Stories about Sustainability: Education and the Architectural Act

Stories about Sustainability presents ideas inspired by architecture, materials and history from around the world.

As a part of the activities surrounding the exhibition Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act and Form in the AA Gallery, two professors from the Valparaíso School of Architecture and active members of the Open City's community, Silvia Arriagada and Marcelo Araya, will visit Hooke Park accompanied by Francisco Adriasola, the exhibition curator, and Alberto Cruz’s family members. In this first act of its kind between both architecture schools, a game will be played between the participants. The act is an intervention involving everyone present that will mark this unique occasion. These acts are part of the usual dynamics of the members of the Valparaíso school at Open City, where poetry meets inhabitants and forms the act of living: the ‘architectural act’.

During this visit, a conversation between Open City Valparaiso and Hooke Park will be held on the topic of teaching architecture in secluded sites where communities become an essential way of living and working in nature. This conversation will be live-streamed, connecting Dorset, London, Santiago and Valparaíso with the rest of the world.

Silvia Arriagada is a graphic designer with a PUCV and PhD in design from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Río de Janeiro (PUCRJ), Brazil. She has been a professor at the Architecture and Design School of Valparaíso (PUCV) since 1983. Arriagada has been part of investigations, exhibitions and has edited books for the School and the Amereida Cultural Corporations as an active member of the Open City.

Marcelo Araya is an industrial designer with a PUCV and PhD in design from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain. He has taken part in numerous papers and investigations, and is an active member of the Open City’s Amereida Cultural Corporation.

Francisco Adriasola is an architect from the Andrés Bello University (2010), and completed a Design and Make MA at the Architectural Association.He holds a Diploma in Museum Studies and a degree in timber construction from de Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Adriasola currently works in Santiago de Chile, where he develops his practice between curatorial and architectural design. He is the curator of the Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act and Form exhibition at the AA Gallery.

Emmanuel Vercruysse is a designer with a deep interest in the relationship between drawing and making. He approaches design as a tacit process; and as a series of translations between drawings and objects that oscillate between intuitive acts and precise operations. This approach to design combined with in-depth knowledge of digital fabrication techniques means that he continues to explore the production of architecture intuitively through iterations of drawing, craft, intuition and code. Emmanuel is Co-Head of the Design and Make Taught Postgraduate programme at the AA.

Image courtesy of the Alberto Cruz Foundation