Friday 6 – Saturday 14 September 2019

The Laboratory

The Laboratory is a cross-disciplinary initiative of the Architectural Association (AA), London at the ABK Stuttgart. It brings together architects, artists, designers and researchers to speculate about our life in the future.

The Laboratory uses collective forms of teaching and learning. For Foresight, we worked with the AA’s Head of Photography and fine art photographer Sue Barr and architectural writer Rosa Ainsley to capture glimpses of our life in the near future through the medium of image and text.

A public programme of lectures and a series of visits to unknown and unseen places gave participants the opportunity to experience the city from an unusual perspective.

Foresight

In a time when the line between fact and fiction is constantly blurred, photography and writing can play vital roles, as both separate and conjoined forms. In Foresight we explored the potentials of the photographic and the textual to predict/depict the (near) future within architecture, whose focus on the future is part of its process, evident from concept to completionto reuse/s.
With knowledge gained from site visits, archives and exhibitions, and from visual and textual documentation, ForeSight asked where it takes you, in photography and writing. How does architecture – whether on the screen, the print, the page or in your imaginative response to these – fuel the narrative of the near future? Foresight investigated the gap between the decisive moment and the staged image, while experimenting with ways of creating stories with writing architecture. It asked whether the architecture is the main character in the story; where it takes you as writer and as reader, what it provides more than location and context and how it might drive the plot?

The idea exists of photography as a witness of a Moment in history that occurred in front of the lens, as a recording of the thing that happened: the ‘Decisive moment’. This reality/objective truth is constantly being tested. Even in the era of classical analog photography, Andre Kertész was directing his photographs: in ‘Meudon’, a steam train passes over the bridge, while below, man with hat was instructed to cross the frame.

As Gary Winogrand puts it: ‘If I saw something familiar in my viewfinder, I do something to shake it up.’ In Foresight we explored the interaction of the strange and the familiar, the construction of every detail of the photographic image, of the written or spoken text to convey images of the future.

Programme Heads:

• Fahim Mohammadi
• Marianne Mueller

Tutors:

• Rosa Ainsley
• Sue Barr

Students:

• Alisa von Postel
• Bettina Nagler
• Delphine Wulf
• Eva Tsz Yan Ho
• Fabian Eidner
• Franziska Senz
• Isabela Lais Tavares
• Kathrin Alischer
• Luca Emilia
• Mona Al-Jadir
• Niko Kaloyanov
• Pharnyada Pakdeepatthapee
• Sasha Swannell
• Theodor Reinhardt

Thanks to:

• Markus Hartmann
• Ute Noll