The
special project AALAWuN began asking a series of questions across the
Bedford Square site at the beginning of the academic year 2016 –
2017. Now in the final term it's time to ask, how has AALAWuN
satisfied its original description and how has it failed?
Josh
Penk, Laurence Lumley, Pete(Jiadong
Qiang),
Ollie Savorani,
Rory
Sherlock, Josh Harskamp.
Fandango
poster
Rory Sherlock
AALAWuN
opened with a spectacle, The
Fiefdom Fandango
( during the AA Open
Week,
3rd
November 2016) This was a whole day event staged in the lecture
theatre that aimed to
bring the school together across all units and years. Students and
staff, past and present
and invited guests where
asked to consider the idea of
experimentation in
general and
more specifically the
AA's
reputation for experimentation and if
it was still relevant to
the school in 2016.
Fiefdom is a reference to an AALAWuN observation
that any cohesion and common goal across
the AA is compromised by a
unit system which splits the school up into a collection
of competing fiefdoms.
first
AALAWuN meeting in Dip
18 studio
Devising
and planning work for
the Fiefdom Fandango began a month before with a dedicated group of
mainly final year diploma students. By
creating a slightly surreal and artificial platform, hovering
somewhere between formal and informal, the
group anticipated serious discussion in a less stuffy, more off
the cuff fashion.
The day was devised
around the
notion of an
all day
dinner table: 3 sessions, (3 servings) where literally
served up; Boiled, Fried & Scrambled in
reference to Cedric
Price's, the
city
as an
egg metaphor.
AALAWuN added one final stage
of its own to the
Architectural Menu: Meringue
– Air.
further
meetings different
locations
(Dip 11 and Dip9)
The
Boiled Session was coordinated with Ed Bottoms in Archive; a
selection of archive
material
chosen by invited students and tutors was discussed. Fried Session
centred around Patrik
Schumacher, Theo Spyropoulos, Mike Weinstock and John Frazer being
asked,
for you, what
would be the next big experiment at the AA?
And finally
Scrambled,
saw Liza Fior and diploma
student
Stefan
Jovanovic
, coordinate
an exchange
of
skills
while
choreographing the participants across
and around
the length of the table.
More
nomadic sessions: aboard
Watchmaker, moored at
St. Katharine Docks with John Fraser
- another speedy get out (Dip
10)
An
excellent
summary
of what AALAWuN
expected on the eve of the event is given below
by Rory
Sherlock
(Dip
14)
:
The
evolution of this project has been to create the conditions within a
room that start to stretch the boundaries or barriers between
different Fiefs that exist in the AA and also between the AA and
elsewhere. The way that we are electing to do that is to abolish the
format of lecture or sit-down in conversation with, by having it
round a dinner table that is not there just as a bloody novelty but
is there as a crucial part of the day. So
food will actually be served but the food (etc) on the table are all
just mechanisms for creating/ facilitating the kind of discussion
that does not exist at the moment in the current format.
The
way that I see that going for the whole day is that there are points
that are formalised, or rather there are moments that are formalised
within that where there are people bringing something to the table.
And so we have invited a set of people that are going to bring things
to the table and then from that; generate discussion and potentially
learning around the table between
the people attending. It's not education, people are not being sat
down and taught but they are sitting there picking up things and they
are learning.
Fiefdom
Fandango to do list
(notated)
Throughway – Through the Day -
Buster
Rönngren
The
enthusiasm and commitment
from the core group was
exceptional but
as planning progressed a
number had to perform
a tricky balancing act between unit work and work for the Fandango.
Some commented on feeling compromised; returning
to their units and finding fellow students immersed in personal
research when they had spent the morning discussing the best way to
carry fried eggs on
a silver tray or how ones movement can best
join one space to another. All arguably credible architectural
concerns but each student committing to Fandango work had to square
such scenarios. The legacy of this particular quandary would
influence AALAWuN thinking when considering post-Fandango
ways
to
work.
The
day long
event did get
groups of students and staff
from
all
over
the school, together,
it even posed
some important questions on
architecture
and
learning. However,
we
could immediately see
that any small shift the
Fandango
may have effected on the school community was overshadowed by
the gargantuan effort
put into staging it.
Likewise
in terms of making there was no contest between the sit, talk and
leave activity of the all day session compared
to
the
ever
evolving
debates, devising, ideas, making and designing
experienced by
the core group
during
planning.
