Sponsorship Brochure

TROPICALITY A NOMADIC VISITING SCHOOL

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Tropicality A Nomadic Visiting School

Content

01. Introduction

Architectural Association

AA Visiting Schools

02. Tropicality

Research Brief

What We Will Produce

The Team

03. Sponsorship Opportunities

Sponsorship Opportunities & Current Sponsors

Kevin Sheppard,

Bayley Street to Bedford Square (2008)

01Tropicality A Nomadic Visiting School

01. IntroductionVisiting School Programme

The AA Visiting School since 2008 has grown into a worldwide programme of more than 50 annual courses. Held on five continents in dozens of cities, territories and remote regions. This courses provide

teaching and learning opportunities for students and other international participants to engage with up close and led by AA tutors and other experts.

The agenda driven, project led learning is a central feature of the programme that allows for focused research and learning through making and experiencing the research context.

In this framework, Tropicality aims to explore tropical domesticity through a series of immersible workshops, where artists, filmmakers and architects will introduce new tools, media, and thinking through

which students and researchers will produce a series of revealing drawings, photographs and a short film.

‘The Architectural Association School of Architecture in London [...] is the oldest independent school of architecture in the UK and one of the most prestigious and competitive in the world. Its wide-ranging

programme of exhibitions, lectures, symposia and publications have given it a central position in global discussions and developments within contemporary architectural culture.’

The Architectural Association was founded in London in 1847 by a group of young articled pupils as a reaction against the prevailing conditions under which architectural training could be obtained.

Opposing continental models such as the French L’Ecole des Beaux Arts; an existing, small association of architectural draughtsmen was rapidly absorbed and the first formal meeting held under the name of

the Architectural Association was subsequently held in May 1847 in the premises of one of the oldest of the Inns of Chancery, Lyons Inn.

Today the school has a total of 650 full-time equivalent students, 82 per cent of whom are from overseas. The Graduate School now has ten postgraduate programmes, including those dedicated to Emergent

Technologies, Sustainable Environmental Design, Histories & Critical Thinking, Housing & Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism and the Design Research Lab and extra currixulum programs like the AA Visiting

Schools. The tradition of self-governance and independence remains strong and healthy.

Architectural Association

AA Visiting Schools

02 Tropicality A Nomadic Visiting School


02. TropicalityA Nomadic Visiting School

Tropicality

Research Brief

Half of a millennia has passed since colonisers introduced alien building types to the tropics, relegating place-conscious, climate-evolved vernacular inhabitations1 to largely unrecorded history. In the 19th century, problems of comfort and survival for white colonisers living in the tropics became the focus of efforts within institutions of the metropole to develop systematic, universal design and construction procedures aimed at delivering ‘hygienic’ tropical buildings2. The end of World War II heralded a period of decolonization during which tropical architecture became institutionalised as a professional field in London3. Research groups including the Building Research Station, and the Department of Tropical Architecture at the AA, which was founded in 1954 by Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and Otto Koeningsberger, sought responses to a ‘crisis’ of incongruity between dominant architectural production and its respective socio-cultural contexts.

In the half-century, since these programmes ended, the built fabric of sovereign tropical regions has undergone natural mutation propelled in part by a reconfiguration of political and cultural networks and a collective introspection. Spontaneous manifestations of the phenomena coined critical regionalism in the early 1980’s5 have emerged from within tropical societies andexhibit parallels, but also stand in colourful contrast to a thickening shroud of globalised homogeneity.

In this visiting school programme, we will consider the informal builder, local artist and architect key sources of power6 and resistance; simultaneously generators and perpetuators of culture. Conceived from within the multi-scalar and often dialectically opposed spheres of their political and climactic contexts, from the local to global, their material creations serve as fettered manifestations of struggle, mutable identity and collective aspirations7.

We will seek and expose moments of residual disjunction, resistance and culturally specific architectural features. We will use drawing, diagram, film and photography to exfoliate the skin of familiarity from modes of domestic being and to document the immediate climactic and socio-political context. Through dissection and reanimation of the constituent elements of selected domestic inhabitations, we will contemplate their role as political8 and cosmopoietic9 instruments within their society.

