Aa Files Conversations

This volume - the first in an anticipated series of similar anthologies - collates conversations from the past ten issues of AA Files, the long-running journal published by the Architectural Association School of Architecture. It includes extended interviews with architects François Dallegret, Léon Krier, John Winter, Mario Botta, John Frazer, Massimo Scolari, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Moshe Safdie, artists Richard Wentworth and Thomas Demand, fi lmmaker Sally Potter, philosopher Paul Virilio, historian Robin Middleton and photographers Tim Street-Porter and Hilla Becher.

This title features essays by Lilly Dubowitz on Stefan Sebok, the art historian Karin Gimmi on Max Frisch, the architectural historian Irene Sunwoo on AATV, the oral historian Linda Sandino on the oral archive, the design historian Eric Kindel on stencils and a conversation between John Morgan and Sally Potter about her father."

AA Files is the Architectural Association's (AA) journal of record. Currently under the editorship of Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, AA Files looks to promote original and engaging writing on architecture. It does this by drawing both on the AA's own academic research, public programme, exhibitions and events, as well as by a rich and eclectic mix of architectural scholarship from all over the world. The forthcoming issue of AA Files examines a range of building typologies and histories from Pyongyang to Lusaka and beyond - its geographic remit is broader than any previous issue. It also features articles looking at some of the wider contexts informing architectural practice, including timelines of ecological rupture, ways of measuring the human body, and the emergence of privatised public space. Contributors include Thandi Loewenson, Calvin Chua, Christina Varvia, Elisa Iturbe, Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler among others.

What can you do with a degree in architecture? Where might it take you? What kind of challenges could you address? Architects After Architecture reframes architecture as a uniquely versatile way of acting on the world, far beyond that of designing buildings. In this volume, we meet forty practitioners through profiles, case studies, and interviews, who have used their architectural training in new and resourceful ways to tackle the climate crisis, work with refugees, advocate for diversity, start tech companies, become leading museum curators, tackle homelessness, draft public policy, become developers, design videogames, shape public discourse, and much more. Together, they describe a future of architecture that is diverse and engaged, expanding the limits of the discipline, and offering new paths forward in times of crisis. Whether you are an architecture student or a practicing architect considering a change, you’ll find this an encouraging and inspiring read. Please visit the Architects After Architecture website for more information, including future book launches and events: architectsafterarchitecture.com

AA Files is the Architectural Association's journal of record and offers a platform for exchange connecting the research produced by the AA community to a larger architectural debate globally. Organised in a series of thematic sections that emerged from the AA Files Issue 76 Glossary, each 'file' contains two or more contributions that explore a common keyword constructing a dialogue between a heterogeneous set of authors with the aim to reframe architecture as a critical point of entry through which the most urgent social and environmental questions of today can be addressed. In Issue 77, the themes are Body, Care, Economy, Environment, Labour, Project and Resistance. A special feature 'file' on Home gathers ten perspectives on domestic living during lockdown from Mexico City to Teheran, while ARÓ (Allies Against Discrimination and Disparity) writes on four keywords that have been added to our AA Files Glossary: Afrofuturism, Exile, Third Space and Transience. With contributions by ARÓ, Panos Dragonas and Lydia Kallipoliti, Cooking Sections, Andrea Bagnato, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, Leonard Ma, Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs, James Westcott and Federico Martelli, Ludovico Centis and Ed Ruscha, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Elena Palacios Carral, Neeraj Bhatia, Pietro Bonomi and Nicoló Ornaghi, Christophe van Gerrewey, Hugh Strange, Alejandra Celedón Forster, Hamed Khosravi, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Alessandro Bava, Fernanda Canales, Brendon Carlin, Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli, Dan Handel, Harriet Harriss, Peer Illner, Kaveh Rashidzadeh, Charles Rice, Francesca Romana Dell'Aglio, Gabrielle Eglen, Jeremy Lecomte, Oli Surel and Max Turnheim.

A journey through the history, cultures, and societies of Marseille. There are many Marseilles, or at least many versions of Marseille: seaside village, haven of gangsters, gateway to the East, city of immigrants and outcasts. It is by turns the dull bourgeois provincial town where nothing ever happens and the mysterious unknowable city of the Mediterranean. In Marseille Mix, William Firebrace explores the many Marseilles, the invented and the actual. Leading readers down narrow streets, through undulating terrain that seems at once, or serially, Italian, Greek, Levantine, and North African, Firebrace traces the history and culture of Marseille through landscapes, buildings, food, films, literature, and criminology. In seven chapters, in writing that is by turns essay, narrative, description, list, recipe, glossary, and conversation, Firebrace investigates the city’s defining mix. He tells stories of famous Marseillais, including Marcel Pagnol and Antonin Artaud, and famous visitors, including the dying Arthur Rimbaud and Walter Benjamin (who wrote about one visit in “Hashish in Marseille”). He describes the brief period when Marseille was the point of departure for European refugees fleeing the Nazis and the city’s mixture of desperation and decadence during the Vichy regime. He visits the basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde and gazes down from its terrace at the panoramic view: an agglomeration of neighborhoods and landscapes that became a city.

AA Files 75 features essays by Freya Wigzell, Kristina Jaspers, Claire Zimmerman, Laila Seewang, Roberta Marcaccio, Rebecca Siefert, Shantel Blakely, Francesco Zuddas, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Francisco González de Canales, Ross Anderson, Salomon Frausto, Theo Crosby, Marco Biraghi and Zoë Slutzky, together with a personal reminiscence by Nigel Coates and a conversation between Thomas Daniell and Shin Takamatsu.