UNIT 1 AGENDA
CONTINUOUS DOMES : On the boundary of liquid and solid
Tutor: Kasper Ax
Director: Omid Kamvari
UNIT 2 AGENDA
FRACTAL COMPOSITES : Dual Processes
Tutor: Riyad Joucka
Director: Omid Kamvari
TRADITION + IDENTITY
23rd August-5th September 2014
The AA Tehran visiting school returns to Tehran for its 5th edition.
Following the success of our previous courses in understanding and promoting public space and simple forms of manufacturing, this year we will return to look at the question of tradition and identity.
Iran has had a long and celebrated history in architecture and architectural innovation that dates back some 3000 years. From the ruins of Persepolis to cities such Isfahan and Yazd there has always been and intense relationship between architecture, context, environment, materiality and a clear identity, something which has almost disappeared from the current discourse of architecture.
Identity itself is a combination of different aspects from geometry, formal language to materiality and a number of other factors. This year we will concentrate on materiality.
There is no doubt that local material and craft contribute a great deal to any regions vernacular. Using traditional means of sourcing and creating material we will attempt to generate new kinds of materials, which build upon tradition. The aim will be to update traditional material and craft to be able to respond to the 21st century requirements.
The 2 week workshop will be split into 2 parts, the first week students will be encouraged to create new materials through a variation of techniques such as mixing, heating, gluing ext. The aim in this week is to create a new hybrid material, one, which has links to local and traditional material but is also capable of dealing with current and future requirements.
During the second week students will explore the potential of the new materials created though the creation of material systems that begin to respond to environmental conditions and allow them to test the material capabilities.
As with previous years, there will be lunchtime lectures by tutors and guests and a public exhibition of the works.
PREVIOUS COURSES
UNIT 1 AGENDA
RETRO-FIT ADAPTABLE SYSTEMS
Tutor: Sara Sheikh Akbari
Director: Omid Kamvari
Advisor: Edouard Cabay
UNIT 2 AGENDA
PLAST/ELAST/IC
Tutor: Carles Sala
Director: Omid Kamvari
Advisor: Edouard Cabay
The Third Place-Urban Machines
Tehran, Iran’s capital, ranks among the world’s fast-growing cities. In the early 1940s, Tehran’s population was about 700,000. By 1966, it had risen to 3 million and by 1986 to 6 million. Today, the metropolitan area has more than 10 million residents. This explosive growth has had environmental and public health consequences, including air, water pollution and the loss of arable land and public realm. The ever increasing land value makes developments and the replacement of urban open space and easy choice. With the disappearance of open public plaza, by traffic islands and motorways the predominant public space left in the city is its many traffic arteries.
With a young population and the Cars as the main mode of transport in the city, the many highways of Tehran come to a grinding halt during rush hour.
Current solutions put forward to ease congestion have been to increase traffic capacities through the construction of more highways. A prime example is the current construction of a SECOND tier to Sadr highway travelling east to west in Tehran. With this mentality and more projects being conceived at closer proximity to homes and residential areas despite the understanding that such solution can only resolve this issue in the short term, our challenge will be to examine the possibilities of left over spaces and the potential for augmentation and reuse of such infrastructure in the future.
This year will be examining the quality of our urban spaces, we will be looking at infill sites, leftover spaces which have been generated as a result inefficient use of public roads to examine the potential for the generation of usable public space, or in other words the third place(the first being the home, the second the workplace). We will be using our experiences from past years in regards to prototyping and simplex manufacturing to inform proposals for urban machines and interventions. These Proposals will attempt to specifically address site concerns and conditions. Our ambition is to produce and implement these proposals on site across the city.