collisions you

accumulated so far.

We will call them “filmic provocations”.

Nathan Su, Through Leviathan’s Eyes.

TERM 1

Term 1 is about absorption of inspirations, visual production, and

versioning. So it will naturally yield visual “cascades” and image

“avalanches”. However, we will not simply continue to

accumulate. At the end of the term, we will take time to organise

them into a key construction. Most importantly, we will ensure you

can slow down and distill your ideas.

Upon further reflection, you will refine your research thesis, and

individual design briefs for the rest of the year.

Ideally, you will begin to outline a new research area for yourself.

You will express a new space – somewhere on the edges of

imageability, iconicity, projection, visualiation, ekphrasis and

visual thinking. You will be able to chart your personal paths with

clarify and conviction.

K. Robinson, “The Theater of Memory” (after G. Camillo)

Unit Archive.

TERM 2:

BALANCING ACTS:

MOMENTS AND WORLDS

In term 2 we will move to the second intense phase

of design experimentation. We will actively building

your architectural project as a series of crucial

moments. These will slowly grow in numbers and

complexity. They will make up a wider, cultural

world.

This will be a new “context” from where you will act

upon the culture and the city.

TERM 2

The Big and The Small

Term 2 will be a continuous balancing act.

In order to maintain the wider scope while refining few essential

pieces, we will deliberate shift our attention back and forth –

between big and small, projected and experienced, connected and

discrete.

We will let the project “grow” in scope and scale, but also

selectively zoom and focus. You could jump from the room to the

planet, and from the element to the vast assemblies.

However, the global imagination should not detract from design

evolution. For the project to progress, you will pay attention to a

few essential ‘Moments’ of the project.

Ecumenopolis;

Unit Archive: R. Scheusan, Diverter.

TERM 2

Moments / ETS

These select ‘Moments’ will require a combination of many

advanced skills – conceptual agility, technological fluidity and

spatial intelligence. We support you with dedicated seminar and

workshops – on the problems of information and structure, process

and form.

These moments will also contain the crucial design elements,

connected to the ETS project for the 5th years. For us, ETS has

always started with an “impossible” brief – yet another conundrum

or paradox! It often progresses by following the most challenging

processes and transactions. You will invent more sophisticated

logistical and structural problems, while making connections

between the cutting-edge technologies.

Unit Archive: F. Paraskevas, The Extra-National Domain.

TERM 2

Projected and Experienced

While moving between big and small, we will also remain

sensitive to how we design your bits and pieces.

We will sway back and forth between things that known but yet to

be seen, and things that are seen but yet to be understood. Here,

you will get better access to the unit’s broad range of tools, from

the diagrammatic matrices to immersive renderings. We hope to

establish a generative process, where both aspects of your design

enhance it, and move it a step further.

Unit Archive: V. Pushpanathan, The Depository of Forgotten Monuments

(RIBA Bronze Megal Winner, 2012);

J. Pawlowska, Intelligent Factory.

TERM 2

Doubt

Beyond your interim prototypes, we will extend this stance – of

“doubt” - to other things we take for often take for granted –

function, location and finality of design. We hope for further

mirages and illusion to arise. And we like to keeps things soft,

“plastic” for longer. Various diagrams and maps will help us tinker

with transitions, renders and animations will intensify their

experiences.

Whether your project is a three-dimensional world or a conceptual

“Flatland", we will build and view it simultaneously – as in the

dream.

Unit Archive: J. Chau, Landscape of Transitions.

TERM 2

Connected and Discrete

Further, we will not rush to quickly discipline these design

ecologies and accumulations into a single, design scheme. For the

project to remain experimental, we will support the flow and the

change of discrete elements. In a way, there will be many micro-

projects within a macro-exploration.

As you try to cluster your emerging elements, we will try and

celebrate latent principles and logics. For a stronger contrast, we

will help you consult recent discourse on compositions,

assemblages, systems, frameworks, etc.

We will keep faith in the uniquely “human” intellectual ability, to

welcome diverse inputs into one capacious, “dis-continuous”

project.

Unit Archive: A. Magliani, The City of Morphologies

(RIBA Bronze Medal nomination).

TERM 2

Outputs

And while things must come together, in the end, we will try to

resist the old recipes. With no master-figures, frameworks or

containers to rely on, we seek other ways to hold together your

growing cultural world – of urban fragments, cultural platforms,

architectural visions.

In the course of the Term 2, you will advance in design and

technical resolution of a set of key elements. You will be able to

present them as one larger context – whether as curatorial or urban

space. And you will start thinking about its ultimate influence – on

real problems and challenges.

Unit Archive: Ssu-Kuo Lo, Anti-Memorial Landscape

(AJ Journal Prize nomination)

TERM 3:

SHOW AND TELL:

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

In term 3, you would focus on revising key content;

selecting the essential visual and written outputs; and

ultimately, learning to broadcast your ideas as part of

the wider architectural culture.

This year, we will make a particular focus on the

immersive final animations. These will help us

explore how your project could be actualised outside

of our unit laboratory – across cultures, cities,

territories.

Unit Archive: X. He, City Synthesiser (RIBA Bronze Medal nomination)

TERM 3

The Expanded Project

In term 3, we will continue advancing the project, and work to

showcase your most important achievements. But we will also

need to wrestle with how to best actualise the project – keep it in

the cultural realm or apply it to an external site? Keep it generic

and abstract, or do add a concrete test? To represent it as an

argument, a design proposal? What representations do we

foreground?

