AA Mexico City Visiting School 2013

Mexico City

Manufactured Landscape/Urbanities, Centro Cultural de España

Wednesday 26 June – Friday 5 July 2013

The AA Mexico City Visiting School is an international programme that aims to engage with the most crucial and imposing challenges that Mexico City faces and the ways in which architecture and urbanism can shape the metropolis at different scales. In these sense the progamme sees the city as a laboratory where the virtual and experimental tradition of the Architectural Association finds a fertile and concrete ground for the application of its methodology in Mexico.

“Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities” explores the metropolitan condition understood as a manufactured process by and for human beings. Henceforth the traditional opposing concepts, artificial vs nature, are replaced under the premise, nature does not exist, where nature is not natural but naturalised and the artificial is not an external or impose construct but manufactured intrinsically.

With this as a starting point the programme will study 2 instances of Mexico City’s “Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities”: The ravines in the west of Mexico City, last bastion of the existing “Nature” and its crucial role in the viability of Mexico City and social housing, as the fundamental construct of the “artificial” habitat in the metropolis´s urban tissue.   These  “Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities” and the ways in which they are designed, produced, reinvented regenerated, show a vast spectrum representative of the crucial urban conditions to be address and therefore they posed an enormous urban and architectonic challenge  to confront in order to apply contemporary design methodologies. 

To tackle the complexities of the “Manufactured Landscapes/Manufactured Urbanities”, the programme will immerse students and staff in a 10 day intensive workshop within a multidisciplinary environment where national and international experts from various fields will enrich their proposals.  Students will work in architecture and/or urban scale teams and will critically assess the impact of their multiple scales interventions.

A backbone of lectures, talks and seminars, including local and international speakers, are designed to broaden and reflect the relevance and the importance of the topic for Mexico City. Finally a public exhibition of student’s work will be held at Centro Cultural de España in autumn 2013.