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The First Year Studio at the AA is a place of experimentation and variation in pursuit of unforeseen opportunities and consequences. The six design tutors form a diverse team that encourages a disparate range of approaches and techniques, the multiplicity of which discourages and disrupts the formation of a singular design methodology. This open challenge requires each student to proactively seek out discussions that will help inform his or her work, to dispute the skills necessary to communicate ideas, and to actively challenge their approaches by working in both groups and individually on all studio projects. Throughout the year students navigate a series of projects that generate a debate and confront the ambiguous definition of architectural practice.
The Projects
Concrete Score the construction of an instrument that can make the sounds of the city.
Construction/Placement discovering the possibilities of making through a 1:1 installation to be within 150m of the AA, as part of the Bloomsbury Festival.
Manual – Drawing – Making an exchange of drawn documentation
of installations in the form of a manual, finding the object anew and
redesigning its construction to scale.
The quintessence of place, or…has anyone found my genius loci? Exploring site through the medium of a short film.
One-Room Pocket Paradise an introduction to more orthodox notions of architectural typologies – this year investigates one-room ‘magnets’ in the city.
Pink reinventing the idea of the linear portfolio as the sole method of communicating a body of work in an attempt to more successfully register a distinct and emerging attitude.
Special Project
For the 2010/11 AA Projects Review Book six special projects have been selected from independent initiatives run by students and tutors that expand the role of writing and publishing, creating platforms for discussion across the school.
Ghost Dance Times (excerpts)
Edited by Louise Amy Underhill and Summer Islam
GDT is a student initiated free newspaper published by the AA Student Forum, printing essays, commentaries, comics and observations
from students and tutors that discuss happenings at the AA and contemporary architectural issues. The original paper was established in 1974 and has been resuscitated in 2010 by the current editors. Excerpts in this publication have been taken from the following GDT issues: No 1, Friday 19 November 2010; No 2, Friday 3 December 2010; No 4,Friday 4 February 2011; No 5, Friday 25 February 2011; No 6, Friday 18 March 2011.