Before formal education emerged in the form of universities, one learnt ‘on the job’. Today, in a world where a ‘job for life’ seems to belong to another age, the need to be ‘re-educated’ is a constant. This is a role that the contemporary workplace has taken onboard, most famously in the ‘campus’ layouts of Silicon Valley tech companies. Rem Koolhaas, a former AA student and teacher, has made the office OMA a setting in which the mirror activities of AMO have become part think-tank and part research school. James Westcott explains how this does, and doesn’t, work, ‘at work’.
Victoria Camblin is a writer, editor of 032c magazine, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. She has worked at NOWNESS, and she co-founded Body & English, which seeks to locate the incommunicable within and without text and image.
Tim Ivison is an artist and PhD researcher with the London Consortium working on urban biopolitics. He is the co-editor of the book Contestations: Learning From Critical Experiments in Education, forthcoming from Bedford Press.
James Westcott works at AMO, where he was co-editor of Project Japan (Taschen 2010), and now coordinates research with the Harvard Graduate School of Design on ‘Elements of Architecture,’ an exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Westcott also co-teaches the studio Vertical Cities Asia at TU Delft, and is the author of When Marina Abramovic Dies: A Biography.
School School is a school about schools taking place in the New Soft Room and Lecture Hall over four days and evenings during Week 2 (30 April – 3 May). Organised by Shumon Basar, Victoria Camblin and Sam Jacob, it presents past and present paradigms and experiments in education. Please see diary listings for specic details. All are welcome.