In the last several years, a crisis of capitalist development has redefined our understanding of cities in terms of international policy making, political constituencies and individual and collective political expressions in the urban realm. Inter Unit 8 has been experimenting with possible new scenarios for this political readjustment at a global scale, departing from its most basic expressions in the city. As a result, students have constructed innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday material activities–such as waiting for a bus, dancing, chatting in the streets, or wheeling and dealing in the city squares–and a particular material organization. In these common everyday practices, students have found the materials from which to reconstruct the political experience in the city. Manifested in public and constructed as a physical material expression, these everyday practices acquire a political value — understanding the political as what Hannah Arendt described as action in public — and redefine new models of the interaction between the individual and the collective in the public arena.

9.10.09

2nd Workshop

W3 & 4 Mediated Governance: Representation, transgression, and re-appropriation
12-16 19-23 Oct

This second workshop focuses on the Director’s office. Perhaps one of the most opaque rooms at the AA, the Director’s office neither represents nor reflects any specific relation with the individuals, students, and staff that it represents. The office’s external envelope should be critically rethought to establish a link between AA governance and members.

Site
AA Director’s Office Walls





Readings
Pamela M Lee, “On the holes of History” in Objects to be destroy: the work of Gordon Matta Clark, The MIT Press, 1995, pp.68-75.
Bernard Tschumi, "Architecture and Transgression" in Oppositions, No. 7, Winter 1976.
Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, 1991, pp.36-65.
Denis Hollier, “Bloody Sundays” in Against Architecture: the writings of Georges Bataille, The MIT Press, 1992.
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Design and research work of Intermediate Unit 8 Architectural Association School of Architecture London UK