IRENE SUNWOO

Princeton University
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the
‘‘Market Place:’’ The Architectural
Association Unit System

As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1971 to 1990, Alvin Boyarsky
presided over a seminal moment in the history of the school. Launching a critical departure from the
AA’s postwar modernist professional training, during the early 1970s Boyarsky developed the ‘‘unit
system’’ as the foundation of the school’s educational program. A framework of vertical studio
teaching, the unit system invited tutors to seize pedagogy as a medium for architectural experiment
and critical inquiry.

Introduction Week
In late September 1973, the Architectural
Association (AA) in London launched its Autumn
term with ‘‘Introduction Week,’’ a program of
activities and events intended, on the one hand,
to facilitate ‘‘[o]rientation and survival in the
city’’ for students new to London. ‘‘Orientation
and survival in the AA,’’ however, a welcome
brochure explained, ‘‘is more particularly what
Introduction Week is about.’’1 To be sure, the
school of architecture—Britain’s oldest and one of
the discipline’s most idiosyncratic—was then
reorienting its institutional position and testing its
own survival skills. Established in 1847 by two
students as an educational alternative to
apprenticeship, the AA had maintained its
progressive ethos, its institutional autonomy, and
its democratic foundations. Yet throughout the
1960s its independence was threatened by an
impending merger with the Imperial College of
Science and Technology, following the Royal
Institute of British Architects’ postwar educational
reform, which mandated the consolidation of
architectural schools into polytechnics and
universities.2 In 1971, after the merger’s eventual
dissolution and in hopes of recovering
institutional stability, students and staff elected
the Canadian-born architectural educator Alvin
Boyarsky (1928–1990) as chairman of the AA—an
arrival that marked the beginning of a new
episode in the school’s history of independence.
Accordingly, as an analog to Introduction
Week’s scheduled tours of London, students also
received a guided tour of the AA’s academic terrain,
recently refurbished by its new chairman.
Throughout the lecture hall, studios, and other
rooms within the AA’s Bloomsbury residence, a
series of Georgian townhouses located at 36
Bedford Square, tutors and staff outlined the
responsibilities of academic departments and
facilities, explained individual teaching objectives,
and lectured on their current architectural
preoccupations. Even the welcome lunch for
Introduction Week—boasting an international
assortment of Indian, Greek, Italian and English
menus—was ‘‘served in different parts of the
school’’3 (Figure 1).
Indeed, the occupation of the school premises
by this programmatic ‘‘menu’’ heralded the
institutionalization of Boyarsky’s ‘‘well-laid table,’’
his metaphor for an educational model that
confronted the student with a rich selection of
divergent theoretical positions and design
methodologies. At the AA, Boyarsky’s ‘‘well-laid
table’’ indelibly recast the institutional identity of
the school, which began to operate as a testing
ground for alternative forms of architectural
production. Whether exploring ecology or
conceptual art, politics or phenomenology,
pedagogy both transgressed the limits of
professional practice and proclaimed a critical
distance from architectural modernism.
In this way, the AA offers a historical lens that
brings into focus a broader shift in architectural
education: from a modernist system of professional
training that codified the architect’s responsibility to
design and build for the needs of society, to a
postmodernist pedagogy that positioned
architecture as an intellectual and critical practice.
Accordingly, this study of Boyarsky’s work at the AA
considers how educational reform contributed to
the emerging contours of architectural
postmodernism. However, what it does not propose
is a periodization of architectural education that
correlates to a stylistic ‘‘movement’’ based on
historicist visual codes. And though certain
hallmarks of postmodernism—such as consumerism,
the rise of media, and pluralism—are salient to a
discussion of the ‘‘well-laid table,’’ my aim is not to
establish Boyarsky’s model as a consummate
postmodern product. Recent publications have
offered critical readings of a diverse range of late
twentieth century architectural practices and how
these tackled modernism’s cultural, aesthetic, and
social abstractions.4 In empathy with such
scholarship, which has complicated architecture’s
postmodern agency, what follows is an attempt to
situate education as one of architectural
postmodernism’s most productive arenas.
Boyarsky’s transformation of the AA’s
institutional program was far-reaching, ranging from
his prolific expansion of its media production to the
invigoration of its exhibitions and lectures program

Journal of Architectural Education, From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 24
pp. 24–41 ª 2012 ACSA

1. Architectural Association Reception, c. 1973. Photograph published in AA Prospectus, 1973 ⁄ 1974. Photo by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of the
Architectural Association Archive.)
and the internationalization of its students and
staff. But perhaps his most well-known contribution
to the school and to architectural education more
broadly was his redesign of the AA ‘‘unit system,’’ a
competitive framework of vertical studios, or
‘‘units,’’ that each offered tutors autonomous
pedagogical territory for developing individualized
architectural investigations.5 During the 1970s, the
AA unit system supported the experiments of tutors
including members of Archigram, Robin Evans, Léon
Krier, Bernard Tschumi, Dalibor Vesely, Elia
Zenghelis, and later in the decade, Nigel Coates,
Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Rem
Koolhaas—among many others.
Rather than rehearse the ‘‘greatest hits’’ of the
unit system during Boyarsky’s chairmanship (see, in
part, above), this institutional history considers the
matrix of figures, events, and discourses that
informed the development of a teaching model that
transformed architectural education at Bedford
Square and beyond, yet which has received limited
historiographical attention.6
25 SUNWOO
The structure of the unit system has remained
relatively unchanged at AA, a remarkable testimony
to the durability and flexibility of the model. In
their subsequent roles as heads of school, its
earliest participants would design further iterations
during the 1990s—perhaps most notably at
Columbia, under the deanship of Tschumi, and at
the Bartlett, under the direction of Peter Cook.
What this historical investigation also questions,
then, is whether the enduring influence of
Boyarsky’s pedagogy, which has contributed to the
education of generations of architects, signals the
persistence of a postmodern moment in
architectural education, or its impending
transformation.7
Unit Systems
The unit system that Boyarsky launched at the AA
in 1973 was in fact the descendent of a teaching
model born out of emergent modernist polemics at
the school during the late 1930s, which was then
revived in the late 1960s in a critical gesture of
revisionist modernism. A brief sketch of these two
earlier iterations of the unit system will elucidate
the foundations and motives of its later
reincarnation during Boyarsky’s AA chairmanship.
When it was first introduced in the Spring term
of 1936 by the Scottish planner E.A.A. Rowse, then
Principal of both the AA’s School of Architecture
and its School of Planning, the unit system
precipitously (and not without controversy)
overturned the five-year structure of the school’s
Beaux-Arts course. The new teaching model
vertically integrated small groups of students into
fifteen ‘‘units’’ each term. More indebted to the
sociological theories of Patrick Geddes than the
expanded socio-esthetic program of the recently
dissolved German Bauhaus, Rowse’s unit system
encouraged group work, project analysis, and
research methods appropriate to the course’s new
emphasis on town planning and contemporary
architecture, thus rendering obsolete the historicist
framework and individualistic working methods of
the AA’s extant Beaux-Arts training8 (Figures 2
and 3).
The controversies sparked by the unit system’s
abrupt metamorphosis of the AA curriculum would
become the stuff of legend within the school by
the postwar period, fueled in part by John
Summerson’s 1947 centenary history of the AA,
which concluded by conflating the institutional
revolution of the 1930s with the rise of
architectural modernism in Britain. Certainly,
following the end of the Second World War, the
broader social identity of the student—that is, as a
future architect—would be reframed in the context
of postwar reconstruction and planning. During the
late 1940s and the 1950s, the AA continued to
develop a ‘‘realistic’’ approach to architectural
education, taking contemporary building programs
in Britain, such as housing, schools, and urban
redevelopment, as the focus of student projects9
(Figures 4 and 5). Faced with an increasingly
professionalized agenda and an influx of students
returning from war, however, the Year System was
soon revived as a more effective structure for the
AA’s modernized curriculum and would remain in
place until the mid-1960s.
A glimpse of the 1963 ⁄ 1964 curriculum
illustrates how the AA student encountered
programs of increasing scale and complexity as he
or she progressed through the school’s postwar Year
System. The First Year of study introduced the
student to modes of three-dimensional design and
representation, proceeding from the visual
arrangement of planes and studies in proportion to
the design of a single-celled space. In the Second
Year inquiry advanced to the scale of town planning
and more complex construction techniques.10
Emphasis on professional practice and construction
technology was further honed in the Third Year,
which began with a reinforced concrete building
project requiring cost estimates, technical analyses,
and the preparation of working drawings.11 While
the Third Year concluded with a medium-sized town
planning project, in the Fourth Year students began
to design at the scale of the urban, with projects
focusing on the redevelopment of areas in central
London. The Fifth Year was largely devoted to an
independent thesis based on a brief developed by
the student and through individual tutorials with
designated staff members.
With the exception of the First Year and the
Fifth Year, each year of students was subdivided
into smaller groups—what was in fact the postwar
iteration of the unit, each supervised by a Unit
Master (who was in turn supervised by a Year
Master) responsible for guiding student work on a
more intimate level.12 No longer the defining
element of a ‘‘system,’’ the unit had become
auxiliary to the Year System curriculum. Just as the
modernity of the unit system, in terms of both its
educational method and content, had eclipsed the
tradition of Beaux-Arts teaching at the AA, an
institutionalized pedagogical practice of modernism
now eclipsed the original polemical agency of the
unit system. Or, as AA Principal William Allen would
declare in 1965, invoking the ‘‘battle’’ that had
2. Entrance to a City Road Tunnel, perspective by C.O. Tremeer; AA Year 4, Term 2, Monument Studies, March 1934. Photo by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of
the Architectural Association Archive.)
unfolded at the school three decades earlier, ‘‘the
argument is now a memory,’’ for ‘‘what was fought
for now prevails’’13 (Figure 6).
By the late 1960s, the modernist agendas of
other leading British schools of architecture,
including Cambridge, the Regent Street Polytechnic,
and the Bartlett, seemed to corroborate Allen’s
statement. And yet, contemporary publications such
as Aldo Rossi’s Architecture and the City and Robert
Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, both
published in 1966, contemporaneously attempted to
dismantle such universalizing perspectives on
modernism—as did a fast-approaching wave of
pedagogical shifts at architecture schools
worldwide. Disparate as they might be, such events
and discourses demonstrated how modernism was
in fact provoking new (self-reflexive) ‘‘arguments.’’
Indeed, by revising the AA’s modernist curriculum,
John Lloyd—Allen’s successor and AA Principal
from 1966 to 1970—contributed such an
‘‘argument.’’ Although his methodology and
ideology may have been less critically charged in
comparison to those of his contemporaries, Lloyd’s
own resuscitation of the unit system in 1967 as a
critique of the AA’s postwar technocratic curriculum
nevertheless laid the institutional groundwork for
the pedagogical innovations that his successor,
Boyarsky, would cultivate.
As Dean of the Department of Architecture at
the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology in Kumasi from 1963 to 1966,
Lloyd—an AA graduate and former First Year
Master—had been responsible for designing the
curriculum of Ghana’s first school of architecture.
For Lloyd, the development of West Africa
presented an ‘‘open-ended’’ situation requiring a
flexible pedagogical analog for a faculty that found
itself ‘‘by necessity, in order to teach, trying to
define the role and form of the future Building
Industry.’’14 Rather than import preexisting
‘‘paternalistic’’ teaching methods based on Western
formal and esthetic canons, Lloyd instead argued
that the Kumasi curriculum should respond to
Ghana’s national policies and building projects, its
local climatological conditions, natural resources,
and emerging social dynamics.15 It was in this
context that Lloyd began to articulate a pedagogical
objective to produce ‘‘generalists’’ capable of
strategic problem solving through interdisciplinary
means.16
‘‘Above all we must engender a scientific
attitude amongst our students,’’ Lloyd asserted in
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 26
3. Land Settlement, presentation board by A.K. Scott, AA Unit 5 project, 1939. Photograph by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association
Archive.)

