Projects Review, the annual end-of-year exhibition at the Architectural Association, showcases work from every student within the school and celebrates achievements throughout the academic year. During 2020 and 2021, our entire community has been challenged to rethink approaches, rework agendas and revisit methodologies in response to constantly changing circumstances. This drive to ‘think again’ reaches far beyond the AA to encompass buildings, cities, environments and ways of life. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted an urgent need to redesign ways to reconvene safely, to reinvent how we might practice and live more sustainably, and to reshape cities as more equitable and democratic spaces. Central to these agendas is the consideration of how we relate to one another, and projects across the AA have explored themes of collaboration, mutual support and community as architectural interpretations of care. Reflecting these concerns, Projects Review 2021 seeks to provoke a new set of questions for the discipline to address as we look to the future.
This year, the theme for Projects Review will be ‘Re’ – a prefix which typically means to ‘do again’, but which in this case will question how we might do things differently.
For the first time, Projects Review 2021 will take place both online and in person and will be accessible to audiences worldwide. Each unit and programme within the AA has chosen a word prefixed with ‘re’ which corresponds to their recent agenda, and in response they will each produce a short film. These films will be screened online on the Projects Review website and on a large outdoor screen in Bedford Square. An augmented reality exhibition will run alongside, encompassing contributions from every unit and programme; this collection of geolocated artefacts, placed in and around Bedford Square, represent the breadth of enquiry undertaken over the past academic year and can be explored via a unique webAR URL.
Click here to visit the Projects Review 2021 microsite.
Click here to visit the AR exhibition.
