Autumn 2022 public programme

The AA Public Programme presents a collection of lectures, exhibitions, symposia, gallery talks and performances that brings together thousands of students, AA Members, visitors and critics to discuss architectural ideas, discourse and forms of practice. 

All events are free and open to everyone. For the full calendar of events please visit our website or sign up to our newsletter to receive more information. 

Highlights from our Autumn programme include: 

AA Approaches 
Monday October 3, 2022 to Friday October 7, 2022 at 6:30pm (UK time), AA Lecture Hall 
AA Approaches, a week-long festival of ideas, draws upon legacies and lineages present within the AA, and reassesses the strategies and methods that they have produced. The series marks the start of the new academic year, celebrates the AA’s 175th birthday and the beginning of Ingrid Schroder’s tenure as AA Director.

Stories about Sustainability 
Mondays at 1pm (UK time), online 
Stories about Sustainability presents ideas inspired by architecture, materials and history from around the world. The series will invite architects to present a recent project that demonstrates how the materiality and craft of the past can inform more sustainable building practices in the future.

New Standards
Thursdays at 6:30pm (UK time), AA Lecture Hall 
New Standards will identify and confront some of the barriers to architecture, its education and practice, and consider how these can be overcome to embrace wider forms of creativity. Each event in the series will address the idea of comfort to challenge the idea of “standards” as a bare minimum or one-size-fits-all approach. Together, we will question how we might better provide comfort in all its nuanced forms. 

Conceptualising ConteXt, Bernard Tschumi 
Mark Cousins Annual Lecture 
Friday October 21, 2022, 6:30pm (UK time), AA Lecture Hall 
Bernard Tschumi will give the inaugural Mark Cousins Annual Lecture. The lecture will discuss how architectural concepts and contexts are inseparable but are often in conflict. The concept may negate or ignore the circumstances that surround it, while the context may generate, blur or dampen the precision of an architectural idea. Should one of these two terms take precedence over the other? 

La Fotografia Terra-Terra / Down to Earth Photography 
Saturday October 15, 2022, 2pm (UK time), AA Lecture Hall 
This symposium coincides with the Otto volte due exhibition at Large Glass that presents a selection of new and recent analogue photography by eight contemporary photographers who are part of a vibrant community working across a network of small towns in the eastern part of the Romagna region in Italy. 

Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect 

Friday November 18, 2022, 2pm (UK time), AA Lecture Hall 
To celebrate the publication of a new book about the work of architect and AA Alumnus Neave Brown by Canalside Press, this symposium will discuss his legacy in architectural education and practice.

The Future is a Journey to the Past: Stories about Sustainability
Friday September 23 to Saturday October 29, 2022 in the AA Gallery 
The Future is a Journey to the Past: Stories about Sustainability, an exhibition curated by Mario Cucinella Architects, explores past and present notions of sustainability in order to develop the ecological thinking necessary to bridge the divide between the natural world and human activity – including, of course, architecture.

Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act and Form 
Friday November 11 to Saturday December 10, 2022 in the AA Gallery 
Observation, Act and Form is an exhibition of drawings, sketches and paintings by Chilean architect and academic Alberto Cruz (1917–2013). The show allows an intimate appraisal of his unique ways of teaching architecture as one of the founders of the Open City of Ritoque, a renowned secluded campus for radical architecture.