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AA School Announces 2011 Honours Students
- Institution’s highest accolade is awarded to just four of it s finest graduating students
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- Part of the annual Projects Review show, June 18 – 9 July at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Bedford Square, London -
The Architectural Association School of Architecture has announced the names of the 2011 Honours Students, the highest accolade the institution can bestow on a graduating student, as it prepares to open this year’s Projects Review – the annual student showcase of some of the most radical and experimental thinking in architecture and cultural enquiry today.
Four fifth year graduating students have been awarded Honours : Kim Bjarke, Tom Fox, Fredrik Hellberg and Aram Mooradian, who will be awarded with an AADipl (Hons) on Friday 17 June. Their work will be exhibited alongside the work of 650 other students across all levels of the AA School at this year’s Projects Review, opening 18 June and running until 9 July. [Full details of Projects Review: http://bit.ly/jKwNJ1] An exhibition dedicated to the work of the four Honours Students will follow later this year at the AA School.
Honours are awarded annually to the graduating students with the most accomplished and innovative work. The four selected this year join the impressive list of alumni of the AA School who have graduated with Honours, which includes Peter Ahrends and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw.
Project s Review, which runs from 18 June – 9 July, is an opportunity to see drawings, models, design prototypes and interactive installations demonstrating cutting-edge architectural concepts from the graduating students of the one of the world’s most internationally acclaimed architecture schools, with exhibition spaces spread throughout the AA School’s premises in Bedford Square.
Honours Student Tom Fox says: “Having started the work on Libya’s relations with Europe last September, receiving Honours was fantastic, as I have been able to discuss these recent events as urban phenomena at a time when architecture has retreated from such a discourse. I am very proud to be awarded the AA Diploma with Honours, and I look forward to further developing the research that I have started over the last couple of years”
Honours Student Kim Bjarke says: “The Honours Award means more to me than perhaps I would like to admit. For me the life as a student of architecture was filled with a level of insecurity and doubt, always questioning if my skills were good enough. As I now leave the student life behind me the Honours Award provides a security and confidence that I will carry on with me to the future of my professional career”
Project Review website: http://projectsreview2011.aaschool.ac.uk
Exhibition Dates: Saturday 18 June to Saturday 9 July 2011
Opening times: Monday to Friday 10am – 7pm; Saturday 18 June 1pm – 5pm; Saturday 25 June, 2, 9 July 10am – 5pm
Entrance: Free
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Notes to Editors
The Architectural Association School of Architecture is the world’s most renowned international and influential school of architecture. Since 1847, The AA has pioneered a belief in architecture as a profession, culture and a unique form of human enquiry. The School has for decades been home to students and teachers who have gone on to become worldwide leaders of architecture and share creative ideas.
AA School alumni include Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Lord Rogers, Will Alsop, Cedric Price and many others. Through its unique, year-long, unit based system of teaching, direct intervention in cities and its intensively collaborative team based approach to learning, the School brings together disconnected worlds, fresh ideas and inspiring insights. The AA School is celebrated worldwide as an imaginative setting for architectural culture.
TOM FOX
The project proposes a series of architectural and infrastructural devices that operate within Europe's southern frontier. Set within the recent reorganis ation of the European border and the popular uprising in North Africa, the project examines the close relationship between circulations of populations, capital and technology, and the construction of both urban systems and water infrastructures. Rather than the prevalent image of the border as a finite limit, the project exposes the frontier as a deep, fragmented and temporal surface extending deep into both the European and African interior, operating through the reorganis ation of local space. Within this system, sovereignty is largely defined by the ability to identify levels of mobility for people and objects, or the power to limit or qualify the right to hospitality. The project proposes both spatial and institutional structures that position architecture amongst the multitude of practices that shape the physical space of the southern Mediterranean city. Spanning from Europe to North Africa, the project reorganises the various regimes of mobility that operate in the territory; tourism, global agriculture, oil extraction, surveillance of migration and water management.
KIM BJARKE
The project is investigating the relationship between the original architectural object and its copies. Contrary to general opinion in today’s society the project is based on the argument that the copy is not something bad, devalued or impure, it is instead something to cherish.
The argument is visualis ed through a scenario of multiple iterations of copying, creating a context in which our pre-conceived ideas of the copy can be re-evaluated.
The physical context of the project is located around Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. But the context of the project is not limited to the physical boundaries of the campus site. It also includes the larger body of Miesian architecture, and how the buildings are represented, and in the end perceived.
ARAM MOORADIAN
Aboriginal dream-time narratives speak of a time when the ground was soft and creation beings shaped mountains and rivers. Now the financial narratives of gold prices reshape the earth through massive excavations and technological incisions. The Atlas of Gold Fictions catalogues the strange infrastructures of the gold economy, from its source in the mines of Australia to the web of precious artefacts scattered across the globe. The infrastructure of gold’s solely virtual value is re-imagined through the speculative artefacts of a new network of gold objects inscribed with the oral histories of the land from which it came. A suicide note is inscribed on a single gold bullet, the sound of a grandmother’s laughter is encoded into an heirloom necklace and the dying languages of Australia’s indigenous culture are recorded onto the gold bars dug out of the very ground of their homeland. Our relationship to our finite resources is re-examined with this new dispersed geology of artefacts encoded with the cultural rather than economic values of the contemporary world.
FREDRIK HELLBERG
In the desert northeast of Los Angeles in an abandoned city called California City the 739,600m2 Second Community floats above the desert floor like a mountain avatar. In its crater the 1500 heliostatic mirrors reflect the light onto the artificial sky covering the desert of the trans-identity port. With a capacity of 40,000 people the port gathers in its featureless white space with individuals open to role-play.
The Second Community explores an alternative identity tourism that goes beyond the virtual space of online role-playing games, the open desert of the Burning Man festival and the convention halls of Cosplayers. Spanning half a kilometre the artificial desert of the port isolates the person in a void of imagination where the persona of an individual becomes a fugitive and creative semiotic gadget which collectively generates a public space of radical self- exploration; an experimentation.
The porous mountain avatar surrounding and supporting the sky of the port collects its energy from the concentrated solar power plant in the centre of the crater, harvesting the power of the sun and delivers it to the caves around the centred port where the identity tourists prepare for the events in the port.
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