Raül Avilla-Royo
Raül Avilla-Royo (Course Master)
Raül Avilla-Royo is a practising architect, educator, and researcher. He studied architecture in ETSAB Barcelona and AAM Mendrisio, after which he graduated with an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design at the Architectural Association. He is currently a PhD candidate at London’s Royal College of Art inquiring into community architectures framed by social movements and collaborative practices, for which he was awarded a “La Caixa” Foundation and LDoc-AHRC scholarships. Raül teaches in the MPhil “Projective Cities” at the Architectural Association and in ETSAB Barcelona. Since 2013 he runs his own practice.
Raül is a member of “Arquitectos de Cabecera”, a Barcelona-based collective that inquiries in community-led city urban processes through architecture pedagogy as a tool for social transformation. Arquitectos de Cabecera has been recognized nationally and internationally, including the City of Barcelona Architecture Award in 2015, 2017 nomination to Mies van der Rohe awards, and a commendation in the 2021 Innovation in Architectural Education Award by the International Union of Architects. In addition, was exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion of the 2018 Biennale of Architecture in Venice and Piso Piloto Exhibition in Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona (CCCB) and Museo de Antioquia de Medellín in 2015.
George Jepson
George Jepson (AA PhD Candidate, Course Assistant)
George is a writer and researcher. Currently, he is completing his PhD studies under the supervision of Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Guidici with a project researching factory design in Manchester from 1760-1915. Funded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, the project traces the political economic networks that developed across the two industrial revolutions in Great Britain to explore the relationship between domestic production and colonial extraction. Previously, he received a distinction for his MA thesis at Goldsmiths College on Massimo Cacciari’s concept of negative thought.
His writing has been published in Volume, Mute, and Kajet, amongst others, and has presented his academic work at conferences across Europe. Previous editorial work includes Volume Magazine and AARC #1 (IF Publications, 2020). Currently, he tutors students in History and Theory at both the Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art, London.
Doreen Bernath © Sue Barr
Dr Doreen Bernath (Course Master)
Doreen Bernath is an architect and a theorist across disciplines of design, technology, philosophy, visual art, media and cultures. Trained at Cambridge and the AA, she won an RIBA scholarship and was a finalist in 2011 for the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Thesis (PhD). She is part of the editorial team of RIBA’s The Journal of Architecture and a co-founder of the research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, an international platform of critical debates, open seminars and publications on the role of theory in the discipline. One of its publications, which she co-edited, is the special issue focused on ‘Theory as Apparatus’, ‘Theory as Transaction’ and ‘Theory as Craft’ in Architecture & Culture November 2015. Her earlier publications appeared in Time + Architecture magazine in China, Dialogue magazine in Taiwan, and the research journal of the Asia Centre at the London School of Economics.
Since 2018, Doreen co-directs AAVS Budapest ‘The Uncommon Walk’ that explores pedestric modes of urban activism: ‘In/Imprints 2018’, ‘Re-Sets 2019’ and ‘Pace Play 2020’. This programme collaborates with significant local architecture centres (FUGA, KÉK, BVA), universities (BME, MOMÉ), art galleries and festivals (Budapest Design Hét) and specialists manufacturers through workshops, travelling exhibitions, installation and filmmaking, eventually leading to international symposium and publication. She was previously a co-director of DEZACT and a founder of SpaceMedia that initiated digital art and architectural collaborations, such as through the biennale ‘Modern Body Festival’ between Den Haag and Taipei.
Doreen has taught in numerous universities internationally since 2006, including UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, Nottingham University and Plymouth University. Currently she teaches at the AA in History and Theories Studies Diploma School, Projective Cities MPhil Programme and supervises PhDs. She also teaches at the Leeds School of Architecture, where she has co-led the MArch design unit ‘Cinematic Commons’ since 2013. As a result of the international symposium ‘Scene and Sequence: On Cinematic Urbanisms’ which she organised in February 2018, a book proposal preliminarily titled ‘Urban Transcripts of the Cinemesque’, and in parallel a research website project, have been put forward, engaging critical voices from a diverse range of cultural contexts in Mumbai, Mexico City, Tokyo and London. She also coordinates the whole school public programme and research clusters, and as PhD director of studies.
Roozbeh Elias-Azar
Roozbeh Elias-Azar (Course Consultant)
Roozbeh holds his MArch from Faculty of Art and Architecture at IAU Tehran and diploma in MSc Urban studies from Urban Laboratory at University College London. Elias-Azar has been practicing since 2002 and in 2020 founded Third-Line based in London and Tehran.