Artist
Alaena Turner, preparing
eggs on
Portable Kitchen designed by
Gary Woodley
Fiefdom
Fandango -Fried session
What's
more,
the
core and
key group
to the whole event,
had
pushed
themselves
so hard
in
negotiating
a full diploma timetable while
still
finding the time to devise and present
the Fandango.
The
outcome being understandable signs of
exhaustion
as they carried
out the ambitious
roles
of
waiters
& agitators
around
the whole day dinner table.
That
situation was heightened further through
the
dilemma
of, who's
spectating and who's participating?
Student's
with little or no input into the devising of the day struggled to
find their role in events. This was seen clearly in the Boiled
and Fried
sessions, where everyone was invited
to join
the debate around
elements of the archive
with fellow students and
staff. The result often found large groups of confused and awkward
looking students bunching up and
blocking the entrance of the lecture theatre. This
silent mass of onlookers not only prevented the important flow of
people around the table, regrettably,
it also helped
re-establish
a
more traditional form of lecture scenario; I
speak you listen.
Interestingly
this awkwardness only
gave way to informality during the Scrambled session when Stefan
Jovanovic
guided
everyone
through a choreographed, who
am I, exercise.
Late
night last minute preparations from core group
who's participating who's spectating? – Fiefdom Fandango
In
retrospect
the
Fiefdom
Fandango was
a start;
maybe
an
ambitious
red herring but something that had to be done
to
show what
AALAWuN
wasn't and where
it
might
go next.
By
the following day, any
pause, the Fiefdom
Fandango
had hoped to bring about was
quickly
swept
aside
by the
pressures
of
term time-tabling; a
bit like, nothing had happened, nothing significant
had been asked, no gesture or
action worth mentioning had taken
place.
Fiefdom
Fandango Menu of the day – Laurence Lumley
As
Fandango dust settled AALAWuN
began to pull at some of the more significant
threads that had survived the day; the
creative
energy and
intense
discussion that
had
been a characteristic of
the group sessions while the event was being designed. Likewise
the
many
questions and
part propositions
that had
been aired then left hanging during the event:
along
with
experimentation, there
were
questions around degree awarding powers, constant assessment, the
unit
system (now
over 50 years old)
and
also
the lack
of
information sharing and
the
nature of
architectural education which inevitably shapes
what architecture is today.
As
flexible as the Fandango format was it had its limitations in getting
to fundamentals. If
the first AALAWuN outing had done anything it had
started
up
a
conversation that needed to be
expanded,
to
be
unravelled.
With limited resources and shrinking manpower, ( many of
the diploma
students were
suddenly thrown back
into catch up of unit work) a more simple platform was needed to
tease the
conversation out further.
Rather
than wasting
energy on
fabricating another
platform we were
looking for an already existing
context.
we
ask, can an exhibition be more temporary?
So
in 840 hours from 13:00 hours 17/11/16 the walls of the bar become
the
site of a shifting argument of images and ad hoc conversations.
Uncertainty
is displayed as a power tool and is asking you to join in
a
discussion about your work at the AA....
The
Bar
Taking
advantage of
a break in the
exhibition schedule
for
the AA Bar,
(the walls were free for just over a month),
AALAWuN
followed
up the
Fandango event with,
840
hours unannounced wall variations.
Because
the bar area
is
the
central hub of AA life, AALAWuN
quickly seized the
opportunity to activate a work
in progress situation,
in
a location with
informal
contact of
the
entire school.
Putting
up -Josh Penk and Rory Sherlock
- late
night installation of scans of Pete's (Jiadong
Qiang) costumes for Fandango waiters
The
compositional goal was to gradually build up an installation of
archive material and other work presented in the Fandango over a 35
day period on the bar walls. A sort of sustained conversation around
subjects already touched on in the first event. With the unceasing
support of Manijeh Verghese, ( AA Public Programme) we continued our
close collaboration with AA Archivist, Ed Bottoms. He was delighted
that selected works would be discussed further and be out, in the
public gaze longer.
