While students at the AA spend their time preparing for the moment they will graduate, their own final projects offer only a mere glimmer of the thinking, drawing and discussions that have occurred in order to reach that point. This year’s AA Book emphasises all of the work that goes into the projects on display – the sketches, drawings, endless iterations of models and messy unit spaces that together shape an architectural education.
Just like the projects of the students and units, the AA itself is a work in progress. Today our home on Bedford Square is bigger and more connected than it has ever been, and with plans to improve workshops and devote more space to studios, we continue to thrive as an environment in constant flux, embracing the changes of each unique academic year and cohort. ‘Work in progress’ is also the driving principle of our Hooke Park campus, in Dorset, where students, staff and tutors not only test the latest building technologies but also use them to build state-of-the-art facilities directly on-site. And for the students who jet off to any one of the AA’s global Visiting Schools, the work and ideas they create with local communities can leave lasting impressions.
Architecture, after all, has always been about more than a final outcome. In reflecting on the work that goes into both the projects presented here, online at pr2017.aaschool.ac.uk and in the 2017 Projects Review exhibition, we continue to challenge our own perception and understanding of our discipline and profession – what it can inspire within a school, and what it brings about in ourselves.
Brett Steele, 2017
Projects Review 2017 offers an overview of the AA's 2016/17 academic year. On display are hundreds of drawings, models, installations and photographs from all the AA's units, courses and departments, documenting the diversity and experimental nature of the AA School.
At the AA architecture is pursued as a form of cultural knowledge across year-long design projects and portfolios. We believe that truly great schools don't just nurture and support architectural talent, they also build audiences for experimentation, out of which new architectural ideas, visions and projects emerge.
With more biennials, festivals, magazines and websites than ever before, it is easy for an architect today to spend their time thinking and talking only about the future of architecture. As a result, the practice of architecture can too frequently, and too easily, equate to an intellectualising of its representative images: in lieu of bricks, we paint broad brushstrokes to see the future, and we sacrifice our mortar to build with -ities -of suspect contemporary kinds – all those potentialities and monumentalities, criticalities and spectacularities about an architecture that ‘might yet be’ in a future ‘not yet here’. Admittedly, the architecture we teach at the AA School is not that which is known so much as it is the making of what it may become. And while the AA Book and 2016 Projects Review website seek to represent the ideas and learning that make up a year in the life of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, we remain as committed as ever to the notion that both are above all else, real and enduring things: materials.
You will find in the 2016 edition of AA Book a photographic exploration of architecture as raw material – the physical stuff that feeds into the AA and that our students deploy to imagine the kinds of architectural worlds. Similarly, pr2016.aaschool.ac.uk is an attempt to document both the physical and the intellectual pieces that make up the material universe of teaching and learning at the AA. The following pages present a vast array of work by this year’s Intermediate and Diploma units as well as students in Foundation, First Year and our graduate programmes.
Thank you to Max Creasy for his photographs, and to both the Print Studio and Digital Platforms for producing a book and website in real-time alongside the projects themselves. Thanks also to AA members for their continuous and ongoing support and, most of all, thank you to the students, teachers and staff for making this year a special one in the life of architecture, and of this Architectural Association.