Abdali Innovation Award | Techno (vs) JU

So you bring together two competing campuses, minimum exposure, zero level of interaction, contrasting teaching methodologies; select 50+ projects from all types, subjects, context or scale, with a 3:1 ratio for the project, stack them in 8 themes, keep them away throughout the whole process and then bring them all together to submit their ‘products’ hours after midnight at prestigious Kempinski!

Result: a damn interesting experiment worthy of a doctorate dissertation!

Perhaps Abdali’s competition did not provide student/student exposure but it certainly exposed many important issues. Perhaps the highlight of last year’s CSBE | Omrania award is the jurors’ summary released which questions architectural education, externalizing the matter of education out of the institutions—

The Abdali Award designed as a competition for ‘innovation in design’ is less important for the projects it collects but rather for the opportunity it given us to observe current architectural education logics—

The non-existing interaction platforms, the radically internalized teaching environments, the emphasis on ‘product’ rather than methodology, isolation of ideas, lack of criticism, adaptability or connection dynamics.

it appears that our “mutation” is counter to that of contemporary architecture models—

Here I can mention two examples for comparison,

1 The MIT architecture campus joins an arch department at a university in Japan for a collaborative student project through virtual online connection using the 12 hour difference to work in shifts where students at MIT use the 12 day hours and then pass the work online to Japan’s campus to work their 12 hour shift- the result is unspeakable!

2 The AA did not only connect virtually but moved all the way to Beijing and established an AA center where they can bring together student from the AA with those in Beijing as well as international students to produce collaborative material, and currently studying doing a similar experiment in Dubai

We managed to meet Ms Luna H. Madi (Abdali Investment & Development PSC) and Jo Chemali (Regional Communication Director, MS&L) and agreed to work something out between AIA and Interruptions— we are hoping this could use the AIA as a gateway to turn this experiment into a student manifesto and a review/analysis/or critical observation (the minimum) to follow this basic blog draft in our upcoming edition.