More
archive put ups - Carlos Peters and Joyce Chen
– details on the LAWuNBAR wall
The
ready-made context of the AA bar
provided a platform without the time and resource sapping work the
Fandango needed. This also
freed up a
number of the diploma students to
initiate open
source conversations as
part of 840
hours unannounced wall variations. Open
Source Conversations,
invited two students from different units to pin up and present work
in progress, in
the bar
over a lunch time session. Each
new session of
presented
work would replace the previous
one on the bar walls.
Here's part
of Buster
Rönngren's
introduction
to Open
Source Conversations :
Open
source conversations poster - Buster
Rönngren
Open Tutorial poster – Josh Harskamp
Open Tutorial poster – Josh Harskamp
Welcome
all to this first instalment of open source conversations, which
is meant to be a round table discussion about some ongoing and in
progress student projects in this school. All questions asked about
these proposals are not so much about what is for the eye alone. I
thought that it would be appropriate to introduce these two students
and their respective briefs by starting with projecting out of an
approximate wall, namely my own unit. If you attended the diploma one
presentation at the start of this year you will no doubt remember the
iconic introduction to the film Manhattan by Woody Allen. Whereby the
protagonist is deciding over numerous ways to start a project. Well
the same Woody Allen is known to have said the following; eighty
percent of life is just showing up. With that in mind, Joshua
Harskamp
who is attending Diploma Unit Four.....(and) Hunter Doyle of Inter
Three.....are
here today to see if there is a common ground to be found in the
notion of just showing up.
Open
source Conversations- Buster
Rönngren &
Josh Harskamp
Valentin Bontjes van Beek with Hunter Doyle and
lunchtime gathering
Over
the following weeks, informal lunchtime presentations where held on
Mondays and Thursdays. The student conversations where attended by at
least one lecturer, of
a different
unit from
the students presenting.
A
simple requirements of open source conversations was
to facilitate an encounter
of
students
from
different years and units. The
broad
sweep of attitude, opinion,
incite
and approach that
resulted
also
met
a main tenet of the AALAWuN remit, to get students and staff from
across the whole school together and talking.
A
student variation with Sofia Pia Belenky, Jane Wong
and John
Palmesino
The
archive sessions; Archive
Variations, allowed
for a further probing of the experimentation
question initiated by
Fiefdom Fandango. Whenever
possible, both the author and selector of the work would attend
sessions; architect and writer
Paul Shepheard came
in to discuss, the aircraft drawings, (recently donated to the AA
archive) with Mark Campbell and a gathering of students and staff.
Another archive session featured Natasha Sandmeier (Unit Master,
Dip9) being reunited with former student, Antoine Vaxelaire in a high
spirited discussion around his woven graduation work now part of
the AA archive: it
makes no sense, you have two weeks to present your final project and
you are knitting a carpet!
Archive
Sessions:Chris
Pierce, Carlos Villanueva Brandt,
Natasha
Sandmeier,
Antoine
Vaxelaire,
Manijeh
Varhese, Ed Bottoms, David Greene
The
840 hours unannounced wall variations
concluded at the
Christmas break 2016. The 35 day residency in the AA Bar really
helped AALAWuN establish a more fitting
way of operating; although hardly unseen,
working within the existing environs of
the bar was a far
more subtle way to work than staging spectaculars. At the same time,
however slight,
there is an
important disruptive element to
the bar work that we continue
to nurture. Each
AALAWuN event
becomes
an opportunity to tweak things, just
fractionally skewing
the situation, for lunchtime bar
traffic to continue as normal
while giving
punters the
choice to hang around and engage or walk on
by.
The
testing tap on a microphone, the silencing of day time radio from
speaker behind the bar and then an amplified, welcome to another
AALAWuN lunchtime conversation, is enough to make a
start. The microphones are essential to compete with the constant
hissing and banging of the coffee machine and the general buzz of
lunchtime conversation. At times presenters have stop mid thought,
mid sentence, only to pick up their thread at the end of noisy jet of
steam. Paul Shepheard found a novel way of dealing with the same
interruption by joining in on the microphone;
ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiishhh.
Perhaps he
realised the sound effect was a fitting accompaniment when discussing jet engines?
So mics pass from presenter to tutor to punter to guest in the
general milieu, while a gradual fixing of archive work to the bar
walls is off-set by work in progress being put up then quickly taken
down. Regular visitors hear amplified snippets of conversation and
catch glimpses of movement across frequently updated walls. Engaging
with the proceedings, as and when they see fit.
