Herculine's Truth Diploma 12 2020 -2021 - INIGO MINNS & MANIJEH VERGHESE - Architectural ...
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Diploma 12 2020 -2021 Herculine’s Truth The Institution and the ‘Other’ INIGO MINNS & MANIJEH VERGHESE
Herculine’s Truth
The Institution and the ‘Other’
My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of
truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity – Michel Foucault
Prison, Museum, University, Church, Asylum, Embassy: Institutions like these
not only shape the values that society holds as true, they also maintain them
over time. Through the narratives they weave we understand ourselves and our
relationship to the world around us. However, recent events have shown us that
many institutions have been exposed as outdated, peddling arcane stories and
redundant myths in the name of truth.
Herculine Barbin was an intersex individual who resisted classification. Michel
Foucault said in his introduction to Barbin’s memoirs that the objective of social
institutions was to restrict “the free choice of indeterminate individuals.” While
Barbin initially enjoyed “the happy limbo of non-identity”, society’s need for
them to conform by being assigned a binary gender was enforced by the many
institutions they moved between.
The questions we will be exploring this year are: what are the myths that these
types of institutions maintain? What are the new stories that need telling? How
do we resist the need to order, classify and separate things in order to understand
them; rejecting binary thinking in favour of a more fluid understanding of
society and the built environment? And, how can architectural interventions and
alternative forms of practice be used to shift institutions towards defining a better
world?
To do this we will explore the voices of what has been termed the ‘other’ (those
who sit outside of what institutions define as the norm) as a means to identify
institutional fault-lines so as to reframe the values that they espouse. We will look
at how both institutions and the architecture that frames them can be redesigned
as a means to build alternative realities and speculate on future worlds that
empower those without agency.
The unit will continue to develop individual forms of strategic architectural
practice. We will disrupt existing institutions through 1:1 interventions to create
impactful spatial proposals. Through focussing on an urgent agenda, expressed
using diverse media and modes of operation, architecture will be transformed into
an agent that determines our own truths without having to rely on the institution
to be our truth-teller.
The Choreum - A new institutional practice working with museum artefacts and
performance to revive objects that have been removed from their source communities.
Russell Royer, AADipl(Hons) 2020 – Diploma 12 2019–20
3
Six Unit Themes - Who? What?
Where? When? Why? & How?
Throughout the year, the unit will use six questions to govern our decision making
in the crafting of our architectural worlds: Who? What? Where? When? Why?
. . . and How? These questions are common strategies employed by journalists,
forensic investigators and researchers when trying to piece together a scenario,
develop a research agenda or complete a narrative. Their origin can be found in
Ancient Greece within Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics where he employed these
simple questions as a framework to explain the reasoning behind moral actions.
For our world-shaping ambitions, these questions or themes can be explained as
follows:
1. Who: Community - Who are the stakeholders within the institution and what
are their roles? What are the social/political trends that they are concerned
with? What rituals or institutional activities relate to them? Who is your
audience? Who supports the creation of your world financially, socially,
ethically, and/ or technically?
2. What: Architectural Language - What are the materials of your institution?
Are they physical, is it performative or action based, or is a social sculpture you
are creating. What spatial qualities do you need to support your programme?
What forms, colours and textures result from materials applied to your
spaces? What fabrication techniques, tools and procedures do you employ?
3. Where: Spatial Context - Where is the project sited to achieve the
greatest impact? How do politics and cultural activities in the area affect
the proposal? Who or what of significance is in the immediate vicinity?
4. When: Time - What is the strategic significance of when this is this happening?
How do specific activities unfold and when do different people engage with
them? What cycles and repetitions occur?
5. Why: Legacy - What does the project want to achieve? Who does it impact
and how? What are the criteria for success and how do you measure the
success of your project? What change is brought about? Why should we
care?
6. How: Practice - What is the larger world that your institution constructs?
What new roles do you imagine for the architect? What media and techniques
will you adopt? How do community, architectural language, context and
time come together through specific practice methodologies and strategies?