his 1966 AA Principal candidate’s statement, ‘‘not

just an ability in low grade applied technology.’’ The
invective targeted what Lloyd viewed as limited and
uninspired uses of technology in postwar British
architectural practice, and in turn, architectural
education. Moreover, for Lloyd, the inflexibility of
the AA’s Year System curriculum engendered
individualistic solutions and a competitive attitude
among students and was thus incongruous with the
collaborative exigencies that they would encounter
as modern practitioners.17 The curriculum not only
distorted ‘‘the relationship between the individual
and his society,’’ he argued, but also, and more
gravely, hindered the fundamental rights of an
individual in a democratic society to ‘‘choice.’’18
Therefore, in the context of the AA—’’founded by
students, for students,’’ Lloyd was quick to
acknowledge—what was at stake was the student’s
‘‘freedom of choice’’ in the shaping of his or her
own architectural education.19
In the Autumn of 1967, Lloyd abandoned the
Year System in an attempt to facilitate research,
independent decision making, and a ‘‘shift in
emphasis from the teaching of a curriculum towards
the education of the individual will.’’20 While the
First Year of study maintained its largely
foundational aspirations and the Fifth Year
remained dedicated to independent work, it was
through Lloyd’s consolidation of the second, third,
and fourth years of study into a newly designated
Middle School that the unit system dramatically
rearticulated the AA’s modernist agenda.21
Previously oriented horizontally to distribute
student supervision to tutors, nine units were now
oriented vertically through the Middle School. Unit
Masters were now responsible for defining design
programs and working methods, establishing a
pedagogical matrix in which the student’s newly
awarded ‘‘freedom of choice’’ encouraged
engagement with subjects ranging from
industrialized housing to ‘‘problems caused by
urban waste and refuse,’’ and ‘‘the possible use of
the continental shelf as an extension of human

27 SUNWOO

4. ‘‘Entering the city from a class D road from the Zone (approaching the tunnel),’’ drawing by Pat Crooke, Andrew Derbyshire, John Voelcker. AA
Fifth Year project ‘‘The Zone,’’ 1952. Photograph by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Archive.)
5. AA First Year Studio, 1958 ⁄ 1959, Peter Rich at desk. Photograph by Elizabeth Sakellariou. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Archive.)
resources.’’22 In effect, Lloyd stated, the unit system
allowed students to ‘‘exercise a large influence on
the structuring of their own curriculum and in
particular on the nature and sequence of the
problems studied as studio programmes.’’23 It was
through such an uninhibited landscape of topics,
navigated and explored ‘‘democratically’’ via the
unit system, that the student’s ‘‘generalist’’
architectural training was to unfold.
And yet, it was an ironic stroke of institutional
democracy that kept Lloyd from seeing his ‘‘Middle
School experiment’’ develop further. After nearly a
decade of debate at the AA over the school’s
merger with Imperial College, in 1970 negotiations
with its once welcoming host crumbled. Facing near
closure, the school experienced an intense moment
of institutional crisis that culminated in Lloyd’s
resignation and the seizure of the school’s
operations by students and staff, who coordinated
an election for a new chairman, In the summer of
1971 they cast their votes for Boyarsky over his
opposing candidate, Kenneth Frampton.24
Fragmentation
When Boyarsky began his chairmanship at the AA in
the Autumn term of 1971, he was no stranger to
the school’s history of upheavals. A Montreal native,
Boyarsky had studied architecture during the late
1940s at McGill under a modernist curriculum that
had been designed by graduates of Rowse’s AA
Planning School. After earning a master’s degree in
Regional Planning in the late 1950s at Cornell,
where he serendipitously crossed paths with Colin
Rowe, he taught briefly at the University of Oregon.
In 1963, he relocated to London, where he taught
at the AA as a Fourth-Year unit tutor (1963–1964),
and then as Fourth-Year Master (1964–1965),
organizing the year program around the planning
and redevelopment of the Royal Courts of Justice in
London. Boyarsky’s resistance to Allen’s efforts to
weigh further technical studies upon the Fourth
Year program of study was complicated by his own
skepticism about the AA’s ongoing merger
negotiations. Disagreements with his superior
ultimately led to the termination of the young
tutor’s post, and as a result Boyarsky accepted a
teaching position at the University of Illinois
Chicago Circle Campus in 1965. Yet, as director of
the International Institute of Design (IID) Summer
Sessions in London—an independent school he
founded and directed from 1970 to 1972, and
whose participants drew heavily from the AA staff
and student body—he was able to keep a watchful
eye on the events unfolding at Bedford Square.25
Introduced only four years earlier by Lloyd and
tested as the Imperial College merger crisis was
reaching fever pitch, the unit system that Boyarsky
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 28