More
archive discussion including John Andrews, Salem
Halulu,
Laurence Lumley,
Paul
Shepheard, Fred Scott and Mark Campbell
By
the end of December 2016, AALAWuN activities in the bar had helped
realise a student organised presentation platform, complimented with
archival resource and experience. The location of our temporary
office, (either of the two brown sofas in the bar) gave AALAWuN a
regular and approachable presence in the school; perfectly situated
for student's and staff to ask questions, make arrangements,
introduce themselves, criticise us or discuss and propose possible
future activities. The momentum of this period was also reflected in
the students who were now regularly associated with AALAWuN. Our
presence in the bar opened up new possibilities for broader
cross-unit collaborations with Sofia Pia Belenky & Tobias Hentzer
Dausgaard of DUE publication and Sean Gwee, Joy Lai and Amy Glover of
Tabe Tabe Pots, Clay Collective. Even though, Joshua Penk, Carlos
Peters, Oliver Savorani and others from the Fiefdom Fandango core
group were now fully focused on demands of unit work, the simple
presentation structures that AALAWuN now had in place meant they
could freely drop in and out whenever possible.
a
regular and approachable presence
Q.
So there will be an exhibition in the bar next term?
A.
Yes
Q.
So AALAWuN will be homeless?
A.
Sorry yes.......but there is another space available in the school
from
early February, not as busy but quite spacious.
Q.
Where's that?
A.
The Graduate Gallery
Q.
Where's that?
A.
You know the corridor space at the far end of the lecture theatre
Q.
What, the place where no one goes?
A.
..............Yes.
The
place where no one goes
AALAWuN
spent January 2017 dealing with the disappointment of losing the bar
as a test site and trying to put together a week long programme of
varied activities for February Open Week. The challenge of trying to
entice students into an out of the way corner of the school to
engage or ignore in a series of none spectacular happenings, felt a
bit 2 steps forwards 3 steps back. The bar had
always been just that; a bar where things happen. We were adamant not
to return to fabricating elaborate structures for AALAWuN activities
but didn't want to lose the momentum of the previous six weeks. The
Graduate Gallery was really a corridor and that was how we would see
it; a corridor where things happen. We did however rename it, The
Place Where No One Goes (TPWNOG).
Preparation
for TPWNOG, corridor
presentation test with
Sean Gwee, Joy Lai, Robert
Busher, Will Faussett.
-
Bsix students; Juan
Andion, Gabriel Mofus, Sara Mohammed, Aneta Pruszynska, Fabio Sousa,
Lolita Stegmar explore
AA archive with Ed
Bottoms , Sarah McLinn and Bryan
Parsons.
Although
the title (TPWNOG) began as a bit of a joke the work of AALAWuN up
until this point had made us increasingly aware of the serious
subtext. So In the first instance there was an invitation for
students to take part in some informal research activities beyond the
confines of unit appraisal. TPWNOG, promised an assessment free
zone and what better timing, than the week when all formal
tuition in AA units stops?
Secondly,
it seemed important to tap into the fallout generated by the
resignation announcement of the head of school; uncertainty about the
future, disappointment and the atmosphere of change it had left
looming over the school. AALAWuN felt duty bound to encourage
serious, open discussion, to field challenging questions and share
alternatives propositions with the school community and invited
guest.
Finally,
back to experimentation
again, this time in the form of a
competition:
The
reputation of the AA is grounded on experimentation, innovation and
creativity. These values are hard-wired into the fabric of the
school.
As
part of AALAWuN The Place Where No One Goes, week long project
(6th–10thFeb 2017)
We
will be staging a competition which deals directly with the crowning
act of study at the AA - the Graduation Ceremony.
Graduation
Ceremony, a Competition for Ideas, not a final project:
The
competition asks the question, what could a graduation ceremony be if
AA core values become an expression of design in the form of an AA
Graduation Ceremony?
All
students and staff are invited and encouraged to participate in the
competition taking place on the 9th February 2017
8AM
Slade
Breakfast Meeting with Gary Woodley and MA painting
students
Luke
Needham
(BSix) presenting his
archive research
The
graduation ceremony competition was scheduled for Thursday in a busy
programme that kicked off the week with a Slade School of Art,
Breakfast meeting at 8am on Monday.
Drawing
Machine:
Quentin Martin,Tamara
Rasoul, James Lysacht, Caspar Schols.