Applying this set of probing questions to the projects, and considering how they
interrelate, provides the richness and complexity to your speculations on the future
required to make them credible and impactful.
Phantom Sensations - Post-amputation rehabilitation tools to avoid phantom limb pain.
Niloufar Esfandiary, 2016.
5
Studio Alchemist - A new architectural practice exploring forms of guardianship
of the natural environment through performance, character and virtual space.
Who?
Tekla Gedeon – Diploma 12 2019–20
We are looking for students who want to find alternatives to the existing – who
want to learn how to speculate in a persistent and precise way and transform
those speculations into new realities. You will do this by identifying strategic
opportunities in your chosen institutions and finding ways to disrupt, transform
and reinvent them. This might mean working with existing power structures,
Diploma 12 will operate as language, media, urban or infrastructural networks but could also mean
considering technology or legislation as a cultured space that needs to be disturbed
as well as social norms that need to be challenged. As institutions use the stories
an incubator for students they tell to describe what we should think and do, we will work with the idea
of ‘telling’ as a means of describing these new conditions. Throughout the year,
you will embed yourself within an existing institution to test the impact of urgent
to identify urgent agendas,
proposals that disrupt or change it at 1:1 and how we as architects might innovate
and introduce new types of fluid, empowering and non-binary institutions or
‘extitutions’ (see page 15).
develop visionary strategies Using the unit brief as a framework to construct your own brief for the year
ahead, you will question traditional architectural practice and look for alternative
models and activities. Through collecting case studies, we will identify like-
and invent new forms of minded practitioners as a community to operate within, and find the necessary
funding, legislative loopholes and sympathetic power structures to deploy our
practices in reality. The creation of an impactful project and practice could be
architectural practice in order done in a number of ways and will depend on each student’s own agenda and
sensibilities. However, most projects will incorporate combinations of the following
approaches: 1. Using built form to enhance new communities and conditions. 2.
to instrument institutional
Using critical or speculative design practice to change our awareness around
issues or question established paradigms. 3. Thinking about architectural practice
as a form of cultural production and designing events and other elements that
stimulate change in a particular direction through engagement.
change. A crucial aspect of your practice will be defining specific strategies that will
inform your project over time. These strategies will be described using the six
themes in order to achieve an architectural language and a defined legacy.
7
What?
The unit will explore
alternative strategies for
Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours), Lawrence Lek, 2015.
living, which can be brought
to existing contexts through In Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy Is Yours), Lawrence Lek simulates a tour
through an alternate future where the Royal Academy is sold to an anonymous
architectural projects and
billionaire as a private home. Shown in situ, the film is a critique that seeks to
subvert the unquestioned authority of established institutions. With a similar goal
in mind, the unit will work with drawing and fabrication techniques, as well as
a variety of time based media to produce architectural narratives that reveal and
practices. We will test these disrupt the structures that create our built environment.
Initially we will produce speculative and radical propositions that disrupt existing
speculations with drawings, conditions. These speculative visions will serve as provocations to challenge the
norms present in existing institutions. Following this, through staged disruptions,
real life collaborations and carefully crafted world building exercises, we will take
time-based media, staged
the speculations and charge them with reality to heighten their impact and effect.
The cultures and contexts of the projects are set by you following a period of
events and social actions at
research at the beginning of the year and will depend on the specific agendas and
research questions that are defined within each individual project. The world you
create will be described through the 5 key themes of the unit to produce a rigorous
and thoughtful project - resulting in an architectural proposition and a broader
different scales. strategy aimed to bring about change. In addition, we want you to use your
projects to explore the limits and potentials of your future practice as architects.
9
Term 1 – New Stories:
Understanding Context and
Speculating on Alternatives
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what
stories we tell to tell other stories with; what thoughts think thoughts... It matters
what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
– Donna J. Haraway
We will start the year by researching institutions, framing our search around the
idea of ‘the other’ or those who fall outside of institutional norms. Taking this term
as a provocation, we will use ‘the other’ to identify how institutions speak about
those that have traditionally been forgotten or overlooked. We will consider the
institutional stakeholders and how their value systems might conflict with or
support other emerging value systems. This could be the conflict between the
social and the political aspirations of the context or between different economic
stakeholders, or how power structures and technology affect the architectures of
the institution and perpetuate its current activities.
