AA Visiting School - Experimental Communities - Black Mountain

The Experimental Communities visiting workshop seeks to outrun the progressive ruination of twentieth-century architecture’s grand narratives by establishing a space for students to work at the juncture of historical research and the act of making. The intellectual fault lines of contemporary production will be tackled by defining new sets of relations with cultural history based on content rather than temporal proximity. To accomplish this task we have turned our sights upon earlier communities driven by ‘charisma, nerve, and talent’, and bound by an ethos forged in a collective struggle to wrestle the arts away from the clutches of the present. Experimental Communities is the first in a series of three workshops tackling the cultural landscape of the American avant-garde. In its inaugural year, it will be held at Black Mountain College (BMC) on the shores of Lake Eden, North Carolina, where in a groundbreaking educational experiment between 1933–1957, ex-Bauhaus tutors like Joseph Albers and Walter Gropius mingled with future stars including John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning and Merce Cunningham. Attracting a particular breed of student with the unconventional promise of erecting Bucky’s failed Geodesic Dome out of aluminum blinds, or partaking in Cage’s first ‘happening’, BMC remains a hub of creative independence ripe for reappraisal. Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the workshop will provide an opportunity to live and work at the exact site where these cultural luminaries spent their own formative years. A contingent of leading practitioners and theorists will join students for a week of design experimentation at the intersection of art and architecture, supplemented by evening lectures on contemporary production paradigms and the role of design pedagogy in the creative endeavour, visits to local sites of interest (such as the Biltmore Estate – the largest house in America) and an ‘architecture clinic’ for ill-fitting projects. Students will reinterpretate BMC design exercises with the aim of inhabiting a distinct cultural framework and letting it bear upon their own contemporary sensibilities and anxieties. Our prejudices are laid on the table – site matters, experimentation is paramount and the eccentricities of history are the most fruitful source of contemporary inspiration. http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/blackmountain.php