What if this wild diversity of outputs – from the unit archive – was

also populating your portfolio by Term 3? How does one make the

final project “consistent”?

And what if there not one story, one site, or one piece of

architecture to lean on? How does one create a flow across

separate representations?

We will need to flex our mental and graphic muscles, to get there.

TERM 3

Consistency

Building on the unit’s amassed experience, we will continue to

question the key pathways we used in the past:

Temporal – such as a visual narrative, a comic or a film, an

itinerary or a “chronogram”;

Graphic – such as a meta-drawing or a digital model; a matrix or a

myriorama;

Intellectual – such as a digital book or a website, a virtual

exhibition or a catalogue.

All these approaches will factor into the final stage of our work.

Renzo Piano, The Art of Making Buildings (RA Exhibition).

Liberation

Discussing what it means to “complete” or close the project, we

will consider how to best visualise it.

We will actively debate our heavily used tools – dioramas and

tableus; collages and hybrid drawings; films and digital animation.

Importantly, you won’t be forced to channel your work into one

key product – drawing, book or film. Rather, we keep the tensions

between them until the end.

Unit Archive: A. Magliani, Objects Against the Canon.

Back to the Beginning: Stories and Animations

While you will of course have carefully edited portfolio and well-

structured booklets to document the year, a very important product

this year will be the final animation.

With this, we would hope to “return” to the beginning - to posing

questions and telling stories. Rediscover mystery, fragility and

ambiguity. Make room for the unsaid and unseen. Admit self-doubt

that surfaces by the end of this intense period of commitment.

What you will see in the end just might surprise you.

And if your project is also moving and immediately accessible, it

will be an additional bonus – liberating you from heavy

explanations and justifications from the past.

Unit Archive: Z. Qin, Moscow Labyrinth

Examples of Projects

But what kind of project could end up with, in the end?

Let me sketch some project that we did in the past, that I think are

relevant to this year’s brief.

Cultural Archives and Histories - construct a virtual domain, with

a focus on scanning, filing and transfer of information. Some

explore the latent architectural qualities of these “labyrinths” –

places that nurture multiple histories and futures.

Anti-Memorials and Morphs – focus on the architectural elements

throughout the cultural projects that transform them. They often

put aside the baggage of memory, monument, ruin. They celebrate

preliminary architectural specters and early “constellations” – that

no longer fit older canons or genealogies.

Visual Ecologies and Transit – and if the project exceeds just one

city or even country, the student then start seeing their projects as a

vast “cultural ecology”. Many of them explore the role of new

technologies in cultural, material and human transit. They explore

new space of transition – through satellite imagery, architectural

models, and city-scapes.

Unit Archive: Ssu-Kuo Lo, Anti-Memorial Landscape

(AJ Journal Prize nomination)

Your Choice

You will have a choice as to how contingent the final project

becomes. You will control as to how it will produce an indirect

effect on the real world. And you will use demonstrations in your

final animations, to stress its relevance and instrumentality. It will

matter.

Regardless of the path you choose, the project you produce will

become a turning point on your personal journey. It will help you

find your own voice, and fine-tune your architectural language.

You will learn to choose your weapons and tools, and be strategic

in how you “show and tell”. Hopefully, it will also give you

confidence to tackle difficult projects in the future.

Unit Archive: X. He, City Synthesiser (RIBA Bronze Medal nomination)

Appendix:

Unit Master

Collaborators

Resources

UNIT MASTER

Maria Fedorchenko taught at the AA since 2008, leading Diploma

8 (2015-2019) and AA Intermediate 7 (2010-2015). She taught at

UC Berkeley, UCLA and CCA since 2003. She holds an M. A. in

Architecture from UCLA, M. Arch. from Princeton University, and

a Dip. Arch. from Moscow Institute of Architecture.

Primarily an educator and theorist with key publications focusing

on diagram and infrastructure in contemporary practice, she is also

a co-founder of the collective Plakat Platform (www.plakat-

platform.one).

She is also a founding partner, with Gleb Sheykin, of a new

generalist practice Karta Architecture Ltd.

She aims to redefine what it means to be a cultural practitioner

today, and discovering new channels for the visionary thinking.

Karta Architecture

AA Visiting School, Moscow

VISITING TUTORS AND COLLABORATORS:

Lorenzo Perri (AA Dipl with Honours) is the co-founder of Plakat

Platform, and has collaborated with the unit for several years. He is

a co-director of Lemonot, practicing between architecture and

performative arts. Programme Head of the AAVs El Alto, he also

taught several design studios at INDA in Bangkok. He is currently

a design studio tutor and lecturer at the Angewandte, Vienna.

Gleb Sheykin (AA Dipl) is a founding partner of Karta

Architecture – a new generalist practice that operates across a

range of micro- and macro- design problems, and links long-term

research questions with short-term design solutions. Currently,

Karta has ongoing residential and commercial projects in the UK,

Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Previously he was a designer at Series

Architects and Fletcher Priest Architects, working on a wide range

of large-scale institutional and commercial projects.

The large network of regular collaborators includes: Andrea Dutto,

Nabila Mahdi, Sebastian Tiew, Ivana Wingham, among many

others.

Plakat Platform workshop

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