Taking a critical position, each student will investigate a space of conflict in
detail to scrutinise it, revealing the larger cultural forces at play (political, social,
material, economic etc). The evidence collected will then be used to design a
disruptive object, action or figure – a trojan horse - that will transform the existing
institution to bring about change. A series of workshops using time-based media
and trend forecasting, as well as contact with other experts and institutions, will
help determine the technical agendas and strategies that will make up each
student’s project. Having gained this expertise, we will further define project
strategies by looking at individual practice methodologies.
We will develop a strategic timeline at the largest scale of the project, zooming
in to then draw a more precise programmatic timeline that begins to answer
the questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? specific to our individual
projects. With the cultural agendas for the project now established, we will begin
describing a proposed world based on the desired change you wish to bring about.
We will ask the questions, what values do you maintain are critical for the
future? And, what is the architecture and the society that these values bring
about? How do you use the telling of your new world and those within it as a
strategy to speculate on alternative futures?
But was met by shadows lurking... Precious Moments - Detail from a story written for different generations
within families to reveal the changing values around protection of the
Earth’s resources, and the use of plastics in the built environment.
Plastic Stories. Iman Datoo – Diploma 12, 2018–19
11Museum of Banned Objects – an alternative future where
birth control is banned, only to be understood as a historic
object viewed within the institution of the museum.
Ellie Sachs and Matt Starr, 2018
13Term 2 – New Bodies:
Testing the Proposal through
Practice
‘I would like to suggest the concept of the ‘extitution’. This is a kind of ‘formless life’
that exceeds, disturbs and does not fit with an institution. Some examples include
the ‘gay’ who does not fit the institution of the ‘traditional’ nuclear family, the
‘refugee’ who does not fit into the modern state, or the ‘idler’ who does not fit with
the disciplines of the modern workplace.’
- Andre Spicer, Extitutions: The other side of institutions
Term 2 focuses on architectural practice with the project serving as a catalyst for
social and cultural renewal. Taking the cultural conditions, values and strategies
identified previously we will develop these into refined architectural proposals.
At first you will produce speculations on new institutions, or ‘extitutions’ as
defined by Andre Spicer, within the context you have been looking at that serve
and empower the voice of the ‘other’. Through the creation of new bodies and
architectures within your institutional context we will explore alternative world
views, new forms of identity and parallel truths.
Jonas Staal’s New World Summit is an artistic and political organisation that
develops parliaments with and for stateless states, autonomic groups, and
blacklisted political organizations. The direct engagement and performances
held in the installations allow for a testing of the limits of democratic ideas and
processes whilst exploring the architectures that might enable this.
In a similar way, we will spend Term 2 testing and prodding the feasibility
of these speculations embarking on a series of 1:1 disruptive tests, simulations
and virtual worlds that challenge the assumptions that have been made. These
actions will be designed to have verifiable consequences that inform the proposed
programmes, fabrication processes and spaces. They will be used to push the
technical and social dreams of the project towards a concrete and architectural
reality - no longer mere speculations, they will enable the radical visionary ideas
to gain truth, credence and technical precision.
The New World Summit - Jonas Staal, 2012-2017
15Land Instrument - An example of a Term 2 simulation: Taking an acoustic
survey of the Lake district to explore the healing potential of sound in the
natural environment
Fai Chung – Diploma 12, 2019–20
Soon Min Hong, Risk Theme Park, 2015
17Term 3 – New Systems:
Strategies for Change
Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the
principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward,
with only one truth – mine...The other of Thought is precisely this altering.
Then I have to act... I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence
whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance.
– Eduoard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
Throughout history architects have transformed radical, visionary ideas into
architectural form - creating innovative or alternative insertions that change their
existing contexts in line with the value systems they believed in. By doing this
they have not only changed the spaces we live in but also brought about shifts
in the way societies behave.
After Pearson Lloyd redesigned the signage for A&E departments across the
NHS, aggressive body language and threatening behaviour fell by 50%. The
introduction of Atul Gawande’s checklist across 8 hospitals in the US led to an
immediate fall in the average death rate by over 40% and a drop in further
complications by over a third. Both these examples show the direct impact a
design solution can have on improving the practice and output of an institution
– all just by thinking about who occupies these spaces, and how they use and
operate within them.
In Term 3 our role will transform to that of architectural strategists as we continue
working within this tradition of architects redefining value systems; developing
world building projects by looking for faint signals in today’s society that can
become the drivers of change for tomorrow’s worlds. With an emphasis on
transforming fictional representations into real, architectural manifestations we
will work at the scale of society, the city, the institutional building and the detail.
To this end we will establish the people who we need to work with, and the
organisational structures which will help make our ideas a reality.
We will introduce our proposals as architectural catalysts that define new values,
with a specific focus on the real legacy or impact of the project. We will ask:
What will the institution of the future look like? How can notions of ‘the other’ be
reframed? What are the architectures, landscapes or spaces in these new worlds?
Who are the figures, communities or audiences that inhabit them? And what is
the best media to effectively communicate them through? We will define the
limits or thresholds of our worlds and the larger context they sit within. In Term
3, we will bring our worlds to life.
Other Ways of Being - Reading the City - Using the book format as a strategy for urban
regeneration by collecting and communicating the memories of residents in war torn Mosul.
Sara Ibrahim Abed – Diploma 12, 2019–20
19Fake Earths - A Planetary Theatre Play. Using the theatre format to explore
alternative landscape agendas and architectural modes of operation
Neme Studio 2018
21Where? New Survivalism - a survival kit to explore the character of The Rewilder using designed
objects and storytelling as a contemporary interpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Parsons & Charlesworth for the Istanbul Design Biennial, 2014
Embedded research and testing ‘Institutions are not monoliths. They are sets of people. So you have to figure out
will take the form of a series
who are the allies within the institutional hierarchy. The ones that are supportive
of the demands can help advance them. The ones that are not sure have to be
talked to so they can get on board. And the ones oppositional to demands around
racial and gender justice, around ecologicical survivability and sustainability,
of meetings with people and they will have to make way for people who understand what we need to do to
survive as a species on a planet composed of interdependent ecosystems.’
- Sasha Costanza-Chock, ferment.tv
institutions. These will give While Covid-19 has limited our ability to travel, we will use this time instead as
us an insight into the types
an opportunity to really embed ourselves within institutions and understand how
they work. Instead of a Unit Trip, this year we will plan a series of visits and
conversations with contacts within your chosen institution to establish how you
can change, disrupt, augment and alter their existing systems and spaces. You
of conditions we will be should establish a network of different variations of your institution and how
they operate. What is the counter-institution or the extitution that sits alongside
your insititution?
working in and the practice During Open Week in Term 1, each of you will design a character from within
your institutional world as someone that has traditionally been excluded. By
methodologies that can be creating an institutional kit of parts, you will start to define their identity through
their tools, media, language, objects, data, props and stories.This kit of parts will
also be a means to engage your audience in presentations and allow them to
used to shape new worlds.
insert themselves into your institution.
Where possible we will arrange group activities and shorter trips as the year
progresses. We will also work with experts to hold a series of workshops to develop
new practice methodologies and ideas with which to craft your worlds.
23When?
The unit will search for Angels Alone - A project inserting VR technologies into prisons to rethink a system
based around rehabilitation rather than punishment.
weak signals suggested
Sebastian Tiew, Diploma 12, 2017-18
by trends, behaviours
and norms within the Situating our projects in the near future places an emphasis on the change we
would like to bring about, or avoid. By adopting forecasting techniques used in
present that suggest certain forensics, journalism and engineering, and applying them to architecture, we find
signals that suggest the contexts in which the changes will occur. But the resulting
designs don’t always have to be about prediction - they can, as Margaret Atwood
emerging patterns and their
explains, also be about “antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail,
maybe it won’t happen.”
