Architectural Association School of Architecture

Home
United Kingdom
London
Architectural Association School of Architecture

Directions Website Contact the university

14/10/2026

Join us in the AA Lecture Hall on Friday 23 October for the 2026 Mark Cousins Annual Lecture delivered by artist Ed Atkins. Titled Passive Mech; Apparatus and Metaphor, the lecture will examine Ed’s videos and writing, and how they surrogate all kinds of technologies to metaphorise creaturely life. Beginning with the artist’s latest moving image work, ‘Passive Mech’ – a timelapse film of a cardboard stage set collapsing in a garden while Spring erupts about it – Ed will move between reflexive cybernetics, tact and metaphor. Atkins will trace how cameras, motion-capture rigs, Post-It notes, children’s games, prose, sentiment and self are each treated as provisional vessels to hold feelings that otherwise have no proper names or shape.

The 2026 Mark Cousins Annual Lecture – Passive Mech; Apparatus and Metaphor’ by Ed Atkins ()
AA Lecture Hall
Friday 23 October, 6.30–8pm

To RSVP on Eventbrite, head to the Public Programme tile in our link in bio

Image: 15th of May 2026, 07.32′19″ (Passive Mech), Ed Atkins. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York; CABINET Gallery, London; and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin.

13/10/2026

We thought it was them

Project by Yinuo Pan, Intermediate 6 (2025–26)

Project description by Yinuo:

Astronomy is told as a history of discovery but also of consolidation: how power over the sky passed from individuals to institutions and curiosity became structured, invisible labour. Professionalisation produces its own outside. The more astronomy was funded and academicised, the more it generated the amateur, and the line between science and pseudoscience was defined not by what one saw but by one’s position relative to institutional authority.

The large radio telescope is the emblem of that power. Vast, costly, and sited across uninhabited terrain, it depends on the removal of the human: observatories are placed where people are not. Appearing to observe without an observer, the instrument assumes the authority of objective fact.

In Project Stillpoint, a Kessler event ends astronomical research, leaving the observatory one function: maintaining its own authority. Stripped of its object, observation collapses into performance. The instrument no longer listens to the sky but speaks for it, returning the region’s alien conspiracy as something found rather than made.

We thought it was them. What survives the end of research is not the discovery of truth, but its manufacture.

12/10/2026

Study with us in the heart of London – applications for September 2027 entry to the AA are now open.

Academic Programmes:

Foundation Programme

BA (Hons) in Architecture Intermediate Programme (RIBA Part 1)

Master in Architecture Diploma Programme (ARB Master’s Level /RIBA Part 2)

Graduate Certificate in Architecture (AA Transfer) Programme

Application Round One Deadline: Friday 20 November 2026

Application Round Two Deadline Friday 22 January 2027

Architecture and Urbanism (DRL) MArch

Conservation and Reuse MA/PGDip

Design and Make MSc/MArch

Emergent Technologies and Design MSc/MArch

History and Critical Thinking in Architecture MA

Housing and Urbanism MA/MArch

Spatial Performance and Design (AAIS) MA/MFA

Sustainable Environmental Design MSc/MArch

Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) Taught MPhil

PhD Programme MPhil/PhD

Application Round One Deadline Friday 22 January 2027

Application Deadline Friday 5 March 2027

Apply in Round One to be eligible to apply for AA scholarships and bursaries – we are committed to supporting the most talented students from around the world regardless of their circumstances, and one in five of our students receive financial support from the school.

About us:
Since 1847, the Architectural Association (AA) has revolutionised architectural
education and nurtured an international community of prize-winning architects,
designers and thinkers who have shaped the built environment around the globe.

Today, the AA offers a diverse range of academic programmes that encourage experimentation, critical thinking and independent learning within a welcoming and supportive community in the heart of London.
Follow the link in our bio for more information on how to apply.

Foundation Programme

Discover architecture through experimentation, creative exploration and making.

Applications open for September 2027 entry.

Round 1: 20 November 2026
Round 2: 22 January 2027

Apply via the link in bio.

Architecture and Urbanism (DRL) MArch

Explore the future of architecture through experimental design, advanced technologies and computational approaches.

Applications open for September 2027 entry.

Round 1: 22 January 202

10/10/2026

Last Saturday, 3 October, the AA hosted its first Accelerate workshop of the year.

Run by Open City, Accelerate supports students from under-represented backgrounds in architecture, providing learning, mentoring and opportunities to help them pursue careers in the built environment.

The first workshop was led by AA alumna and Council Member Pui Quan Choi. Through a series of introductory activities, students met one another and reflected on what belonging means to them. They were introduced to the AA, explored the School on a guided tour, and produced continuous line drawings inspired by the spaces and junctions they encountered along the way.

Students then worked with drawings of meaningful and useful objects from their homes to create stencils, which were printed onto their Accelerate tote bags and a collaborative tablecloth.

