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.
Spatial Performance and Design (AAIS) explores practices of design that reach beyond standard definitions of architecture and performance. The programme focuses on fields such as dance, theatre, music, exhibitions and festivals, with a focus on the sociopolitical effect of works in these fields. AAIS offers 12-month MA or 18-month MFA options within a learning environment that encourages students to communicate and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to challenge and extend the frontiers of art, architecture and performance.
Individuals who work in the creative industries often define their work as multidisciplinary; AAIS responds to this by encouraging students to develop new methods of collaboration. Participants in the programme research, design and produce a series of spatial performances and installations through which they examine overlaps between creative work and design during the development of projects and events. AAIS reveals unseen networks between professions, products and methodologies, enabling students to develop a language with which to communicate between creative disciplines.
We create pathways for students to learn new skills and techniques. The programme has established connections to other institutions, academics and practices within a wide range of creative disciplines; these contribute to the programme through lectures, seminars, exercises, tutorials and talks. The studio also creates real-world projects that shape the work of the year and enable public participation. Alongside this, students are encouraged to build new professional networks from creative backgrounds as diverse and complementary as performance, design, music, film, photography, fashion, communication and curation.
Constructing the Not-Yet
AAIS enters the new academic year with a renewed commitment to the politics of imagination, spatial practice and embodied speculation. With reference to Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1954–59), this year we ask: how can spatial and performative design anticipate realities not yet born? Bloch’s conception of the not-yet-conscious will underpin our investigations this year, situating the studio as a site where critical desire meets spatial articulation and where performance functions as a rehearsal for radical forms of life.
Hope, in Bloch’s materialist philosophy, is not passive longing but active construction. It is the substance of future thinking, tethered to a critique of the present. This year, AAIS will function as both laboratory and rehearsal space, engaging the architectural imagination as a mode of refusal and projection. We will explore architectures that speak, listen, move and resist; scenographies that anticipate transformed social contracts; and collective practices that remain in process, unfinished or contingent, like hope itself.
This speculative and political impulse is grounded in a longer cultural and environmental lineage. From Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which imagined spatial and social structures as interwoven forms of critique, to Bruno Latour’s calls for new modes of terrestrial attachment, we recognise that future worlds are never detached from the material limits and ecological urgencies of the present. More’s island republic was both a spatial fiction and a political demand, shaped by a world undergoing displacement and enclosure. Latour, in contrast, asks us to compose without the comfort of detachment, to make alliances with what is already here. These positions frame our task: to create spatial practices that resist abstraction, remain grounded and build imaginative traction in the thick of crisis.
The year will be structured around a series of projects, performances, seminars and workshops with guest tutors working in performance, critical theory, educational practice, spatial politics and sound. These sessions will support students in developing original work that operates across disciplines while remaining materially and politically grounded. Through design, performance and critical writing, students will construct spatial acts that pursue the utopian, the incomplete and the subversively possible. This will lead to a London-based public event in March and will culminate in June with a week-long festival at Verdens Ende – ‘The End of the World’ – as part of the Færderbiennalen in Norway.
Our approach remains collaborative, experimental and fundamentally hopeful. Against the closure of political imagination and the instrumentalisation of design, we continue to develop practices that are interprofessional, improvisational and in perpetual rehearsal.