Our future scenarios will operate between prophecy and warning, existing in a
implications going forward. timeframe that is not so near to overlap with the present, but not so far to fall
within the realm of science fiction. We will then begin to test our design strategies
and built forms by simulating conditions of the near future and by developing a
We will analyse the past criteria for success to measure the value of our projects. Initially we will produce
speculative and radical spatial propositions that disrupt existing conditions.
Following this, through staged events at different scales, material artefacts and
and experiment with the
carefully crafted world building exercises, we aim to take these speculations and
charge them with reality to heighten their impact and effect.
present in order to design for
You will determine the approach, tone and attitude towards the cultural context
of your institutional project through your analysis of spatial case studies at
the beginning of the year and how you begin to test them through a series of
disruptive events. Ultimately, the specific agenda of each individual project will
the future. define the territory of the near future and determine the spatial, social, economic
and political transformation that will come into effect.
25Split - An intervention in collaboration with the Warumungu tribe from Fai Chung, 2019–20
the Northern Territory of Australia that challenges the power structures and
authorities that create the narrative around landscape and geology
Fabien Knecht, 2017
27Why?
Central to the unit agenda is Nana Oforiatta Ayim collects alternative forms of knowledge through the medium of the kiosk and
the pop culture tradition of kiosk culture in Ghana as part of her pan-African cultural encyclopedia
the need to develop projects project that maps the cultural landscape of an entire continent.
that can bring about change. ‘I’ve always made it very clear that for the sake of a deeper truth, you have to
be inventive, you have to be imaginative. Otherwise you will end up being the
accountants of truth. I’m after something deeper. I call it the ‘ecstatic truth’ – the
As architects we are in a ‘ecstasy of truth.’ ~ Werner Herzog
In Diploma 12, we will develop personal agendas to drive individual practices. The
position not just to design for
unit will be an incubator where you will construct your identity, and identify the
core concepts, strategies and agendas that you are interested in exploring - both
now as a student but also thinking of your longer term practice as your career
the future but to design the
progresses.
We are interested in urgent issues that matter, and how we can intervene in
the specific contexts in which these issues are embedded. Here, we will help you
future itself. We will explore develop methodologies to work through these ideas, and will explore interesting
formats and engaging media as tools to communicate your project, in a critical
and effective way, into the context in which it is to be read.
what forms of architectural Our goal is to challenge the nature of conventional architectural practice by
using the unit as a way to test and invent your unique modes of operation. We
projects and practices could
advocate for greater fluidity between the worlds of academia and practice, using
research and making to inform and test design decisions, and new forms of media
to communicate them to contemporary audiences in exciting and experimental
ways. We will explore how we can strategically position ourselves in the world
be invented to do this. to produce the greatest impact.
Ultimately we do this as we believe architectural practice can be a key strategic
tool to implement change.
29How?
A look inside the space of production – the tools and materials used for architectural
With media and designed performances produced by the office of Studio Alchemist
Tekla Gedeon – Diploma 12, 2019–20
actions as portals into
our new worlds, we will We encourage you to bring your own diverse interests into the unit to shape your
project. These interests will be given rigour and precision through a clear unit
hone our technical skills,
methodology. We will help you develop critical agendas, research strategies, and
a clear criteria for success to measure your alternative future scenarios against.
identify experts in related
Over the course of the year, we will go through the following stages to develop
your projects:
1. Research - Collecting, documenting and analysing institutions and the physical
fields, and find ways to 2.
and social structures that exist around them.
Urgency/Conflict - Identifying critical issues to serve as a catalyst for the
larger project such as emerging conditions of importance, power structures,
bring communities together 3.
disappearing resources, or communities that have been marginalised or
‘othered’.
Craft - Developing material and architectural language through making.
through new understandings
4. Speculation - Imagining alternative futures, exploring architectural fantasies,
dreaming of new communities and envisioning architectural alternatives.
