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.
Land Lab is a collaborative platform focused on the complex entanglements of living systems between hyper-local and world orders, and is embedded in material infrastructures. Its work addresses the diverse forces that shape the land: material systems and flows; ecological culture; other-than-human intelligence; planetary thinking and computation; legal and governance structures; the socio-economics of land use and land rights; systems of production, energy and food; landscape; and geopolitical epistemologies and political ecologies.
One of the Lab’s first outputs was the AA Gallery exhibition Ripple, Ripple, Rippling in 2024, which highlighted hidden changes in Chinese rural homes and village landscapes that support a floating labour force sustaining the country’s urbanisation. The exhibition also reflected on the evolving methods and media used to engage with these changes, through architecture, anthropology, filmmaking and performance. In 2025, Land Lab began to engage closely with Hooke Park to plan future public lectures, residencies, festivals and activities as part of the school’s new Land Futures initiative.
