AA Visiting School Politics of Fabrication Laboratory II

Politics of Fabrications Laboratory continues a series of speculative itinerant workshops which experiment with politically charged materials in actual city sites. The second stop will be Havana city where we will experiment with architectural structures in brick and concrete. The pearl of the Antilles, the city of infinite wealth in the colonial world, is now a rotting paradise looking for a new future, but it still seduces by demonstrating its otherness within the global condition. Havana traps its visitors in an intense tapestry of smell and touch that allows a different vantage point from which to redefine our idea of material expression. From this point we will start opening up ideas for new constructions in the public space. Havana workshop will be structured in two 1-week segments. In the first part (tools and conceptual-scheme), students will learn new software to represent innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday activities and particular material organizations. These experimental propositions are meant to define new models of interaction between the individual and the collective in the public arena. In the second part (fabrication-construction), students will work collaboratively on the implementation of one of the schemes that has been selected from the first proposals. Fabricated on site, this temporary prototype will evaluate in real life the achievements of previous designs. http://havana.aaschool.ac.uk