Alvin boyarsky biography

Alvin Boyarsky was an Outsider too: a Polish-Canadian Jew, not very tall and furthermore a male child among a plethora of sisters.
Born in Montreal in 1928, Alvin Boyarsky grew up in the predominantly French Canadian and Scot- tish Presbyterian context of Quebec.
As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1971 to 1990, Alvin Boyarsky presided over a seminal moment in the history of.

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Exhibition Review of Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association

Exhibitions Saint Louis Conciergerie, Paris (organized by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux) 8 October 2014–11 January, 2015 Even among the colorful panoply of great medieval rulers, very few can match the legacy and regal charisma of Louis IX (1226–70). Admired and imitated by his contemporaries and successors in France and the courts of Europe, Louis seemed to epitomize the quintessential but often unattainable qualities of a Christian monarch in the High Middle Ages: he was a courtly and just ruler who consolidated his kingdom, a chivalric crusader, a devout and sophisticated patron, and, ultimately, a saint. The irresistible glamour of Louis IX’s reign not only attached itself to the king but also permeated the entire court and especially its seat, the city of Paris and the Île-de-France. The dazzling quality of art produced in France in this period and the shift in architectural tastes to a particularly reined Gothic style known as Rayonnant inspired Robert Branner (editor of the Journal

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Irene Sunwoo —

In Front of Lines that Leave Something Behind: Exhibiting Boyarsky's AA

“What we need is someone like Boyarsky.” This exasperated plea was uttered, not long ago, by a member of a search committee tasked with the selection of a new dean for a prominent North American school of architecture. Indeed, over the past few years the demand for new heads of architecture schools in the U.S. has been unusually high. Among the heavy-hitters that have recently been in the market for new leadership are Princeton, Cooper Union, Columbia, MIT, Sci-Arc, and Princeton again. Add Yale to the mix, with Robert Stern’s imminent departure from the school in spring 2016, after a nearly two-decade-long run, and it would seem that something is in the academic air. Change? If so, from what? Perhaps it is too soon to say. For the moment, we could revisit the records of what was thought to be at stake in architectural education a decade ago.¹ Or we could turn to a steady stream of new scholarship on post-’68 pedagogical innovations and reforms, which continues to gently poke contemporary

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Drawing ambience

Igor Marjanovic, Jan Howard, Drawing ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015, pp. 160.

“We fight the battle with the drawings on the walls”. This is how Alvin Boyarsky summed up his strategy at the head of the Architectural Association, the central London school of which he was chairman from 1971 until 1990, the year of his death. In the 1970s, the Architectural Association, better known by the acronym AA, was a fundamental workshop for the architecture of the following decades, and Boyarsky’s leadership was critical to this end.

When appointed chairman by a committee of students and professors (winning a hard-fought battle against historian Kenneth Frampton), the school was facing closure, with a balance sheet in freefall. The cultural crisis of Modernism, the economic recession and cuts to student grants by the then Minister for Education, Margaret Thatcher, (the AA is an independent school) seemed to herald the forced end of the AA’s “British” period, one that sho