6. Performance by AA students at 36 Bedford Square, 1961. Photograph by Paul Simpson. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Archive.)
inherited was still very much in its nascency.
Throughout his first year in office, the new
Chairman, teaching staff, and students together
evaluated the efficacy of Lloyd’s academic model in
a series of school meetings, working parties, as well
as in the pages of the AA Newsheet, a new
in-house bulletin covering the school’s day-to-day
affairs.26 Rather than a radical overhaul
spearheaded by Boyarsky alone, the AA’s departure
from Lloyd’s modernist philosophy and the
reorganization of its curriculum developed through
a process of dialogue.
Although their opinions and interests were by
no means uniform, both students and tutors agreed
that the intensely democratic nature of Lloyd’s
educational policy—that is, the insistence on the
student’s responsibility for shaping the course of his
or her education—was in principle highly desirable,
and certainly, in keeping with the ethos of the AA.
Yet, left largely unchecked, such democracy had in
fact triggered various forms of ‘‘fragmentation’’
within an educational platform that purported to
produce ‘‘generalists.’’ Combined with their unit
work, the disparate agendas of the ‘‘service’’
departments—Systems Studies (building
technology), Arts & History (visual arts and the
history of art and architecture) and, newly
introduced in 1971 by Boyarsky, the
29 SUNWOO
Communications Unit (audio-visual technology)—
put AA students in a ‘‘confusing position of
attempting to reconcile several points of view.’’ The
result was the veritable ‘‘fragmentation of the
student mind,’’ according to one student.27
Teaching staff had experienced their own strains of
‘‘fragmentation.’’ First Year Master Tony Gwilliam
flagged the difficulties of supervising and managing
the entire group of sixty First Year students, and
suggested breaking the monolithic introductory
course into a sequence of smaller teaching units,
each developed by a different tutor, to better
prepare students for the range of methods and
work undertaken in the Middle School.28 Rumblings
were also heard from within the Middle School. The
high degree of individualism across student
projects, which not uncommonly departed from
established project briefs (and were under Lloyd’s
policy encouraged to do so), was compounded by
the student’s freedom to move from unit to unit,
thereby exponentially increasing the demands and
scope of tutorial supervision.29
Corroborating accounts surfaced in a ‘‘Middle
School Survey’’ launched by the AA Newsheet,
which invited tutors and students to share their
experiences in the unit system and compiled reports
of each unit’s activities that year. The report on
‘‘MS2’’—nicknamed ‘‘the Greek Unit’’ after its
tutors Thalys Agaropoulos and Elia Zenghelis, and
which took as its theme ‘‘buildings and the
city’’—revealed that the unit had amassed an
enrollment of nearly one hundred students by the
Summer term. The population of the ‘‘Greek Unit’’
thus constituted an overwhelming majority of the
entire Middle School student body of two hundred
and fifty. In contrast, the Middle School community
action unit taught by tutor Brian Anson had less
than thirty students in the same year.30
It was in the last year of study, overseen by
Fifth Year Master Peter Cook, then assisted by a
team of tutors who included Colin Fournier, James
Gowan, Bernard Tschumi, and Dalibor Vesely, that
‘‘educational freedom’’ perhaps reached its
apotheosis. At times, however, the price of
independence in the Fifth Year was a student’s
virtual anonymity. Today, many former Fifth Year
tutors recall a typical scenario at staff meetings: as
names from the roster were read aloud to
collectively review the progress of individual
students, the identities of many students was often
a mystery to tutors.31 Nevertheless, the
independence of the Fifth Year could also yield
extraordinary and fiercely original results—such as
Robin Evans’ piezoelectric study (1969);
‘‘Motorolarama’’ by Piers Gough, Diana Jowsey, and
Philip Wagner (1971); Mike Hickie and Bob
Jardine’s establishment of a community television
station in North Kensington (1971); and Peter
Crump and Bruce Haggart’s ecological manifesto
published as the little magazine Street Farmer
(1971), to highlight just a few notable student
projects32 (Figures 7 and 8).
The pressing matter that underpinned such
heterogeneous critiques of the existing educational
structure at the AA, then, was not the quality of
student work, nor the capabilities or methods of the
teaching staff. Many of the latter had in fact
established themselves as resident personalities;
tutors such as Keith Critchlow, members of
Archigram, Gowan, and Zenghelis, for example, had
inspired and guided a generation of students during
7. ‘‘Motorolarama’’ at Wormwood Scrubs, London. Piers Gough, Diana Jowsey and Philip Wagner, AA Fifth Year project, 1971. (Courtesy of Piers Gough.)
the 1960s as the school principalship shifted hands
from Allen to Lloyd. Rather, what was at stake was
the coherence of the overall structure of
architectural education at the AA. In a sense, what
students and tutors advocated was a more
strategically synthetic form of institutional
‘‘fragmentation.’’ Infiltrated by a unit system that
had swiftly and boldly overturned a rigid, twenty-
year-old curriculum, the institutional infrastructure
of the AA had seemingly dissolved under the
Lloyd’s ‘‘generalist’’ rubric. In the Summer term of
1972, at the end of Boyarsky’s first year as school
Chairman, Archigram member William Chalk would
dismiss the Middle School unit system as nothing
short of an ‘‘abysmal failure’’ and even conceded
that ‘‘the re-adoption of [the] Year Master would
help to shoulder the responsibility of so many lost
souls, shopping in the Middle School Department
Store.’’ As he added parenthetically with acerbic
disdain, ‘‘note I didn’t use [the word] Supermarket,
because there is nothing super about it.’’33
In addition to fragmentation, then, Chalk’s
recourse to the language of consumerism in his
indictment of the unit system introduces another
trope of postmodernism. His invocation of the
metaphor of shopping is revealing on multiple
levels. We need only to consider his roots in
Archigram as a reminder of how deeply the logic of
consumer culture had become ingrained in the
British architectural avant-garde. During the 1960s,
concepts such as obsolescence, ready-made
components, and consumer choice were equally
championed by colleagues such as Cedric Price and
Reyner Banham (and before them in the 1950s,
through the Independent Group’s religion of mass
culture), as antidotes to the formalism and
abstraction of modern architecture. Chalk’s
instinctive transposition of the shopping metaphor
into his analysis of the Middle School unit system
outlines a trajectory from off-the-peg design and
‘‘throwaway’’ esthetics into the domain of
architectural education, implying the possibility of
an analogous antidote to the formalism and
abstraction of modernist architectural education.
But whether in the ‘‘department store’’ or the
‘‘supermarket,’’ the student was already a
consumer. The unit system’s ‘‘freedom of choice’’
had already commodified architectural education at
the AA; the task of its postmodern reinvention,
then, would be to maximize the experience of
consumption.
Predatory Creatures
At the conclusion of his first year as AA chairman,
debates about the school’s academic infrastructure
surely lingered on in Boyarsky’s mind as he quickly,
if not seamlessly, changed hats in late July 1972 to
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 30

8. Street Farmer, magazine cover, Peter Crump and Grahame Caine, AA Fifth Year project, 1971. (Courtesy of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive.)
commence what would be his third and last term as
director of the IID Summer Sessions, hosted that
year by the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Established in 1970 as ‘‘a well-laid table and a
platform for free-ranging souls as opposed to the
31 SUNWOO
arid battery fare of their local school and
professional cafeterias,’’ the independent summer
school was, in fact, the first institutional articulation
of Boyarsky’s gastronomic metaphor. Culling
students, architects, historians, designers, and urban
planners from across the world to participate in its
six-week-long programs of lectures, seminars, and
workshops, the Summer Sessions also operated—as
Boyarsky had declared prior to Chalk’s remarks on
an AA ‘‘supermarket’’—as a ‘‘marketplace for
exchange of ideas.’’34 A significant point of
intersection between the philosophy of the Summer
Sessions and the shifting institutional fabric of the
AA, this shared notion of pedagogy as a mode of
consumption also evolved within a broader field of
discourse on the current state of architectural
education.
In the aftermath of student uprisings during
the late 1960s and in response to the attendant
dissolution and ongoing reform of educational
institutions, the Summer Sessions offered neutral
ground for the discussion of such phenomena. In a
series of forums devoted to pedagogy, teachers and
students from Denmark, Italy, Hungary, South
Africa, and other countries described the objectives,
pressures, and solutions that were shaping their
respective educational ‘‘scenes’’ (Figure 9). The
international ‘‘marketplace’’ of the Summer Session
therefore provided a critical lens on contemporary
architectural education at the very moment that
Boyarsky was recalibrating the program of the AA.
Although an active participant in the conversations
that unfolded, the new chairman did not explicitly
divulge the details or debates concerning the
school’s reorganization that had arisen during his
first year in office. His comments nevertheless
disclose his own perception of the AA and of
architectural education more broadly. On the cusp
of a significant relaunch of the AA’s educational
program, what his comments make clear is that the
project of restructuring the AA was not an isolated
matter of curricular reform, nor was it even limited
to education; rather, it was a matter of the
ideological foundations of modern architectural
production.
In a presentation at the 1972 Summer Session,
four representatives from the University of Toronto
outlined the Department of Architecture’s new
‘‘open-ended’’ curriculum, formally instituted in the
autumn of 1968 and designed to ‘‘encourage each
student to develop his own view of architecture.’’35
The presentation sparked an animated group
discussion among attendees on the role of the
curriculum in architectural education. While a fellow
North American participant expressed his own
frustration over the time and energy he had spent
grappling with the curricular guidelines published in
the ‘‘Princeton Report’’—the assessment of
curricula in American schools drafted by Robert
Geddes and Bernard Spring in 1967 and sponsored
by the American Institute of Architects—another
attendee critically observed the inherent paradox of
the student’s purported ‘‘freedom’’ to develop an
individual position within the prescribed,
overarching philosophy of the Toronto curriculum.36
Furthering the discussion, Boyarsky imparted
his own interpretation of the role of the curriculum
in architectural education. Through its sequence of
technical exercises, design programs, and other
requirements, the curriculum promised to teach the
student ‘‘how to see,’’ ‘‘how to join brick and
glass,’’ or even ‘‘how to write,’’ he proposed. Put
differently, latent in such curricular constructions
was the epistemological promise of architecture
itself. Through the sum of its parts, the curriculum
therefore presupposed a definition of architecture in
all its visual, spatial, material, tectonic, and even
discursive constituents. However, it was through
such teleological gestures that the curriculum—
regardless of institutional, historical, or national
context, or even its composition or design—would
remain inherently ‘‘paternalistic’’ and ‘‘tyrannical,’’
Boyarsky contended: paternalistic in the sense
that its obsolescence is inevitable in the face of
unrelenting social and technological developments,
and tyrannical in the sense that its prescriptions 9. Stationery, International Institute of Design Summer Session, 1972. (Courtesy of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive.)
would nullify the cultural and intellectual
differences of those who engaged with it.37
In effect, the curriculum was indeed (to Echoes of Lloyd, who himself had found parsing his modernist stance on pedagogy
paraphrase Walter Gropius) a blueprint for it ‘‘criminally irresponsible to lay down a against Boyarsky’s ruminations, a modulation in
architectural education. curriculum,’’ are perhaps audible here. However, by educational methods and objectives becomes more

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 32

discernible.38 Although based on the conviction that
individual students should steer the course of their
education, Lloyd’s notion of ‘‘educational
democracy’’ ultimately relied on a totalizing
conception of architecture as the product of an
interdisciplinary framework of operations and a
conception of the architect as its coordinator,
trained to adapt and respond to changing social
demands and contexts. In this way, Lloyd’s
philosophy recalled Walter Gropius’ emphasis on the
teaching of ‘‘method’’ versus ‘‘information,’’ as
much as it did the global ambitions of Buckminster
Fuller’s proposals for an expanded multinational and
multimedia educational network.39 For Lloyd, a
democratic model of architectural education
anticipated the democratic choices that the architect-
as-coordinator would encounter in the dual role of
member and spatial organizer of modern society.
In his response to the ‘‘Toronto Curriculum’’
presentation, Boyarsky made an alternative
proposition. The new task of the school of
architecture, he stated, was to ‘‘be a critic of
society,’’ rather than merely its provider or form
giver. To be sure, Boyarsky was not alone in his call
for architectural education to embrace a more
critical, rather than simply professional or social,
stance. The capacity of the studio, atelier, and other
pedagogical spaces to adopt a manifesto had
already become apparent, for example, in Robert
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s
1969 studio at Yale, which culminated in the
publication of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), or
even the radical formation of Unité pédagogique 6
(UP6) in France.40 For Boyarsky, however,
architectural education as a polemical mechanism
presented itself at an institutional scale and in the
shape of the AA. If a school of architecture was to
function as a critical thermometer of contemporary
architectural production, then it must be fueled by
‘‘the energies and interests of a lot of people, so
that the school community is bubbling with dozens
of sometimes contradictory interests and activities’’
and in which the ‘‘so-called curriculum,’’ Boyarsky
33 SUNWOO
argued, must therefore be ‘‘conditioned daily,
weekly, and annually.’’41 Conscious of the negative
connotations of such a simultaneity of ideas,
Boyarsky defended the support of such an ongoing
ideological surplus as ‘‘the most responsible activity
of all for a school of architecture.’’ ‘‘It makes
everybody uncomfortable and edgy,’’ he explained,
‘‘because everybody has to justify their own
existence to themselves.’’42 In this proposed
pedagogical model, the imperative of ‘‘choice’’ did
not facilitate or simulate methods of practice.
Rather, working in concert with the continuous
formulation of competing architectural positions, it
would stimulate the production of theory.
Later on, during his own presentation, Boyarsky
further developed his proposition of architectural
education as a process of ideological friction by
framing it within the AA, deftly reinventing what his
predecessor had fashioned as a democratic training
ground for modern architects.43 At the AA, no
tutors were tenured, he informed his audience at
the Summer Session, and in place of a traditional
curriculum, the school offered an ‘‘interactive
kaleidoscopic situation’’ in which a cacophony of
positions formed the crux of its educational
program. With students and staff primarily working
at home and in nearby offices, respectively,
Boyarsky described (with a touch of pride) how the
AA ‘‘doesn’t have any facilities.’’
It’s just a chandelier—which is an eighteenth
century chandelier—an eighteenth century
marble fireplace, with nice windows
overlooking a green London square. And a bar
which sells whiskey and wine [and which has]
lots of comfortable chairs. And students get
their crits in the bar or under the chandelier.
It’s like downtown. You come to meet people
to talk.44
Enamored by this vignette of 36 Bedford
Square, Boyarsky summed up the ‘‘relative
informality’’ of this educational milieu by remarking
‘‘there’s no place, there’s no money, and nobody’s
there for very long periods of time. It’s very
interesting.’’ Withstanding the winds of change,
vestiges of old-world conviviality persevered against
a stark institutional backdrop now vulnerable to its
urban surroundings and programmatically
eviscerated to maximize the circulation, pursuit, and
consumption of ideas. ‘‘People at the AA have one
thing in common,’’ Boyarsky delighted. ‘‘They’re all
predatory creatures’’45 (Figure 10). Capitalizing on
their differences, a new breed of occupants would
come to inhabit this renovated space.
Fair Grounds
‘‘The AA philosophy is one of selection by
choice,’’ affirmed the AA Newsheet at the start of
the Autumn 1972 term, before outlining the
‘‘dramatic changes’’ to the undergraduate course
that lay ahead.46 In deference to this philosophy,
both Lloyd and Boyarsky had seized upon the
unit system as an alternative to a curriculum
organized by year. But if the modern
choreography of Lloyd’s unit system had
counterbalanced the ‘‘will’’ of the student within
the regimented display of the Middle School
‘‘department store,’’ its emerging postmodern
movements would prove more dynamic.
Maximizing the philosophy of ‘‘selection by
choice,’’ during Boyarsky’s second and third years
as AA chairman the unit system was distributed
throughout an undergraduate course newly
reconstituted into First Year, an Intermediate
School (second and third years), and a Diploma
School (fourth and fifth years).47 Pressuring tutors
throughout the school to replenish and revitalize
the AA’s repertoire of architectural provocations
and inviting students to take on the roles of
discerning ‘‘predatory creatures,’’ the unit system
therefore reemerged as an educational model
predicated on both production and consumption.
Cyclical, self-organizing, and equally self-effacing,
it was a system of architectural education
designed to counteract its own obsolescence.48
 Throughout the postwar period, the programs
and exercises of the AA’s introductory First Year had
distilled architecture to its ‘‘fundamentals,’’ and had
in fact functioned as a probationary period to assess
‘‘whether or not the student has the potential to
continue with the study of architecture.’’49 By
contrast, Boyarsky’s revised First Year distilled
modes of architectural inquiry. Divided into groups
of twenty, throughout the 1972 ⁄ 1973 academic
year students rotated through four ‘‘Briefing Units,’’
each designed and taught by a different tutor.50
Although the basic design and visual exercises in
Tony Gwilliam’s unit might have preserved some of
the original ambitions and methods of the
preexisting introductory year, the other three units
adopted divergent tactics. Students in Stefan
Szczelkun’s unit explored the relationship between
mobility, technology, and education through the
refurbishment of a London city bus purchased by
the AA. After outfitting the bus with audiovisual
equipment and living quarters, students tested their
design during a two-week tour of British schools of
architecture51 (Figure 11). Alternatively, Grahame
Shane’s unit used the city of London to introduce
students to architectural issues in an urban context,
while in Tony Samson’s unit the ecological and
social conditions of a Welsh village in a ‘‘transitional 10. Enid Caldecott (AA Librarian), Alvin Boyarsky, and Marjorie Morrison (AA Slide Librarian) in reconstruction of AA Members Room at 36 Bedford
phase’’ between postindustrial dormancy and Square, installed at the ‘‘AA 125’’ exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1972. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Photo
redevelopment served as a point of entry. A Archive.)

modification in the following academic year

extended the First Year units into three year-long
programs; after participating in a brief common
course, students joined the unit of their choice.52
Unsettling the previous grounding of architectural
‘‘fundamentals’’ in formal and spatial principles and
modes of representation, the unit system’s
fragmentation of the First Year of study established
a new introduction to architecture, one that
equipped the student with the critical apparatuses
necessary to navigate the heterogeneity of
architectural production within the educational
program of the AA, and indeed, outside of the
school.
In this sense, the subsequent encounters with
the unit system in the Intermediate School and the
Diploma School confronted students with an
unrelenting stream of architectural introductions.
For example, during the 1973 ⁄ 1974 academic year,
Intermediate Unit 1 approached architecture
through the platform of community action.
Organized by the renegade planner Brian Anson,
the unit spearheaded a campaign to educate
Scottish communities on the effects of North Sea
offshore oil drilling, which had recently spurred ‘‘an
avalanche of speculative planning proposals in
Scotland.’’53 Arguing that ‘‘technology which
exploits nature ultimately exploits man,’’ the
‘‘Rational Technology Unit’’ (Intermediate Unit 4),
formed in 1973 by tutors Gerry Foley and George
Kasabov, responded to the energy crisis through
seminars and research on resource consumption,
population growth, and the conservation of
materials and energy in an effort to understand how
to ‘‘design with nature’’ rather than ‘‘against it.’’54
Entering architecture through immaterial resources
and technologies, Intermediate Unit 6, co-taught in
1973 ⁄ 1974 by Archigrammer David Greene and
television director and filmmaker Mike Myers,
proposed that ‘‘the imaginative communications

