It’s really hard to meet a real Londoner in London, since people from all around the world are constantly coming to this multi-cultural city with many layers of history and traditions. The city is bustling with tourists throughout the whole year, so you can’t really walk from the hotel on one side of Oxford Street to the AA school on the other side of the street. Instead, you are carried by a crowd of people (a regular stampede) with about a 1000 different languages ringing in your ear. 

That might be the first impression but what London was for me afterwards were all the more hidden aspects of the city. It was interesting to visit a city for the first time and not to be just a tourist. We got to know the different side of London thanks to the projects we were working on. We visited the places and met the people we probably wouldn’t if we were “regular turists”.

In any case, I bet anyone can find something for himself in London – being bored there is a real challenge.

On second Sunday we learned pattern cutting and each of us made himself/herself a jumpsuit made out of white linen. We went to four London areas (described in one of the previous posts) wearing these jumpsuits and examined the reactions of passers-by. Their reactions were of course very different and, depending on the social structure, very characteristic for each of the four areas.

People in Bank didn’t even want to notice anything while rushing to work, so for Bank, our catastrophe was an extreme isolation of people in their workspace. In Brick Lane, passers-by thought we were exercising some sort of a religious protest, so for this area a potential catastrophe is a conflict between groups of emigrants from Bangladesh and groups of artists.

For Piccadilly Circus, the distinctive catastophe is an overaboundance of turists, who were expecting a performance from us. And for Canary Wharf, where they immediately arrested us, the artificiality and total control of the surroundings.

In conclusion: each of these situations (city overcrowded with tourists, cultural and religious conflicts, isolation and control of the living environment) can potentially lead to a catastrophe if it culminates extremely.

On third Sunday we worked on a project for final presentation in which we presented our group as an agency for raising awareness and warning people about potential local catastrophes. Our agency was named CSCC: Citizens for a Social Cooperative through Catastrophe and our slogan was »The only way to imagine a Utopia of social cooperation is to conjure a situation of absolute catastrophe.« (Slavoj Žižek) This slogan was selected by our tutor Cher, who is a big fan of Slavoj Žižek's work.

In our work we decided to focus on existing local social relations instead of global catastrophes. The project developed pretty much spontanely and so the discussions from one day lead to what we want to do the next day. We made a blog where we posted a part of our work and our comments. Here’s one of my early comments on the topic of relations between architecture and fashion design:

There are obviously 2 kinds of relations: architecture - fashion design as practices and other kind of relations: building - clothing as products. Relation between building and clothing which are basically relations in formal and functional aspect and relation in meanings or messages.

And as practices both architecture and fashion design are about future, about predictions, projections... Architectural design is always about seeking for solutions, answers ..which may be different from fashion design. Both architecture and fashion design are reflections of society and though they have a more or less parallel development through history with other forms of art but there is different process, or different way from context to concept, similarities and differences in approach to existing physical context, cultural context, social, political …  and then relations in dealing with identity of person and identity of place , where architecture is about creating sense of where we are and fashion deals with sense of who we are, and illusions of both where we are and who we are.

On first Sunday, we started to get to know four different parts of London: Brick Lane – a place where artists and emigrants from Bangladesh work and reside, Bank – a finance and banking center, Piccadilly Circus – a tourist attraction and Canary Wharf – the new business/residential part of London.

We examined the behavior and dressing code and physical surroundings – that is, parallels of fashion design and architecture where fashion design studies the identity of the person and the architecture studies the identity of the city.

During our summer session, we also visited some of the most interesting exhibitions:

Skin+Bones in Somerset House - an interesting exhibition of parallels between architecture and fashion design.

New London Architecture – a public display of future building projects, since London is currently filled with cranes and construction workers because of the 2012 Olympics.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavillion in Hyde Park is a pavillion projected by a different famous architect every year. This year, the pavillion is a work of Frank Gehry. We visited displays and discussions held in this pavillion (Is the pavillion the most fashiony architecture gets? Is the pavilion the architectural outcome that most closely reflects the fashion approach in terms of: a) Skin as structure and skin as content? b) Seasonal 'event' structures?)

