As the School Community prepares to choose the next AA Director in a few months’ time, the Search Committee is organising a symposium in Term 2 comprising of keynote lectures and roundtable discussions with invited guests. This will be an opportunity for the School Community and our wider audiences to come together for a series of public discussions and to think deeply about the future of the AA and architectural education as a whole. It will be a forum for debate in which everyone in attendance will be encouraged to actively engage, participate and share ideas.

The lectures and discussions will address how we might learn from various educational models in a wider context, as well as exploring new and alternative creative processes within architecture and beyond. Importantly, the event will address the critical responsibilities held by architectural education in relation to pressing global and planetary issues.

Schedule (all times in GMT):

Morning Session

10.30am – Introduction by the AA Search Committee

10.35am – Keynote address by Marina Tabassum, 2021 Soane Medal recipient – Rethinking Creativity

11.15am – Roundtable: Creative Process

Tom Emerson, ETH – 1 to 200

Zoe Laughlin, UCL Institute of Making – Material Methodologies

Mark West, Atelier Surviving Logic – Play Time

Chair: Kate Davies, Director of AA Design and Make and Head of Communication and Media Studies

01.00pm – Lunch

Afternoon Session

02.00pm – Introduction by the AA Search Committee

02.05pm – Keynote address by Balkrishna Doshi, CEPT, The 2022 RIBA Royal Gold Medal recipient – A message from Doshi to the AA

02.30pm – Roundtable: Educational Models

Sepake Angiama, INIVA – Turn Around - Don't Look Back in Anger

Lidia Gasperoni, TU Berlin – Modes of Transformation: Sites–Media–Effects

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Yale – Atmospheres and Encounters

Chairs: Aidan Domican & Deniz Ozcan, AA students

04.00pm - Coffee/ Tea break

04.30pm – Breakout sessions with the audience on-site and online to discuss themes explored throughout the day and to reflect on the future direction of the AA.

05.00pm – Breakout sessions report back and a wrap-up discussion

06.00pm – Drinks reception

The event will take place both online and on-site*. All members of the AA School Community are invited to join on-site* or online and the public are invited to join online only.

*Please be advised that anyone attending on-site will be required to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test result taken at least 72 hours before entering the AA and to wear a mask at all times apart from when eating or drinking.

Participants include:

Sepake Angiama is the artistic director of the institute for international visual art in London- a curator and educator, whose praxis lies in the discursive and social framework, in order to collectively rewrite our understanding of the world. This has inspired her to work with artists who disrupt or provoke aspects of the social sphere through action, radical forms of pedagogy and architecture. While in her position as Head of Education, Documenta 14 she initiated the project Under the Mango Tree - a self-organised gathering of unlearning practices.

Balkrishna Doshi worked with Le Corbusier in Paris in the 1950s before returning to India to supervise his works in Ahmedabad. He is as well known for his own architectural projects as he is for the creation in 1962 of CEPT, which is still the leading school of architecture in India today. The school has expanded over the years to include planning and the visual arts. Doshi was the recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 2018 and of the RIBA Gold Medal for 2022.

Tom Emerson co-founded 6a architects in London with Stephanie Macdonald producing buildings and landscapes for the arts and education. He is dean of the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich where he leads a research and design studio exploring the relationship between making, landscape and ecology. He taught at the AA from 2000–04, was on the AA Council from 2006–07, and was an AA External Examiner from 2014-19.

Lidia Gasperoni has a PhD in philosophy and is a research and teaching associate at the Department of Architectural Theory of the Institute of Architecture at the Technical University Berlin. She teaches architectural theory and philosophy with a focus on media philosophy, Anthropocene theories, and aesthetics.

Zoe Laughlin is a co-founder and Director of the Institute of Making at University College London. Working at the interface of the science, art, craft and design of materials, outputs range from formal experiments with matter, to large-scale public exhibitions and events. Her work has been shown in London’s Science Museum and is included in the permanent collection of The Design Museum.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is Assistant Dean and Professor at the Yale School of Architecture where she has taught both architectural design and history-theory for the past twenty-five years. While such “double-duty” has become somewhat rare in the increasingly specialised academic environment, overcoming the fault line between verbal and visual thinking remains her main pedagogical goal.

Marina Tabassum is a Bangladeshi architect and educator who founded Dhaka-based Marina Tabassum Architects in 2005. In her work, Tabassum seeks to establish a language of architecture that is contemporary yet reflectively rooted to place, always against an ecological rubric containing climate, context, culture, history. Tabassum has taught in Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Technical University, Delft, University of Texas and Bengal Institute. In addition to Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, she has received many accolades including Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture and Soane medal in Architecture from the UK.

Mark West is a teacher, artist, inventor, builder, researcher, inventor of numerous fabric-formwork techniques for concrete construction, and founder of the Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology (C.A.S.T.) in Winnipeg Manitoba. He is currently retired from teaching, living in Montreal Canada, and working independently at his Atelier Surviving Logic.