Annual General Meeting 2023

Notice is hereby given that the Annual General Meeting of the Registered Members of the Architectural Association (Inc.) will be held in the lecture hall at the AA, 36 Bedford Square, London and via Zoom on Monday 04 December at 6.30pm GMT.

The meeting will be followed by a short presentation by the new Chair of History and Theory at the AA, Nicholas Simcik Arese, who will discuss the PhD Open Seminar that he has run this term to examine past and future potential connections between the AA and the Warburg Institute ahead of an exhibition in the AA Gallery from 19 January to 7 March.

This year’s AGM will offer a preview of the research and conversations that have shaped the upcoming exhibition as well as ideas for how history and theory at the AA will continue to evolve in the coming years, while also providing an occasion to bring our global membership together to celebrate the achievements of our community over the past year ahead of the festive season.

Schedule:
6.30pm – Introduction to the AGM (President)
6.35pm – Apologies and Declarations of Interest – (President)
6.37pm – Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held on the 5^th December 2022 -­ (President)
6.40pm – Trustees Report & Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31st July 2023 for AA Inc. - Presentation & Receipt - (Head of Finance and Chair of Finance & Audit Committee)
6.50pm – Appointment of the Auditors for 2023/2024 - (Chair of Finance & Audit Committee)
6.55pm – Any Other Business – (All)
7.00pm – Close of AGM
7.00pm – Presentation by Nicholas Simcik Arese: Towards Architectural Freedom
8.00pm – Mulled wine and mince pies in the Lecture Hall

For more information on the presentation:

Towards Architectural Freedom

There have long been affinities between the Architectural Association and Warburg Institute. These chimerical hubs of Bloomsbury are purposefully imaginative spaces, with particular institutional arrangements, and unusually loyal followings, ‘outsiders’ sustaining deep influence. What principles underlie the mutual interest? What possibilities could collaboration hold?

Perhaps both institutions dabble in academic anarchism: foregrounding autonomy, deliberation, and prefiguration, while scrutinising disciplinary trappings and over-professionalisation. Perhaps this way of thinking and making also affords the freedom to reconsider foundational knowledge about the social nature of both art and architecture. To assess this premise, building on the outcome of weekly discussions at AAxWarburg seminars, this talk refines the anthropological registers through which one can understand how the Warburg and the AA have existed beside each other, while charting how they might collaborate, towards rethinking the interaction between ideas, buildings, and society. Along the way, we sketch the framework for a mutualistic theory of architectural freedom.

Nicholas Simcik Arese is Chair of History and Theory at the AA. He was formerly Assistant Professor of Global Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge and Research Affiliate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Oxford. He is an ethnographer and architect who combines economic anthropology and legal geography to understand how people repurpose planned cities. His monograph on the political creativity of squatters in suburban Cairo and an edited volume titled Experimental Properties are forthcoming.