after school

Join us for the book launch of after school

Schools are contradictory places—sites of discipline and erasure, and also of play, solidarity, and collective care. after school, co-produced by Carnegie Museum of Art and in otherwards, the imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, brings together architects, artists, educators, students, and activists to study the states and stakes of public education. Developed alongside the exhibition of the same name, the publication follows classrooms, corridors, itinerant sites, and cooperative experiments to examine how public education has been shaped, organized, and contested. Grounded in Pittsburgh, the city’s educational landscape becomes a site through which to consider the past, present, and futures of social infrastructure, and of the right to education. Essays, testimonies, lesson plans, and archival materials trace histories from the city’s first public high school and New Deal–era programs to cooperative school gardens and Black-led Street Academies of the 1970s. Drawings and photographs accompany the texts, attentive to how education takes form in buildings, streets, policies, and everyday life. after school gestures toward the possibility of a school not yet here.

We are delighted to launch after school at Architectural Association Bookshop, hosted by Projective Cities. The evening will include a conversation between Theodossis Issaias, Rosy Head and Sepake Angiama, and moderated by Hamed Khosravi. The book will be available to purchase at a special launch price of £20 (RRP £25).

The Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design is an interdisciplinary research and design programme that examines multi-scalar questions arising at the intersection of architecture, urban design and planning. The programme is dedicated to a systematic analysis of, design experimentation for, theoretical speculation on, and critical writing about the contemporary city.

Theodossis Issaias is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art and as Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of human rights, conflict, and the provision of shelter. He is a co-founder of FATURA Collaborative, a research and design collective established in 2009.

Rosy Head is Chair of History and Theory and an interdisciplinary theorist whose research and teaching focus on the political, philosophical, and practical dimensions of planetarity, from plot to planet. She is the founder of AUZINC, a collaborative platform for interdisciplinary knowledge that rethinks conventional frameworks and foregrounds the imaginative and strategic role of the arts in shaping public discourse and collective life.

Sepake Angiama is the artistic director of the Institute for International Visual Art in London and a curator and educator whose praxis lies in the discursive and social framework, in order to collectively rewrite our understanding of the world. This has inspired her to work with artists who disrupt or provoke aspects of the social sphere through action, radical forms of pedagogy, and architecture. While in her position as Head of Education, Documenta 14 she initiated the project Under the Mango Tree - a self-organized gathering of unlearning practices.