Erlend Bakke-Eidsaa (Diploma 16) has been awarded the SOM prize in the 2008 RIBA President's Medals Student Awards with his Part 2 Project 'Siberian photo (re) synthesis'.

Project description
Pneumatic actuated large span structure to harvest methane and encourage agriculture along the thawing Siberian tundra. It is an undulating structure which accelerates the transformation from tundra to fertile land through increased heat, nutrition and co2 levels. If agriculture in the rain forest leaves a trace of ash in fertile land, the proposal leaves a trace of vegetation and inhabitation in undeveloped land. Structurally and formally it challenges the use of double curvature and local form optimisation within pneumatic structures. This is a symbiotic system where the pneumatic is used to actuate and support the main language enabling far larger scales.

Tutors Steve Hardy and Jonas Lundberg comment:
This is a radical proposal for turning the inevitable as global warming into an opportunity for a new hyper productive agricultural landscape to emerge. Super vast does not suffice to describe the scale, if the whole melting Siberian frontier was to be methane harvested, farmed and settled. The structural behaviour and the resulting spatial quality intrigue me. Although, I’m not a structural engineer, I think the composite condition between the behaviour of the massive acrylic tubes and the regulating, triangulating and actuating high pressure pneumatic bear witness of sophistication and innovative thinking. This is architecture at its best, routing for a brave new future.

Aesthetics of Technology

Hospitals generally being known to be the most energy consuming programmes, the project focuses on being energetically aware and environmentally responsible, engaging the latest trends in Renewable Energy Sources, which were used to create a diaphanous roof structure that was constructed by proliferating gradually shifting scales of rhomboidal PV units. 'Energy' gardens and public cafes are placed in a centrally located connective 'landscape park' for patients and visitors, creating a hospital complex which doesn't aim to close off to the surrounding context, a typical strategy of exclusion that fosters an idea of separation (for the sake of 'health') that has been an attitude in early modern history up to today, but instead enliven the sense of healing through aspirations of outreach. Opening up the access to the 'park' to the public, the hospital becomes gradually integrated and weaved into the urban context.

DOCOMOMO UK Masters of Concrete lectures 2009
The Total Theatre Design : Was it Walter Gropius or Stefan Sebok?

The Hungarian architect Stefan Sebok  was trained in Dresden where his student thesis was a Tanztheater. He  moved to Gropius’s office in 1924–5  about  the same time Moholy-Nagy went to the Bauhaus – with whom he later collaborated on in  the design of the famous Light Modulator – and while there worked on the famous Piscator Total Theatre. He also worked on the Kharkov Theatre and went to the USSR, worked with the Vesnin Brothers there before he was killed by the KGB in 1941. This talk is based on  the researches of his niece Dr Lilly (Sebok) Dubowitz  and is dedicated to Dr Catherine Cooke.

Chair: AA Vice  President Dennis Sharp
Tuesday 27 January, 7.00
ABA Gallery 70 Cowcross Street London EC1 (Farringdon tube)
£4.50 for students on the door or book [email protected]

An evening of presentations, discussions and networking for people interested in the relationship between shelter and the built environment. What can individuals in the built environment offer the development and humanitarian sectors? What can commercial organisations learn from NGOs, charities and volunteers?
 
How do these two worlds relate?
Using the PECHA KUCHA format, 12 speakers will present their current work, aspirations and designs in the field of shelter.
 
Tickets £5, which will be donated to a UK shelter charity.
ARUP, 8 Fitzroy Street, London, W1
Thursday 5 February, 7.30–10.30
For more information and RSVP to Bonnie Chu ([email protected]) 

Battery City: A Post-Olympic Beijing Mini Marathon is the continuation of Marathon events conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist which have been taking place at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions since 2006. Through interviews and group discussion conducted by Jiang Jun, chief editor of Urban China, the Beijing Mini Marathon seeks to map the most pressing concerns of the minds of Chinese artists, architects, writers, and intellectuals at this moment, and to regenerate energy for future development within the Chinese context.
 
Also interviewed: Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Zhang Anding, Xiao He, Zhang Da, Dai Zhikang, Wang Jianwei, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Jun, Ma Yansong, Yangjiang Group, Yan Jun.
 
Sound Performance: Yan Jun THE STETHOSCOPE
Calligraphy creation: Yangjiang Group (Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin)
Media Partner: Urban China Magazine
Translator: Venus
Stenography: Ruize Stenography Company
Supported by: Subjam, Zak Group

Listen to Zaha's guest-edited Today Programme (Radio 4 on Friday 2 January) and feature on the AA with Peter Cook and Charles Jencks.
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7785000/7785759.stm

ANTIFABRIC – Ivan Ballesteros (DRL 2004/06); Elena García Pérez (DRL 2004/06); Aurora Santana (DRL 2003/05) – wins first prize in Connectivity competition organised by the Second Biennial of the Canary Islands.

Exhibition: Territories of Landscape to 15 February, Espacio Cultural El Tanque. Tenerife
 
The practice has also been selected in the National competition ARQUIA PROXIMA 2008, a selection of the 128 best realisations in Spain for young architects; with our research work regarding the component SLC (Smart a Linear Component) we developed at DRL and continue to work on.
 
Competition: ARQUIA PROXIMA 2008
Organizers: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos
Architects: ANTIFABRIC [Ivan Ballesteros + Elena Garcia]
Publication: Arquia/Proxima 2008. Orígenes y desacuerdos Fundacion Caja de Arquitectos
  
www.antifabric.com

AA Inter10 and ecoLogicStudio in collaboration with the CAAC Seville, FRAC Center director Marie Ange Brayer and the IAAC in Barcellona have planned a week long ecoMachinic Parade Seville and Barcelona.

Highlights of the week are:
a visit of the Seville 3rd Art and Architecture biennale youniverse with curator Marie Ange Braye
a symposium featuring, among others, the work of idLAB and ecoLogicStudio (Tuesday 9 December) and
a three-day international students workshop and an ecoLogicStudio lecture at IAAC in Bacelona (Friday 12 December).

Other visits and events are listed in the following links:
http://www.caac.es/actividades/proyectos/frame_arqycie08.htm
http://www.iaac.net
http://www.ecologicstudio.com/v2/project.php?mp=0&idcat;=3&idsubcat;=29&idproj;=35

Graduation film by Takanao Todo (AA Dipl 3 2007) has been chosen as one of the best 20 films in Short Film Festa Nippon.

http://www.shortfilm-nippon.com/movies/no12/