PROJECTS REVIEW EXHIBITION 2009 ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
1 Comments Thursday, July 02, 2009 | 11:14 pm.
Projects Review 2009 opens tomorrow, Friday 3 July, offering an overview of the AA's 600+ full-time students projects displaying from drawings, modeels, installations, photographs, to large 1:1 working prototypes, intractive media, including the AA summer pavillion in Bedford Square.
The PhD programme exhibition, curated by Kirk Wooller and myself, Emanuel de Sousa, unites all of these modes of representation and presentation, through a full-scale installation in the reception area. Comprising a blown-up tiled catalogue of the PhDs completed and approved until now at the AA, the entrance wall sees itself profanated by a real-time graffiti intervention that tags all ongoing research (and other things) in the institution, challenging the established knowledge.
Projects Review 2009 runs from Friday 3 July to Saturday 25 July 2009.
[ images: PhD Projects Review 2009 exhibition area, AA Reception. Photos by Emanuel de Sousa. Please find more photos here ]
Labels: AA PhD Dialogues, architectural association, london, projects review 2009
Here is the abstract of the paper I presented at the AA PhD Dialogues 2009: Ideology in Transparency, on Friday, 8 May, entitled 'Other Transparencies: Heterotopia Disrupting Modern Self-Transparency'.
'The paper investigates ideology and heterotopia in relation to the social ideal of modernity as ‘the utopia of absolute self-transparency’ [Vattimo, 1989].
The subjection of modern society to scientific analysis – analogous to the one applied in the natural sciences – was not only an epistemological programme but also a revolutionary move towards the ideal of a radical transformation of society – the self-transparency of reason and the self-consciousness of ‘being’ in the public sphere.
The belief that society could be transformed through similar processes by which matter and natural form were being transformed implied a framework of unilinear (universal) history; one that would come to an end with the end of revolutionary utopia of the nineteen-sixties, making impossible in principle the realisation of self-transparency.
The utopia of aesthetic rehabilitation of the beautiful and the everyday was now a distorted counter-utopia, coping with an idea of ‘being’, not as ground and as stability of eternal structures, but rather as event and as plural ethics of interpretation.
‘Other Transparencies’ explores the appropriations of the term heterotopia – as textual and geographical ‘other’ sites – in cultural and spatial theory, in order to diagnose a ‘transferred’ understanding of ideology, in contrast to the supposedly ‘post-ideological’ conditions of the present.'
A forthcoming publication on this year's theme, Ideology in Transparency, is being edited by Kirk Wooller and myself, Emanuel de Sousa.
For more information on the AA PhD Dialogues 2010, please visit AA PhD Dialogues.
'The paper investigates ideology and heterotopia in relation to the social ideal of modernity as ‘the utopia of absolute self-transparency’ [Vattimo, 1989].
The subjection of modern society to scientific analysis – analogous to the one applied in the natural sciences – was not only an epistemological programme but also a revolutionary move towards the ideal of a radical transformation of society – the self-transparency of reason and the self-consciousness of ‘being’ in the public sphere.
The belief that society could be transformed through similar processes by which matter and natural form were being transformed implied a framework of unilinear (universal) history; one that would come to an end with the end of revolutionary utopia of the nineteen-sixties, making impossible in principle the realisation of self-transparency.
The utopia of aesthetic rehabilitation of the beautiful and the everyday was now a distorted counter-utopia, coping with an idea of ‘being’, not as ground and as stability of eternal structures, but rather as event and as plural ethics of interpretation.
‘Other Transparencies’ explores the appropriations of the term heterotopia – as textual and geographical ‘other’ sites – in cultural and spatial theory, in order to diagnose a ‘transferred’ understanding of ideology, in contrast to the supposedly ‘post-ideological’ conditions of the present.'
A forthcoming publication on this year's theme, Ideology in Transparency, is being edited by Kirk Wooller and myself, Emanuel de Sousa.
For more information on the AA PhD Dialogues 2010, please visit AA PhD Dialogues.
Labels: AA PhD Dialogues, heterotopia, ideology, transparency
Here is the poster for this year's AA PhD Symposium, AA PhD Dialogues 2009: Ideology in Transparency which announced the event around the world.
I designed it using as a background image a photograph of mine taken in Oxford on a greyish day a while ago.
I designed it using as a background image a photograph of mine taken in Oxford on a greyish day a while ago.
