Annual General Meeting 2025

6.15pm – Special General Meeting
6.30pm – Introduction to the Annual General Meeting
6.35pm – Apologies and Declarations of Interest
6.37pm – Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held on the 9th December 2024
6.40pm – Trustees Report & Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31st July 2025 for AA Inc. - Presentation & Receipt
6.50pm – Appointment of the Auditors for 2025/2026
6.55pm – Any Other Business
7.00pm – Close of AGM
7.00pm – Presentation – Wordliness Rod Heyes and Amandine Kastler
8.00pm – Mulled wine and mince pies

Rod Heyes and Amandine Kastler, Programme Heads of Conservation and Reuse, will give a short talk titled Wordliness.

Conservation and Reuse is a fledgling programme at the AA that launched with a first cohort of twelve postgraduate students in September 2025.

The programme begins with a question of how to practice hopefulness. At a time when large-scale narratives can appear intractable, many small-scale circumstances are subtle and characterful, oddly optimistic, and full of opportunity – a disused power station, a contested forest, a preserved fort, an abandoned wharf. Situations proliferate in which conventional disciplines of architecture, conservation, and reuse overlap, and where a working knowledge of history, ecology, epistemology, and radical action is required. Hope flourishes in an awareness of the world at large combined with a capacity to make connections and a willingness to turn your hand to anything. You could call this quality worldliness, with its overtones of both sophistication and a concern for ordinary life.

Conservation and Reuse is a design programme, a history programme, and a skills programme. It works on an exposure model, expecting students to synthesise out of a diverse range of ideas from different places and times, underpinned by an interest in nature, time, knowledge, and technology. We hope to convince students, and a wider public, that real situations are worthy of deep enquiry and that out of that grows not limitation but a confidence and a boldness to effect change.

Rod Heyes is a registered architect and runs his own nascent practice in London called Alteration + Repair. He was a director at Caruso St John Architects from 2005-2025 and has taught architecture at the University of Bath, Kingston University and London Metropolitan University, and was a Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2016–23. Rod was Visiting Professor of Architecture at TU Wien in 2020. Alongside his practice and teaching, Rod completed an MSc in building conservation from the University of York in 2020 and directed Caruso St John’s work at Tate Britain, Hospitalfield Arts and Stockholm City Library. Rod co-directs the Conservation and Reuse programme at the AA with Amandine Kastler.

Amandine Kastler is a registered architect and co-founder of the Oslo-based office Kastler Skjeseth Architects. The office’s work focuses on adapting existing buildings, with particular emphasis on vernacular structures in Norway. Amandine graduated with Honours from the AA, and before establishing Kastler Skjeseth Architects in 2015, she gained experience at OMA/AMO in Rotterdam and David Chipperfield Architects in London. She is an Associate Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where she co-founded and teaches the Transformation in Practice master courses. She has taught at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO) and the AA, and currently co-directs the Postgraduate Conservation and Reuse programme at the AA with Rod Heyes.