Third-Line is a cross-disciplinary office concerned with the built environment, spatial practices and place imaginaries. The practice operates at the intersection of architecture, art and urban geography. They work with London housing typologies and the cities’ historic urban context for private clients and public organizations. Their projects also include an artist studio in Tehran and house and workshop in rural Iran. Third-line has collaborated in an urban space and public art project in Doha for Qatar 2022 world cup, rethinking historical housing typologies as references for a progressive urban intervention.
Roozbeh’s collaborative research work on forms of public space of Tehran was published in domus 902 (2007) as well as in paradoxical Tehran issue in domus 901 (2007) His photographic works on architecture and materiality has been exhibited in Iran’s 8th biennale of photography and his artistic collaboration with Nazgol Ansarinia on ‘Fabrication’ (2013) has been exhibited internationally. ‘Revolution Begins at Home’ (2019) was developed for the first Sharjah Architecture Triennale together with Hamed Khosravi and is now part of the permeant collection at Sharjah Art Foundation.
Cristina Gamboa © Sue Barr
Cristina Gamboa (Course Master)
Cristina is a chartered architect and teacher. She studied at the Barcelona School of Architecture ETSAB / UPC, and the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning / University of Stuttgart. Cristina is co-founder of Lacol, a cooperative of architects established in 2014 in Barcelona, where she has focused on researching participative approaches to design and developing cooperative housing and housing policies, tested in on-going projects.
Lacol works from architecture towards social transformation, using architecture as a tool to intervene critically in the local environments. The activity is based on a horizontal system of labor, acting alongside society with the motivation and challenge to achieve a transition towards sustainability in the broadest way possible: political, social, economic and environmental. Lacol’s practice embrace Architecture, Urbanism, Housing policies and Participatory processes, blurring the limits of the different disciplines to define a cross-sectional and participative approach. She has focused on researching participative approaches to design and developing cooperative housing and housing policies, tested in on-going projects.
They had been recognized locally and internationally, recently they won the 2018 City of Barcelona Architecture Award.Her individual and collective work has been published and exhibited in ‘Piso Piloto’ Exhibition opened at the CCCB in Barcelona (2015), Medellín (2016) and Ciudad de México (2017); in the Catalonia Pavilion – Biennale of Venice (2016); in the Barcelona Pavilion – Biennale of Buenos Aires (2017); ‘Together! The New Architecture of the Collective’ opened at the Vitra Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany), among others.
She has written and lectured about cooperative housing processes, challenges and potentialities of the model and its architectural design. Cristina’s writings include ‘To build housing to build community. The experience of La Borda housing cooperative and its replicability in the context of Barcelona’ (2018); ‘The experience of LaBorda, from the development to the project’ (2016). She also co-edited the book ‘Habitar en comunidad’, Ediciones de la Catarata (2018).
Cristina currently teaches at ETSAB (DPA PIII_IV Contemporary Collective Housing, Associated Professor). She also taught as a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Architecture / Royal College of Art ( ADS7’s co-tutor).
Platon Issaias © Sue Barr
Dr Platon Issaias (Programme Director)
Platon is an architect, researcher and educator. He is the Director of Projective Cities: MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also Diploma Unit 7 Studio Master. Prior, he has been a Tutor/Visiting Lecturer at the School of Architecture/RCA (MA Architecture, MA City Design), and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, University of Westminster. He has also taught at the Berlage Institute/Rotterdam, the MArch Urban Design/Bartlett-UCL, the University of Cyprus, and Syracuse University, London Program.
Platon studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTh). He holds an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft. His thesis Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common investigated the recent history of planning in Athens and the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development. His published work includes ‘Solidarity’, AA Files 2019; ‘Displaced, in place and in Transit: refugee population in Greece and the formation of planning protocols and domestic machines’, Transient Spaces: Building Shelter in Crisis Contexts (NY, 2019); ‘Designing the Informal – The Case of Athens’, in Athens: From Informal to Paradigm (Athens, Futura, 2019); ‘From the Flat to the City: The construction of Modern Greek Subjectivity’ Joelho, issue 8 (2017); ‘Domestic, Production and Debt: For a Theory of the Informal’ in T. Stoppani et al (eds) This Thing Called Theory (London, 2016); ‘Mechanism of Suspension: Infrastructure and Legislation for Free Camping’ in Y. Aesopos Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece (Domes Editions, 2015) with T. Issaias and A. Vougia; ‘On Conflict, Generic and the Informal: The Greek Case’, in Very, Vary Veri, Harvard GSD, 2 (2015); ‘The Absence of Plan as a Project: Notes on the Planning development of Modern Athens, 1830-2010’ in P.V. Aureli (ed.) The City as a Project (Ruby Press, 2013); ‘From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia’, DOMUS, issue 962, October (2012) i; and ‘Labour, City, Architecture: Athens as a case study’ in P. Dragonas, A. Skiada, Made In Athens (YPEKA, 2012) with P.V. Aureli and M.S. Giudici.
