Architectural Association School of Architecture

Undoing for doing

Project by Ash*ta Sequeira, Intermediate 1 (2025–26)

Project Description by Ash*ta:

An exploration of occupying railway arches and their forecourts; proposing a set of workshops for learning making, for more making.

This year, Intermediate 1 explored the creative possibilities of un-doing, working with subtraction as much as addition and investigating the disjunctions between form and use, purpose and accident, and co-operation and co-option. Through observation, direct intervention and drawn speculation, the unit reconfigured spaces and institutions of learning across London through drawing, photography, filmmaking, model-making and 1:1 fabrication.

AA DIPLOMA HONOURS 2026

This academic year, five projects were awarded the AA Diploma with Honours – the highest award that can be achieved upon completion of the Diploma Programme.

Jing Yun Zhou from Diploma 14 was one of this year’s recipients with the project: HOT ASSET

Project description by Jing Yun Zhou:

Contemporary London housing has been engineered as a “HOT ASSET”, a man-made financialised machine optimised for capital accumulation but ecologically and socially stagnant. The rapid growth of London’s new-build housing has produced a widespread pattern of physical failure across the city’s residential fabric, where overheating and social isolation are built into the housing form itself.

Argue that overheating is not simply a technical fault to be solved by regulation or mechanical cooling, but the spatial consequence of a wider system of financialised development, standardised planning, airtight construction, and fragmented ownership.

Framing the building as a ‘state of action,’ it proposes a radical retrofit framework that reorients the London housing typology towards metabolic collaboration that links thermal repair to resident agency.
By dismantling the legal and spatial rigidities of the leasehold model, the intervention shifts residents from passive occupiers to collective agents of their own environment.

Retrofit is here reclaimed as a radical political act: a systemic reconfiguration of ownership and air that replaces the stagnant ‘thermal trap’ with a breathable urban typology.
Ultimately, the project codifies environmental resilience as a fundamental housing right, asserting that the capacity to adapt one’s climate is the primary condition of modern inhabitation.

To view more work from our students, visit the Projects Review 2026 page via the link in our bio or via this address: pr2026.aaschool.ac.uk.

The AA Summer School 2026 drew to a close last Friday after a final week of activity by the six Bedford Square-based units, as they built and tested installations, held happenings and performances, and gathered on the terrace for a final celebratory party. The Summer Public Programme also welcomed Open City CEO (and former Head of Public Engagement at the AA!) Manijeh Verghese for ‘Stories from the City’ – an evening talk on how the organisation’s programmes of work create chances for people often marginalised by the built environment to access, share and shape their city.

AA DIPLOMA HONOURS 2026

This academic year, five projects were awarded the AA Diploma with Honours – the highest award that can be achieved upon completion of the Diploma Programme.

Sacha Trouiller Sacha Trouiller from Diploma 7 was one of this year’s recipients with the project: Peripheral Sea: The Idle Territory of Berre

Project description by Sacha Trouiller:
This work investigates forms of domestic and landscape infrastructure as a continuation of research embracing the idle urbanisation of the Etang de Berre. Only a few kilometers from Marseille, this peripheral territory is one of the most productive and populated areas of the metropolis. Here suburbia is not a constellation of settlements or a succession of industries and highways, but it is indeed that, plus something in between, an indefinable and formless operative force. There is no longer a city nor a landscape, but rather an agglomeration of both; a constant edge condition. The repetition of abandoned futures has gradually rendered the Berre Sea a confused and almost invisible backdrop to Marseille’s metropolitan imaginary.

Unfolding in two interventions, located at the edge of both the urban spread and the water, the project addresses both urgencies of housing shortage and landscape destruction in the region. The proposed buildings and structures, while remaining specific to their sites, are in some sense extraneous to them. They refer, obliquely, to the entirety of the Berre territory and the monumental infrastructures that constructed it. They can be seen as acts of collimation, to alter even slightly the way the Berre Sea and its architecture are perceived; their failure and their possibilty. Fundamentally, they seek to question the meaning of place in a peripheral setting; not to resolve it, but to generate other levels of existence within it.

To view more work from our students, visit the Projects Review 2026 page via the link in our bio or via this address: pr2026.aaschool.ac.uk.

The AA Summer School continued this week with more events including a speed dating lunch, presentations from this year’s Diploma Honours students and activities exploring the theme of this year’s programme, Learning from London.
AA Summer School units:
Unit 1: Microcosm(ic) London with tutors Lindsey Krug, Radu Remus Macovei and Edward Wang
Unit 2: The Infraordinary with tutors FORMS OF COMMONS (Chiara Malerba, Margherita Sorgentone and Constanza Zeni)
Unit 3: Cry Me a River with tutors Elisabeth Terrisse de Botton and Matthieu Brasebin
Unit 4: Parade with tutor Alessandro Pasero
Unit 5: Feasibility with tutors Gonçalo André Pires, Marija Urbaite and João Lourenço dos Santos
Unit 6: Heatwave with tutors Jacob Höppner and Leo Herrmann

AA DIPLOMA HONOURS 2026

This academic year, five projects were awarded the AA Diploma with Honours – the highest award that can be achieved upon completion of the Diploma Programme.

