ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory was launched in 2009 as a physical and intellectual space focused on the inseparable interplay between urban form and social life. Now in its eighth year, ANCB decided to broaden its experimental journey as an independent public platform with an annual magazine entitled The Metropolitan Laboratory that further explores our deliberate goal of providing an alternative urban discourse. Entitled “Education: Trial and Error”, this first issue looks at the topic of artistic and architectural education. As a survey of highly progressive pedagogical approaches, it questions the role of education in past, present, and future. The broad spectrum of articles and essays ranges from Black Mountain College, Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Cedric Price, and Oswald Ungers all the way to Beatriz Colomina, Olafur Eliasson, Ai Wei Wei, Thom Mayne, Odile Decq, Peter Cook, and Joan Ockmann, to mention but a few. Inherent to all of these contributions is a profound apprehension of the positive surplus of unsolicited changes, uninvited irritants, unanticipated setbacks, and failures as the future seeds of human achievement and progress.