Since 2009, Platon practices as a founding member of Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective. Fatura Collaborative has developed projects in a wide range of scales, from intimate objects, to architecture, urban design and planning. Their work has received multiple awards in Greece and internationally, most recently the 3rd prize for the redesign of Lycabettus Hill Theatre Public Space in Athens. From 2015 to 2020, they have been developing an incremental housing project based on alternative cooperative models in Da Nang, Vietnam. Their work has been presented and exhibited widely, most notably in the 2015 Venice Biennale, the Benaki and Acropolis Museums, and the 10th and 5th Biennale of Young Greek Architects.
In 2018, he co-curated the exhibition Islands of Exile: The Case of Leros in Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy, which presented the findings of a four-year-long interdisciplinary project on the island of Leros, Greece and its history as a place of displacement, detention, and control.
Hamed Khosravi © Sue Barr
Dr Hamed Khosravi (Course Master)
Hamed is an architect, educator and writer. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. He holds his Masters in Urbanism, within the EMU programme, at TU Delft and IUAV in Venice. Hamed received his PhD in history and theory of architecture in ‘The City as a Project’ programme at the Berlage Institute / TU Delft. Hamed has recently completed his Post-doctoral research on the ‘Labour Movements and Architecture: Tehran (1943-63)’ at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (IISG). He has been teaching history and theory courses, seminars, and design studios in various schools of architecture including TU Delft Faculty of Architecture, Oxford Brookes School of Architecture, and the Berlage Institute. He is currently the Studio Master of Diploma Unit 7 at the Architectural Association (AA) and the coordinator of the Transitional Territories Studio (Landscapes of Coexistence) at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture.
Hamed’s recent writings include Tehran. Life within Walls: A City, its Territory, and Forms of Dwelling (Hatje Cantz, 2017), ‘Aesthetics of Ruins’ in JAE Journal of Architectural Education (2018), ‘The Nomos of the Sea; Pirates, DJs, Hackers, and the Architecture of Contingent Labour’, in The Avery Review, 29, (2018), ‘Inhabitable Walls: Notes Towards a Genealogy of Islamic Sacred Space’ in P.V. Aureli & M.S. Giudici (eds.) Rituals and Walls. The Architecture of Sacred Space (London: AA Publications, 2016), ‘The Multiple Lives of Gabriel Guevrekian’ in AA Files (2015), among other titles. His forthcoming book, Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, will be published by Hatje Cantz in 2019.
Hamed is co-founder of the research collective Behemoth Press, active in architectural research and education as well as curatorial projects. His individual and collective projects were published extensively and exhibited in different international venues, among them are: ‘The Architecture of Fulfilment’ for the Venice Biennale 2014, ‘Cerberus: The Three-Headed Monster’ for the Kuwait Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016, ‘Prato: Citta-Fabrica’ for the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016, which have been all developed together with Amir Djalali and Francesco Marullo. ‘The Garden of Free Waters’, together with Plan Común, for the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2016, and ‘The Port and the Fall of Icarus’, developed together with Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin and Filippo LaFleur for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018.
Daryan Knoblauch
Daryan Knoblauch (Course Master)
Daryan is an architect, designer and scenographer, who’s work focuses on alternative models of living for which he uses print,- exhibition,- furniture and installation design as mediums of communication.
He studied Architecture and Urbanism at the Architectural Association (AA) in London where he graduated with distinction from the Taught MPHIL Projective Cities Programme in 2021. His thesis “KRISTALL, The Domestication of Water”, investigated the emergence of the bathroom in Germany as a built repercussion of body culture in search of new collective living models in Berlin today. Prior, he received a BArch (hons) from the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, where his thesis was awarded the “BDA-Master Award” for the best German Thesis of 2018 by the German Chamber of Architects after which he perused a MSc in Architecture at KU Leuven´s Sint Lucas Faculty of Architecture in Brussels.
Daryan has worked as an architect in Brussels for 51n4e, in San Francisco for Kava Massih Architects and in London/Wuppertal for Team 51.5. He was a research assistant for the Chair of Architectural Resources at AU from 2015 till 2018, before becoming a teaching assistant at Projective Cities in 2020.