Ruby Amelia Neal .wip from Diploma 17 was one of this year’s recipients with the project: The Smoke of the Earth: Re-Framing The Anxious Landscape

Project description by Ruby Neal:

The Smoke of the Earth explores how architecture can emerge from the ground conditions of Stoke-on-Trent, a city shaped by centuries of extractive industry. Built on seams of clay and coal, its landscape is underpinned by abandoned mining tunnels and a made ground composed of earth, coal spoil, and furnace slag. As industry has declined, these hidden infrastructures remain, producing a terrain marked by subsidence, fragmentation and extraction.

Rather than treating this landscape as a ruin to preserve or a site for regeneration through another masterplan, the project asks how architecture might create conditions for collective encounter within a place suspended between exhaustion and possibility. Experimental theatre becomes a spatial and social strategy rather than a contained performance, where visitors become spectators and protagonists simultaneously.

The building is formed almost entirely from excavated site earth, already mixed with coal spoil and blast furnace slag, whose mineral content provides natural stabilisation. Thick rammed earth walls carry the geological and industrial history of the site, transforming the residues of extraction into visible structure. Chamfered openings, shifting light and drifting sound guide movement through a non-hierarchical sequence of spaces where rehearsal, performance and everyday life overlap. Rather than offering redemption, the project creates a space to confront the ground beneath our feet and consider what might come next.

To view more work from our students, visit the Projects Review 2026 page via the link in our bio or via this address: pr2026.aaschool.ac.uk.

This year’s AA Summer School (AA Summer School) kicked off on Bedford Square earlier this week, with presentations, unit sessions, a talk by Aurora Tang, aperos organised by units and much more. Over the coming weeks, the Summer School take part in group lunches, aperos and parties organised by different units on the programme.
 
Learning from London units:
Unit 1: Microcosm(ic) London with tutors Lindsey Krug, Radu Remus Macovei and Edward Wang
Unit 2: The Infraordinary with tutors FORMS OF COMMONS (Chiara Malerba, Margherita Sorgentone and Constanza Zeni)
Unit 3: Cry Me a River with tutors Elisabeth Terrisse de Botton and Matthieu Brasebin
Unit 4: Parade with tutor Alessandro Pasero
Unit 5: Feasibility with tutors Gonçalo André Pires, Marija Urbaite and João Lourenço dos Santos
Unit 6: Heatwave with tutors Jacob Höppner and Leo Herrmann

AA DIPLOMA HONOURS 2026

This academic year, five projects were awarded the AA Diploma with Honours – the highest award that can be achieved upon completion of the Diploma Programme.

Changjin Kweon CJ Kweon from Diploma 10 was one of this year’s recipients with the project: Pulse Logic

Project description by Changjin Kweon:
Pulse Logic proposes a data-driven public asset for Nine Elms Station, where collective urban data is returned to the public through architecture rather than used to control public life from above. Transport predictions, crowd density and environmental conditions are translated into visible spatial states: openings, light, ventilation and shared waiting areas. By reading the building, people can wait, move, gather or invent their own responses.

This is the project’s Closing the Loop: public behaviour changes the architectural state, and that altered state becomes a new civic signal, transforming infrastructure into a responsive, legible and publicly accountable urban commons.

A live map aggregates TfL’s arrival and line feeds and, where the public record falls silent, supplements them with anonymised crowd-density sensing. The map is not a representation but a measuring device: as it runs, it samples arrival rhythms, dwell times and local density, accumulating the dataset the station has never recorded.

From this dataset the project derives the Arrival Wave Index (AWI), a reading of the incoming surges that give the station its tidal character. AWI is combined with live environmental conditions into a single real-time model. This model is what the architecture wears: the same values that describe the crowd and the air become, moment by moment, the building’s openings, ventilation, light and waiting space, so the structure is continuously redrawn by the data it gathers.

To view more work from our students, visit the Projects Review 2026 page via the link in our bio or via this address: pr2026.aaschool.ac.uk.

The AA Foundation Programme (.foundation.course) recently had their end of term Jury at Hooke Park, Dorset. Students worked operationally with models and prototypes, assembling 1:1 scale fragments for a cabin. Their work examined changing weather, shadows and the surrounding woodland, using photographs, film and recordings made on site.