Taking place June 26 - July 5, the AA Mexico City Visiting School will engage with the most crucial and imposing challenges that Mexico City faces and the ways in which architecture and urbanism can shape the metropolis at different scales. In this sense the international program sees the city as a laboratory where the virtual and experimental tradition of the Architectural Association finds a fertile and concrete ground for the application of its methodology in Mexico. With the theme of "Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities”, the program explores the metropolitan condition understood as a manufactured process by and for human beings. More information after the break.
The traditional opposing concepts, artificial vs nature, are replaced under the premise, where nature does not exist, where nature is not natural but naturalized and the artificial is not an external or impose construct but manufactured intrinsically.
With this as a starting point the program will study 2 instances of Mexico City’s “Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities”: The ravines in the west of Mexico City, last bastion of the existing “Nature” and its crucial role in the viability of Mexico City and social housing, as the fundamental construct of the “artificial” habitat in the metropolis´s urban tissue. These “Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities” and the ways in which they are designed, produced, reinvented regenerated, show a vast spectrum representative of the crucial urban conditions to be address and therefore they posed an enormous urban and architectonic challenge to confront in order to apply contemporary design methodologies.
To tackle the complexities of the “Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities”, the program will immerse students and staff in a 10 day intensive workshop within a multidisciplinary environment where national and international experts from various fields will enrich their proposals. Students will work in architecture and/or urban scale teams and will critically assess the impact of their multiple scales interventions.
A backbone of lectures, talks and seminars, including local and international speakers, are designed to broaden and reflect the relevance and the importance of the topic for Mexico City. Finally a public exhibition of student’s work will be held at Centro Cultural de España in autumn 2013.
To sign up, and for more information, please visit here.