AA London

Architectural Association – Introduction Year 2008/09

As a school of architecture, the Architectural Association is unique in at least three ways: firstly, for the incredible scope of our global experience (with 90 per cent of our hundreds of students and teachers each year, originating from 50 or more overseas countries, we are by far the most international school of architecture ever created); secondly, for the breadth of our influence in evolving new, experimental kinds of architectural pedagogies and personalities (such as our acclaimed unit system of year-long, project-based ways of teaching, our more recent development of ground-breaking collaborative team-based forms of teaching and learning, and our deep commitment to hands-on fabrication, prototyping and direct intervention in cities and projects); and finally, for the depth of our experience in presenting as well as provoking emerging ideas and work by architects, artists and designers, which we bring to London each year as part of our acclaimed AA Public Programme.

Collectively these features allow the AA to embody what I like to call a genuinely global form of architectural intelligence – a quality itself hugely important as the world (including its architects) wakes up to and negotiates the immense problems and potentials of our era’s unprecedented globalisation. The AA School seeks to learn, teach, promote and transform architecture in ways that allow the school to remain at the forefront of architectural education. During the past three years we have embraced a broad range of new initiatives that allow us to do this in exciting new ways.

Opening Doors: Since 2005 and following the school community’s decision to enable a new direction for the school, I have had the tremendous honour and privilege of leading a period of incredible renewal, renovation and reinvention across the entire school. In three short years this larger project has gained great momentum, gathered an incredible amount of outside interest and attention, and prepared the AA for even bigger and more positive changes in the years ahead. To say that this initiative has been a success so far would be an understatement: during the past year we have received more applications for admission to the school, from more countries and across a wider range of current AA courses and programmes, than ever before in the school’s history. Much of this renewal has included changes reviewed during the past year and a half as part of our successful revalidation of our under-graduate and graduate schools. Many of these changes can be seen today in the sheer number of new faces, spaces and initiative sat the AA.

Since 2005,our already brilliant teaching staff has been replenished by an unprece-dented wave of new teachers, and continues to offer the highest teacher-to-student ratio of any architecture school anywhere in the world. Since 2005 we have hired more than 50 new teachers from London, Europe and around the world, who now lead design studio units and teach in new courses. Within our five-year ARB/RIBA-accredited undergraduate course, this rate of renewal is particularly striking: we launch the 2008/09 year with more than half of our entire undergraduate teaching staff having joined the AA in the last three years, and many other new teachers contributing as consultants, lecturers or regular visitors. These talented individuals have brought energy, ambition and experience that extends the range of units, agendas and intellectual projects in the school today. New pedagogical initiatives since 2005 have been equally stark in changing how our students work within the school. Our new Research Clusters are evolving into larger and more collaborative infrastructures that allow students and teachers to step periodically outside the work of units and programmes. They are also attracting outside funding and partnerships that we have lacked in recent years. The creation of our new studio-based First Year course has met with great outside interest due to its capacity to put our youngest students literally in the heart of the main spaces of the school. In recent years we have moved fast and worked hard to invest in new workshop, media and other facilities. Last year’s launch of our new digital prototyping lab, our new digital photography studio and our digital platforms team and workspace have been great new additions. Over this past summer we have invested heavily in a major renovation of our Computing Lab, work that follows last summer’s move of our Photo Library and the creation of a new Media Lounge. Upcoming improve-ments to our Library, and this year’s launch of a new AA Bookshop following our acquisition of the retiring Triangle Bookshop, are all projects that help round out a picture of major changes to our existing buildings. Bigger improve-ments, however, lie ahead.

Where We are Going: 2008/09. We begin this academic year with the announcement of a major new project that focuses – and takes to the next level – many of the ambitions and ideas guiding the above developments, and in the most compelling, exciting and architectural form imaginable. On behalf of the entire AA, I am pleased to announce a major expansion and improvement of the AA School’s historic home, here in Bedford Square. Following nearly a year of study, negotiation and consultation led by the AA Council and School working together, and in close contact with a talented group of outside advisers and consultants, an agreement has been approved with our landlord, Bedford Estates, for the acquisition of new AA buildings. This will include the imminent outright acquisition of two neighbouring buildings, with a third building with a sitting tenant being made available in the near future. Combined with the dispersal of existing AA properties, this agreement offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a consolidation and expansion of the facilities of the school and the entire Architectural Association. This expansion will allow great progress in bringing studio space to the last remaining part of our student body requiring this essential resource: our Intermediate and Diploma students. This project is essential to our students and to our future, and presents an opportunity to transform the entire culture of the AA unit system. The opportunity to acquire neighbouring buildings enables a sweeping conso-lidation of the entire school into a single, shared campus, reversing a decades- long trend of dispersal of AA students and faculty across Bloomsbury. While part of an incredibly positive recent history of success, this has nonetheless left parts of the school distant from one another.

As we move towards realising this great vision of a single, unified AA campus, we will also be in a position to make great improvements to other academic, administrative and public programme spaces not only for the school, but also for our entire AA membership and growing number of worldwide public visitors.
At the time of writing, details of when and how these new buildings and properties will be made available are still uncertain. We anticipate that the first properties will become available some time during the 2008/09 academic year. Following the past two years of modest but sustainable growth in selected parts of the school, this agreement will allow the AA to move quickly and begin to address its urgent space needs. There will be a great deal of work to do during the coming year to plan for this project. We look forward to the challenge, and the great future it promises.

The 2008/09 year will again feature an extensive diary of open evening lectures, exhibitions and other activities. Our autumn calendar begins with an exhibition of unbuilt projects for London titled Future Non-Future that brings together dozens of projects by many of the world’s leading architects. AA Publications will again roll out a long list of new books, many of which will feature the work of our students and staff, units and programmes, as we continue to expand our ambitions as a leading publisher of experimental contemporary architecture, writing and projects.

Alongside projects and personalities like these, the AA School today seeks to embody the definition of a great school, as a genuinely cultural centre and a professional training ground for the protection and promotion, learning and exchange of ideas, knowledge and skills of contemporary architecture. It is my pleasure to welcome you to this, the 161st year at the Architectural Association. As a form of human knowledge, architecture as we know it could not exist without the possibility,inherent within all architectural projects, for making improvements on the world as we find it. At the AA School today we welcome the challenges this places on us as a learning organisation and our students as creative individuals, regarding the future we all work to imagine, communicate and help to create.

During 08/09 the AA’s Open Studio lead by Miraj Ahmed, Saskia Lewis and Theo Lorenz will seek to extend its scope of discovery, experience and learning to an even wider range of creative, design and fine arts. Historically, a large majority of AA Foundation students go on to apply for and gain admission to our five-year Undergraduate School. The Studio seeks to build on this success, and to attract qualified individuals who might find the AA a perfect setting to prepare themselves for study in other creative fields.

In January 2009, within the framework of the Visiting School, we will launch the new AA Interprofessional Studio (AAIS), which will give experienced individuals an opportunity to step away from their existing professional (or even academic) activities and enter the unique AA environment in order to see their own field and interests in new ways. Each year the AAIS will launch a single year-long brief that will structure a wide range of design activities leading to the realisation of a major project. Led by Theo Lorenz, and with the first cohort of students arriving in 2009, the course has already received EU funding enabling partnerships with institutions in Germany, Hungary and France.