It was a fantastic opportunity to meet this year’s cohort, share ideas about architectural education, and begin what promises to be an exciting journey together.

We look forward to welcoming them back to the AA soon.

09/10/2026

Join us in the AA Lecture Hall on Tuesday 13
October at 6.30pm for a talk by the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA).

This talk will introduce the work of EASA, a decentralised network of architecture students that has run autonomously since its inception in
1981. Organised by students, for students, EASA offers a unique framework for education, accommodating a non-institutionalised way of teaching, learning and exchange. The event will trace EASA from its radical origins at the AA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, through to recent international initiatives and future opportunities.

European Architecture Student Assembly
AA Lecture Hall
Tuesday 13 October, 6.30-8pm

To RSVP on Eventbrite, head to the Public Programme tile in our link in bio

Image: Participants of the first EASA, Liverpool, July 1981

07/10/2026

Join the AA Visiting School at Bedford Square this November for a week-long workshop exploring the intersection of architecture, spatial performance and the moving image!

Participants will learn the fundamentals of film language and transform video sketches into projection-based environments, installations and performative media strategies, working with light, sound, scenography and the body. The workshop – part of the AA Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) – combines screenings, hands-on exercises and collaborative experimentation to explore narrative, perception, spatial storytelling and collective authorship.

Find out more and apply now via our link in bio

Framing Realities
16–20 November 2026
AA School, Bedford Square

05/10/2026

Hinterlands of Rukun

Project by Iris Sudjarwo, Diploma 4 (2025–26)

Project description by Iris:

At the threshold of legibility, where the administrative instrument meets the territory it cannot read, something resists organisation. Not through refusal but through incompatibility. The systems built to govern territory were calibrated for a fixed world: stable coastlines, static land, a sea that could be declared free or enclosed without consequence to the system itself.

What operated outside that frame was not absent. It was organised by different principles: by watershed rather than boundary, by seasonal rhythm rather than administrative cycle, by the accumulated intelligence of communities whose governance left no archival record because it did not need one.

The hinterland is where the question of freedom has always been most alive. Not freedom as the absence of constraint. Not freedom as the right to transit. But freedom as the capacity of a living system to act according to its own nature: to flood, to infiltrate, to migrate, to negotiate. That question was never resolved by the documents that declared the sea free.

It is still open.

02/10/2026

Peter Salter: Drawings is now open at the AA Gallery!

The exhibition brings together drawings by Peter, including previously unseen material, produced between 1985–2020. Last week, we hosted a private preview of the exhibition which was attended by many of Peter’s contemporaries at the AA, where he taught in the 1980s and 1990s. Additional drawings by Peter are also on display in the Front Members’ Room.

To coincide with the exhibition, Peter Salter: Drawings, a new book published by AA Publications goes on sale in December and is now available for pre-order from the AA Bookshop (AA Bookshop).

For more information, visit our link in bio!

Peter Salter: Drawings
Friday 25 September – Saturday 5 December
Free entry
Monday–Saturday, 11am–7pm
AA Gallery, Ground Floor, 36 Bedford Square

Image Credits: Elena Andreea Teleaga

29/09/2026

The new academic year is in full swing at Bedford Square!

After meeting with tutors across the school, students have chosen their units for the
year, and teaching begins...

Here’s to an exciting year of workshops, lectures, seminars, study trips, juries, presentations and student projects!

Explore the AA and our programmes via the link in bio.

Image Credits: Emily Wang

23/09/2026

Join us in the AA Lecture Hall on Thursday 1 October, 6.30pm for ‘Part Map, Part Myth: Art and Architecture’ by the artist Louis Pohl Koseda.

With a practice that exists as part map and part myth, Louis Pohl Koseda (Louis Koseda) delivers a talk on new approaches to creating civic artworks. Primarily using drawing as a method to move between disciplines, Louis shares a collection of artworks drawn from imagination – exhibited at the solo show, ‘The Dawn of the Golden Age’ at Christie’s London last year – and a series of personal short stories that interpret the observed world as a ‘daisy chain of coexisting systems’.

This practice of recentring the civic image-making process is one that requires us to rethink the reason for the image-making. How do we reinterpret the sacred, the satirical and the cyclical nature of time and imagination alongside formal design? The talk culminates in a series of social architecture ‘thought experiment projects’ and spatial agency exercises that attempt to reach some form of reconciliation between the fields of art and architecture. After the presentation, Louis will be joined in conversation by Silvana Taher Silvana Taher.

‘Part Map, Part Myth: Art and Architecture’
AA Lecture Hall
Thursday 1 October, 6.30–8pm

To RSVP on Eventbrite, head to the Public Programme tile in our link in bio

Image: Louis Pohl-Koseda, ‘Surreal Estates’, pen and charcoal

Address

36 Bedford Square
London
WC1B3ES

Website

http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Architectural Association School of Architecture posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The University

Send a message to Architectural Association School of Architecture:

Want your university to be the top-listed university in London?