The Foundation Programme is a one-year full-time course that focuses on observation, conversation and the development of key skills. This course is aimed at students who are at the very start of their architectural studies, and facilitates individual and group project work.
The Intermediate Programme (BA(Hons)) is a three-year full-time programme. The First Year is characterised by its shared, open studio, where students work individually and together across a series of projects. Years two and three introduce students to the unit system, in which small design studios (12–14 students) operate a vertical structure of Second and Third Year students.
The Diploma Programme (MArch) is a two-year full-time programme that accepts students who have completed the Intermediate Programme at the AA, as well as eligible new students who have studied elsewhere. The programme leads to the AA Final Examination (ARB/RIBA Part 2) and is structured around a unit system, in which small design studios (12–14 students) operate a vertical structure of Fourth and Fifth Year students.
The AA offers ten Taught Postgraduate Programmes for students with prior academic and professional experience. Most of the programmes are full-time courses of advanced study, except for Conservation and Reuse, which provides a part-time study option.
Professional Practice is a RIBA Part 3 course and examination that allows successful candidates to register as architects with the Architects Registration Board (ARB). The course is open to AA RIBA Part 2 graduates and eligible non-graduates.
The Visiting School encompasses diverse learning programmes, workshops and site-based agendas shaped by participants working intensively in small groups over varying periods of time from one to two weeks. Central to each programme is the idea that experimental, new and provocative forms of architecture are best learned by doing.
History and Critical Thinking (HCT) offers a postgraduate platform from which to develop and communicate knowledge that connects contemporary issues with systematic historical enquiry. At stake in the writing of history is a political engagement with the social, material, cultural and environmental exigencies of the present. Therefore, the ambition of the programme is threefold: to provide conceptual resources to explore social, political, economic and institutional structures as well as their impact on architectural histories and forms of production; to understand contemporary discursive and material organisations from a historical, critical, environmental, interdisciplinary and transnational point of view; and to highlight the ways in which architecture is entangled with other spatial practices and alternative forms of knowledge production and dissemination.
Through a programme of lectures, seminars, open debates, group readings, archive visits and writing workshops, students are encouraged to critically reflect on practices of historiography and the archive, language and translation, and social, environmental and territorial issues. This enables them to develop the resources and skills required to engage with recent scholarship, and to advance architectural thinking and practice. The programme sees specific and canonical architectural histories as valid sites of investigation, while supporting students, epistemologically and methodologically, to discover and promote missing and marginalised voices, as well as new ways of thinking.
Writing is essential to the programme and is considered here as a pedagogical project, a practice of thinking and a tool to articulate and communicate ideas in a precise, effective manner. We explore different modes of writing alongside other communicative media such as drawings, photographs, film and literature. Students are encouraged to explore, adopt and adapt elements of disciplines and practices in their own writing, while preserving their own voice.
The historical and theoretical understanding that HCT graduates gain through the programme allows them to pursue doctoral studies, to develop their careers in other fields such as curation or journalism, or to become involved in research and teaching in architecture.
The programme takes place over 12 months: students complete six courses during Terms 1 and 2, after which they participate in the Thesis Research Seminar and produce a written thesis in Terms 3 and 4. Language and critical writing are integral to all of these courses, which focus in Term 1 on issues of historiography and histories, theories and practices of the archive. In Term 2, courses focus on disciplinary, social, territorial and environmental questions. Throughout, students are encouraged to engage in conversations, to expand their disciplinary knowledge from a variety of viewpoints, to enhance their analytical and critical skills, and to develop new competencies in visual, verbal and written communication. Historians, critics, architects, artists, curators, archivists, publishers and editors contribute to the programme through the annual HCT and PhD Debates, Workshops and Open Seminars, which enable discussion and collective reflection.
HCT also provides research facilities and supervision to research degree candidates (MPhil and PhD) registered under the AA’s joint PhD programme, a cross disciplinary initiative supported by all the Taught Postgraduate programmes.