Daryan is the DAAD-Research-Fellow 2020/21, received by the German Academic Exchange Service and was honoured with the Deutschland-Stipendium by the Federal Government of Education for outstanding academic achievements. His work has been featured widely within AAfiles, Deutsches Architekten Blatt (DAB), e-flux, Kölner Architektur Plattform (KAP), Mensch-Architektur-Gesellschaft (MAG) and the Seoul Architecture Biennale 2021 among others. He co-curated the “Coherent Existence Pavilion” at the City Leaks Festival in Cologne and was the production and design assistant for the exhibition “Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was, on the work of Zoe Zenghelis” curated by Hamed Khosravi.
Ioanna Piniara © Sue Barr
Dr Ioanna Piniara (Course Consultant)
Ioanna is an architect and researcher in the fields of spatial history and theory, policy and design, and political theory. She graduated from the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds an MSc in Architectural Design from the University of Thessaly, Greece and a PhD in Architecture from the Architectural Association (AA) supervised by P.V. Aureli and M.S. Giudici. Since her postgraduate studies Ioanna developed a research interest in privacy as a biopolitical device for the control of domesticity within the neoliberal media-tech complex, which was supported by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Her PhD by Design thesis We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe further explored the neoliberal appropriation of the ‘private’ and the link between housing policy, housing typology and urban planning in European capitals. Her design contribution was a synthetic model of a land policy, an urban strategy, and an architectural project for a housing settlement in Athens that operates within the field of the urban commons. This PhD research was supported by the AA, the Onassis Foundation, the A. G. Leventis Foundation and the Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust.
Ioanna is also teaching History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association and is a guest reviewer at the Journal of Architecture. She has lectured on domesticity as an institutional and spatial concept of urban governance at the AA, Cambridge, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Cyprus, Syracuse University, London Program and the National Technical University of Athens. Her contribution in publications and conference proceedings includes ‘Housing Policy as a Form of Urban Governance: The Barbican Estate and the Enclosure of the Urban Commons’ in Stavros Stavrides and Penny Travlou (eds) Housing as Commons: Housing Alternatives as Response to the Current Urban Crisis (Bloomsbury Press, 2022); ‘(Re)drawing the housing commons: A Typological Reading’ STOÀ Journal, Issue 2 (2021); ‘The Private as Representational Type: The Superblock and the IBA Berlin Block’ in Close Readings: Alan Colquhoun 1921–2012 Colloquium (Architecture Foundation, London, 2021); ‘Towards an Ecology of the Private: Redesigning Community Living in Athens’ in Dream-Play-Challenge: The Future of Residential Living Symposium (Women in Architecture Festival, Berlin, 2021); ‘We have Never been Private!’ (Future Architecture Platform, http://futurearchitectureplatform.org, 2016); ‘The Circulation of Domesticity in a New Political Economy’ MONU Magazine, Issue 24 (2016). Ioanna is currently developing a new research interest in feminist studies in order to conceptualise female empowerment by inquiring underrepresented female contributions to the architectural and urban design of the 20th century and evaluate how they can inform the 21st century urban commons discourse.
EXTERNAL EXAMINER
Prof Katharina Borsi
Katharina is a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham.
STUDENT ASSISTANT (2021-22)
Clara Asperilla Arias, phase II Projective Cities Student, 2021-22.
Clara Asperilla Arias
Clara is an architect, currently completing her MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) at Architectural Association with a research about rurality, gender and labour in Spanish 20th century colonies, supported by AA School of Architecture.
She received a BArch (hons) from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), with the support of Madrid government excellence scholarship. Meanwhile, she complemented her architecture background with international experiences at University College of Dublin and Seoul National University, where her work was featured both at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. She combined her studies with participation in architecture competitions, obtaining an international award in ARCHsharing France, on prototypes of collective living.
She completed her MArch in the field of Design and Architectural Theory in ETSAB Barcelona (Polytechnic of Catalonia), with a design project on urban peripheries, mobility infrastructure and social conciliation, awarded with an honorable mention and presented at Depósitos Pignatelli in Zaragoza, in the context of Pre_imaginarios architecture and urban exhibition.
Clara has an international professional experience background, as she has worked as an architect in Barcelona for Coll-Leclerc, in Dublin for Henchion+Reuter, and in Porto for Architectural Affairs. She has been the exhibition designer for “Joao Alvaro Rocha” in the context of Mês da Arquitetura da Maia, and is currently combining her MPhil research studies with positions as Projective Cities assistant and as librarian at Architectural Association.
