The aim is to change architects' attitudes towards space, which is too often created from technological convenience rather than how people really interact with environment; and to encourage engineers to use artists and sci-fi writers for ideas and angles.

Marianne Mueller, co-director of cluster and Diploma Unit Master at the AA School, says: "The aim of Concrete Geometries is to transform how architects think about the creation of space and how it is used for everyday life.

"This topic seems quite an obvious thing to be exploring, but it is not a discussion that is being held in architecture today.  By involving designers and artists we are able to rethink our practice on the creation of space.

"Digital design has provided architects with new tools to experiment with the use of space. We need to challenges our current thinking of space and how we as architects create it."

The research programme, Concrete Geometries, began in January 2010 with an call for submissions exploring how geometric aspects of space, such as size, shape or relative position of figures, are perceived and influence behavior in a very real sense.

Some 415 entries were received from artists, architects and designers around the world, from which over 30 were chosen for further research. and 20 selected for the exhibition, including:

• Room Drawing Installation, by German artist Christine Rusche: transforming the perceived space of a room using graphic patterns on its walls
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• Connecting Corridor, by Dutch designers Studio Elmo Vermijs: an installation connecting two buildings which is too narrow to allow two people to pass, forcing its users to interact with strangers
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• House Installation Project, by British artist Fran Cottell: an installation in an existing domestic setting, a raised platform acts as a walkway for visitors, bringing into play conflicting and contradictory power relations. The installation serves as a social experiment to see which prevails - visitor or intruder


• Dymaxion Sleep, by Canadian architects/artists Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell, Canada: a structure of nets suspended over a garden which changes the viewer's fundamental spatial relationship to plants.

Mineral House - Atelier Tekuto, Japan
Building project: polyhedral volumes and reflections that deviate from the restrictiveness of a site.
Credit: Atelier Tekuto



Art installation which served as a venue for temporary events which transformed the familiar formats of speech and lecture into a dialogue between visitors and speakers
Credit: Kai Schiemenz

Science and science fiction
The frontiers between art, science and science fiction have always been imprecise. In many ways there are both opposed and closely related. To such an extent that engineers can now draw inspiration from the works of artists and writers of science fiction. 



An ESA video report illustrates this interaction with an experimental art exhibition by Ken Rinaldo at a Swiss museum and a conversation with British science fiction author Alastair Reynolds.

Gaberlunzie loves the  clip, but feels that the ESA draws slightly too heavily on brilliant Jules Verne, and might have ventured into modernising a little with some others. 

Having  once had the awed pleasure of sitting in a pub listening to Arthur Clarke (right) and Charles Eric Maine (left) argue over the validity and meaning of the ending to 2001 Space Odyssey, his reckoning is that Clarke's science 'fantasy' proposal of space satellites is yet another very fine  example of the intriguing relationship between fact and fiction, and perhaps even people and space.