Critical Thought:
Kevin Rhowbottom and
Clive Menzies
Other
visitors included BSix college; a group of six form students
presented their findings from a short collaboration with AA Archive.
Several
short presentations
included an introduction to the work of Critical
Thinking, And
Kevin Rhowbottom's
love song to architecture via Michelangelo
Antonioni and Gil Scott
Heron.Theo
Spyropoulos's DRL students chaired the heated discussion; Vision
is a dirty word,
which they kicked off
by screening
a film
they had
made
specially for the debate. Student Forum continued
their dissection of the Bretexit issue and there was also a chance to
get to know the AA's new head of Teaching and Learning: Meet
Mark Morris.
Vision
is (not) a dirty Word with DRL students
- Sean
Gwee at the wheel with
Carlos
Villanueva Brandt
during Meet
Mark Morris
The
extensive
programme for TPWNOG stretched AALAWuN's limited design resource
already receiving generous support from Manijeh Verghese. The help we
received from Boris Meister
and Jan Blessing
in AA Graphics not only helped make visual sense of the growing list
of activities to feature on TPWNOG poster but was
another fruitful
expansion of the AALAWuN
working
dialogue
within
the school.
We
were learning that much of our proprietary work for AALAWuN
activities was acting in this way. The AA plant round up for the
drawing session planned for the Wednesday afternoon with Anderson
Inge did exactly this. Anderson had discussed a drawing session in
TPWNOG which would begin with participants bringing a plant in to
draw from another location. These, office, library, reception etc,
locations were logged and photographed in advance to serve as a
practical guide for locating the plants. It was interesting how the
social nature of this preparation work of searching and plotting
became an extended aspect of the drawing class to come.
Plant
plotting in Sabrina Blakstad's office –
students and staff during
drawing session in TPWNOG with Anderson Inge
While
the events and activities scheduled for TPWNOG fluctuated greatly in
pace, a number of student driven projects planned to last the whole
week offered an underlining continuity. Jack Hardy would work in and
around the corridor preparing the inflatable for his Old Kent Toad
Parade, Sofia Pia Belenky and Georgia Hablutzel would document the
week by collecting material and compiling a fanzine, Zerox
Reader. Finally, Sean
Gwee would install his potter's wheel for the entire week in the
corridor, he was on the look out for first time pot throwers and put
the invitation out across the school.
Xerox
Readers: Georgia Hablutzel & Sofia Pia Belenky.
First time pot throwers with Sean Gwee - Jeffrey
Amankwah and Bsix students
The
week fluctuated between being awkward,Joyous, edgy and informative.
Completing the week was a rewarding slog. Student participation, was
equally mixed ranging from standing room only at times for the Vision
is a dirty word discussion to apparently only two students
wanting to meet the new head of Teaching and Learning.
We
were also treated to an unscheduled steady stream students passing
through TPWNOG all week. Each one exclaiming a desire to; throw a
pot, draw a plant, break their routine, talk some more and design
their dream graduation ceremony. But each time each one would declare
they were too busy with a tutorial, unit work, extra work, or
catching up on work. Put simply, they had too much work to do!
Pausing
to note, then getting back to work with a concern for students
feeling so stressed and busy in Open Week, AALAWuN, reasoned that we
could only encourage and help in providing the framework for
situations like TPWNOG to materialise, the rest was up to the
students:
I
admire and am very grateful for the honest and challenging discourse
that is taking place
as
a result of AALAWuN.
In particular, the events that took place in The Place Where No one
Goes during open week offered an openness and spontaneity that is not
often found at the AA. Events such as these encourage an otherwise
slightly self-aware and contrived atmosphere to become something more
fluid and welcoming and inquisitive..Amy
Glover
Dor
Schindler, Hunter Doyle measuring up 6.7
metre long TPWNOG
table, constructed
with Janos Bergob, Shou Jian Eng & Nicholas Lin.
- Plants
on table during
drawing class with
Anderson Inge
While
attempting to keep things fluid and welcoming, AALAWuN are
always open to experimentation. In The
Graduation Competition we employed a simple shift in the day's
presentation that involved live-streaming the competition Jury from
our purpose built table into
the
lecture theatre. The technical flip was made possible by Joel Newman
and Sepher (Sep) Malek of the Audio Visual department who we've
enjoyed a supportive dialogue with all year.
