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The original idea of the pavilion brings nature into the building and encloses you within it. This is an embodiment of the 19th century idea of creating this strange, exotic form, somewhere in a garden or a park. I think we are close to doing that by taking this geological shape and embedding it within Bedford Square.

 – Jorge Godoy
GUN Architects

I didn’t immediately find de Maré’s work so appealing, but have learnt to love its subtleties in composition, its evocative power, and its subject matter often suffused with nostalgia.

 – Dr. Andrew Higgott
Former AA Photo Librarian and Architectural Historian

Each site has its own presence and quality, and we developed the dance material from a very specific perspective that offers the site with a very clear idea of how we wanted it to be seen by the viewer and what kind of sensation we wanted to create. The performance is the overall installation.

 – Lynda Gaudreau

I believe the application for Degree Awarding Powers is the only way forward.  Without it I honestly don’t believe the AA will be able to survive in the long term: we will either be forced to amalgamate with another institution or we could cease to exist altogether.

 – Marilyn Dyer,
AA Registrar

What I find very interesting is what happens in the moments when the audience leaves. Different performers have their rituals in the space after the show. What happens when you walk into the space and it’s not yet show hour? The environment is so loaded; obviously it lives on, on its own, in the dark.

 – Fred Gehrig,
Performer and Director

Every project begins with a piece of paper. Even if the end product is an installation or sculpture, it is a continuation from a pencil sketch. Paper exists in everything I do, it is the very beginning. When I seek what can be done with a specific piece of paper, I sometimes find that it is too beautiful to do anything with it.

 – Alexander Brodsky

The idea for the Institute of Making evolved out of our work building a materials library, and our passion for the relationship between materials and processes. We wanted to make a space that felt full of potential, really celebrating the material world and that which could be made.

 – Zoe Laughlin, The Institute of Making

Hans Skotte often quotes the jazz song “T’aint What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It)” to convey the importance to being aware of your actions, as much as your outcomes, when working in this type of practice. “Not What, But How” has become a motto that we feel captures our approach to design and building.

 – WORKSHOP Architecture

The party was planned as a continual event and I hope that is the way people enjoyed it. What makes any party good is the people. This event was aimed not only at the student community but for the whole membership to enjoy and it was very nice to see students and members celebrating together.

 – Eleanor Dodman

When you are in your early years at the AA I don’t think you have a clear perception of what an architect is. You are into exploring things, exploring materials and trying to understand how to tackle a problem. We didn’t have a mature view of what an architect was. We were winging it, travelling on magic carpets. 

 – Mike Davies

The fundamental criteria for an AA Honours project have not changed over the years. The work must challenge preconceptions. It must exceed its unit, its tutors, its origins, its language and reach a brink of collapse. These projects are not seamless or slick, they have rough edges that reveal potential. 

 – Barbara Campbell-Lange

Those museums that carefully transfer an artist’s or writer’s studio, their intimate place of production and investigation, to a new home in the gallery, frozen at the moment the artist ceased to exist, and open to the glaring eyes of a public fascinated with the ineffable workings of the creative process.

 – Adam Nathaniel Furman

The goal was to provide, through the tables, a special feeling of radiation, emanating from its form, the fluorescent colours and the mirrored surfaces, as a metaphor representing the explosion of energy.

 – Manuel Collado & Nacho Martin,
Intermediate 11 Unit Masters

The Masterplan is an opportunity to reassess the user experience in the Library; the way that students access the collections and carry out research is changing constantly, and the Library must address these changes to ensure we continue to support the learning, teaching and research needs of our users. 

 – Eleanor Gawne, AA Head Librarian

When a reader picks up your publication, you have an obligation to them to provide them with something that merits the reading of it. They would give you the most valuable thing that they have which is time. I think a lot of people who publish architectural publications forget that that’s their duty.

 – Jack Self
Editor of Fulcrum

Busoni was a key figure in the discourse around musical modernism and his ideas resonate just as much – perhaps more so – today. The act of republishing the essay, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, is a kind of mission statement for what I hope to develop with Precinct.

 – Wayne Daly
AA Print Studio

A challenge of Night School is the distinction between the audiences that we are trying to address. There’s a way in which we think Night School can make a case for architecture as an integral, popular part of culture rather than an esoteric act.

– Sam Jacob,
Programme Director
AA Night School

I think the longevity of the explorers’ research proposals and the fact that they were provocations to change British Architecture is becoming apparent. Bringing the show back to London will make their relevance even clearer.

 – Vanessa Norwood, Head of AA Exhibitions
Curator of Venice Takeaway

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