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 34

skills needed to make a good film or a good
television programme are the same in principle as
those needed to make good buildings. It is a
question of designing pieces of time as well as
blocks of space.’’55 Revisited here, such
investigations and concerns certainly echo
within architectural education and practice
today.
Notwithstanding their differences, the
investigations conducted at the AA during the
1970s would move outside the realm of professional
practice, as a collective polemic. As the agendas of
individual units tacitly counterpoised the methods
and objectives of one another, the unit system in
turn also generated a continuous obstruction of
disciplinary certainty. The potential of the unit as
manifesto was already latent in Lloyd’s Middle
School, although overshadowed—if not
suppressed—by its ‘‘democratic’’ aims.
11. AA First Year students with Peter Murray and the ‘‘AD ⁄ AA ⁄ Polyark’’ bus, 1973. (Courtesy of Peter Murray.)
Foregrounded as the building block of architectural
education at the AA, its systematization during
Boyarsky’s chairmanship synthesized and and self-generated programmes,’’ invoking the now Given full reign over the pedagogical territory
institutionalized a culture of architectural familiar metaphor that had surfaced in previous of a unit, Diploma unit masters now devised
fragmentation. conversations both at the AA and at the Summer advanced teaching programs.59 For many of the
Today, the polemical agency of the AA unit Sessions.57 earliest Diploma units, the contemporary city
system is most often associated with the Diploma As the second year of his chairmanship drew to figured as the object of scrutiny, although it would
School, but it would in fact take a year of tinkering a close, there would be no Summer Session to be manipulated through distinctive theoretical
before it would fully participate in this system. preoccupy the now former IID director. In its place, filters. A cross section of these investigations
Although its teaching staff were asked to play the the AA had absorbed its structure, operations, reveals theory as an impetus for the AA’s departure
dual roles of ‘‘both tutors and people of ideas’’ to community, and even its institutional language. This from its modernist legacy and illustrates how
cultivate ‘‘a much more critical atmosphere,’’ an transfer culminated in the Autumn 1973 term when pedagogy offered, an intellectual infrastructure for
overarching program ultimately prevailed across the Boyarsky extended the unit system not only to the architectural postmodernism.60
final stage of the 1972 ⁄ 1973 undergraduate Diploma School but also to the reconstituted While ‘‘urban insurgency’’ had been the subject
course.56 The unexpected departure of Cook ‘‘Service Units.’’ As the name of the latter suggests, of a series of his lectures at the 1972 Summer
(former Fifth Year Master and subsequent head of these units functioned as a support structure for the Session at the AA, Bernard Tschumi honed and
the Diploma School) from the AA in January 1973 AA’s architectural design program and included the reinterpreted the concept as ‘‘urban politics’’
(to take up what would be a brief stint as director General Studies Unit (formerly Arts & History), the through the platform of Diploma Unit 2.61
of the ICA) prompted a further reevaluation of the Technical Studies Unit (formerly Systems Studies),
fourth and fifth year of study by students, staff, and and the Communications Unit, which consolidated Not politics in the institutional sense though
the school chairman. During a school meeting in instruction in all visual media.58 In September 1973, (Parliament, elections, parties, local
January of 1973, Boyarsky proposed that the ‘‘Introduction Week’’ thus inaugurated the authorities. . .), neither politics in the
Diploma School student should be able to ‘‘‘weave’ establishment of the unit system as the AA’s new ideological sense (class struggle, proletariat,
his way through a ‘rich supermarket’ of offerings model of architectural education. party. . .) but politics in a sense that has not

35 SUNWOO

12. Chronicle in Urban Politics, front and back cover. Produced by AA Diploma Unit 2, 1974. (Courtesy of Bernard Tschumi.)
been yet defined, and which perhaps must
always remain undefined. Such politics are not
concerned with well defined alterations to
institutional rules, but rather with the
elaboration of subjective spaces and social
playgrounds. Although based on an analysis of
the city in terms of social relationships and
modes of production, this political journey
never speaks about revolution without
explicitly referring to everyday life.62
This declaration of the unit’s refusal to engage
with the city’s form or its institutions appeared in
the ‘‘little magazine’’ Chronicle in Urban Politics
(1974) (Figure 12). From the unit’s inception,
Tschumi had envisioned the collective publication
project as a pedagogical resource that would
encourage students to develop both design and
critical writing skills. Over the course of the unit’s
history during the 1970s, other forms of
representation—including photography, literature,
and film—would play an increasing role in its
explorations of the spatial complexities of everyday
life63 (Figure 13). As its title suggests, the
publication chronicled the breadth of Diploma Unit
2’s activities and compiled student projects and
texts, as well as transcripts of lectures delivered at
the AA by invited guests. During the unit’s
inaugural year, these guests included Antoine
Grumbach, Fernando Montes, and a number of
radical Italian architects. Among the latter, Pietro Di
Rossi, Paolo Deganello, and Gianni Pettena had
hosted the unit in Italy during group
trips—moments of which are captured in
photographs on the front and back covers of
Chronicle in Urban Politics, symbolically conveying
the dialogic itinerary contained within.
Like Tschumi, the Czech emigré Dalibor Vesely
had also graduated from the Fifth Year teaching
staff to the Diploma School, where in 1973 he
began presiding over Unit 1. Titled ‘‘City of
Continuity: Towards Urban Resurrection,’’ the unit’s
activities were based on the premise that ‘‘the city
as an institution is deeply rooted in the nature of
our civilization.’’64 Unit 1 explored this hypothesis
through contemporary and historical urban analysis.
While a ‘‘live project’’ generated proposals for an
urban institution sited on Cambridge’s new city
center, for the unit’s ‘‘research project’’ students
studied ‘‘the problem of urban dwelling and
elementary patterns of urban fabric, such as street
patterns, urban blocks, clusters etc.’’ Vesely also
coordinated an intensive series of lectures, some
taught by visitors to the unit. Ranging in subject
matter from ‘‘City as a vision, Bruno Taut, Die
Stadtkrone’’ to ‘‘Surrealism and the contemporary
city,’’ the lectures introduced students to an
alternative history of urbanism via the radical
modernism of early twentieth-century avant-
gardes.65 Although its theoretical foundations were
tenuous, as Vesely conceded pensively in the Spring
of 1974 in the AA Events List (a new weekly
itinerary that documented the multiplicity of
activities now flooding the school), the unit was, as
he explained, ‘‘going through a process of defining
a framework for a new approach to [the] city.’’66
Put differently, pedagogy was shaping a theory of
urbanism.
In a similar move, Diploma Unit 9 made its
debut in 1973 by beckoning ‘‘Post-Intermediate
students to shift from the domain of ‘reality’ to the
scope of ‘possibility.’’’67 Taught by seasoned AA
tutor Elia Zenghelis,68 the unit invited students to
join its efforts ‘‘to develop an architectural
language for large scale and complex institutions.’’
Such a language was to be ‘‘based on ideological
concepts,’’ rather than historically or socially
conditioned factors.69 While rejected outright by
Tschumi and upheld as a transhistorical typology by
Vesely, urban institutions would preoccupy Diploma
Unit 9 through explorations of the scale and
density of the city and a reevaluation of the
conditions of the modern metropolis. Zenghelis
inaugurated Diploma Unit 9 through a series of
design projects that advanced inquiries that he had
initiated in the previous year as an Intermediate
Unit 6 tutor, and which had considered ‘‘the
advantages of millions living together on relatively
restricted areas’’70 (Figure 14). Equally informed by
his collaboration with his former student Rem
Koolhaas on the 1972 Exodus project, Zenghelis
asked Diploma Unit 9 students to take ‘‘a
significant strip across London’’ as a site ‘‘to exploit
its magnetic urban potential’’ and to propose an
urban park ‘‘designed to hold a continuous
‘Ideological World[‘s] Fair.’’’71 Of the latter he
anticipated, ‘‘this territory of architectural dialectics
will be an information battlefield and test bed of
conflicting ideologies.’’72
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 36
13. ‘‘Prison Park,’’ presentation panels by Nigel Coates, AA Diploma Unit 2 project, 1974. (Courtesy of Nigel Coates ⁄ Architectural Association.)
An ‘‘ideological world’s fair’’ was indeed an apt
description of the emerging ‘‘unit culture’’ at the
AA during the early 1970s—not simply in terms of
its diversity of theoretical arguments or even the
internationalism of its student body and staff, but
also in terms of the very display mechanisms
intrinsic to its machinery. Such mechanisms were
already at work in the Autumn term of 1973 at
‘‘Introduction Week,’’ as tutors advertised their
positions at the beginning of the academic year to
attract students. These pitches would become an
institutional rite at the AA as the convivial, domestic
connotations of the ‘‘well-laid table’’ unequivocally
appropriated the competitive, urgent tone of the
‘‘marketplace.’’ Certainly, the shopping metaphor
was now common parlance at the AA. At the
conclusion of the first year of the unit system’s full
infiltration of Bedford Square, in the Summer of
1974 the AA Events List commented that ‘‘the
school has changed from the well defined
department store into a supermarket with
something of everything, all polished and well
stacked.’’ But as the editorial suggested, the school
had ‘‘moved on again from this point to the market
place—and now perhaps the bazaar, where many
things are offered, but there are few r[u]les of
presentation.’’73 These observations coincided with
37 SUNWOO
preparations for the AA’s end-of-year exhibition. In
the summer of 1974 the end-of-year show would
be the first public showcase of the fruits of its new
educational model. Each unit was allotted a space
within the school to design an exhibition of its
activities and work. ‘‘The visibility and thus
credibility of the school needs no overall format so
each of the parts becomes self sufficient,’’ the
Events List assured its readers, and clarified the
stakes of the task at hand: ‘‘The visitor’s view of us
depends on his needs and the degree of satisfaction
offered to his taste.’’74 Opening the AA
‘‘marketplace’’ to the architectural public, both
tutors and students, then, prepared the school for a
new breed of ‘‘predatory creatures.’’
Generations
‘‘No other architectural school in Europe can even
remotely claim the prestige and pervasive
importance of London’s Architectural Association,’’
the Architectural Review (AR) immoderately
declared in a feature published in October 1983,
one decade after Boyarsky had fully
institutionalized the unit system at the AA.75 These
accolades appeared after a number of victories by
former AA tutors in major international
competitions. Tschumi had secured the Parc de la
Villette, with Koolhaas and Zenghelis (as the Office
of Metropolitan Architecture) placed as runners-up.
Zaha Hadid, once a student of and co-tutor with
Koolhaas and Zenghelis (and a former OMA
associate), had submitted the winning entry for the
Hong Kong Peak, a residential and recreational
complex. As the magazine remarked, this string of
successes both ‘‘vindicated’’ the AA’s dedication to
architectural experimentation and validated its
educational philosophy.76
Accordingly, the feature chronicled the
maturation of the Diploma unit system. The article
traced, for example, the evolution of urban theories
in the units launched by Tschumi, Vesely, and
Zenghelis (and subsequently advanced by their
respective co-tutors Nigel Coates, Mohsen
Mostafavi, and Koolhaas and Hadid) and illustrated
how the unit system had provided neutral testing
ground for theoretical pursuits, whether in the form
of the socially charged readings of domesticity by
Robin Evans and Fred Scott or the radically atavistic
urbanism of Léon Krier. To be sure, the AA shelf-life
of Krier’s theoretical position was brief, as AR
pointed out. Indeed, in contrast to the legacy of
some other units, the inability of Krier’s teaching to
gain ground within the milieu of the AA during the
mid-1970s both demonstrated the intrinsic volatility