Tropicality is a nomadic visiting school programme which will conduct architectural investigations over a period of three years from within three geographically and culturally disparate, yet climactically comparable postcolonial regions. We will hold the visiting programme in collaboration with local universities, which include:

1st year Costa Rica – Veritas University, San Jose

2nd year Vietnam – Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Mihn City

3rd year India - Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Mumbai

The programme seeks to source knowledge from, and establish a discourse with architecture practices involved in related, relevant work from within the focus regions. We have initiated a dialogue network, one of the roles of which is to place students of the visiting programme into apprenticeships with collaborating studios and to initiate an evolving network of local practices.

At the culmination of the three years work we will organise a conference at the AA involving key accomplices to summarise the first round of dialogue about contemporary tropical architectural manifestations and the role that they play in challenging current theory and praxis.


Día del Boyero

San Jose, Costa Rica


What we will produce

Film

Students will make a film that tells a story about the tropical house and the cultural, social and identity issues that form and are formed by it. They will cast architecture as the protagonist or antagonist and juxtapose several stories of people within different spheres of the society. The film is conceived of as a design excersise, and potentially a diagram for the design of a house.

Drawings and Photographs

Students will produce a series of drawings and Photographs as experiments to explore the relationship between spatial organisation, tactile features, artifact social behaviours and culture. We will pursue an unique aesthetic which embodies the questions and discoveries in the studies.


Central Market

San Jose, Costa Rica


Maria Paez Gonzalez - Course Director

Maria is a practicing architect, currently working with Foster + Partners as a leading member in the design and construction of Apple Campus, the new Apple headquarters. She has tutored workshops in the Architectural Association and Veritas University and collaborates with Relational Urbanism in several research based projects. She is also the founding member of Fundacion HCGB which aims to preserve the architectural heritage of Coro, Venezuela a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Brendon Carlin - Course Director

Brendon is a Unit Master at the Architectural Association and director at Urban Systems. Brendon has practiced and taught extensively at prominent institutions worldwide including the AA Graduate Design and Make programme, the Berlage Institute, and workshops with several AA Visiting School Programmes and Harvard’s GSD. Through research, mentoring and practice, Brendon develops generative form and space making design processes focused on the potentials of architecture within and against new technological, political, social and cultural realities.

Andrew Houston - Course Tutor

Andrew is a film theory scholar and currently lectures on the development of film expression, contemporary global cinema, Italian neo-realism and French new wave cinema in addition to tutoring post production studio at the Colorado Film School. Andrew has won several awards as a short filmmaker and is releasing his first feature length film this year.

The team


AA School Life

Current Sponsors & Partners


Fundación Historiador Carlos González Batista

The AAVS are non profit research programs, becoming an extension to and embodiment of the AA School’s ‘unit system’ of teaching and learning architecture. The hallmark of this model is the delivery of distinctive, highly focussed design agendas delivered to a small collaborative group of students, architects and other creative people in the development of projects.The AA VS is similarly about learning, exploring, collaborating and experimenting in order to re-imagine the shape, form and expectations of architectural education.

03. Sponsorship OpportunitiesAcademic, Logistic and Further Development

Tropicality AAVS

One student with financial need£695

Sponsor a lecture by an expert in the topics£1000

Support publications and associate your name with preeminent architectural discourse£2000

You would have the opportunity to sponsor the course for a student and have direct contact with them and their research work.

Sponsor an event or lecture for the Students during which they can benefit from the knowledge of an expert on the topics being discussed. We can provide more specific detials of the event ot be sponsored upon

request.

The AAVS has a 3 year research agenda where we will visit Central America, South

East Asia and India. Our Aim is to have the opportunity to showcase our findings each year of research and at the end of the 3 year research agenda

in through a collated publication.

TROPICALITY A NOMADIC VISITING SCHOOL

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Sponsorship Brochure

Documents

Transcript of Sponsorship Brochure