THEME

FOLDED FORCE

AA Greece Visiting School is a series of mobile academic programmes traveling and reaching cities outside the country’s capital.

It functions as a ‘satellite’ of education that promotes the Architectural Association’s exclusive, intensive form of teaching and learning around the country. AA Greece VS begins in the cities of Patras, Thessaloniki and Chania and constructs large-scale models which will act as active nods of communication among the various locations.

These cities are located far from each other and from the capital. Every location is distinguished by its’ own unique built environment which allows for a more specialized and genuine set of design qualities. In every city, there will be one final constructed prototype model. This model reflects the city’s personality and will act as a point of connection with the other city prototypes. Design parameters that will define the form and function of a model from one place also become the ‘guidelines’ to influence and affect the architectural design of the others. In this way, the connection –once made- among the cities will remain active even after its’ completion. The AA Greece VS began ‘connecting’ cities around the country starting with Patras and continuing with the city of Thessaloniki.

The main aim of AA Greece Visiting School is to extract information from the existing urban conditions of Patras, Thessaloniki, and Chania, re-interpreting the extracted data on a one-to-one scale active prototype. AA Greece Visiting School is conducting a research on specific city parts in relation to parameters of social activity, historic and contemporary events, urban morphology and more. The results of these investigations are then interpreted through diagrams and interactive visualizations for the building of a prototype which bears the potential to communicate certain urban aspects and conditions of these areas. This process is repeated in each cycle of the school series, where information extracted from every city will eventually be overlaid with each other, thereby leading to the emergence of complex network topologies which link all cities with different contexts and backgrounds.