5. World Building - Exploring successful and failed techniques from a number
of actions, spaces and built
of disciplines to create total environments. Learn from this canon to create a
strategy as a means to bring about change
6. Practice and Process - Define the media and methods that best suit the specific
project objective and agenda, thinking how best you can deploy architectural
form. means to achieve this goal in terms of what you want from your future
practice.
31Technical Studies
The technical resolution
of the project focuses on
the material consequences Compression Carpet - New forms of immersive tools for the future, designed as
antidotes to our submissive nature towards technology.
Lucy McRae, 2019
of architecture looking Using your architectural analysis and speculations from Term 1 and strategically
deployed 1:1 tests from Term 2, Technical Studies will continue to refine your
at procedures, craft and
attitude towards the material, environmental and fabrication processes required
in your proposal. We will adopt both a practical and critical attitude to explore
the possible technical qualities of your project.
fabrication, with the 1:1 Referring to emerging technologies and new scientific developments, as well as
traditional fabrication techniques, we will develop a progressive attitude to the
technical aspects of the larger project. We will explore them according to the
event used to test our core unit themes to develop a technical strategy aligning with the architectural.
We will respond to architectural case studies gathered throughout the year to
understand how historical examples operate in relation to your proposed world.
material hypotheses through
This will help us to understand how behavioural qualities are linked to material or
spatial decisions, giving new meaning to how we measure technical performance
of an element or space in the institutions of our near futures.
its successes, failures and Starting from Term 1, we will develop the TS with the final technical report
to be submitted at the end of Term 2. Where possible, we will augment the
A3 document with different interactive time-based media such as animated
transformations. drawings, performative models, audio recordings or annotated films to capture
our investigations.
33Workshops and Expertise
You can’t change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down,
taking the overview, you see pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want
to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be
part of the weaving.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
We will be working with a number of institutions and individuals in workshops
and juries to develop skills and refine the critical angle and technical resolution
of your projects. These meetings will be designed to expand our understanding
of practice and help you find new pathways to developing your own way of
working.
We will be looking at the following to work with:
• Nana Oforiatta Ayim on alternative forms of knowledge
• The Decorators on institutional disruptions
• ARUP Foresight on tools of speculation
• Tina Gorjanc on speculative scenarios
• Victoria Gould/Complicité Theatre Company on performance and maths
• Cecilie Hansen on the anthropology of design
• Marguerite Humeau on ritual behaviours in alternative futures
• Natalie Kane on curating digital futures
• Lawrence Lek on constructing alternative worlds
• Pearson Lloyd on redesigning communication
• Thandi Loewenson on untangling exclusionary dynamics
• Makerversity on new forms of production
• China Mieville on What if? writing the future
• Anna Mills on graphic novel illustration and narrative
• Nissa Nishikawa on choreography and the body
• Marina Otero Verzier on new institutions
• Lucia Pietroiusti on engaging audiences and rethinking formats
• Thomas J Price on celebrating the anonymous figure
• CREAM Projects on world-building and game design
• Michael Prokopow on material cultures
• Ben Rivers on film and the outsider
• NEME Studio on environmental imagination
• RCA Sculpture Staff and Students on form and material
• Andre Spicer on exstitutions
• Dean Sully on conservation science
• Sissell Tolaas on scents and space
• Thomas Thwaites on living your world
• Owen Wells on digital animation
• Aaron Williamson on scripted spaces
Customs House - A reconstruction of the Folkestone Custom House through which 19th
Century travellers to Britain would pass as part of the entry procedure. Used here as one
of a set of urban rooms in which events and actions can take place around the town.
