Welcome to this year's online compendium of the AA School, made up of equal parts of architectural investigation, invention and imagination by the 700 students and 200 teachers and members of staff who fully embody the world's most distinctive school of architecture.
In common with Projects Review exhibition and book, this website seeks to do far more than offer a cursory glimpse into the much bigger, deeper world of projects, discussions, debates and other academic activities that have shaped the 2011/12 academic year.
Above all else, what it shows is the depth of our ongoing, unrelenting commitment to the making of intelligent architectural audiences – and not only brilliant and committed architects or other creative individuals.
The intelligent staging of near-constant interaction between critical minds is a primary commitment of our school. And this involves not just our teachers and students, but also wider groups of individuals. The near-daily, non-stop activities of student and visitor presentations, studio projects, seminars, visiting juries and reviews, lectures, conferences, symposia, exhibitions and everything else that fills the spaces and rooms of our school can be seen in dozens and dozens of online and print pages of this year’s Projects Review.
How to imagine how an architect might act, or what he or she may ultimately become in a world like ours, evolving with unprecedented speed, complexity and uncertainty, is of course the single, larger, core question you find in this book. To grasp this, what we ask of you is the same as we ask of our students: read between the lines, look across the projects, and through some of the everyday language.
Since its founding more than a century ago, the AA School has thrived, like modern architecture itself, on the confrontation between the world as found and the world(s) not yet imagined. For the latest architectural advice on where that contrast may be taking us all (and not only architects), look carefully at what follows. At least in the minds of our students, the future has never been clearer.
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