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.
Wood Lab brings together expertise from forestry, architecture, engineering, ecology and material science. Led by Kate Davies and Emmanuel Vercruysse, Wood Lab’s research explores long-term forestry strategies within Hooke Park, contributing to an urgent conversation within architecture about the potential and sustainability of timber. Wood Lab has been made possible thanks to the generous support of John Makepeace, who founded the Hooke Park campus as Director of the Parnham Trust.
Throughout 2024, as part of the ongoing 100-Year Forest project, Wood Lab Fellows Catherine Byrne and Jeremy Ralph collected data from the forest, including the first full inventory and woodland condition assessment of Hooke Park in many years. This data has informed an analysis of the current state of the forest, as well as shaping a 100-year strategy and action plan for the woodland. This strategy includes an assessment of predicted changes to both the environment and the timber market over the coming century, and suggests new forestry tools that could contribute to management decision-making.
In autumn 2025, AA Publications launched the book Seeding Change: Visionary Timber Architecture at Hooke Park 1981–2001, which consolidates research by Wood Lab Research Fellows into archival material held by the AA relating to the first three buildings realised at Hooke Park by John Makepeace and the Parnham Trust: the Prototype House (1986), the Workshop (1990) and Westminster Lodge (1996). Encompassing a rich and extensive range of original drawings, maps, photographs, plans and documents from the Hooke Park Archive, the book traces the genesis and development of the campus and its radical experiments in roundwood.
