Aformal Academy Archive

UABB 2015 Re-Living The City Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, from 5th December 2015 to 28th February 2016, Shenzen.

The notion of learning, like our comprehension of cities, is undergoing a massive transition. As opposed to the classical top-down, checking-boxes, fixed-systems; we need to REread and REform the process of acquiring knowledge. Often people’s defining educational moments are intense, dynamic, diverse moments/experiences/places out of the norms of the “classroom” and “school”.
Aformal Academy–RE: Learning The City is a spatial and co-creational knowledge exchange, where professors, both foreign and local students, lecturers, local craftsmen, in-town guests, local researchers, exhibitors and citizens crash together in a free-flowing information exchange–creating a process of multi-layered learning across disciplines, for all.
The profession is going through a moment of deep rethinking, due to the economic recession, the acknowledgment of the Anthropocene and the complexity that concerns the contemporary human habitat. As Etienne Turpin’s recent book Architecture in the Anthropocene claims, it is necessary to rethink the whole experience of practices and knowledge taken from modernity. Hence it is necessary to be aware of the failure of an idea of progress and of an anthropization strategy that is no longer sustainable. Today we can strongly perceive the change of the practice. On one side architectural firms go on with their work that is strictly connected to the neoliberal global market. On the other side, hybrid practices–in form of collectives – develop their work breaking the disciplinary borders to get in touch with other cultural fields. The aim of Tomorrow’s Spatial Practice is to question which modalities and tools will be able to characterize the profession of tomorrow.

Aformal Academy is a project by L+CC (Jason Hilgheford and Merve Bedir)
The editorial coordinators of the Aformal Academy Archive are: IRA-C and Parasite 2.0

Contributors: Pierre Vanni, Michael van Iersel, m-a-u-s-e-r, Dori Sadan, Jesko Frezer, Aristide Antonas , Simon Yuill, Martina Motta, Nicolas Korody, Jeremy Till, Monu Magazine, Oblò officina di architettura
Guests: Fosbury Architecture (Antonio Buonsante, Federico Casati), Plan comùn (Diego Grass), Ruja Office (Ruohong Wu, Jose Qunitanar), Something Fantastic (Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz), Amateur Cities (Ania Molenda, Cristina Ampatzidou), Charta Magazine (Francisco Moura Veiga, Francisco Ramos Ordonez), Make Collaborate (Mathieu Bojnowskyj), Urban Next (Ricardo Devesa)
Curated by Aaron Betsky, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, Doreen Heng Liu
Web design: From Outer Space

www.aformalacademy.com