14. Density Study by Kerstin Nilsson, from AA Intermediate Unit 6 ‘‘Housing Prototypes and Densities’’ booklet, published January 1973. (Courtesy
of the Architectural Association Archive.)
of the unit system and reflected an institutional
resistance to the rise of architectural
postmodernism’s historicist provocations (which
were also filtering through the school
contemporaneously via the teaching of Charles
Jencks in General Studies).77 Commending its
resilience to such external pressures, AR observed,
‘‘the most important project to be produced at the
AA in the last decade has been the structure of the
AA itself,’’ fashioned ‘‘not simply as a school of
architecture, but as a model urban institution
designed to counteract the increasing
fragmentation, specialization and consumerization
of public life.’’78
Although I have argued that the very
institutionalization of the unit system at the AA had
actually internalized such ‘‘fragmentation,
specialization and consumerism’’—akin to what
Jameson has characterized as postmodernism’s
‘‘consumption of sheer commodification as a
process’’79—the AR’s conflicting interpretation
nevertheless points to contradictions latent within
Boyarsky’s postmodernist educational philosophy. If
the informality of the ‘‘well-laid table’’ and the
unregulated activity of the ‘‘marketplace’’ had
challenged overturned pedagogy’s complicity in
sustaining the philosophical, formal, and
professional foundations of architectural
modernism, the polemic of Boyarsky’s educational
model was motivated by what was nothing short of
a truly modernist ambition to create a new
architectural culture. The school of
architecture—that institutional typology hinging
(however tenuously) professional concerns with
intellectual discourse—was perhaps the ideal stage
for such a cultural insurrection to take place.
Certainly, AR’s spotlight on the AA plainly
acknowledged and substantiated the school’s own
coherent architectural culture, legible not only in
the unit system, but also in its extensive publishing,
lecture, and exhibition programs. In this way, the
AA’s constellation of activities perhaps rival the
expansive program of the Bauhaus, that
institutional heavyweight of early twentieth-century
modernism, whose pedagogical methods had been
reinterpreted at architecture schools worldwide.
Indeed, if the AA’s postmodernist model of
architectural education had crystallized through
critiques of the standardization and
professionalization of pedagogy, it had also
reclaimed a role for the school of architecture as the
crux of architectural culture and the site of
disciplinary reinvention.
Although Boyarsky’s institutional redesign of
the AA during the early 1970s had subversively
situated the school’s cultural production on the
margins of the discipline, a decade later the AR
feature repositioned its coordinates dead center.
This movement is made clear by the fulsomely
extensive coverage of the school in AR, mouthpiece
of the British architectural establishment. During
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 38
the 1970s, the AA had retreated contentedly into
the more brazen, open arms of Architectural Design
(which by the end of the decade had itself become
saturated with the cool, muted tones of
postmodernism’s typological and historicist
reveries). The AA’s endorsement by AR, however,
was not a matter of ‘‘selling out.’’ Rather, on a
related but different register, the institutionalization
of an avant-garde through the medium of education
is certainly key to gauging the interlaced inflections
and histories of both modernist and postmodernist
architectural pedagogy.80
After a decade of watching the AA unit system
flourish, Boyarsky revealed a glimmer of
apprehension about its future direction in an
interview conducted by AR for its 1983 feature on
the school. The tutors who had first tested the unit
system during the 1970s—‘‘the
thoroughbreds’’—had moved on, Boyarsky noted,
and had left behind a legacy of teaching programs
and architectural investigations that were being
reinterpreted by a ‘‘second generation’’ of tutors,
many of whom had studied under the ‘‘first
generation’’ of unit tutors.81 Two years earlier, this
generational phenomenon had provoked tutor
Robin Evans to lament that the ‘‘teaching units,
however insular, are becoming more and more
alike,’’ and that the ‘‘subject matter for excitement
is harder to find.’’82 Although the volatility of the
AA’s postmodernist ‘‘marketplace’’ model had been
designed to inhibit the hegemony of architectural
certainties, its consumerist processes and pluralism
were equally capable of producing a new
institutional regime. The unit system had
successfully become, as Evans implied, just that: a
system, one laden with inherent contradictions and
veiled modernisms, yet—as its legacy beyond the
AA suggests—both effective and thoroughly
exportable, nonetheless.
Acknowledgments
This article represents a portion of my doctoral
dissertation, which has been supported by a Graham
39 SUNWOO
Foundation Carter Manny Award for Dissertation
Writing, and fellowships from the Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art and Princeton
University. My project has greatly benefited from
conversations with many of the former AA tutors
and students who appear in this essay. Special
thanks to Edward Bottoms at the AA Archive and
Nicholas Boyarsky for facilitating archival research;
to Spyros Papapetros, Dalibor Vesely, Jean-Louis
Cohen, Thomas Weaver, and Lucia Allais, who
provided comments on earlier drafts; to Reinhold
Martin who allowed me to develop my research in
the context of a seminar at Columbia University;
and to the editors at the Journal of Architectural
Education. Nicholas Boyarsky, Nigel Coates, Piers
Gough, Peter Murray, Elizabeth Sakellarios, Paul
Simpson, Bernard Tschumi, the AA Archive, and the
AA Photo Archive all kindly provided images for
publication.
Notes
1.‘‘Programme, Introduction Week, 24–28 September 1973,’’
Architectural Association Archive (AAA), Box no. 2008:55, p. 1. That
year over forty-seven different countries were represented in its
undergraduate body alone. See ‘‘Students’ Countries of Origin,’’ AA
Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 10. It is also worth noting that on January
1, 1973 the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community.
2. Two main bodies constitute the AA: the Association, which comprises
a membership that is governed by a Council of elected members, whose
primary responsibility is the stewardship of the School of Architecture.
For nearly its entire institutional history, AA students have been
permitted to sit on Council, thereby exercising the right to participate in
administrative matters. The RIBA’s postwar educational reform was
directly informed by the proceedings of its 1958 Oxford Conference. On
the Oxford Conference, see Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock,
Architecture—Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural
Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994),
pp. 137–148.
3. ‘‘Programme, Introduction Week, 24–28 September 1973,’’ AAA, p. 1.
4. See, for example: K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the
Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Reinhold Martin,
Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s
Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Aron Vinegar,
I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008).
5. For an analysis of media production at the AA during the 1970s, see
Irene Sunwoo, ‘‘The Static Age,’’ AA Files, no. 61 (Winter 2010), pp.
118–129. For an overview of Boyarsky’s expansion of the AA’s cultural
activities during the 1980s see Igor Marjanović, ‘‘Lines and Words on
Display: Alvin Boyarsky as a Collector, Curator and Publisher,’’
Architectural Research Quarterly 14 (2010), pp. 165–174.
6. Literature on the history of the AA and Boyarsky’s chairmanship is
largely limited to articles, essays, and book chapters. See, for example:
Igor Marjonovic, ‘‘Alvin Boyarsky’s Delicatessen,’’ in Critical Architecture,
ed. Jane Rendell (London: Routledge, 2007), 190–199; Andrew Higgott,
‘‘Searching for the Subject: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural
Association,’’ in Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain
(London: Routledge, 2006), 154–187; David Dunster, ‘‘Boyarsky and the
Architectural Association,’’ in An Architect’s Guide to Fame, ed. Paul