»Psycho Buildings« in Southbank Centre – installations made by world-famous artists on how they experience architecture.

»Street Art« in Tate Modern – better yet: on Tate Modern, since the display was held outdoors, on the riverside facade of Tate building.

... continued next week

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Jelena Grujiæ is the winner of the 2007 Trimo Urban Crash competition.

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As I already wrote, there were 6 groups working on different approaches to the “London ever after” theme: Worst Case Scenario, Memorial to Future Past, Architastrophe, London Y-Z, A Catastrophic Silence and Factory for Passe London.

Each of these 6 themes sounded really interesting (you can read about them on the AA website but I liked Cher's and Bettina's presentation the most so I joined their unit – Architastrophe. Cher graduated in philosophy and fine arts in South Africa and Bettina graduated in fashion design in Berlin. They both work in a London-based company that predicts future trends in fashion.

In their presentation they talked about exploring architecture’s and fashion design’s common ground, pattern cutting and sewing… A thought crossed my mind: we’ll be making some sort of super multi-functional transformable clothes that we can fold to a minimum size and carry around in our bags so they come handy if a disaster strikes. These clothes will then act as an umbrella and keep our bodies safe in extreme conditions at the same time… in a way, designing clothes that are kind of similar to astronauts’ space suits. In the end, we didn’t really do anything of that sort. Throughout the course we examined the parallels between fashion design and architecture as a sign of a catastrophe.

    My group

My unit colleagues were Sundos, Badia and Kholoud, three girls from Saudi Arabia, Rita from India, Desislava from Bulgaria (all these girls have already finished their third study year of architecture), Ha li Wong who studies biology in Canada, Beatriz from Madrid, Yoo Jin Lee and Hae an Kim from South Korea, John and Sherwood from Hong Kong (who just finished high school) and Kerry from Australia who works in a financial field but wants to change her career. Each of us had a totally different background, yet we had to work together to make the final project. I thought it would be really hard and complicated, but somehow we worked well together from day one, so our team work soon became an interesting mix of ideas.

… continued next week.

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Jelena Grujiæ is the winner of the 2007 Trimo Urban Crash competition.

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When I first entered the AA building I heard laughter, Natasha and Shuman – the summer school tutors as they made the roll call, mispronouncing some of the longer and strange sounding names. About 90 people from all proverbial sides of the world came to the summer school. Some of them young, barely out of middle school and interested in studying architecture and others older, 40 + years of age who wanted a change in their careers.

Not only students were from different cultures and different backgrounds, tutors too were practically everything but professors of architecture. Some of them were AA school graduates, some of them artists, others graphic designers, architects, musicians and fashion designers.

On first day we divided ourselves into 6 groups (units) working on different approaches to a common theme of our summer school – the future of cities and potential catastrophes.

So what did we do? From the description on the AA summer school website

Look out. Life is imitating art. What was once the domain of the disaster movie is fast becoming the real-life plot of our collective futures. From The Day After Tomorrow (eco-Armageddon) to I Am Legend (man-made viral pandemic); cities have become the ticking-time bombs of tomorrow. This year, the AA’s Summer Architecture School will focus on the forces—social, economic, ecological, technical—that might potentially conspire to bring about the city’s—and the world’s—end. Using London as an experimental laboratory of ideas and hypotheses, we will yield unexpected discoveries and innovative proposals. As more and more people move to cities than ever before, a figure that is set to rise to 70% of the global population in just 40 years time, what are the imminent and long-term emergency scenarios, and how might we either avert or design away the disasters? The brief, intense course—based on the renowned AA Unit System—emphasises techniques of interpretation, recording, drawing, making and thinking through diverse media types, both analogue and digital.

The pavillion in front of the AA, made by the students

The second pavillion in front of the school

... continued next week

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Jelena Grujiæ is the winner of the 2007 Trimo Urban Crash competition.

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