The Year Ahead
Welcome to the 2011/12 academic year of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. This is a brief introduction to the activities that make the AA the world’s most diverse and influential school of architecture. Now in its 165th year, the AA is an incredibly fluid, dynamic and active learning environment. Alongside the formal coursework it offers a year-long schedule of evening lectures, book launches, exhibitions, conferences and other events, bringing together a growing public audience for architectural culture today. Further, the AA School lies at the heart of a global association of architects and other committed individuals. This is only a summary of the AA: the best way to experience the AA is through direct participation in it – whether as a student, an AA Member or as part of the audience convened here throughout the coming year.
The AA has been located on the west side of Bedford Square, London’s last-remaining intact Georgian Square, since the early years of the twentieth century. Today the surrounding area of Bloomsbury is recognised as Europe’s single largest academic precinct. It houses some of the UK’s largest and best-known research universities, leading independent academic institutions and the European headquarters for many overseas universities, colleges and schools. Major cultural institutions such as the British Museum and the Welcome Institute are also nearby.
At the core of the AA, the five-year ARB/RIBA accredited AA Undergraduate School leads to an AA Diploma and Parts 1 and 2 of the UK qualification as an architect. This part of the school also includes an associated, full-time Foundation Course for those contemplating studies in architecture or associated creative fields at the AA or elsewhere.
The focus of our undergraduate students’ academic lives are the units, which involve year-long design teaching and learning alongside associated Complementary Studies courses. The AA Graduate School (around one third of our 600 full-time students) is accredited by the Open University in the UK, and encompasses 11 programmes in graduate design or other specialised courses of study. Conservation of Historic Buildings and AA Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) both offer options for part-time study; all other undergraduate and graduate programmes are full-time. Admission to all parts of the school is very competitive, interested prospective students are encouraged to visit the AA and to make an application in the knowledge that the AA seeks self-motivated students, able to bring interesting personal, professional and other academic qualities that will allow them to contribute to a school filled with like-minded students and staff.
Complementing the AA’s courses and activities in London, the AA Visiting School was formalised and expanded in early 2008, giving visiting students all around the world the chance to experience the AA’s influential form of unit-based teaching. In this capacity, the Visiting School has arranged short design workshop courses in over 30 different cities worldwide, bringing together AA tutors, outside partners and local teaching staff to work on important projects and problems related to the challenges of local cultures, cities and environments.
The AA School: A Legacy of Experimentation
Our mission at the AA School isn’t to teach architecture as it is already known, but rather to create the conditions for new forms of teaching, working and above all thinking and learning that will ultimately transform architecture in ways not yet fully realised. This has long been the central ambition of the AA School, which for decades has been home to the world’s leaders in architecture.
The AA is a famously independent educational experiment: we are self-directed, self-motivated and self-funded. As the UK’s oldest and only remaining private school of architecture, it has grown up alongside – and to a very great degree helped shape – the architectural profession. It should be stressed that the AA School sits entirely outside the state funding of higher education in the UK, and as a private school – with a broad commitment to bringing issues of contemporary architecture, cities and the environment to a large public audience – we are deeply committed to realising the potential that our independence allows, by adapting intelligently to the changing conditions of architecture at a time when the profession is facing a spectacular range of challenges.
The AA’s independence also means that we are able to push boundaries, test new ideas and promote new ways of teaching and learning. As a small and independent school located at the heart of a multicultural city, the AA is unique in at least three important ways. First, we are by far the world’s most international school of architecture, with nearly 90 per cent of our full-time students and nearly as many of our teachers coming to the AA from abroad. Secondly, we are organised around two distinct kinds of activities, both of which are of immense value to our students and staff: our formal courses and our Public Programme of evening lectures, symposia, exhibitions and publication launches. Thirdly, there is the famous pedagogical basis for the school itself: our ‘unit’ system of teaching and learning in which, in various ways, all of our students participate as the foundation for the experimental forms of teaching that remain the hallmark of the AA.
Modern Times
The modern history of the AA School is bound up with the incredible legacy of architectural personalities, projects and pedagogies, which have emerged from the school during the past 50 years. When we consider that three of the past decade’s recipients of the Pritzker Prize are AA graduates from a brief, intense 17-year period during the 1960 and 70s – Richard Rogers (AA ’60), Rem Koolhaas (AA ’72) and Zaha Hadid (AA ’77) – we realise that our school has fostered remarkable architectural careers and personalities. The AA has long been a home for some of the most experimental advances in architectural education, teaching and learning, hosting countless avant-gardes – from the thinking of Cedric Price or the seminal group Archigram in the 1960s, the provocative NATO collective of the 1980s, to the formalised, team-based experimentation across electronic design networks begun with the formation of the DRL in the 1990s. For decades the school has been the place where young architectural interests and agendas have been given space to establish themselves, seek audiences and mature into the kinds of projects and careers that gain worldwide recognition.Past AA prospectuses are where architects can find the origins of many of the ways of thinking that spawned some of the great architects, designers and educators of our time. During a period when it was directed by Alvin Boyarsky, one of the twentieth-century’s leading architectural educators, the AA School was a hive of experimentation and invention, with teachers like Jan Kaplicky, Ron Herron, Bernard Tschumi, Nigel Coates, Zaha Hadid, Peter Cook and many others laying out agendas for work and careers that would unfold over the past quarter century.
Today this legacy of invention runs strong in a school that is committed not only to new kinds of architectural projects, practices and ideas but also to an open experimentation with the many new ways of working and thinking architecture. Our era has been transformed not just by the realities of globalised economies and forms of practice, but by fundamental changes to the organisation of architectural studios and design networks, based on an increasingly collaborative, multidisciplinary approach. Today the AA seeks to embrace, confront and transform the conditions of architectural practice and culture – as well as the very idea of how an architectural school should be organised, operated and inhabited in an era of change.
At the heart of the AA’s exploration of new approaches lies our belief that architecture – including architectural thinking – will be transformed one project at a time. The school’s famed ‘unit’ system of teaching is built around a few, simple challenges to a conventional school of architecture. We believe that:
1) Students learn best by working in small, highly focused groups around a single tutor or team for an entire year. The expectation is that our students can direct their own path through a school that offers an intense diversity of possible paths; our students assume a great part of the responsibility for defining their own future through their selection of a specific unit (in the Undergraduate School) or programme (in the Graduate School).
2) AA learning is project- and portfolio-driven. AA students learn architecture and address the broad spectrum of associated professional and political issues by embedding these realities within the scope of a single, resolved, design portfolio.
3) Collective assessment and enquiry is fundamental. Student projects are assessed at the end of the academic year by a panel of tutors, who together determine the relative success of any given project and portfolio. The AA undergraduate end-of-year review panels, as well as our Graduate School’s double-marking of design studio results, ensures that our students’ work is seen and socialised across the school.
Taken together, these features of the AA’s internal organisation help account for how a small and independent school such as ours can so consistently define the conditions for the emergence of unexpected and promising new architectural agendas.
Brett Steele
Director, AA School