Davies and Torsten Schmiedeknecht (Oxford, UK: Elsevier, 2005),
33–50. Alternatively, other publications coordinated by the school
comprise vignettes of its institutional history as told by its protagonists.
See for example, James Gowan, ed., A Continuing Experiment: Learning
and Teaching at the Architectural Association (London: Architectural
Press, 1975). What remains perhaps the most informative historical
account is that by John Summerson, brief as it may be, and though it
deals only with the first 100 years of the school’s activities. John
Summerson, The Architectural Association, 1847–1947 (London: Pub.
for the Architectural Assn. by Pleiades Books, 1947).
7. This study aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on
architectural education in the late twentieth century. Recent work
includes Sean Keller, ‘‘Fenland Tech: Architectural Science in Postwar
Cambridge,’’ Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006), pp. 40–65; Andrew Leach,
Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent, Belgium: A&S Books,
Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University, 2007);
Jean-Louis Violeau, Les Architectes Et Mai 68 (Paris: Recherches, 2005);
Jorge Otero-Pailos’ chapter on Charles Moore in Architecture’s Historical
Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern.
8. For an excellent analysis of architectural education at the AA during
Rowse’s tenure, see Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of
Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 179–
191.
9. See account of former student David Goddard in James Gowan, ed.,
Projects: Architectural Association, 1947–1972 (London: Architectural
Association, 1972), p. 10.
10. ‘‘Year 1’’ and ‘‘Year 2,’’ Architectural Association Curriculum Table
(1963–1964), AAA.
11. ‘‘The Studio Training,’’ Architectural Association Prospectus (1963–
1964), AAA.
12. In principle, throughout the year students were to change units or
Unit Masters to ‘‘encounter a variety of outlooks upon architecture,’’
though in fact some students opted to remain within the same unit for
the duration of the year. A.A. Information Notes (1962–1963), AAA,
p. 7.
13. AA Prospectus (1965–1966), AAA, pp. 9–10. Allen, a technocrat
who had honed his expertise in physics and acoustics at the Building
Research Station, had risen in rank at the RIBA during the 1950s. Along
with other modernists including Leslie Martin and Richard Llewelyn-
Davies, Allen had participated in the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference,
which culminated in a nationwide educational reform that had set the
terms for the AA’s potential absorption into the Imperial College of
Science and Technology. See Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock,
Architecture—Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural
Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994),
pp. 137–148.
14. John Lloyd, ‘‘Intentions,’’ Arena, The Architectural Association
Journal 82, no. 904 (July ⁄ August 1966), ‘‘Kumasi Special Issue,’’ p. 40.
15. Ibid.
16. John Lloyd, ‘‘Principal’s Comments,’’ Architectural Association
School Handbook (October 1967), p. 1.0. On Lloyd’s role at Kumasi see
Hannah Le Roux, ‘‘Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and
Nigeria,’’ Architectural History 47 (2004), pp. 385–389.
17. John R. Lloyd, ‘‘Application for the Post of Principal of the
Architectural Association School of Architecture, Supporting Statement,’’
AAA Box 1991:13, p. 3.
18. As Lloyd would remark, ‘‘recent debates on the need to reshape
Parliamentary democracy and the world-wide student unrest are the
most obvious symptoms of the need for [a] redefinition’’ of this
relationship. John Lloyd, ‘‘Education for Choice and Change,’’ Arena:
The Journal of the Architectural Association 84, no. 923 (June-July
1968), p. 2.
19. John Lloyd, ‘‘Education for choice and change,’’ Arena: The Journal
of the Architectural Association 84, no. 923 (June-July 1968), p. 2.
20. John Lloyd, ‘‘Principal’s Comments,’’ Architectural Association
School Handbook (1968), p. 2. Reflecting back on his changes to the
AA curriculum, in 1975 Lloyd (a Subud mystic who in the course of his
principalship would change his first name to Michael) commented:
‘‘given the exuberance, diversity and ability of the AA it seemed to me
criminally irresponsible to lay down a curriculum. Rather I believe that
those affected by the series of decisions which make up a course of
study are in a better position to take the decisions themselves. I was
also confident that the staff had very much more to offer than had been
possible under a curriculum-orientated school structure. Not least, I was
sure that by restructuring the school so that participation was the norm
there would be a great release of enthusiasm and creative effort.’’
Michael Lloyd, ‘‘Reply,’’ in A Continuing Experiment: Learning and
Teaching at the Architectural Association, edited by James Gowan
(London: Architectural Press, 1975), p. 163.
21. John Lloyd, ‘‘The Structure of the Undergraduate Course,’’
Architectural Association School Handbook (October 1967), p. 1.1.
22. John Lloyd, ‘‘Education for choice and change,’’ Arena: The Journal
of the Architectural Association 84, no. 923 (June-July 1968), p. 5.
23. John Lloyd, ‘‘The Structure of the Undergraduate Course,’’
Architectural Association School Handbook (October 1967), p. 1.1–1.2.
24. For an account of these events, see Charles Jencks, ‘‘125 Years of
Quasi Democracy,’’ in Gowan, A Continuing Experiment, pp. 149–160.
25. For a biographical account of Boyarsky’s Chicago period, see Igor
Marjanovic, ‘‘Alvin Boyarsky’s Chicago: An Architectural Critic in the City
of Strangers,’’ AA Files 60 (2010), pp. 45–52. On the history of the
International Institute of Design Summer Sessions, see Irene Sunwoo,
‘‘Pedagogy’s Progress: Alvin Boyarsky’s International Institute of
Design,’’ Grey Room 34 (Winter 2009), pp. 28–57.
26. The AA Newsheet was founded by Neil Steedman, an AA graduate,
in Autumn 1971 and ceased publication in Summer 1974.
27. Fitzroy Ponniah, ‘‘Towards a Unified Educational Policy for the
School,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 11 (Summer Term, 1971 ⁄ 1972),
unpaginated.
28. Tony Gwilliam, ‘‘First Year AA’72,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 16 (Summer
1971 ⁄ 1972), unpaginated.
29. As already discussed in 1970 by Middle School tutor Aristides
Romanos. See Aristides Romanos, ‘‘Viewpoint: Notes on an Educational
Experiment. Towards a Structure of Academic Freedom,’’ Architectural
Association Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1970), p. 44–49.
30. ‘‘MS2 – The Greeks,’’ AA Newsheet no. 13 (Summer 1971 ⁄ 1972).
31. Peter Cook, interview with author, November 2010, New York;
Bernard Tschumi, interview with author, February 2011, New York;
Dalibor Vesely, interview with author, February 2011, London.
32. For Cook’s own account of his experience as a teacher at the AA
during this period, see Peter Cook, ‘‘The Electric Decade: An
Atmosphere at the AA School 1963–1973,’’ in Gowan, A Continuing
Experiment, pp. 137–147.
33. Warren Chalk, ‘‘Go Tell It To the Mountain,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 11
(Summer Term, 1971 ⁄ 1972), unpaginated.
34. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘In Progress IV: Summer Session 70,’’ Architectural
Design (April 1971), p. 220.
35. ‘‘Toronto Curriculum’’ presentation, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ audio
recording, IID Summer Session, 2 August 1972, ABA. The new Toronto
curriculum had been developed by Peter Prangnell, whose redesign of
the first year of architectural study at Columbia University had prompted
Australian architect John Andrew—appointed Chairman of the
Department of Architecture in 1967—to hire Prangnell to undertake a
similar curricular overhaul at Toronto. See ‘‘Winds of Change,’’ Parts 1,
2, and 3, Canadian Architect (February 1969), pp. 32–44.
36. ‘‘The Study of Education for Environmental Design,’’ A Report by
Princeton University for the American Institute of Architects. Co-
directors: Robert L. Geddes and Bernard P. Spring (Princeton: Princeton
University, December 1967).
37. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ International Institute of
Design Summer Session, London, audio recording, 31 July 1972, ABA.
38. Lloyd, ‘‘Reply,’’ in Gowan, A Continuing Experiment, p. 163.
39. See Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture; Buckminster Fuller,
Education Automation.
