First Works. Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s

During a tumultuous period in the 1960s and 70s, a new generation of architects began their careers amidst a period of profound social change, new conditions for architecture and the city and lasting changes to popular and critical forms of cultural production. First Works tells the story of this period and reassesses the conditions of architecture and the beginnings of architectural careers through a selection of projects undertaken during the 60s and 70s.
The book, accompanying a major travelling exhibition, presents a single key early project, in the form of models, sketches, photographs and drawings, by 20 young architectural practices: Archigram, Archizoom, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Cedric Price, Robert Venturi, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Tom Mayne and Michael Rotondi, Morphosis, Bernard Tschumi, Herzog & de Meuron and Zaha Hadid. Alongside these ‘first works’, 20 invited critics, including Kenneth Frampton, Sylvia Lavin and Pier Vittorio Aureli, offer contemporary commentaries on these projects and their place within the architects’ subsequent careers.
FIRST WORKS: EMERGING ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIMENTATION OF THE 1960s&1970s
AA Gallery & Front Members’ Room
7 November–12 December 2009, January 11 – February 13 2010
'The mask one wears when entering a profession becomes one's authentic face' Friedrich Nietzsche
'What is a beginning?' Edward Said
It seems clear today that in any discipline related to the production of culture the question of how one starts a career is absolutely central. Not by chance, successive generations of architects have found in their first works the basis for long-term interests, agendas and even obsessions. More interestingly, these beginnings often represent a kind of compressed architectural portfolio of an architects' career, marking key discoveries, breaks or shifts in how they think, work and learn architecture. FIRST WORKS offers a broad selection of this experience through the arrival of a generation that went on to, and continues to, profoundly influence architecture.
A key objective of this exhibition is to trace the origins of contemporary architecture through the formative projects of its most celebrated figures. The projects included will allow students and architects to reconsider practices now often better known through their current or later works. FIRST WORKS provides a timely opportunity to resituate the crucial role of these projects, and their various forms of realisation --built, and otherwise--through which critical forms of architectural practice can be seen to emerge and later influence architecture. At a time when the launching of an architectural career and the work of young architects is itself undergoing great change and experimentation, this exhibition provides the basis for re-assessing some of the world's most important and vital projects and personalities today. Exhibition materials include original architectural drawings, sketches, models, early publication materials and more. Accompany monograph published by AA Publications, 256 pp. full-colour.
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/PUBLIC/exhibitions.aspx