The Decorators, 2017
35Calendar
TERM 1 - NEW STORIES: UNDERSTANDING CONTEXT AND SPECULATIONS
WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION WEEK 7: STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT &
REFINING EXPERTISE
WEEK 2: : RESEARCH & METHODOLOGY WEEK 8: STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT &
INTRODUCTION REFINING EXPERTISE
WEEK 3: RESEARCH & METHODOLOGY WEEK 9: STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT &
*Institution analysis - find examples and map power structures REFINING EXPERTISE
*internal jury with TS Tutors to develop strategy
WEEK 4: CULTURES IN CONFLICT – EVIDENCING WEEK 10: FUTURE SCENARIO WORKSHOP &
*identify experts and networks within institutions to contact SPECULATION
*Exercise to create a 12 scene play to define the other
WEEK 5: CULTURES IN CONFLICT -EVIDENCING WEEK 11: FUTURE SCENARIO & SPECULATION
*jury to present institutional research *start planning institutional disruption to be run in Term 2
WEEK 6: EMBEDDED RESEARCH &ACTIONS WEEK 12: FUTURE SCENARIO & JURY
*Open Week *end of term jury to present scenario and strategy
*Over the Break, all students should use a range of media to define the 5Ws of their institution
5th Years to develop technical thesis and structure of submission
TERM 2 - NEW BODIES: TESTING THE PROPOSAL THROUGH PRACTICE
WEEK 1: 5Ws & MEDIA WEEK 7: WORLD BUILDING
*revised portfolio and architectural strategy jury *Using your media describe the materiality/technical aspects of the
world
WEEK 2: REVISE 5Ws & MEDIA WEEK 8: WORLD BUILDING
*Portfolio workshop *refining practice and technical qualities
WEEK 3: PRACTICE AND ACTIVATION WEEK 9: WORLD BUILDING
*TS5 Final Submission
WEEK 4: PLANNING DISRUPTIONS WEEK 10: WORLD BUILDING
*1:1 Tests *4th Year Previews
WEEK 5: STAGING DISRUPTIONS/OPEN WEEK WEEK 11: WORLD BUILDING
* 1:1 Tests, TS5 Interim / Open Jury *5th Year Previews
WEEK 6: INSTITUTION vs. EXTITUTION
*jury to present contexts, practices, 1:1 Disruptions, strategies and
proposals
*Over the Break, all students should arrange meetings and presentations with institutional experts to inform your project
5th Years to continue to integrate TS ideas into overall project
TERM 3 - NEW SYSTEMS: STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE
WEEK 1: EXPERTISE & WORLD-BUILDING WEEK 6: LEGACY & IMPACT
*portfolio review & jury *presentation rehearsals
WEEK 2: RE-STAGE DISRUPTION WEEK 7: 4TH YEAR TABLES
*making the project real
WEEK 3: MEDIA & COMMUNICATION WEEK 8: 5TH YEAR TABLES
*describing strategy & presentation workshop *plan exhibition
WEEK 4: WORLD BUILDING WEEK 9: EXTERNAL EXAMINERS
*develop description of the world and it values *projects review exhibition
WEEK 5: RESOLVING INSTITUTIONAL
STRATEGY
*Final Jury
The Institute of Trust - an exploration into how trust can be measured, analysed and
designed into architectural elements, materials, spaces and language to preserve the
institution.