Sep commented on the merit of this
specific exercise as we cleared away; enthusiastically pondering,
future applications of such a novel set-up for wider school
scenarios,Tables, Crits and Juries.
Graduation
Competition –
presenters include Manja
Van de Worp, Manijeh Varghese, Sofia Pia Belenky,
James
Anicich....
Jury
– Lucy Moroney, David Greene, Lara Lesmes and Clive Menzies . Jack
Hardy's big Bethnal Green Toad was road/toad tested
One
other overarching aspect of the Graduation Competition was seeing how
an event that involved the participation of students and staff from
across the school, encouraged
a roving documentation. The AALAWuN edited account of the
competition day followed a natural flow around the building, linking
entrance and exit points of TPWNOG corridor. The time loop opened up
during the event gave intriguing glimpses of collaborative
broadcasting within architecture; a fractured whole held together by
human interaction rather than a building and its inhabitants being
passively clocked on CCTV.
A
continuity and linking work became another coherent characteristic of
TPWNOG. Between the start and finish of our time in the corridor
space we were really pleased to be able to develop an already
constructive dialogue with Theo Spyropolos and the students of DRL. A
group of ten or more DRL students had produced a film/manifesto for
the, discussion, Vision is a dirty word. Following the event,
Ziqian Dloptimber and Senior Fei, the two students involved in the
core production of the film, decided to develop the themes of the
film back into a large banner. Along with research work in the AA
library, the extended tableau became a backdrop for a further
discussion
on
Manifestos with texts including, Krier,Woods,Tatlin, Koolhaus,
Hadid and Van Doesburg.
Manifesto
or not – with Ziqian Dloptimber, Neill Lin joined by Senior Fei ,
Anri Gyuloyan, Emre Erdogan, Lena Puchkova, Heidi Ham, Ruilin Yang
Weiham Chang Knot Saenawee of the DRL among other interested parties.
By
mid March the bar exhibition was down and the walls were for AALAWuN
use again. One other TPWNOG collaboration, this time with Sean Gwee,
evolved into a bridge back to the bar:
as
apart of the (TPWNOG) programs, I installed myself as furniture in
the graduate gallery, my pottery wheel and I were witness to almost
all the conversations over the course of the week. From the crazed
and frankly warranted ravings of an ever-angry Kevin Rhowbottom to
the calm and benevolent presence of Anderson's plant drawing class,
the conversations and dialogues had that week were both essential and
enriching.
TPWNOG
did not stop there with the pots made during the week at my wheel
displayed in a session called "LET'S TALK ABOUT
POTS/EDUCATION/PAINTINGS" where the pots were displayed as a
dialogical tool in the bar, with their sinuous and intuitive forms
forming the seed of many conversations regarding what it means to
make and what value implies.
Time
is a created thing. To say I don't have time, is like saying, I don't
want to.
- Lao Tzu ancient Chinese
philosopher and writer
That's the update, our work in progress. Instead of trying to clumsily round off, much better to share examples of a couple of responses we received when we asked for student feedback on the work of LAWuN this year. The first from Georgia Hablutzel, the second from final year student Laurence Lumley :
LAWuNBAR
On
the 17th of March Tabe
Tabe collective put up 42 temporary small shelves on the bar
walls to house the now fired, first time pots made during
TPWNOG week. By the 23rd of March The pots had been
removed, a discussion
on Learning had been presented and recorded and a group of Slade
PHD student's had installed
a series of painterly objects on the 42 vacated shelves. AALAWuN
were back in the bar, The LAWuNBAR. It was time to make a pause for
Easter.
42
Shelves: Let's talk-Sean Gwee, Joy Lai & Amy Glover of Tabe Tabe
Pots. Learning- Mark Morris with Steve Lancashire on Illich and
presentations from Sofia Pia Belenky and Josh Harskamp on Itinerant
learning. Painting as Object – Slade PHD students, staff and
associates , including, Alaena Turner, Estelle Thompson, Onya
McCausland and Gary Woodley – propose,position and ponder around
the 42 Shelves.
