Alvin Boyarsky and the influence of Chicago á la carte on the Architectural Association's teaching revolution.

Architecture from bodies and their forces

Abstract

Alvin Boyarsky, architect and future dean of the Architectural Association, landed in Chicago in the fall of 1965 as associate dean of the College of Architecture and Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rather than placing him in an academic bubble, this experience piqued his interest in the urban and architectural conditions faced by the city's most vulnerable residents at the time, primarily the African-American population. In this context, Boyarsky emerged as a key figure in the period’s activism, a situation reflected in his underappreciated work Chicago à la Carte. Here, he shows, in addition to providing a parallel history of the city, the need for an architecture and urbanism concerned with context, where more than objects and forms, the bodies that inhabit it, and the invisible forces that are generated are represented. Following a detailed examination of the book, the article directly connects these approaches to the innovative and radical teaching methodology he applied to the Architectural Association, in London, from 1971 until his death in 1990. A method that transformed a collapsing university into a global benchmark, educating the most prestigious architects of the last decades, such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid.