In 1962, as a Jamaican high school graduate with one year's working experience in a drawing office, I was excited at the opportunity to pursue architectural studies in England...
John Voelcker’s archive has been recently donated to the AA Archives. It includes his AA student work, together with important correspondence and documents relating to his early involvement with the MARS Group, with C.I.A.M. and his role at the heart of Team X.
Earlier this year Dargan Bullivant (1925-2021) presented the AA Archives with his entire collection of AA student work from the late 1940s. It is one of the most complete set of portfolios we have from this key period in the AA’s history...
We are highlighting here some further treasures unearthed during the digitisation of the AA Archives' architectural lantern slide collection - one of the largest and most important surviving such archives in the UK...
The 1st phase of digitisation of the AA's historic Lantern Slide Collection has been completed.
The collection is one of the most important surviving holdings of architectural lantern slides in the UK...
"Architecture is a conception of the mind. It must be conceived in your head with your eyes shut… Architecture is organisation. YOU ARE A ORGANISER, NOT A DRAWING BOARD STYLIST."
In Peter Cook's words: "it was as an ace airbrush artist that she became a star... Every project has been turned upside down. She invented machines, she parodied gadgets, she parodied the heroic architectural monument..."
As Summer arrives in Bedford Square, the AA Collections invite you to enjoy a selection of the AA Archive's photographs of strawberry tables designed by current and past AA staff and students for Projects Review and Graduation.
Inspired by Black Lives Matter, the Architectural Association Library would like to highlight a selection of resources in its collection, which support global anti-racism movements and confront systemic inequalities in architectural education and beyond.
While many of us continue to spend more time than we would like in our own homes, the AA Archive invites you to live vicariously through photographs of our 19th century predecessors out-and-about on their distinctly non-social-distanced annual excursions...
"Although the actual idea that a building actually moves like a machine or a creature is physically absurd, the idea that a building, representing an institution or community, has an animus, is not... "
Bridge of Styx, 1988: "The thing just grows … organically. Welding, sparks flying, grinding, shouts, profanity, spit, beer and dirt. Knees, back, fingers ache". Feels good. Watch it growing, sprouting legs, looks like a bird’s nest … eating Chicken Al Capone and knowing it’s going to be great."
Alex Marshall's 'Gloria': "a society's glorious celebration of itself in its last dance of death..."
The AA Archives is launching a major new project to digitise one of the UK’s largest and most important surviving collections of early 20thC architectural glass lantern slides...
The AA Archives will shortly be making available online films of its entire collection of architectural models, each rotating through 360 degrees...
AA Archives & Birkbeck, University of London invite applications for a three-year or six-year part-time Collaborative Doctoral Award...
The AA Archives have launched an initiative to digitise a collection of around 1,450 photographs taken by the modernist architect, Erno Goldfinger (1902-87)...
The AA Archives is embarking upon a new project to systematically digitise and make accessible the extensive photographic archive of Eric De Maré - a collection gifted to the AA Foundation by Sir Michael Hopkins in 1989...
Until the 25th May, the AA Back Members’ Room will house an AA Collections exhibition curated by inaugural AArchitect in Residence, Stefan Popa (AA PhD candidate). Entitled ‘[Re-] Use: ‘Ethic or Aesthetic?’...
Douglas Patterson has very kindly donated material related to his infamous 1973/4 AA project (undertaken with fellow student Jerry Hewitt) to produce a prototype vehicle for man-powered flight...
Famously Reynolds' AA 4th Year project for a Warehouse in Bristol (1956), was acknowledged by his tutor, James Gowan, as providing the inspiration for the roof of the Leicester Engineering Building...
The 'AArchitect in Residence' programme is an initiative which invites current AA students to submit ideas for a lecture and exhibition drawing on materials from the AA's Archives, Library and Photo Library.
The AA Archives is proud to announce that it is a partner in a new international collaborative network, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council. Working with the V&A, the Soane Museum, the RIBA, the Sorbonne...
The AA Archives are lucky enough to have acquired a vinyl LP recording documenting a legendary event within AA history – a poetry happening, featuring the greatest figures of the Beat generation - held in the AA Library on 15th July, 1965...
Tony Fretton has extremely generously donated to the Archives his AA graduation project from 1972, proposing a new building for the AA.
Mike Gold has very kindly donated to the AA Archives some of his own student work produced between 1958-63.
The family of AA alum, Amarjit Kalsi (1957-2014), have donated a set of his virtuosic student drawings. Amo worked for Richard Rogers and Partners, where he played a leading role on some of their most prestigious projects including the Lloyds building, the Millennium Dome, the European court of human rights building in Strasbourg, and Barajas airport in Madrid...
Edward Reynolds' work is of startling originality, including faceted and curvilinear geometries, zoomorphic forms and complex circulation systems. This talk will set Reynolds within the context of architectural discourse in the 1950s...
A portfolio of fascinating Beaux Arts drawings from the 1920s were recently donated to the AA Archives by the grandniece of AA Alumnus, Leonard Jackson (1899-1969)...
Lisette was a student in AA Diploma 10, under Bernard Tschumi and Nigel Coates and her works includes legendary briefs...
This flickering passage through the journal is disrupted by an insert. It pops out, between the thumb and the book. Here the page measures a good four times the width of the main book and around one and half its height....
Showing at the AA Archives display in AA Projects Review 2015 are a selection of work by Alison Smithson, Kenneth Frampton, Dolan Conway, Brian Mitchenere and many others.....
During the late 1940s a series of ‘AA Scrap Books’ were put together, collating ephemera and documents dating right back to the AA’s foundation in 1847. The AA Archives are now engaged in the long process of digitising, cataloguing and re-housing...