AA Research advances the study of ideas, architecture and urbanism, and society. We cultivate the highest quality of scholarship to enable cultural change, drawing on our global tradition and recognition for shaping architectural thought and possibility at once. Our central values are originality and substance, where rigour and imagination, empiricism and theory, critique and proposition, mutually constitute each other. We support work that is globally comparative, historically longue-durée, and disciplinarily meshed, towards ‘big ideas’ evidenced by fine-grain analysis.
AA Research acts as an agency, facilitating the practicalities of scholarship and its influence, so that scholars can focus on meaningful thinking and making. Our in-house services connect talent to material to audience to world: early-stage project development, intellectual mentorship, lab and researcher support, resource access negotiation, grant application assistance, editorial guidance, publishing and communications direction, global events and exhibitions platforming, and application targeting with makers and practitioners. As an independent and democratically structured organisation, we continue to operate outside of the conventional university research frameworks and metrics, bound to the principle that deep discernment and originality are nurtured by association.
AA Labs draw from the expertise of an interdisciplinary cohort of fellows including architects, artists, policymakers, engineers, scientists and creative entrepreneurs. They are driven and supported by grants and Lab Partners, and carry the potential for additional external investment to be contributed as the research develops.
Archive Lab examines alternative organisational approaches to history and artefacts, as means of challenging received narratives and of examining the role of the AA in the perpetuation of abiding Eurocentric readings of history and culture in architectural education. The Lab brings together initiatives that explore strategies for decolonisation and the diasporic experience, and investigate their impact on the built environment and cultural production.
The first embodiment of this work is the Entangled Archive, a Graham Foundation-funded project currently underway to digitise material from the AA Department of Tropical Architecture (DTA, 1950–1972) and provide an online platform for researchers eager to examine the network of global relationships entangled with the DTA, in order to challenge the orthodoxy of its programme. The project will catalogue existing DTA material held by the AA Archives; make this work available through digitisation and publication in an online database, scheduled to launch in early 2026; and contact living alumni to trace the legacy of the DTA, discover and preserve missing documents, and to record the experiences of this dispersed international cohort.
