The Canary Islands Visiting School programme at Architectural Association School of Architecture invites participants to the Canarian Archipelago to learn from archetypes and alternative modes of tourism, agriculture, housing, land and sea stewardship.

School: Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture
Course: Canary Islands Visiting School
Location: La Palma and Gran Canaria, Spain
Course dates: 6 September to 16 September 2024
Application deadline: 9 August 2024

The term hermoso, used by Canarian grandmothers to describe their islands and the babies born to their rich volcanic soils, traces back to its Latin root formosus, meaning 'full of beautiful forms'.

Situated near the collision of four tectonic plates, the Canarian Archipelago was a key staging ground for Spanish and British colonial architecture.

Today, global crises driven by extractivism and profit rationality converge here, pushing life on the islands to the limits of tolerance and survival.

This crisis has spurred calls for radical new models of tourism, agriculture, housing, land and sea stewardship. The archipelago serves as a microcosm and critical case study for a wider rethinking of architectural practice.

Despite architects' best efforts to create more beautiful, interesting, and pluralistic worlds, we have too often been coerced into lending superficially diverse stories and appearances to the same underlying abstracting logic.

In our first year of research on La Palma, collaborators are invited to experiment with archetypes – examples of law and architecture grounded in simple, distinct form and self-evident ethics, which are otherwise 'open' due to their limited complexity.

Archetypes like cuevas, terrazas and charcos on La Palma exist on the boundary between the natural and artificial, infrastructure and architecture, the familiar and unfamiliar, form and no form, typology and non-typology.

Applications to this course have now closed.

Top image by Non-typological Architecture 2024.

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