Labels: AA PhD Dialogues, design, ideology, oxford, transparency
‘IDEOLOGY IN TRANSPARENCY’
AA PhD DIALOGUES
2nd Annual AA PhD Research Symposium
Architectural Association
School of Architecture
36 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES
Friday 8 May 2009, 10.00 – 7.00
aaphdsymposium.net
AA PhD Dialogues is an annual international event organised by a select group of PhD candidates at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.
AA PhD Dialogues is the follow-up event to the 2008 AA PhD Symposium, ‘The Critique of the New: Questioning the Legitimization of Newness Through Technology’, with Mark Wigley (Columbia University GSAPP) as keynote speaker.
Each year a theme is selected based upon a particular set of terms that address current questions within contemporary architectural discourse. This theme operates as an umbrella under which individual PhD research can be collectively discussed in an international forum.
THEME
The notion of transparency has achieved a continued, if varied, currency in architectural discourse throughout the twentieth-century. Along with a multitude of material attributes, transparency advocates a shifting, yet ever-present, ideological sensibility. Towards the latter part of the twentieth-century, however, the general notion of transparency as an ideological mechanism began to decline. Today, while a literal sense of transparency remains, seemingly its ideology does not. This symposium aims to resurface the question of ideology in (contemporary) architectural discourse by creating dialogues around the following questions:
_ As the notion of transparency appears to be superseded by the immateriality of the digital, how can contemporary architectural research address transparency’s role as a technological innovation, as a mechanism for design, and, above all, as an ideological device?
_ Do new design technologies and media produce more transparent systems of communication?
_ Despite the apparent displacement of ideology in current architectural arguments and projects, what are the subjacent ideologies that remain and how might we be able to scrutinise them?
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Roemer van Toorn, from the Berlage Institute
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Doreen Bernath, Nerma Cridge, Eva Eylers, Kris Mun, Emanuel de Sousa, Tania Lopez Winkler and Kirk Wooller
AA PhD DIALOGUES
2nd Annual AA PhD Research Symposium
Architectural Association
School of Architecture
36 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES
Friday 8 May 2009, 10.00 – 7.00
aaphdsymposium.net
AA PhD Dialogues is an annual international event organised by a select group of PhD candidates at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.
AA PhD Dialogues is the follow-up event to the 2008 AA PhD Symposium, ‘The Critique of the New: Questioning the Legitimization of Newness Through Technology’, with Mark Wigley (Columbia University GSAPP) as keynote speaker.
Each year a theme is selected based upon a particular set of terms that address current questions within contemporary architectural discourse. This theme operates as an umbrella under which individual PhD research can be collectively discussed in an international forum.
THEME
The notion of transparency has achieved a continued, if varied, currency in architectural discourse throughout the twentieth-century. Along with a multitude of material attributes, transparency advocates a shifting, yet ever-present, ideological sensibility. Towards the latter part of the twentieth-century, however, the general notion of transparency as an ideological mechanism began to decline. Today, while a literal sense of transparency remains, seemingly its ideology does not. This symposium aims to resurface the question of ideology in (contemporary) architectural discourse by creating dialogues around the following questions:
_ As the notion of transparency appears to be superseded by the immateriality of the digital, how can contemporary architectural research address transparency’s role as a technological innovation, as a mechanism for design, and, above all, as an ideological device?
_ Do new design technologies and media produce more transparent systems of communication?
_ Despite the apparent displacement of ideology in current architectural arguments and projects, what are the subjacent ideologies that remain and how might we be able to scrutinise them?
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Roemer van Toorn, from the Berlage Institute
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Doreen Bernath, Nerma Cridge, Eva Eylers, Kris Mun, Emanuel de Sousa, Tania Lopez Winkler and Kirk Wooller
Labels: AA PhD Dialogues, ideology, roemer van toorn, symposium, transparency
AA MANIFESTO: IDEOLOGY was a pre-event (a 'beer summit' to tell the truth!) organised as a pre-event to the AA PhD Dialogues ‘Ideology in Transparency’, 8 May 2009.
Here's the calling we launched along with a bunch of posters (which I designed) that announced the event throughout the AA and wider London.
'Calling All Visionaries!
Are you disgruntled with the current state of architecture?
Do you have a better vision for its immediate future?
Can you formulate this vision into a 1-minute manifesto?
Will you seize this opportunity to shout it from the rooftops?'
Are you disgruntled with the current state of architecture?
Do you have a better vision for its immediate future?
Can you formulate this vision into a 1-minute manifesto?
Will you seize this opportunity to shout it from the rooftops?'
Labels: AA Manifesto, AA PhD Dialogues, architectural association, architecture, beer, ideology, london, manifesto, visionaires
