The Conservation and Reuse Programme (MA/PG Dip) approaches working with existing things from the perspective of climate change, driven by an urgent need to cultivate the careful use and reuse of materials and spaces – from the cathedral to the car park. This is central to a set of school-wide strategies at the AA that ask how innovation in materials and fabrication can address problems of relative value, resource conservation and cultural significance.

The programme reaches beyond buildings to include landscapes, environments and wider material practice, and is concerned with both tangible and intangible culture. The syllabus explores historical and theoretical frameworks of conservation, encouraging students to engage with questions of value and heritage from a critical standpoint and to develop an awareness of the ‘spheres of implication’ in which structures are embedded. This enquiry takes place alongside investigations into new and established construction techniques – ways of making and remaking – and includes the development of practical skills.

Regulatory frameworks and commercial attitudes constrain how practitioners can act in the world. This programme explores how these strictures could be transformed by a holistic understanding of what we opt to demolish and what we choose to conserve and reuse, leading to a future-orientated practice. Students synthesise theoretical, technical and practical knowledge in a Design Thesis that examines a situation of their choice, taking responsibility for a rich existing environment and exploring how it could change.

The AA sees a need to equip a new generation of practitioners with the ethical, critical and technical skills to tackle a complex world, and to put design at the centre of responses to questions of value. This new programme will nurture practitioners who are able to work with existing things, make sound judgements and realise beneficial change with precision, optimism and grace.

Programme Structure

The programme offers Master of Arts (MA) and Postgraduate Diploma (PGDip) pathways, with two modes of study for each: a 12-month programme for full-time students and a 24-month programme for part-time students. Each pathway comprises six core courses of lectures, seminars, clinics, workshops and tutorials. The MA pathway concludes with a seventh course, the Design Thesis. Teaching is delivered at the AA in Bedford Square, London and all students also participate in three residential visits to the AA’s Hooke Park campus in Dorset in Terms 1, 2 and 3. The programme welcomes students from a range of professional or academic backgrounds, including architects, historians, archaeologists, artists and engineers, as well as those with multidisciplinary experience.

The programme supports architects who are working towards registration as conservation architects, and is fully recognised by the Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC). This means the course achieves a standard that should allow its graduates to satisfy IHBC membership criteria, where supplemented by a suitable balance of professional experience. Ordinarily, applicants for IHBC membership without formal conservation training require a minimum of five years of relevant professional experience, but graduates of fully recognised courses only need a minimum of two years’ experience. Some of the teaching on the course can also be used to partly satisfy the requirements for continuing professional development needed to register as an Architect Accredited in Building Conservation (AABC).

Courses

Introduction to History, Theory and Ethics of Conservation and Reuse
Term 1 (full-time and part-time)
The history of working with existing things is fascinating, as different practical and conceptual approaches have developed in different cultural and historical situations. These approaches have often combined prevailing cultural attitudes with narratives about identity, sometimes crystallising around the nation state. The first half of the course draws upon the history of ideas and theories surrounding conservation of art, architecture and ecology, adopting a comparative approach that contrasts attitudes in different places and at different times. The second half focuses on how hegemonic groups have built narratives around value that can be challenged, and on how abstractions, desires or ignorance in one place can produce damage, exploitation and injustice in another.

Value and Contemporary Issues in Conservation and Reuse
Term 2 (full-time), Term 6 (part-time)
This course examines questions of value and the choices that surround what existing things we should keep and how they should be treated. Value systems that privilege scarcity imply that the destruction of one example raises the value of the remaining, risking the creation of a Noah’s Museum of cultural artefacts – the last of their type. But it can’t be right that everything, no matter how mundane, should be conserved with equal energy and enthusiasm. This course explores the choices and categories that surround value judgements and orthodox ways of interpreting significance, before asking whether the underlying frameworks are valid and coherent or in need of overhaul.

Comparative Construction and Carbon Awareness
Term 1 (full-time), Term 5 (part-time)
This course is about construction, past and present, as well as the nature of technology and our attitudes to it. It is necessary for professionals to understand historic construction culture and how it relates to what we think of as mainstream technologies today. The first part of the course compares construction technologies across time and space, suggesting alternatives to the extractive and non-regenerative materials that have become dominant. The second part tackles carbon directly and consists of an introduction to building physics, operational and embodied carbon, and the application of low carbon technologies to existing situations.

Understanding, Assessing and Changing Existing Things
Term 2 (full-time), Term 2 (part-time)
Every example of material culture represents a snapshot of dominant norms, scientific discoveries, economic exigencies, personal ideas and inescapable practical constraints. While some places and things are well documented, practitioners are often faced with situations where there is no guidebook. The first part of this course explores what to do in these circumstances and how to elicit evidence from objects and sites. In the second part, learning is focused on assessing materials and assemblies, recognising failures and defects, and specifying appropriate methods of adaptation and repair.

Circularity, Reuse and Practical Skills
Term 3 (full-time), Term 7 (part-time)
This course explores adaptation and reuse, designing for circularity and avoidance of waste at different scales and over different timespans. A series of comparative case studies help to illustrate imaginative ways of reusing, repurposing or recycling buildings. In addition, the course includes practical workshops in construction skills which are coupled to seminars from practitioners who have worked with familiar technologies in instructive or experimental ways.

Future-orientated Practice
Term 3 (full-time and part-time)
This course is divided in three parts: Law, Procurement and Expanded Modes of Practice. To encourage a critical appraisal of contemporary practice from the very beginning of the course, teaching of Expanded Modes of Practice is distributed throughout the year. An introduction to existing legislative frameworks will be held in Term 1, with the bulk of learning around Law and Procurement concentrated into Term 3. The course encourages students to have agency over their practice, to promote radical change in existing regulatory landscapes and to be innovative, confidently taking on future-orientated roles in the world.

Design Thesis
Terms 1–4 (full-time), Terms 2–8 (part-time)
The Design Thesis is developed throughout the programme. Students will pursue independently framed research-based design projects incorporating the technical, theoretical, ethical, aesthetic and legal parameters introduced in the first six courses. Existing environments are not fixed, and adapting our saturated built environment requires the design of change. Although this may involve questions of tectonics and form, it could also require practitioners to imagine actions and processes that can be directed or redirected in new and unexpected ways. Intuition, dialogue, design and representation are fundamental modes of research – ways of discovering new knowledge. Design research is key to developing progressive and speculative approaches to rapidly evolving challenges in practice. The Design Thesis elevates sustainable reuse to an art form.