As
we began compiling this report in early May 2017, we were just
squeezing in a final set of Unassessed
Lunchtime Conversations before the school locked down into Final
Tables mode. As the year has progressed critiquing the endless
assessment treadmill, within education has grown in importance to
AALAWuN. And encouraging students to open up their projects as work
in progress is very much a part of this critique. The pop-up platform
context, AALAWuNBAR, extended an invitation to prod, cajole and learn
to all those who want to join in.
Four
sessions of Unassessed Lunchtime Conversations in and around the
LAWuNBAR Wall. Visitor, student and staff contributions include:
Saskia Lewis, Ema Hana
Kacar, Elliot Rogosin, Nabila Mahdi, Quentin Martin, Theo Spyropolos,
Ryan Dillon, Shin Egashira, Ed Bottoms, Mark Morris, Jo Hagen, Rory
Sherlock, Mark Cousins, Sam Hardingham, Frank Quek, Matt Hepburn,
Laurence Lumley, Dominic Cullinan, Amy Glover, Josh Harskamp, Mike
Davis, Agelica Rimoldi, Oliver Hall, Jon Goodbun, Georgia Hablutzel,
Tobias Dausgaard.
A
generosity of time and attention from guests, students and staff and
a seriousness from an intriguing mix of AA, Oxford Brookes and RCA
students of all years, completed four engaging sessions; praise for
refreshing new approaches to age old problems, disappointment at the
work in progress looking too finished. One guest who hadn't been in a
school of architecture for 17 years found the work now looked much
the same as then. Another student gives a glowing reply to the
question, what gets you up in the morning? Maybe it was down to the
LAWuNBAR context but a common observation was how much those
presenting should look to learn from each other while the work was up
side by side. And perhaps the most gratifying LAWuNBAR
moment
happened when Oliver Hall (DS7 Oxford Brookes) and Agelica Rimoldi
(AA inter 12) more or less ran their entire session;
cross-referencing each others work and passing any interesting
questions to the one with the more appropriate project work.
The
AALAWuN special project, enjoys a unique position of being both
inside and outside the AA school; in one way an itinerant body but
equally a part of the everyday fabric. AALAWuN has been given a
privileged perch, often like the calm point at the eye of the storm.
So applying a variety of low key propositions allows us the
occasional glimpse of a strata of school life that others seem too
busy to stop and notice, let alone consider. The ever unwinding edits
and slices of what is and isn't taking place, complementary,critical
and neutral, contribute a particular insight into the AA and to the
broader context of learning today. In this respect, AALAWuN is very
much in the AA tradition of experimentation, innovation and
creativity (both seen and unseen).
That's the update, our work in progress. Instead of trying to clumsily round off, much better to share examples of a couple of responses we received when we asked for student feedback on the work of LAWuN this year. The first from Georgia Hablutzel, the second from final year student Laurence Lumley :
I
just wanted to show my support for everything and anything AALAWuN.
As a student I have seen the level of conversation around all things
AA and beyond grow among colleagues and with myself. the exposure you
have brought has started a general openness between students and a
much needed pressure to begin to agree, disagree and discuss... I
have been exposed to the wide range of opinions, debates, and general
mind-opening over the last few months with AALAWuN. At
times subtle, profoundly shocking, however always reviewed (...with
self //with others). AALAWuN has created opinions and a
true feeling of new found optimism towards the place... I cannot
thank you both enough for everything that AALAWuN has
made and what you have enabled in all.
There
has been a lot of talk recently of the 'school community'. I am not
sure I know what this means. As a student entering the fourth year of
the school, it is very hard to really find a place. Those who have
been here since first year or foundation seem to feel the school is a
kind of family - not so for us. We start our first day in a locked
room, off a corridor of 15 or so locked rooms, with 11 other inmates,
and that is that. For me the AA is no community at all. I know I am
not the only one of my cohort that feels this way - many of us have
had the same experience. AALAWuN has been an incredibly effective
force in opening up the school. Literally unlocking doors (holding
meetings in a different unit space each time), and providing a
clearing for people from across the school to meet, get to know one
another, and discuss ideas. Quite honestly I have not found any other
space in the school that really does this (perhaps a bit in the 'soft
room' last year, and now that is gone). AALAWuN serves an important
and irreplaceable role in this respect.
…...Once
I have finally served out my time in the AA (not too long to go now),
it will probably be my involvement with AALAWuN that will remain the
best and most encouraging experience I take away.
No
answers, but a lot to think on; no bad thing.
.................
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