PhD research at the AA encompasses the majority of the school’s postgraduate programmes in the areas of architectural history and theory, architectural urbanism, emergent technologies and design, and sustainable environmental design.
A number of the PhD programme’s recent projects place emphasis on design research with the intention of incorporating the resulting designs as part of the end product of their thesis.
This year six new PhD projects were started and seven have been completed with an additional three scheduled for completion this summer. Emanuel de Sousa was the recipient of the 2010 AA-CCA grant and joined the Canadian Centre for Architecture Visiting Scholars Programme in Montreal to study the CCA archives on Aldo Rossi, Cedric Price, Gordon Matta-Clark and John Hejduk as part of a month-long residency. Throughout the year several of the PhD programme’s candidates contributed to conferences and publications in the UK and abroad.
This year the PhD Symposium, held in May, was organised under the auspices of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) and chaired by Marina Lathouri with keynote lecture by Elia Zenghelis and presentations from nine PhD scholars. Propositions: Ideology in Transparency, edited by Emanuel de Sousa and Kirk Wooller, is the resulting publication of the AA PhD Dialogues Symposium with contributions from AA staff and PhD candidates as well as visiting scholars.
PhD degrees at the AA School are administered by the Architecture & Urbanism Management Group in partnership with the Open University.
Special Project
Excerpts from Beyond Entropy: When Energy Becomes Form
Edited by Stefano Rabolli Pansera
AA Publications 2011
Beyond Entropy: When Energy Becomes Form is the resulting
publication of a two-year long AA-sponsored research cluster run by Stefano Rabolli Pansera that was launched on Friday 27 May 2011.