ARCHITECTURE
AA Agendas - Little Worlds
Architectural Association 2014 ISBN 9781907896538 Acqn 30432
Pb 21x30cm 350pp col ills £30
With essays by Brett Steele, Christopher Pierce, Charles Arsene-Henry, Robert Somol,
Barbara Campbell-Lange and a conversation with Madelon Vriesendorp
Little Worlds documents three years of conversations and projects in Diploma Unit 9's ongoing
enquiry into context. At a time when architecture is trying to redefine itself, the issue of context –
how to collect it, make it, shape it, talk about it, and enter one's architecture within it - is more
pressing than ever. The book pulls together a collection of utterly unique and singular worlds that
together argue for a positioning of architecture: not geographically, but rather set within its rich
cultural context shaped by real histories and imagined futures. Ultimately, Little Worlds addresses
a question all architects face at the beginning of their bright futures - how to shape an identity.
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ARCHITECTURE
AA Agendas 12 - Drawings That Count
Architectural Association 2013 ISBN 9781907896262 Acqn 30353
Pb 22x22cm 176pp col ills 320
Edited by Francesca Hughes, with an interview with Mary Beard and essays by Noam Andrews
and David Edgerton
This collection of 60 large drawings produced over five years by AA Diploma 15 addresses the
construction of context by architecture for its own very particular purposes.
No architectural category is more fickle or more artificial than 'context'. A self-declared 'render-
free zone', the unit's interrogations of architecture's seminal sites (antiquity, technology, the future
and its proxies) examine the role of figuration and the exclusion of indeterminacy in the always
already mediated question of context. Through the quiet business of counting, these line
drawings - against the double ascendancy of parametricisation and the glossy rendered
perspective - question architecture's ambivalent relations to the artifice it installs between itself
and the outside world.
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ARCHITECTURE
AA Agendas 11 - Mediating Architecture
Architectural Association 2013 ISBN 9781907896019 Acqn 30415
Pb 17x25cm 120pp col ills £15
Given today's multitude of demands on the built environment, the role of the architect has
extended from being a mere designer and builder to acting as a mediator within a much larger
network of expertise. This mediation takes place on multiple levels - within the building industry,
between public, clients and designers, and between public, clients and designers, and between
the actual design and its environment. To achieve this, the field of work, the tools of design and
the representation of architects needs to develop.
The architect has to design the design process itself. Mediating Architecture demonstrates the
extended role of the architect through the applied work of AA's Diploma Unit 14 within London's
Thames Gateway over three consecutive years. A series of essays reflect this methodology from
the multi-disciplinary perspectives of architecture, urban design, landscape design and
philosophy.
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ARCHITECTURE
AA Agendas 9 - Making Pavilions
Architectural Association 2011 ISBN 9781902902821 Acqn 30424
Pb 17x25cm 184pp ills £15
This book features the experimental pavilion projects carried by the AA's Intermediate Unit 2 over
the past six years.
Over the past six years the students of the Architectural Association's Intermediate Unit 2 have
designed and built a series of experimental pavilions. Structured to follow a year in the life of the
unit, this book presents the processes of the pavilions' design and production, from concept ideas
to workshop fabrication. Essays by the unit's tutors, Charles Walker and Martin Self, explain the
ambitions and pedagogic basis of the programme, rooted in the idea of experiential learning.
Through the voices of students, tutors and anonymous critics, both the educational validity of this
innovative design-build programme and its architectural output is explored.
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ARCHITECTURE
AA Agendas 8 - Nine Problems in the Form of a Pavilion
Architectural Association 2010 ISBN 9781902902739 Acqn 30366
Pb 17x25cm 160pp col ills £15
Created as part of the 2008 tenth anniversary celebrations of the Design Research Laboratory,
the AA DRL TEN Pavilion is one of those built projects that push the conventions in architecture
and structural engineering as well as the building materials industry.
From Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion to the Serpentine Gallery's annual summer
pavilions designed by architects such as Toyo Ito, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, the production
of pavilions has been at the forefront of architectural experimentation. Because of their temporary
nature and loose functional requirements, pavilions can be realised as a pure expression of the
way in which building materials are manufactured, organised, managed and assembled. People
might not automatically categorise pavilions as great works of architecture, but they have
nonetheless provided a vital platform for challenging current practice and making it evolve into the
future. Created as part of the 2008 tenth anniversary celebrations of the Design Research
Laboratory, the AA DRL TEN Pavilion is one of those built projects that push the conventions in
architecture and structural engineering as well as the building materials industry. A fullscale
construction built by a group of students as part of their academic activities, the pavilion was
conceived as a way of bringing together digital explorations in architectural design with state-of-
the-art manufacturing processes and advanced structural calculations based on non-linear stress
analysis. This book, edited by Yusuke Obuchi and Alan Dempsey, recounts the story of the
creation of the DRL TEN Pavilion and through it illustrates the design, development and assembly
processes involved as well as the structure's place within the evolving teaching methodologies of
the DRL as a whole.
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ARCHITECTURE
AA Agendas 7 - Articulated Grounds: Mediating Environment and Culture
Architectural Association 2009 ISBN 9781902902715 Acqn 30376
Pb 17x25cm 166pp col ills £15
Work from the AA's Diploma Unit 2 fuses two seemingly mutually exclusive paradigms in recent
architectural discourse, mediating between technological performance as well as the
manipulation of grounds, defined here as the external and internal circulatory systems that
structure social organisations. In the process, the unit defines a new social agenda and aesthetic
philosophy for transforming established design strategies, and lends conventional notions of
sustainable design a new civic and cultural relevance.
The projects are all either located within or influenced by a Brazilian context, rich in sculptural,
variegated landscapes and African as well as indigenous Indian influences. Innovative design
proposals shown in this book illustrate symbiotic relationships between urban society,
environmental conditioning and landscape by articulating ground organisations to mediate and
synchronise both environmental and cultural flows.
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