40. See Vinegar, I AM A MONUMENT: On Learning from Las Vegas;
Martin Pawley and Bernard Tschumi, ‘‘The Beaux-Arts since 1968,’’
Architectural Design 41, (September 1971), p. 533–566.
41. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ International Institute of
Design Summer Session, London, audio recording, 31 July 1972, ABA.
42. Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ 31 July 1972, ABA.
43. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ International Institute of
Design Summer Session, London, audio recording, (undated) 1972,
ABA.
44. Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ (undated) 1972, ABA.
45. Ibid.
46. ‘‘Lower School First Year,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Session 1972 ⁄ 1973
Autumn Term). See ‘‘Editorial,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Session
1972 ⁄ 1973 Autumn Term).
47. On the one hand, such reorganization was practical. With the
creation of the Diploma School, the weight of RIBA requirements was
shifted from the fourth year to the fifth, granting the fourth year
student more time for design work while also imposing structure onto
the fifth year. The caesura between the Intermediate School and the
Diploma School coincided with the ‘‘year out’’ that followed the third
year of study, but importantly also created a point of entry for
continuing students from other British institutions and international
students from abroad—a financial palliative to an ongoing saga at the
AA during the 1970s, when the Department of Education & Science and
local education authorities withdrew grants for students at the AA, a
private and independent institution.
48. Higgott’s essay on Boyarsky’s AA chairmanship is to date perhaps
the only account that attempts to historicize the unit system, yet limits
its study to the Diploma School. See Higgott, ‘‘Searching for the
Subject: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association.’’
49. See, for example, ‘‘Structure of the Undergraduate Course’’ in AA
Prospectus (1968–1969), unpaginated.
50. ‘‘Lower School First Year,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Session 1972 ⁄ 1973
Autumn Term), unpaginated.
51. The AA First Year bus tour was jointly coordinated by Architectural
Design, through the initiative of Technical Editor Peter Murray, and by
Polyark, a network of architectural schools conceived by Cedric Price.
See ‘‘AD ⁄ AA ⁄ Polyark Bus Tour,’’ Architectural Design (April 1973), pp.
201–212.
52. See ‘‘First Year Requirements,’’ AA Prospectus (1973 ⁄ 1974), p. 11.
53. ‘‘Lower School – 2nd & 3rd years,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Autumn
term, 1972–1973), unpaginated; ‘‘Unit 1,’’ AA Prospectus (1973–1974),
Intermediate School, p. 2.
54. ‘‘Unit 4, Rational Technology Unit,’’ in Intermediate School, AA
Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 6.
55. ‘‘Unit 6,’’ in Intermediate School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 9.
In 1972 ⁄ 1973, the inaugural year of the new Intermediate School,
David Greene had co-taught Unit 2 with fellow Archigrammers Ron
Herron and Dennis Crompton.
56. For example, the theme of the first group design program was the
‘‘Street Corner.’’ For student projects, see ‘‘Street Corners,’’ AA
Newsheet, no. 4(Autumn Term, 1972 ⁄ 1973).
57. Michael Walsche, ‘‘Alvin’s staff meeting,’’ AA Newsheet 2, no. 10
(March 1973). Also see ‘‘Will Success Spoil Peter Cook?’’ AA Newsheet
2, no. 7 (January 1973).
58. On the AA Communications Unit during the 1970s, see Sunwoo,
‘‘The Static Age,’’ AA Files, no. 61 (2010), pp. 118–129. I regret that
General Studies and Technical Studies cannot be discussed in further
detail here.
59. The adoption of the vertical studio dominated by a tutor in fact
echoed the structure and hierarchy of the Beaux-Arts atelier. My thanks
to Jean-Louis Cohen for this insight.
60. Tschumi, who had joined the AA teaching staff in 1970, recalls that
in it the launch of the new unit system, Boyarsky had encouraged
different units to collectively develop comparative urban studies.
Bernard Tschumi, interview with author, 30 October 2009, New York.
61. Tschumi’s teaching would subsequently relocate to Diploma Unit 10.
62. Bernard Tschumi, ‘‘A Chronicle of Urban Politics’’ in Chronicle of
Urban Politics (London: Architectural Association, 1974).
63. At the start of the 1973 ⁄ 1974 year Tschumi had in fact planned for
the production of two magazines over the course of the year, although
From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 40
the second would be published by the unit in the following year,
1974 ⁄ 1975. See Chronicle of Urban Space (London: Architectural
Association, 1975). On the history of Diploma Unit 2, see Bernard
Tschumi and Nigel Coates, Discourse of Events (London: Architectural
Association, 1983); and Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, ‘‘The London
Conceptualists: Architecture and Performance in the 1970s,’’ Journal of
Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008), pp. 43–51.
64. ‘‘Unit 1, City of Continuity, towards Urban Resurrection,’’ Diploma
School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 2–3. On the later history of the
Diploma Unit 1 see Dalibor Vesely and Mohsen Mostafavi, Architecture
and Continuity: Kentish Town Projects, 1978–81: Diploma Unit 1
(London: Architectural Association, 1982).
65. ‘‘Unit 1, City of Continuity, towards Urban Resurrection’’ in Diploma
School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 2–3.
66. Dalibor Vesely, ‘‘City in Continuity,’’ AA Events List Week 14 (28
January – 1 February 1974), cover. For an analysis of the AA Events List
see Sunwoo, ‘‘The Static Age,’’ pp. 120–122.
67. ‘‘Unit 9,’’ Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), pp. 18–20.
68. This interest in the ‘‘culture of congestion’’ was shared by his former
student and future Diploma Unit 9 co-tutor Rem Koolhaas, who would
further explore the phenomenon in Delirious New York (1979). See
‘‘Unit 9,’’ Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), pp. 18–20. That
41 SUNWOO
year, Zenghelis was assisted by Thalis Argyropoulos, Stuart Knight, and
Stirling-office-export Léon Krier. During the 1960s, Zenghelis had
taught in the First Year, as well as in Lloyd’s Middle School.
69. ‘‘Unit 9,’’ Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), pp. 18–20.
70. Intermediate Unit 6 program (1972–1973), p. 5, Peter Wylde
Papers, AAA. On Zenghelis and Koolhaas’s encounters at the AA see Elia
Zenghelis, ‘‘Text and Architecture: Architecture as Text,’’ and Lieven De
Cauter and Hilde Heynen, ‘‘The Exodus Machine,’’ in Exit Utopia:
Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976, edited by Martin van Schaik and
Otakar Máčel (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2004), pp. 255–262;
263–274.
71. ‘‘Unit 9,’’ in Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974),
pp. 18–20.
72. Ibid.
73. ‘‘End of Year Exhibition,’’ AA Events List, Week 31 (24–28 June
1974), front cover.
74. Ibid.
75. ‘‘AR Reviews AA,’’ Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 23.
76. ‘‘AR Reviews AA: Celebration and Comparison,’’ Architectural Review
174 (October 1983), p. 68.
77. ‘‘AA Now: A Selected Survey of Work from the Last Decade,’’
Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 44–67. Nevertheless, Krier
today views his brief time as an AA tutor as an opportunity to hone his
own theoretical position and reflects fondly upon the critical atmosphere
that the school generated. Leon Krier, interview by author, 7 April 2011,
via Skype.
78. ‘‘AR Reviews AA,’’ Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 23.
79. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. xv-xxxiv.
80. For readings of the institutionalization of the avant-garde in the
context of art history and artistic production, see Peter Bürger, Theory
of the Avant-Garde, Theory and history of literature v. 4 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Andreas Huyssen, After the
Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Theories of
representation and difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986).
81. For an overview of the Diploma School unit system during the
1974–1975 year, see Higgott, ‘‘Searching for the Subject,’’
pp. 154–177.
82. ‘‘Ambience and Alchemy,’’ interview with Alvin Boyarsky,
Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 28–29; Robin Evans, ‘‘From
Axes to Violins,’’ AA Files 1, no. 1 (Winter 1981–1982), p. 120.