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.
Existing Things of Relative Value explores the changing value attributed to objects, materials, spaces and places and how this determines approaches to their reuse and preservation. This Lab brings together ongoing work from individuals, units and programmes across the AA to challenge existing designations and cultural hierarchies within the context of the climate crisis.
The first structured iteration of this shared initiative is the new MA/PGDip in Conservation and Reuse. The programme approaches working with existing things from the perspective of climate change, driven by an urgent need to cultivate the careful use and reuse of materials and spaces – from the cathedral to the car park. This is central to a set of school-wide strategies at the AA that ask how innovation in materials and fabrication can address the problems of relative value, resource conservation and cultural significance. The AA sees the need to equip a new generation of practitioners with the ethical and technical skills to tackle a complex world, and to put design at the centre of responses to questions of value. This new programme will nurture practitioners who are able to work with existing things, make beneficial judgements about design and bring about change with precision, optimism and grace.