Fabienne Tjia – Diploma 12, 2017–18
37References
World Building: Architectural Language
• Future Histories - Lizzie O’Shea • ExtraStateCraft - Keller Easterling Press
• Fiction as Method – Sternberg • The Architecture of Closed Worlds - Lydia Kallipoliti
• Utopia as Method, The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society - R. Levitas • Your Private Sky - R. Buckminster Fuller Architectural Language
• The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order - George Monbiot • Materiability - http://materiability.com/about/
• Staying with the Trouble – Donna Haraway • Never Modern - Irenee Scalbert & 6a Architects
• How to Build a Universe - Phillip K Dick • Radical Matter - Franklin Till
• Speculative Everything – Dunne and Raby • Transmaterial - http://transmaterial.net/
• Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance - Robert N Proctor
• Fictioning - David Burrows & Simon O’Sullivan Practice:
• Dreamscapes of Modernity – Sheila Jasanoff • Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need - Sasha Constanza
• Notes: On Ghosts, Disputes and Killer Bodies Chock
• The City as Commons – Stavros Stavrides • Artificial Hells – Claire Bishop
• The Internet Does Not Exist - e-flux journal • Four Walls and a Roof – Reinier de Graaf
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins • Future Practice - Rory Hyde R
• Why We Build - Rowan Moore • Fitzcaraldo & My Best Fiend - Werner Herzog
• Wargaming - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame • The world game – Buckminster Fuller
• Talking to my daughter about the economy - Yanis Varoufakis • Architecture Depends - Jeremy Till
• Emissaries - Ian Cheng • Drawing, writing, Embodying: John Hejduk’s Masquesof Architecture - Amy Bragdon Gilley
• Images - Pierre Huyghe, Wade Guyton
World Building & Narrative
• The Power - Naomi Alderman
The Institution & The Other: • The God Child - Nana Oforiatta Ayim
• Extitutions: The other side of Institutions - Andre Spicer • The Complete Short Stories (Volume 1 & 2) – J.G. Ballard
• What is a Total Institution? - Nicki Lisa Cole • The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
• How Institutions Think - Mary Douglas • William Morris - News from Nowhere
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None - Kathryn Yusoff • The Vorrh – Brian Catling
• Back to Black - Kehinde Andrews • Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Jose Luis Borges
• Race, Space and Architecture: http://racespacearchitecture.org/index.html • Remainder / Satin Island - Tom McCarthy
• Listening to Images - Tina M.Campt • Sympathy - Olivia Sudjic
• Poetics of Relation - Édouard Glissant • A Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
• Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom - Walter Di Magnolo • The City and the City – China Mieville
• Theatre of the Natural World - Mark Dion • The Museum of Innocence - Orhan Pamuk
• Regeneration, New Institutional Practices - Het Nieuwe Instituut • Important Artefacts and Personal Property... - Leanne Shapton
• Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture - Craig Owens
• Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States - Rutgers Series: The Public Life
of the Arts - Paul DiMaggio
• Spaces of power: feminism, neoliberalism and gendered labor - Janet Newman Spaces and urban arrangements are usually
• Uncommon Ground, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature – William Cronon
• Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago - Anna-Sophie Springer treated as collections of objects or volumes, not as
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat – Oliver Sacks
• Migrant Journal actors. Yet the organisation itself is active. It is
• Encyclopedia of Community - David Levinson and Karen Christiansen
doing something.
- Keller Easterling
39I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.
Coal, Audre Lord 1996
Kinnomic Botany - Redesigning the botanical garden and museum to
accommodate non-human and non-western narratives
Iman Datoo, Diploma 12, 2019-20
41INIGO MINNS
Inigo Minns is an architect, curator and lecturer whose design process explores
alternative forms of architectural output. This has lead to collaborations with
a number of designers and artists and has produced projects that use ideas and
methods from, amongst other things, film, archaeology, theatre, museology,
choreography and curation. Moving between research, speculation and built
architectural output, Inigo Minns’ work looks at the staging and events that
arise as a result of our experiences in the built environment. Inigo has extensive
experience teaching architecture, speculative design an as well as other
disciplines in the UK and abroad.
MANIJEH VERGHESE
Manijeh Verghese is Head of Public Programmes at the Architectural Association
and a seminar leader for the AA Professional Practice for Fifth Year course. She is
a founding Director at Unscene Architecture and Co-curator of the British Pavilion
at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. She is currently an External Examiner at
the University of Cambridge. Over the past eight years, she has led postgraduate
and undergraduate design studios at both the AA and Oxford Brookes University
and has taught workshops and courses across universities in the UK and abroad.
She has worked for architecture practices including John Pawson and Foster +
Partners, and has contributed to design publications such as Disegno and Icon, as
well as think-tanks, books and peer reviewed journals.
Unit staff will be teaching throughout the year, bringing in experts for talks and
Unit Staff
workshops to align with the structure of the three terms. As a general rule tutorials
will be held twice a week accommodating students in different time zones with
additional support and workshps to develop technical skills and use of time-based
media.
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